I first did a Daily Create on 19th March 2016, and I’ve been doing it daily for years now. As of this morning I have completed 2465 challenges. Sometimes, when I have a bit of spare time, I look back at ones I missed and fill in the gaps. I had hoped to end 2022 with a final tally of 2500, and I came pretty close.
So what will my challenge be for 2023? To do the TDC every day, of course. My ultimate all time goal is to complete every single daily create, but doing an extra 1541 over the next year might be too much of a challenge. But I will keep chipping away!
Some people walk around talking to themselves, the world at large, or anyone who might listen. Others of us blog. I often use this space to work out what I am thinking by writing out my thoughts – as Laurel Richardson says, writing can itself be a method of enquiry. Other times I write out the words that have been occupying my thoughts because they keep repeating themselves to me until I allow them to trickle out into the world. But for the last month I have found myself with sort of writer’s block – whenever I sit down to write, I find I cannot. It seems that my mind will not allow me the space to write until I have said this.
My father died on December 2nd, 2022. On January 3rd, 2023 we go through the final rites of passage. I feel very lucky that I had time near the end to sit by his bed and tell him how much he meant to me, and how much I will miss him. But this end was a long time coming – vascular dementia is a cruel disease that takes people away a little bit at a time.
Father was always a talker – we could, and did, spend many hours talking about philosophy. He loved talking about the books I was reading for my studies, and bought many of them for himself. When I was away I’d ring him on a Sunday at 10pm and we’d talk for an hour, hang up and he would ring me back so we could talk for another hour. But as his dementia progressed he stopped having anything to say, and he would hand the phone over to mother instead. Gradually, I realised, dad was slipping away.
And then he broke his hip, and never walked again. Instead of coming home, he moved to a care home. Then lockdown happened, and … he kept slipping gradually away.
The picture at the top of this post is of father giving a speech at my wedding – you can see from my face that he has just told some sort of dad joke. This is how I remember him – proud of his family and happy to tell the world how proud he was.
“Rainbow at Mugdock Castle” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
For the third year running, some of us have collaborated on a calendar to brighten our days and walls in 2023. I have loved every one of these collaborations, and I think that this is the best of all so far. It’s available on the CLMooc blog as pdf and Google slides. We hope you enjoy it. The image in this blog post is my submission.
Over the last few months Wendy and I have been doing some thinking about the calendars we’ve collaborated over in CLMooc for 2021 and 2022. We’ve written a short report which is published as part of the ASCILITE conference proceedings, and Wendy presented at the conference last weekend. You can see the slides below, and the abstract of the report.
Abstract
Can collaborative creativity help to connect digital practitioners with each other and enhance their well-being? In order to answer this we undertook a piece of qualitative research. Using bricolage as our methodology, we surveyed participants of a collaborative creative project and used grounded theory in order to categorise the responses. In order to illustrate our findings and better explain the nature of the creative project, we share some of the artwork and music that was created by participants as part of this project. We conclude that as well as enhancing well-being, this creative endeavour also added to the personal learning of these participants.
