Personal Blogs

We've made the decision to move the school's website to schools-online. There were other options but they all involved me being too involved which, although it was never directly stated, was the main reason for change.

I agree, the bus-count is one. [The number of people who have to be run over by a bus for things to fail utterly.]

Still I'm conflicted. Over the years the website has moved from being a rag tag collection of pages to something that was central to the school's life—for example we used to produce, at great cost in money and effort a paper newsletter, now we use the website. And as at present everything had to go through me I was becoming a choke point.

That is the great advantage of schools online, I can do the initial set up, June can manage the accounts and the staff can create the content.

My issues?

• The thing is ugly. Ugly in the aesthetic sense and ugly in the coding sense
• Because I had complete control various styles were consistently reproduced
• Because I had complete control various idiocies were not perpetrated

Actually it's probably nostalgia that is my big problem, I built something good; I grew something that changed the way that we do things as a school. And I think that I built well.

For example my wife recently got a mobile phone with an internet connection that was worth using, so I checked out the school site, it linearized perfectly [well almost]. Six years ago I designed a responsive web site!

Building that web site was the main reason that I took to the OU road, I love that site and I'm incredibly precious about it. It is time to give it up but...

I hate the idea that we are going to get an off-the-shelf solution simply because we cannot justify spending time and money on building something special. Boroughmuir is a great school; average, run-of-the-mill, these aren't our values.

The web site isn't the school and we can't divert resources from our core business of teaching kids, that I understand. And what we've plumped for will fufill the basic spec. Maybe I'm wrong but to me it feels like we've choosen the easy option.

Judge for yourselves here is my site, and here is a schools-online site.

Today I started doing something that I'm not sure what I feel about, a maths TMA.

For various reasons I haven't been keeping my real blog up to date, so I haven't been projecting my life-state into the ether. In fact I haven't been doing anything anywhere of consequence. So you probably don't know where I am inside my head.

Today I started what, might be, my last maths TMA ever, strange thoughts intruded. This has been a long road, and not the road that I thought I'd be taking when I first placed a foot upon it.

I could have done a computer degree, there would be little effort involved, but I included maths. And, do you know? Even although I was found wanting mathwise it was the right choice. Sure, it's been hard and I'm flirting with failure, still it was the right choice.

Tonight I solved a Diophantine something that I knew naught of six years ago. It wasn't a particularly difficult one but you still get that buzz when things go well. I'll miss that.

Sometime soon another part of my life is going to be closed down. Well, not closed down but the road will become obscure. If I were twenty I could head in many directions but I'm old and I'm going to have to pick one, That is not going to be maths.

Come PT3 in the post I'm prepared for tears.

Much of life is crap, is boring, is routine; a bog-standard human life. However high you fly however low you sink the life that was given you was vanilla. It's up to you how you decide to use it.

We tell ourselves lies, the biggest one being that I, the essential core of what I am about, has messed up because of what some others have done to us. In most cases.

I add the rider because, given power, you can indeed do horrible things to the insides of another human being's head.

Most of us have someone[s] who love us, they may make mistakes, mistakes that you remember, mistakes that hurt us, but excusing your performance based on a mistake that some loved-one made, with your best interests in forefront of their mind? That seems a wee bit slippy.

I deliberately didn't mention inequality of oppertunity above, because all of the great things about life are available to every human.

This morning, walking to work in the dawn, listening to every bird in the world singing their hearts  out, I saw three Canada Geese ignoring me on the canal.

I'm not going to be chased away from this place by my own petty anger.

What annoys me is that this place, the OU blogs, seems to have become a course forum for some courses. Why does that annoy me? Because you have your own course forum, why do you post course-specific stuff here? Why is that every third post is some mangled Anglish that says nothing, explains nothing and is un-understandable to most students? Are you so stupid that you can't create a wordpess blog? Or use your course forum?

Yes, I can scroll past. Except that isn't the point is it? If I'm screen downing I'll miss stuff, the stuff that I want to read because of the [meaningless to me] screed of tripe that you've written to impress, who? The worst thing is that you are suppost to be about eLearning and yet you can't explain one thing [online] to fairly clever people.

Why? Why are you doing this and why when we complain do you say, "shut up"? Or ignore us entirely; Apart from Jon I can't find one instance where one of you has commented on another person's blog, or have replied to a comment on your own blog unless the comment was from one of the cabal.

