2021 – the year of the podcast?

For most years, at the start of the year (usually January), I have a big drive to get my web presence organised, and start updating my site more regularly. The flurry of activity tends to fall away completely once I get back into the rhythm of teaching – and when I put things into context for myself, for much of the year I’m actually producing a lot of content for my units, and writing over 40,000 words of feedback on various pieces of work from students at different levels in their studies. On top of that, I contribute fairly extensively to discussion forums within courses and elsewhere. All-in-all, I’m probably preparing a lot more content than I realise, and it leaves me a bit drained of creative energy for my own projects.

So this year, it’s the year of podcasts and graphical abstracts as part of my teaching, and as part of my own learning. Hopefully it will also be the year of including data visualisation within my web-site. If I can get those things going, the year will be an online success, and “Watch this space” will be a bit more interesting than watching grass grow …

And note-to-self: my category of Reading and Viewing will need to become a category of “Consuming and Reflecting” to reflect on what I’m doing when I’m reading, listening and viewing.

Reading in 2020

The year began well, with a number of cool books that I had time to write about. But as things got crazier and crazier, the time left to read and write in between preparing classes, preparing food, and living within the confines of lockdown seemed to dissipate into nothingness. It turns out that the history of my year of reading is probably best summed up in a barrage of text-messages to various people about various books … but that would be tedious to print out. The highlights are below.

David Graeber: Bullshit jobs and other books and articles featured heavily in my shared reading (lots of ideas that resonated with me).

I re-read a bunch of books on programming in various languages and setting up websites, but I didn’t really do too much of that as I ran out of headspace

Behavioral Insights and Nudge were two books that resonated with me in anti-phase – and I’m still working through these ideas for future posts. In short, they reminded me of the extent to which Psychology as a discipline has sold out to the medical model and the idea of mental health and mental illness on a single continuum. By ignoring cognitive sciences and normal human behaviour, it has allowed its core areas to be taken over by behavioural economics and machine learning, or by the “wellbeing” industry.

And I had the pleasure of re-reading the six books of the Dune trilogy – what a great series to revisit, and very prescient for the times. And of course, I hadn’t realised there’s a new movie coming out – but it should also be a treat.

And of course, I spent a huge amount of time reading and re-reading the various sport and exercise material I like, the newest of which is Enter the Kettlebell by Pavel Tsatsouline

Working out little and often over the long haul – my sporting career

I have spent most of my adult life playing various sports and engaging in exercise. In early primary school, I was short and asthmatic and slow at running for my age, and I was also a year younger than many of my classmates. The hurdles were like high-jump for me, and there were no lower ones to learn on. We weren’t really a beach family so I didn’t learn to swim well, nor were we a netball family, so I didn’t play team sports. While I didn’t do a lot of formal exercise, I did walk 1 km to school every day, and I always arrived an hour early so I could play on the play equipment – various horizontal bars and monkey bars of different heights and some ropes. I remember my first blisters and callouses on my hands on on the back of my legs from doing spins on the bars, and I remember the joy of doing the “top flip” from successively higher bars and walking around my back yard on my hands. Unfortunately, I never went to calisthenics or gymnastics to learn how to do those movements in a technically correct way. And while it is not something that I seemed to be aware of at the time (somewhat strangely in hindsight), my dad, who was very sporty, was being treated during this time period for TB contracted during the war, so he really wasn’t in a great state to play with us kids.

The thing that kick-started my sporting career was the school rounders team (rounders being a modified version of baseball). I wanted to play on first base, but I couldn’t throw accurately to third base (in reality I couldn’t even throw to third base inaccurately … it was too far). My friend Francine and I decided to learn to throw like the boys, so we got our tennis balls and used the brick wall of the two-storey school building as our training area. The rules were that we threw the ball overarm, the ball had to hit the wall below the first storey line and come back to us on the full. This was my first progressive training program, self-designed in Grade 5 at the age of 9 or 10 years old. Initially, we had to be very close to the wall but eventually our bodies figured out how to throw the ball to generate power, and we ended up being on the far side of the netball court and aiming for specific bricks. That early deliberate practice got me the first base gig on the rounders team, and laid a foundation for good fielding skills and wicket-keeping in my 15 years of playing cricket.

