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Learning Online once more

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I started distance learning with the Open University on 2001. I’m a better student than I am an employee sad ADHD and assorted challenges probably having something to do with it - I’m unduly suspicious and untrusting of people and easily bored. A happy working life for me means juggling three or four part time jobs and paid or paying hobbies.

Meanwhile I’m back in Coursera and onto the third of five modules on Project Management. I’m impressed with the content and the pedagogy. It’s pleasing to see how learning online has evolved and how practices that become apparent in my time have been adopted. Technological advances, relentless improvements and experience means that the science of learning is understood - you are made to listen, take note, struggle, be tested and as a result the knowledge being shared slowly accrues. I want to apply practical tips on project management into my Town Council work, maybe in a task & finish group for the swimming club and perhaps even getting myself back into video production which I so loved in the 1980s and 90s. On verra.

I have up social media a month ago. No X, Facebook or Instagram, no doom scrolling. If the BBC doesn’t stop quoting Elon Musk every time he makes an arse of himself on X I am going to ditch BBC news as well. 

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The end of year does this to me. 

I come into it with ideas to achieve a few things, change behaviours, get better, be better. 

I'm forever in my late 20s mentally so I don't give a flip about my age even if others do. There are roles and jobs for people in their 60s and 70s. Volunteer work is a pushover, but being a Town, District or County Councillor requires 'putting yourself out there' and in competitive seats being a 'known as a contributor and pragmatist who gets things done solving problems and dealing with challenges'. I can do this. I do this anyway. 

This can tie in with my interest in the environment and trees, an interest in 'youth' and sports development, my interest in the arts and the power and joy of creativity.

I could have been marking 15 years at the Open University. 

There's a story. We're just back from that part of the world ... almost. I could never have moved the family from our lovely Lewes in East Sussex to Milton Keynes, but we may have forged a new life in somewhere like Banbury. 

Another life, another time. All that counts is the next hour (the introduction to the Project Management Course I have signed up to on Coursera); the rest of the morning on some DIY in our leaky shed/workshop at the top of the garden; a woodland walk (if the rain stops), and hopefully some art (the large pen and ink drawing or relief print I am doing of Dover House, Barton on the Heath before making supper, watching a movie and settling down to a second reading of Ely Green's autobiography 'Too Black, Too White'.

And so a plan is made.



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