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from NomadWarMachine
Shark Pens flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
Fountain Pens flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
Today’s TDC says:
Show us the old school office supplies you regularly use for school or the office. (Digital devices need not apply.) Yuo don’t get much more old school than a fountain pen, and I use mine for all my writing. You can see some of them at the top of this post.
from NomadWarMachine
This week’s group post asks us about our motivation to blog, and Krikket gives us a set of prompts. Here they are, with my answers.
Bricolage. Roughly -breaking things down into managable chunks and keeping check lists and other tricks to keep me realising that I am moving forward.
I don’t have any blogging goals. My aim for this month is to blog my daily create (rather than just completing it), and I suppose Blaugust is ensuring that I keep to that.
31 TDCs published to my blog
I am often motivated to blog because of community activities. So this group project motivated me to write this post. More generally, then if I feel like blogging, then I blog. If I don’t, then I don’t. I don’t feel worried or guilty if I am not blogging. I have some regular posts so my blog is never quiet for long- every Sunday I post my Silent Sunday image to my blog, and most months I post a slideshow of my daily photos.
My Blaugust? I don’t know what that is. I can see a bunch of really good people working behind the scenes to make sure Blaugust is a good experience though, and I appreciate that.
Well, this post has caught me as I am expected to set my SMART objectives for work next year, so I am pretty anti goal setting at the moment. My aim there is to set objectives so mundane and trivial that I can’t help but achieve them – that usually works.
I’ve read some and enjoyed them. The thing that inspired me most was the conversation in the Discord that led to me writing this post.
from NomadWarMachine
Story for today’s TDC
Story Prompt Generator flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
Wandering through the desert looking for a home Freda the Friendly Ghost came upon an oasis. As she looked around in its nooks and crannies she found a shimmering cloak. Maybe this will help me to keep warm, she whispered. As she spoke the cloak lifted up like a magic carpet and she knew, if she stepped onto it, she would be taken to her new home.
Friendly ghost flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
from NomadWarMachine
Today’s TDC asks us to
Use the Portent Title Generator to randomly generate a title about DS106…then WRITE THAT POST!
So I did. Amusingly I got this prompt
Portent Title Generator flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
Amusing, that is, as I usually complete the activity soon after it is published at 10am my time, but today I’ve been caught up in meetings and with workmen, so have only just sat down to look at it at 3pm.
Anyway – here it is. Another post from me talking about how I love to do the Daily Create every day because it stimulates my creative mind and helps to take me away from the daily grind. And because practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does make better.
from NomadWarMachine
from NomadWarMachine
Creative Bomb flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license
I found out about the Daily Create because I became part of an online community. As I’ve written before, in 2014 I signed up for an online experience organised by Dave Cormier called Rhizomatic Learning – The community is the curriculum which I thought was going to be about Deleuze and Guattari, and even though it wasn’t I met a bunch of great people and am still collaborating with some of them in various ways a decade later. I was also introduced to CLMOOC and found many like-minded remixers and bricoleurs there.
As a result of meeting these people, and particularly thanks to my friend Ron Leunissen, I was introduced to #DS106 and the Daily Create. I dipped in and out of participation at first, only responding if a prompt really piqued my interest, but since November 22nd 2017 I have completed the daily challenge every day, without fail. I’ve also written about how important it is to me on a guest reclaim blog post, and I won’t repeat all I said there about the influence that this daily activity has had for me – but it’s a hugely important part of my daily life. Well, after 2894 days of participation it’s not surprising that it’s very much #4life for me.
from NomadWarMachine
248/365 Busy bees flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
I love making postcards. Doodling ideas on paper, then drawing them on blank cards, looking through my spreadsheet of names and addresses, writing a message on each, adding stamps and taking to the postbox. A ritual that relaxes me, makes me feel close to the friends I am writing to, helps me to forget about the world around. This week I posted a dozen cards across the world. Now I wait till they arrive.
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Percolating ideas flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
I’ve been enjoying dipping in and out of the “On Writing” series that Jim Groom’s been hosting on Reclaim TV, although I’ve not been able to watch them live as they usually stream at 5pm on a Friday, by which time I am off line and off to the pub to meet friends. However, luckily they are also recorded, so I can catch up at my leisure, and this week I finally got around to watching the episode with Lee Skallerup Bessette, or ReadyWriting, as she’s known on ALL the socials.
