A departing decade, through the rear view mirror
Late 2009, aware of the waning moments of the decade that seems to now be called the Noughties, I started writing a review of what had been a tumultuous ten years for me. Those ten years had included personal moments such as a brief flash of (very) minor pop stardom and getting married, to spending half of the decade living in Tokyo, and such major global events as 9/11, the second Iraq War, and the Great Recession. I ended up with so much to write about that the review ended up taking something like six months to complete and publish, and I put it out in the spring of the following year.
As there’s a lot of these personal retrospectives about at the moment and my tendency is to deliberate over my writing, I’m going to throw habit to the wind and have a stab at getting this all done in one or two nights. It won’t have the rigour of ‘Noughties, But Nice’, but at least it should catch the moment a little better.
So…here goes!
Ten things about the past decade
I started the 2010s living once again in Brighton and working as an English teacher, as I had been for a good proportion of the previous decade, only this time with more of an academic angle on the language teaching. I was undertaking a pretty rigorous postgraduate Diploma as part of an early effort to retool my career into something else. I’d been married for a year and a half, had been tinkering with a remix of a Yoko Ono track I’d been working on (did I ever publish that one?), and was getting ready for my first conference workshop, on using blogs in teaching.
I end the decade having found a career as an Educational Technologist in higher education (HE), am the father of a six-year-old daughter, and the co-founder of an eight-year-old Internet radio station. I’m at the foothills of an application to become a Senior Fellow at Advance HE , am working on the playlists for my radio sets for the first quarter of 2020, and will be preparing for a workshop at a large technology event in Amsterdam in February, on critiquing the potential use of holographic projection in teaching.
S’funny — seems like not much has changed despite so much having changed. Anyway, ten things about my 2010s.
1. Twitter, and other writings
At the end of 2008, I joined Twitter, prompted by Barack Obama’s use of it during his first Presidential campaign. I’d been a reflective writer since picking up a paper diary in 1984 and kept a daily log of thoughts on life. For several years, this paper diary overlapped with keeping a blog, and I moved between private and handwritten to public, media-rich writing. Twitter, with its brevity and global reach, has been my reflective go-to throughout the departing decade.
I’ve made friends and built a professional reputation through it, use it as my first ‘go to’ for breaking news, and seem to spend every day on it in some capacity or another. Some of it horrifies me, like the nefarious uses of it for spreading disinformation and right wing trolling, but as my personally-curated feed doesn’t have as much of that as I know is also out there, I seem likely to carry on using it into the next decade. I’ve also picked up on writing on Medium in the past few years, which is delightful as a writing and reading experience, despite how clearly locked-down a platform it is. First peer-reviewed journal article this decade too, and a first proper book chapter in the one coming.
Below is a link to a short post I wrote about Twitter in 2017, for the ‘23 Things’ MOOC:
2. Masters in Digital Media
At the end of the blog post about the previous decade, I hoped that I’d fit some sort of Masters degree in before those ten years was up. This was one that I managed to get in pretty early, squeezing an MA in Digital Media at Sussex University in, between 2011 and 2013. I wanted something that could build on an undergraduate degree in Humanities taken in the 1990s, that I could relate to my work (which was clearly leading towards a career in education by that point), and which was both theoretical and practical. I also wanted to take a more rigorous and critical look at the information society/digital revolution (delete as appropriate), as I was no longer so wide-eyed and in wonder about all things tech-related.
The MA was really hard, because I was studying part time whilst working full time in a very demanding job, and I was determined to get a Distinction from it to counter the disappointment of having scraped through my BA with a 2:2 back in the day. I also ended it with parenthood too, so had plenty on my plate. However, I loved every minute of it, from being a student again, gaining a better understanding of research, to exploring contemporary ideas in depth and making some really cool online things.