I attended a private girls school for my secondary education – this school had quite a broad range of sport options on offer, and while I was sent there for the academic and musical opportunities, it was at school that I was exposed to different sports. We could play a different sport each term for our “house” although formal physical education classes ended in year 9 for those taking an academically focused program. I played softball (using a baseball, but underarm pitching), table-tennis and cricket, and also discovered that there was an active women’s cricket competition in Melbourne, with a club in my local area. I joined the local cricket team and walked the 2.5 km to and from training twice a week and again for games on Saturday. In all the time that I played sport, our training involved a warmup (running laps of the oval), a few random stretches and toe-touches, and then drills or simulated play. We batted and bowled in the nets, and we practised catching the ball. There was no strength or conditioning, and any specialist training was purely in terms of the technical aspects of the sport.

Meanwhile many of the girls on my cricket team loved their Australian Rules football, and we often played kick-to-kick before or after training. One day, we were kicking the footy around and were invited to train at the local football club. There was great excitement about the possibilities of actually playing football (in 1974!) until the recruiters realised that we were actually girls – and then, no dice! While girls could not play Aussie Rules footy, it was actually possible to play soccer, but my father was not at all supportive. I wanted to be a goalie, and his verdict was that I was too short … a fairly accurate assessment if I was aiming to be an international star, but probably not a good reason not to try out a youth sport.

By the time I went to university, I was pretty dedicated to my cricket training, and trained during the winter, including running and net sessions at an indoor facility. In trying out different clubs and societies, I joined the Karate Club, which I think was Shotokan style, and while I was keen to learn, the instructor was not impressed with having women in class. After a few weeks of training, the requirement to stay training was being able to do 50 pushups on your knuckles on the wooden floor – not something that most women can do without any prior training for it. He also had a habit of walking along the lines and punching people in the stomach to test whether their abs were tight – again something that should probably be taught before it’s tested. While I didn’t persevere in martial arts in that environment, it stayed in the back of my mind as something I wanted to do. While my mother was an out-and-out pacifist, my father learnt karate under the Japanese during the war (so, like bush camping, not something he then wanted to do for “fun”) and was an avid Muhammad Ali fan, and made me watch Ali’s fights with him while he gave a running commentary on them.

During university, I continued playing cricket, travelling across town to play with a top level team rather than staying with my local club. I also regularly went bush camping with friends, in my early twenties finally learnt how to ride a pushbike. My mother had decided that cycling on the road was too dangerous for young people, so I had never graduated from my tricycle to a bicycle – so when I bought my first bike, I decided to buy a good one, and to ride to and from work every day, rain, hail, sleet or snow (the latter two of which were highly unlikely in Melbourne – if I’d known better, I would have specified headwind or 40 deg heat as my extremes!). If after a year of riding, I decided I didn’t like it, the bicycle would have paid its way. For my first ride from Mont Albert to Monash University in Clayton, I selected all the back roads I could find, and it took me more than an hour and half to ride the 15 km, via streets I now know were the hilliest option I could have found – up past a water tower in one backstreet detour. I persevered and within a few months I was arriving at uni in well under an hour feeling quite invigorated despite my ride being consistently against the prevailing winds. Because of my late start in cycling, I always consider myself not a cyclist, but it turns out I’ve been cycling reasonably consistently for 40 odd years now, so that’s probably longer than many.