Lee and Jim talk about many of the facets of Lee’s life – such as her growing up in Quebec but not being a francophone (watch the episode to hear why she asserts this), but – of course – it’s what Lee says about blogging that really resonates with me. Like Lee I’ve always been a voracious reader and a prolific writer, though I don’t write nearly as much as Lee, I don’t think. And, also like Lee, I do find it pretty easy nowadays. So when I heard Lee saying (at about 53 mins into the video) that her habit of blogging has helped her to be able to consistently push out a lot of decent quality words quickly, as long as the subject is one that’s familiar to her, I was nodding vigorously at the screen. And then she connects this type of writing to learning a musical instrument:
you don’t have to be great at it right but you just keep practicing it because it makes sense and it brings you joy and it helps you make sense of your life and it connects you to other people (at about 54:44 mins in)
Yes, absolutely yes. I’ve had a pretty shit week this week, for one reason and another, but I’ve still managed to churn out lots of words – because I can. Well, when Lacey lets me! Thanks Lee, and thanks Jim, for a great episode.
from NomadWarMachine
Every time I have an academic book chapter published I promise myself that I will never do it again, because it takes so long from first submitting an expression of interest to finally seeing it published. But then I forget, and see a call for chapters that interests me, and before I realise what I am doing I’ve committed myself to the process again.
But, on the other hand, there’s something really fulfilling about seeing the final publication and reading over what I wrote again – not least because it’s been so long that I have actually forgotten what I wrote. So recently I was really pleased to find that I had chapters in two books published.
The first was a book about similarities and differences between disciplinary research and SoTL:
Honeychurch, S. (2025). SoTL and Disciplinary Research in Education Sciences: Collaboration, Bricolage and Remix. In: Bohndick, C., Kordts, R., Leschke, J., Vöing, N. (eds) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning und disziplinäre Forschung: Eine komplexe Beziehung. Doing Higher Education. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-47908-4_14
The second was, on the face of it, on the very different topic of Hope:
Honeychurch, S. (2025). 3. Serious fun: Reimagining Higher Education from a humane perspective. In S. Abegglen, T. Burns, R. F. Heller, R. Madhok, F. Neuhaus, J. Sandars, S. Sinfield, & U. Gitanjali Singh (Eds.), Stories of Hope (1st ed., pp. 41–48). Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0462.03
As I read both chapters over I realised that both owe a lot to my remix communities in different ways. The title of the first explicitly talks about bricolage and remix, though the chapter itself discusses it in the context of an academic group who are not themselves bricoleurs. The second doesn’t mention remix in the title, but the chapter itself uses DS106 as an example of how to infuse HE with hope and fun.
When I talk to newer academics about starting out in publishing I advise them to find a golden thread – a theme that they see recurring in their work, or would like to develop. I guess it’s no surprise that I’ve found mine.
from NomadWarMachine
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”
I used to agonise over how I wrote, because it seemed to be so disorganised, so messy, so … inefficient. And then, at some point in my thesis write up, I realised that there was no point in worrying about the things I could not change, as Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer advises. It was then that I started to realise that this was just how I wrote, and to make a virtue out of it. But one stage of my writing still troubled me and tripped me up. At some point in any writing project I undertake I would become convinced that I was not able, and never would be able, to finish it – either because my writing was rubbish, or the topic was trite and boring, or because I was not authorised to write about it – the reason would vary, but it always happened. At this point sometimes I just gave up, but when it came to my thesis write up there was no way I was not going to submit it. I’ve written before about this writer’s block, and how I don’t find it easy to let go of my writing and publish it, but as time has passed I have realised that this despair that I feel is actually just one of the stages of my writing. And although that doesn’t stop the feelings from occurring, it is helping me to overcome it. So here are my seven stages of writing.
| Excitement | I have an idea … |
| Boredom | But it’s taking too long … |
| Despair | Ugh, this is hard! |
| Fear | Maybe I just can’t do it? |
| Hope | Oh, maybe if I look at it like this …? |
| Relief | Actually, it’s not that bad! |
| Pride | It’s done! |
There’s still more to tease out about this whole process, of course – but this idea has been percolating for a long time now and it’s time to let go of it.
