Hundreds of people in the UK and thousands globally are still dying from this horrible virus. We have become impatient to go back to “normal” life. Apparently pigeon shooting and horse racing is starting again. Really? I guess we have different priorities. Human life seems not too matter. I despair. I worry. I am staying in lockdown.
At a time when everything feels like a race, a race against each other, the photo below gives me hope. A glimpse of hope for humanity. Watching the rocket launch and especially the warm welcome when the astronauts finally arrived at the International Space Station was heartwarming. It really showed what we can achieve together and make the impossible possible.
image taken from the live stream that was available at https://youtu.be/pyNl87mXOkc
We can work together and sustain such collaborations if there is commitment to each other, commitment to work together for the wider good. Ephemeral common interest motivated by personal gains as a driver for a collaboration is never a good sign and will not last. We see this again and again.
At the end of this week, we will be offering the open course FOS with colleagues from 10 institutions in the NW of England. We are grateful for their contributions and being part of this adventure. We hope that it will attract interest from the wider academic community and staff and students will join us to learn together. Especially now, during the pandemic where everything is changing rapidly, despite the stillness we may see, our minds and practices actually travel faster than ever before, change faster than ever before. Are we ready for September? This course will hopefully help us experience something different, something that will help us reflect on our own practice, a course that will help us experiment and learn with others. Something that will provide new ideas, something that will trigger changes in our thinking, actions, interactions and practices. The experimental nature of the course means that not everything will work. This is a given. We are not aiming to model perfection or excellence. Is any of this actually possible or desirable? Experiencing eureka moments, experiencing things going wrong, being there for each other, troubleshooting and recovering but also discovering new ways of solving old problems, we hope will make FOS attractive to all those who join us for 10 days in June. Often colleagues give up when they try using a technology and it doesn’t work. I have done it too. But every such experience is a learning opportunity that helps us re-think our own approach and the tactics we use. Tactics is a useful way of putting it, I feel, and Craig Hammonds thoughts relating to this has been an inspiration.
“To recognise and accommodate the expressive and meandering connections emergent from within the scripted worlds of liberated learners, practitioners must start to creatively and tactically manoeuvre pedagogical alterations within the stultifying rules of the academic monolith. Democratic practices and tactics should be experimented with, to ensure that serendipitous and subjective voices are afforded space to birth and grow towards meaningful explication.” (Hammond, 2017, 15)
The plan is to model real practices. Not perfection. Not everything will work. Things will go wrong. We know they will. But we will use these experiences to learn. To troubleshoot together. To move forward. We probably learn more from negative experiences if we allow it to happen. If we don’t ignore our own mistakes and shortcomings and do something about it. So easy, too easy to blame the technology or somebody else…
FOS has its roots in the final project of the MSc in Blended and Online Education I completed at Edinburgh Napier University. Like so many other ideas and concepts I developed later on. Looking back at this journey and what grew out of this experience, I can say that this course has been transformative for my practice as an academic developer. This project led to the postgraduate module FDOL at the University of Salford I developed and the open FDOL course with Lars Uhlin from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. After offering FDOL three times using PBL as a cross-institutional collaboration between our two institutions, two child courses were created that indicated two different directions of travel (ONL and FOS). My doctoral research and the discoveries I made as FDOL was one of the cases I investigated, took me to new places. FOS was born out of FDOL and some features are influenced by BYOD4L.
What else? I have continued crafting. Made two special masks this weekend. Just need to post them. I also love looking after our plants in the house and in the garden. Maybe we will even have some strawberries. Maybe.
I have been writing like mad on my final MA project. I have over 15,000 words already and still have a way to go. I know where the story is going. Just missing some of the details. I am really looking forward to my early mornings to make a little bit of progress every day. I know when I have ran out of creative steam and I stop. Thirty minutes is my max. I feel a sense of achievement every day. By the end of June, the very first draft will be complete. Maybe even sooner. I am getting there. Can’t wait to see it all coming together, also with the storydress, that is ready and waiting.
Stay safe and look after each other!
References
Hammond, G. A. (2017) Roland Barthes, Guy Debord and the Pedagogical Value of Creative Liberation. Prism: Casting New Light on Learning, Theory and Practice http://prism-journal.blackburn.ac.uk/ ISSN 2514-5347 Vol. 1 (2): pp. 8-24, Available at http://prism-journal.blackburn.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/2.1-Hammond-PR2-1.pdf
Chrissi Nerantzi 
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