While at uni, I made the most of the extensive sports facilities, reasonably regularly playing squash badly, going for a swim (and fighting the water all the way), very occasionally even venturing onto the tennis courts for our short-lived Friday afternoon pre-drinks lab tennis game. Given that I did a PhD and then became an academic, I stayed on various campuses for quite a long time, and eventually began my soccer career in the Queens University post-grad women’s soccer team. We graduated to the local comp (quite a diverse demographic) and on returning to Australia, I joined the Monash University Soccer Team in a serious attempt to become a good goalie. Sadly, after three games, I was accidentally but forcefully kicked in the ribs by a much bigger opponent (the joys of mixed ability recreational sport – no violent intent, but a complete misread of play) and spent the next week or so in hospital recovering from broken ribs and a punctured lung. Given that I was mother to a young child and had just started a new job, I decided that maybe soccer was a bit risky for the moment, and went back to playing cricket.

As my kids grew older, it seemed that it was time to start them in the sports they might want to participate in rather than continue to play formal sport myself – so I retired from cricket, and started taking the kids to gymnastics (for fundamental movement skills) and swimming (for basic safety – not negotiable until they could swim competently). The kids variously tried netball, soccer, racquetball and rollerblading, but eventually gravitated towards indoor soccer and taekwondo, both of which I also joined in on. Partly it gave me something to do while waiting between games and training, but more so because, while I liked to watch the kids play, it was very difficult not to step into a coaching mode or to be that parent that cared more about the game than the child playing. I started both sports around the same time, and I was also commuter-cycling around 150 km per week along with training for events like Around the Bay in a Day (an annual 210 km bike ride). I really enjoyed sharing sport activity with my kids – I did two Great Victorian Bike Rides with the family when the children were very young and were carried (variously in a bike seat, in utero, and in a trailer) and then again twice with my daughter riding her own bike.

Indoor soccer was a year-round activity for 10 years – the time it took for my son to graduate from his grade 5 team through to playing in the parents-and-kids mixed indoor team until finally all the kids from the various families had moved on. Over 10 seasons, the parents-and-kids team only missed the finals for a couple of seasons (there were three seasons per year) and we were regularly on the winners’ podium. This team began as a parent-kids team focused on a couple of families who knew each other well, and I was a bit of a ring-in as my son was allocated to “their team”. Over ten years, a cast of thousands moved in and out of the team, and the glue that held the team together was the social connection around playing sport with family and friends. It was quite revealing to me how stoked some of the fathers were to be playing sport not only with their children, but also with their partners, who may not have played sport ever, or at least since primary school. I love the fact that my biggest collection of medals and trophies comes from the one sport I have participated over a consistent period of time that I never trained for – I just showed up and played – it seems that the awards and medals I have are inversely proportional to my skills, merit and care-factor in both academic and sporting endeavours. I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson there.

Taekwondo became an interesting contrast with indoor soccer. I started them at the same time, but I am still training in taekwondo, and from Day 1, I took taekwondo seriously and worked very hard to acquire skills and knowledge. I also built long-lasting friendships, and those have endured beyond taekwondo. I trained taekwondo with both of my children and there have been challenges over time with there being such a close family connection and connection across generations in terms of friendships and associations. The complexities of such levels of interaction can create challenges, but overall I still think of as a real bonus. My interest in taekwondo began at a time when I was very actively involved in designing, developing and supporting online teaching resources, and in using the internet myself, so I blogged quite a bit about taekwondo and academia. My personal website at Wisebytes.net was first established in 2002, and I wrote reasonably regularly for around five years. Sadly, in that time, the internet moved from being a space for sharing ideas and content to a place for selling ideas and content, and all of a sudden, what people said as private individuals online might begin to intersect with how workplaces or organisations viewed their brand. It seems so strange to be writing these words – probably for most people, the internet in 2021 is all about brand, and all about curating personal and professional image.