[You don't read what anyone else here writes:- broadcast. What do your elLeaning principles say about educators who broadcast but don't recieve?]

Come on, one of you must have the bravery to poke your head above the parapet and say that I'm wrong in anything that I say here.

Otherwise you a just cowards.

I've been trying to write a blog post, on my nonsense, about number theory. I think that I know what I want to say but it seems that I've become too drunk say it. The argument [about why this is just great & brilliant stuff] is tight but the maths is loose. So I leave it until I'm sober [next Sunday].

Now I don't have to blog about numbers, or anything else for that matter, but what would happen if I had to blog? What might I say?

There are people here, on this very site, look over your shoulder's folks, who have to blog as part of their course. Is this either appropriate, useful or right? I think not for all three. Why do I think not?

For a long time I wasn't sure about appropriate; these were clever people, people who cited references, people who knew about the online, e-learning process, ... stuff that really belongs on a course forum. Should I talk about Turing, in a course sense here?

Useful? Only to them methinks. To the rest of us they are bad-advert of...stuff we never signed up for. I've posted comments on these crap sites. Guess what? No reply. Ever.

OU bloggers change my life meme on a constant basis. The forced aren't OU bloggers, at best these are counters: counters of beans, words, the letters after their names, of something that real people don't count...the join-the-dots-crew.

They are all about e-learning, about delivering knowledge online, about the dissemination of knowledge in the widest possible sense.

And yet I don't understand in single, or combination, any of words that they've ever written. It's a cant and it's meant to be a cant. They are deliberately excluding us. Or are they just stupid? Or are they evil?

Don't believe me? Scroll five posts up or down, some H-blah number will be posting something about why you will read what they've written that you won't read without some type of torture.

All of the above I'd forgive if they weren't so boring.

For the computer course, one unit completed for the maths course and one TMA question grokked for the maths course.

Plan for the weekend [a long one]? Two maths units read, three TMA questions grokked. Plan for tonight? Fire up Dia and create some sequence diagrams for the solitaire thingee! >

Sometimes one must allow yourself some fun...

... and some Muse.

For different reasons my wife and I like clocks. For me it's a memory of my paternal gran and grampa's house, where every quarter hour was marked by a tintinnabulation of chimes. For my wife? Well, you'd have to ask her. Anyhoo, we've always had a lot of clocks; every room in our house has at least two. Fifteen in a four room house.

The problem is that they [the clocks] get out of sync; Like my gran and grampa's clocks did—I well remember the day when we were 'treated' to a whole hour of ding-dang-ding-dong at distressingly irregular intervals. Coco [my brother] and I were border-line deranged by this, our grandparents seemed unmoved.

Aside from not knowing what the actual time is there's the ticking, "tick, tick, tock, tick, tock, tock...". Annoys.

So when, recently, we had a few pence to rub together we decided that we needed a big clock, a ruling clock, the one clock to rule them all. Here is what we purchased. It isn't on the wall yet, it sits in the corner, worshiped, keeping perfect time. The other clocks have had their batteries removed or have been otherwise disabled. We still have our personal alarms because we may be away from the one clock....

Having a ruling clock I've noticed that I'm enslaved by time, it rules my life; everything I do has a deadline. This feels inhuman. I wake up precisely before my shifts, when I open an eye I know what time it is by the light and the noise.

Why does the one clock rule us?

explaination for why I have been so quiet lately.

Not sure that you cared...

Been doing stuff. Computer course, shared project, working hard at a nonsense project. Happy.

I found that I wasn't doing what I desired, for too long I've just been coasting along, ticking boxes. I'd forgotten why I needed maths, it was always a tool to an end, so that I could understand stuff like this, not something that I wanted to know; just something I need to know.

I often get like this when I have my computing head on: thrawn. I must be one thing or another mustn't I?

Yeh well, neil, you don't. What is it about you that you don't like? Why this eternal naval gazing? Why can't you be happy?

That has never been something that I wanted.

My avatar doesn't seem to show up in some of the course forums, can't have that. So I discussed this with my wife last night. We came up with a plan.

The plan involves make-up, false eyelashes, cigarettes and strong drink. The type of plan that I love.

See me soon...