After several years languishing on a hard drive, I finally published my dissertation on Medium last year — link to the first post below. And I did get the Distinction in the end too :)
3. Fatherhood/parenthood
This is obviously the most important of all the things mentioned here — I became a father to a wonderful daughter! Parenthood is one of the areas of my life with a pretty strict division between public/networked and private, in that I pretty much never share pictures of my daughter online or write about her either. This is largely a parental protectionist urge, particularly as it removes agency from her about what is or isn’t shared about her online, and I’d rather she made those choices herself. However, I couldn’t write a review of my decade without reference to her existence and how incredible it is to have had her come into my life. She’s six-and-a-half, and is already fully bilingual in English and Japanese. Showing signs of being a voracious reader too — that’s my girl!
4. Home owning
Another thing that I don’t tend to mention online is home ownership. This is partly as a result of it being something that is so difficult for so many of a certain age to be able to achieve, despite the old expectation that the natural order of things in Britain is for people to become homeowners as they get older. The Resolution Foundation has a chart that shows the percentage of families (singles or couples) by housing tenure, with a 10% decline in mortgagors over 20 years — a clear downward trend by anyone’s standards. However, against the odds and to my great surprise, I became a mortgagor myself this decade. Not quite a home owner outright, but far closer to it than the lifetime of tenancies I’d been through.
Owning a home gives you a certain rootedness, which I’d lacked for much of my adult life. It also gave me the opportunity to fulfil certain domestic tasks that my former status as a renter had never given me exposure to, such as painting the entire outside of a building, overseeing the construction of an extension, and building a garden from scratch with my own hands and toil. Doesn’t half make a good way to tear you away from a computer for sustained periods of time.
5. The Thursday Night Show
I spent my 20s in various rock bands. Managed to get into another one in Japan in my 30s, and also started making electronic music. However, by my 40s, with family and professional life taking far greater precedence than grubbing around in music dives, a change of focus was necessary for continuing to be able to scratch that musical itch.
Started in 2012 and now about to enter its eight year in operation, The Thursday Night Show is an entirely volunteer-led Internet radio station that I helped co-found and have been DJing on since then. I programme the acts that play every Thursday, and play my own sets — from my lounge at home — once a month. To my great surprise, we’ve not dropped a single week of programming since we started.
There’s a whole story to tell there and this is not quite the time for it, but it’s been an amazing to ride to build this global, local community and hear so much fabulous music week in, week out. Drop by the chatroom on a Thursday night and say hi, if you’ve not done so before.
Link to the archive of all my own live shows below:
6. A career, at last
It took me until my 40s to finally find my professional calling, but with educational technology in higher education, I seem to have finally done so. Appreciate that some folks never find their calling, so I’m grateful for ‘better later than never’. I work as a Senior Educational Technologist at a mid(ish)-ranking London university, and for the first time in my professional life, I can genuinely say that I love what I do. I currently manage the relationship between a central educational technology service and three schools, focusing on Business, Law and STEM subjects. I also manage a small team of brilliant Ed Techs and we are part of a much wider team that includes responsibilities for regular operations and cross-institutional projects.
It’s not easy work, but having spent so long in teaching and having taken that journey from being a wide-eyed enthusiast about all things digital to being much more instinctively critical about the impact of networked and digital technologies on teaching and learning, I feel a bit of an old sailor helping others to navigate through choppy waters these days. Link to my CMALT portfolio below:
7. Conferences & events
I long thought that participating in conferences and other events was one effective way to build a professional reputation, and therefore lay the pathway for a career, so am often hard pushed to let pass the opportunity to pop another abstract in for something exciting looking. I cut my teeth on conferencing in the first half of the decade, with workshops at a series of Study Group Teachers Conferences and IATEFL as my first international conference (which luckily happened to be in my home town that year). The second half of the decade has seen as particular focus on higher education and educational technology.