So while I’ve continued on in taekwondo to the point of being a 4th degree blackbelt, and competing in two World Championship competitions and winning a gold medal in my veterans sparring division, and I’ve spent the last decade dabbling in strength training, initially in the interests of avoiding hip surgery and later to prepare for, and recover from, a total hip replacement, and I’ve recently also started to learn boxing, I’ve tended not to post about my training or my academic work. There are so many options of where to post things, and as it turns out, I have a poorly curated presence on Facebook, very limited activity on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter (pretty much none at all other than having a profile) and a half-baked attempt to create appropriate spaces for academic, sport and personal sharing. It’s coming more and more to my attention that the lines between different spaces is becoming more and more blurred, so the only realistic way to curate any internet space is to keep it all in one spot. Which is here.

Alan Baddeley’s Working Memories

I was planning on reading Alan Baddeley’s classic text on Working Memory, and in searching the library, I found a 2019 version, which I failed to notice is titled “Working Memories”(plural), a really clever title for an autobiography of his career in memory research! It’s been a pleasure to read this book, which covers a lot of theory, but set in both the scientific and social context of the times. It is very instructive for younger academics to understand the very different social and political environment that shapes academia in terms of its funding and the control of gateways into recognition (through academic appointments, the concept of tenure, and the role of publishing in recognised journals). It is also instructive to read of how people navigate through changing times, to hear about the social networks that are so important in understanding the evolution of ideas, and to read about how theory and application are linked. It is somewhat reassuring to know that links between theory and application take a long time to develop, involve a range of different types of researchers, and often involve quite idiosyncratic personalities and interests.

Here is a review of the book which includes this quote:

There is a story about an introduction to a company report in which the document was compared to a bikini: “what is revealed was important, but what it covered was critical” … Written at the age of 84, this book is at the same time an insightful history of cognitive psychology, and an authoritative scientific autobiography.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13546805.2019.1606707?journalCode=pcnp20

The review goes on in more detail in a similar vein to my own views on the book, which I highly recommend as a starting point for anyone wanting to read about cognitive psychology.

Observations on online teaching and coaching

In the new Covid19 world, I enjoy listening to podcasts as I go for my daily walk, and my favourite podcast while I’m walking is Dan John’s podcast. If you haven’t read Dan John’s extensive library of work in the strength and conditioning and coaching world, there are 35 of these podcasts already, and they only started recently!

In today’s podcast, Dan was fielding a question from someone who asked about online coaching being “the way of the future” post-covid19, and I was interested to reflect on Dan’s response. He noted that he had been doing online / remote coaching for a very long time, originally via the post (yep, writing regular letters to his coach about his workouts and training, and getting responses on how he was going and what to do next), and then via the Web (in what now might be called a Blog, but in the olden days was just a regular website).

The key feature of remote or online training is the fact that it is asynchronous. Dan reminded us that, even when it is synchronous, or live, it is asynchronous in the sense that we don’t know when or where our participants might be. When I tune into someone’s live-streamed lunch-time exercise class from Melbourne, it may be midday for me, but it might be 3:00 am for another person in Paris … and the whole way of thinking about 3:00 am training is different! It may also be summer in Melbourne and winter in Paris or vice-versa.

So while many people are happy to put on a Jane Fonda style aerobics video and “follow along”, or tune into a TV or web-cast yoga class, if you are seriously into teaching or coaching your individual students and you need an income stream from so doing, there is a whole lot more going on. Importantly, I am very happy to pay a subscription for Dan John’s workouts and member resources because I already know who he is and a bit about how he thinks, which makes me confident I will get value for money. Do you have enough free content yourself to make someone happy to pay for your ongoing services, and do you have the time, energy and skills to keep on creating fee-worthy materials?

In the podcast, Dan also talked about his experience putting college level courses online, emphasising the huge amount of work required to prepare the materials. This is the very steep learning curve many academics and teachers are on right now – the idea, as Dan expressed it, is that there is a whole lot of work required to create an online learning site, but the payoff is that it is then a bit of a doddle to teach … you just need to pop in regularly to see how people are going and to answer their individual questions. This is when I started gesticulating and trying to talk back to the podcast (so yes, asynchronous, but still synchronous in how my own mind connects with what is being said). The part that Dan may well take foregranted is that the ability to “pop in and see how students are going” is a high level skill in itself. The thing about asynchronous learning is that people have a lot of time to think about your materials – they can ask you things and raise questions that you had not anticipated, and may not be prepared for, and they can do it at times when you are not “in that headspace”. Many teachers get by with knowing enough to fill the scheduled teaching time, and answer a few extra questions, and then “sorry folks, time’s up”. Dan can “pop in and field questions” because of his own formidable depth of knowledge in strength and conditioning, and in religious studies, along with his own dedication to learning from his students. Some of us find interaction with our students to be challenging in a very enjoyable way and it’s what motivates us, but for others, it is very anxiety-provoking. The podcast and forum on Dan’s site emphasise his commitment to “closing the loop with feedback”, whereby he reflects on and responds to people’s feedback. This ensures that he is tailoring his knowledge to each individual, while sharing that learning with his broader community of practice. This is not something that many newbie online coaches will have the skills, experience and enthusiasm to pull off, and they will also not be aware of how much time it takes to do this.

Online coaching has been a “thing” for quite a few years now, and I have pretty much learned all I know about strength and conditioning online, originally through reading the work of people like Krista Scott-Dixon, Brett Contreras, Mark Rippetoe, Jim Wendler and Ross Emanit among others, but eventually settling on Dan John as my “go-to” source of information, particularly after discovering that two young Australian people I know through taekwondo, had randomly stayed at Dan’s house and trained with him (and I say randomly, because it was not a visit planned in advance, but rather Dan’s amazing generosity and hospitality to total strangers because they were interested in his work and were passing through the US with a flexible itinerary).

All of the online people I have learnt from have been building impressive online sites for training for the last decade or more, and most of them have also been building subscription services for some of their material more recently. In the time of Covid19, they already had the platform, the existing content, the strong client base, and serious skills to take it all online. People completely underestimate the amount of deep knowledge, time and other skills required to maintain a steady stream of online content, and to generate new material that matches the changing needs of a changing audience. I have worked in online education for the better part of 25 years, and for the past 5 years or more, I have a flurry of blog posts around Christmas/New Year about how I’m going to update my online presence and reorganise my resources, and then my “real work” of university classes begin, and it all falls in a heap – it really takes dedication to generate regular high quality online content and helps to be part of a team.

So after listening to Dan, I thought I would put together some thoughts on what people might consider if they are thinking of taking their face-to-face training business online. This is a non-exhaustive (but somewhat exhausting) list:

  1. Do you have a loyal face-to-face clientele who want to continue training through Covid19?
    • If they are in the same time-zone, can you have them log in to their regular time-slot of class, which you live-stream?
    • While the training itself may be sub-par compared with live classes, you will be maintaining the social cohesion of your classes and allowing clients to maintain a routine, which is really important in times of upheaval (for you as well as your clients).
  2. Are you planning on your Covid19 strategy being part of your “new normal”?
    • You will have a LOT of work to do in building the range of skills to make it sustainable – I think of this as being in Dan John’s quadrant 3 of training – lots of skills at a high level.
    • You will also need to know what your value proposition is in this new normal – with full awareness that your competition will not just be the guy down the street or in the next suburb, but will be a whole global audience.
    • At the end of Covid19, people who were ready to go online before the crisis began may have a whole new clientele some of which may originally have been your clients, but there will also be people craving for face-to-face instruction … so you need to be clear about where your primary skills lie and what that will mean into the future.
  3. Do you want to be able to give your clients feedback?
    • You can use Facetime, Skype, Zoom, Messenger as easy ways of connecting with your students and running the classes in a way that is familiar TO THEM.
    • If you are live-streaming via You-Tube or Vimeo, will this be possible? Let’s Plays have the advantage that the activity being videoed is on the screen, so it is easy to interact with your live class, but it is harder to chat while you’re teaching or participating in a physical class where you may not be able to see the screen or stay in your video shot without someone actually being at the other end of a camera.
    • You can have them send videos of their session for you to critique. This is a great way to do things, but VERY time consuming, and not at all sustainable if you have a large client base or a lot of time, or excellent Shark Habits. Apps like Coaches Eye work well for this.
  4. Do you want to be able to pace your session according to how clients are going?
    • If they’re your regular clients, they may be comfortable interacting, but you’ll need to be mindful of whether they have space, and whether there are other people also doing your sessions with them.
    • Pacing a session to a live audience is a skill, but it is a different skill doing it online where you can’t quickly see people, you can’t quickly see or hear their breathing, when the video is not good enough to notice subtle changes in coordination that might tell you to slow down or switch things up or offer technical corrections.
  5. Do you want them to be able to socialise with their regular training partners?
    • You’ll need something where everyone is able to see each other, but your classes will need to be smaller (which is good, but will take more work)
    • Forums are a great place to build a community on line, but not everyone is comfortable with “socialising” in this way.
  6. Are you proficient with technology?
    • For the most part, to be successful with online coaching, especially if you don’t have a bespoke team of tech support people, requires that you use technology you’re comfortable with.
    • For many people (both coaches and clients), that will be their smart phone and services like Instagram and Messenger or Skype. You can also pay for hosted services that allow for live streaming of content, or you can use a host of available Apps, but it is important that you can use those tools well and you know how they work and what data they are capturing (e.g., your members to whom they can target their advertising …).
    • Dan makes a great point that I think many people miss: he makes lots of, as he says, “crappy videos” that are “right-now” videos of people actually doing stuff and they are for instructional purposes. They are NOT beautifully curated videos of Insta-perfection and there is a whole other post to write on the difference between right-now online teaching materials for your own specific audience at a particular time versus professionally made digital resources for “everyone”. The short story is that you need a lot of deep knowledge to know what are the important instructional qualities that will help your clients, whereas Insta-perfection is more about advertising your look
  7. Are you able to spend money on pay-for online services?
    • If you are just looking to see your business through Covid19, can you really afford to be investing in pay-for online services?
    • However if you are trying to create a future business model, can you afford not to. In my experience, you will need to pay for the infrastructure, and you will need to have professional technical support to take care of website issues, live streaming issues if that’s what you are offering for a fee, payment gateways and security if it is your long term business. Would you really set up a physical gym as your main business, and leave all the doors unlocked including the door to your office and to any resources you sell, and never do any maintenance on your equipment? It’s a serious undertaking to create and maintain a website with content that people pay for.

As I noted, these are just a few ideas that came to mind after listening to Dan’s podcast, and the reason why my own website is only updated in bursts and spurts, is that I vacillate between publishing what I’m thinking right now (as blogging used to be) versus trying to write the perfect go-to article. I’m trying to be more like Dan, to put my stuff out there quickly in case it’s useful to others, even though the primary value has been to clarify and record my own ideas and reflections. And I’m trying not to clog up Dan’s forums with overly long posts 🙂

Curiosity as defence against depression

I was listening to a podcast from Conversations of Richard Fidler talking with Bill Bailey – and they discussed (among other things) the idea of curiosity as something that protects against depression. Something about curiosity draws you out of yourself, and also allows attention on exploring the possibilities of the environment. They also chatted about the idea of having specific interests, in Bill Bailey’s case birdwatching, where the activity is ostensibly what takes you outside, and what structures the way in which you explore the environment – making it task-focused rather than being so broad as to be overwhelming. The activity also creates a timetable and a social environment for activating curiosity, thereby allowing for regular “doses” of engaging in curiosity …

Here are two Bill Bailey episodes on YouTube, one serious, and one very very funny

The serious one, about bird watching and species going away
The funny one, about the Stephen Hawkings’ History of Time

Leadership versus management

As I was sitting in a meeting this afternoon (actually, I was sitting in my garden in the Autumn sun in a virtual meeting), I had an epiphany about the realities of leadership versus management in the time of Covid-19. Leaders lead the way, and managers then implement whatever needs to be implemented to support that way. Good leaders still lead the way even through previously uncharted territory, and they communicate calmly, confidently, truthfully AND regularly – so even if they don’t quite know where they are going, even if they can’t quite see how they’ll get there, they communicate their main message: that they will look after their people to the best of their ability. Good managers then scramble to make it happen.