Personal highlights include a presentation in the Greek island of Kos for ICICTE, a handful of sessions at Bett (the vast annual Ed Tech trade fair), the co-development and spread of a workshop called ‘The Pedagogy of Space’ (designed for encouraging participants to look at learning spaces from different perspectives), visiting Chicago for the 17th International Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning, taking a workshop on ‘The Holographic Academic’ (subject of my forthcoming book chapter) to ALTc 2019 at the University of Edinburgh, and running an ‘AI Games Jam’ at MozFest 2019 with my colleague Dr Jane Secker.
Full list of events participated in here. Below is a recording from a panel session I convened and chaired at Bett 2018, on the notion of the ‘smart campus’:
8. Politics
I mean, politically, this decade has been absolutely awful. The whole austerity paradigm, the paroxysms of Brexit and Trump, the climate crisis, to name just a few. This was my initial response to the Brexit vote, and this was why I marched against it at the last-but-one opportunity to do so. My first time out on the streets, en masse, since the marches against the Iraq War in 2003. From the very end of 2019, it looks like Brexit’s actually going to go ahead after all, and I remain convinced that it can only be an awful move for Britain to exit the European Union.
All that said, there has at least been an unprecedented outpouring of resistance to all the bad stuff that’s been happening, from the Womens’ March that emerged from #MeToo to the rise of Extinction Rebellion and the school strikes prompted by Greta Thunberg. There’s also no guarantee that the next decade will be as awful politically — Trump has officially been impeached, after all, and if we as a species want to bring a Green New Deal into being, we just have to do so, right? The piece below from Cory Doctorow starts to think us into the right space for getting there:
9. Places visited
The Noughties was kind of ‘peak travel’ for me, with visits to places as far apart as Tanzania, Nepal and Argentina. I visited countries in three new continents (Africa, Asia and South America), leaving only two left to set foot on. The 2010s naturally saw a lot less travel, given the focus on building a career, but there were still some pretty awesome places visited. I paid my last visit to Japan in 2010, which inspired a series of short films (one of which is above). Being back on European soil these days, I managed a handful of moments in some of Europe’s finest capitals (Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam). With a visit to Chicago in late 2018, I returned to the US for the first time since living there in 1993.
The visits to Greece, the US and The Netherlands were all done for work, which had once been a longstanding aim — to be able to travel and see other places, but to go for professional reasons. I also managed to chalk up a couple of weeks in Sydney for a work trip back in 2011, so this decade saw me setting foot on my sixth continent too. That means there’s only one more left to visit, but in these days of Extinction Rebellion and being much more conflicted about things like flying, I’m not sure how much of a chance there is of a visit to the seventh continent in the coming decade. Would certainly still love to at least glimpse Antarctica before I die though!
10. London
The city that defined my 1980s was Cardiff, where I spent my teenage years. My 1990s were clearly a Brighton decade. The 2000s were overshadowed by Tokyo in so many ways. The 2010s? It has to be London. I’d managed to avoid London for so long, other than as an occasional visitor, despite both sisters having formative years there. Seems my time finally came around.
After Tokyo, everywhere else just felt so damned small. I wasn’t planning on working in London, but once I did — and despite the hefty daily commute I have in there from the Sussex coast — I got it. And once you get London in your hair and under your skin, it’s really hard to get it out. Funnily enough, I’ve yet to actually write anything much about London, so perhaps it’s time I did. I’ve come to know London HE, the commuter areas, some of the hipster parts (I work in Islington, and near Shoreditch), and have come to know Londoners too. Despite having resisted it for so long, I feel that a part of my psyche is now forever London. Am clearly going to have to explore this in writing more at some point!
So, I’m concluding this post in the last half an hour of the decade. What awaits in the next decade? Turning 50 is one thing. My daughter heading through childhood and into her teenage years another. A PhD for me, perhaps? That long-awaited trip to Antartica, or a return to Africa? Will I still be in HE/Ed Tech/London/the UK by the end of it all? Will the Earth have become rapidly uninhabitable from runaway climate change? Will The Thursday Night Show still be running?
There’s no way of knowing any of this from this vantage point, so there’s nothing else for it but to crack open a beer and raise a glass to you all for a Happy New Year — cheers!