If your leaders turn out to be managers rather than leaders in a time of crisis, they will say nothing until they have formulated a clear plan and an approved set of processes and sign-offs, despite the fact that such a level of clarity is not feasible when everything around them is changing every day. The end result is that, despite the best of intentions to support their people, they communicate nothing of substance, and their people can feel abandoned.

And for light relief in terms of leadership, I can’t go past this M*A*S*H Covid advice video

Or, in an absence of leadership, some useful advice to get you through from one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Douglas Adams.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2bcFfMt6rGLTPpbG0yLwPw0/42-douglas-adams-quotes-to-live-by

How to keep exercising and training at home

As you probably already know if you know me, apart from my university life, I like to train in martial arts. In particular, I have been training and instructing ITF taekwondo at the United Schools of Martial Arts for more than 15 years, and more recently I have added some (very intermittent) cross training in boxing at Murphy’s Boxing Gym

I’m now trying to put together some stuff on Moodle to allow specific face-to-face classes, i.e., classes with the instructors and people you already know and work with, to continue online into the future.

Update to this post in 2021 – as it turned out, I did not get very far trying to help out my taekwondo and boxing schools. Why not? Setting up independent websites for production quality presentation is no longer a cottage industry that can be managed on-the-side while running a full time job, especially during a pandemic, when you can’t walk through ideas and concepts with people. Big tech was much quicker to respond and update services so that everybody could use Zoom, Skype and Instagram Live to stay in touch with clients. As each product got better, the others had to boost themselves to keep people in their ecosystems.

But in the mean time, there are already some great training options already available online for general fitness and conditioning. Here are two (two people, four sites) of my favourites:

Why Moodle, and not just YouTube channels and Skype? Because it allows for interaction and classes for your own specific clients as an interactive process rather than consumption of media.

More on Covid-19

Times are changing rapidly! I’ve started a new set of lab resources, and I’ve set up Moodle, but I’ll probably dispense with a wiki for now as there’s only 24 hours in each day!!!

For my Moodle, I’m trying to set up some resources to allow my instructors in taekwondo and maybe also in boxing to set up some online classes for their students. While it’s good to link to all the online streamed classes of big organisations, or to provide a set of self-learning videos, I’m looking to set up something that is specific to the students they already have, to present interactive classes and to help parents keep their kids involved.

I’m hoping that some of the material will just be open resources for anyone to use, but then some more specialised classes for their own people with a way of maintaining an income stream.

And I’ve also started playing with a great open-source video-conferencing tool BigBlueButton for people who don’t have access to university-level resources that we can easily get used to. There is a free version that allows you to do everything except save recordings, and then there are various hosting sites that allow for a bit more at a cost. But always good to try before you buy

The new online world of Covid-19

Wow – this was to be my year of getting back into using online tools so that I would be ready for a post-retirement world where I would have time to write a bit more, do a bit more tech stuff etc … but little did I know that my timeline would be fast-tracked to cope with a whole new online world for the foreseeable future (in itself an interesting concept!).

I have moved my lab website to this new domain, and I am trying to set up my own Wiki and Moodle as places for us to share things as if we were all still working in normal times. I will eventually look to putting things like R and Python notebooks in place to share, but I guess that’s on hold for the moment.

I will post my own personal reflections to my own blog, and share the appropriate feed to the DTT lab blog. If that works and you are reading this post from DTT Lab, you can also add your feed to the blog – in fact, I can probably make a page where we can add your own social media feeds so you don’t need to write to multiple places.