My mind tends to work like a filing cabinet that has its contents strewn over the floor. There are sections and categories, but they are all a bit mixed up, and sometimes get lost amongst other related items. I might put them into little piles that make sense at the time, but when I go back to find them, all that sense seems lost.

My Masters and then PhD theses notes begin in the early 2000s. 20 years ago I moved into my current house, and I am now finally preparing to sell up and move again. All those notes and files, thoughts, reflections, artefacts, photocopies and printouts with highlighting and notes in margins (yes, our course notes did used to be provided in hard copy) are scattered throughout boxes, bookshelves, files, to say nothing of the old floppy disks, USBs, broken computers, mostly put away in my shed ‘out of the way’. Hence, out of sight, out of mind. Until right now when I have to sort through it and get rid of the physical evidence, most of which can be found in one form or another, on the Internet.

But of course I keep reading new things, I might take notes, copy/paste sections, make links in my mind to other categories, or how I might use this information in future to build other ideas or to support my own points of belief/argument. Most recently I’ve been reading a lot in relation to my professional development course, #EDUC90970 Facilitating Online Learning. Part of the requirements of this course is to set up numerous pages on a wide range of platforms, hence this “edublog” and all my other messy pieces of documentation, thoughts, collections.

The filing cabinet contents are now being blasted by a big wind, further scattered, and whilst I scramble to organise it all into neat piles, I feel myself getting older and more tired; that all of this ‘information'(?) is drowning me, yet when I stop breathing, it will only be worthy of the recycle bin. So why persist I ask? Because I’m always passionate about knowing/learning more? That I want to know how to do things better, and I want to understand different perspectives? That I need to conquer the things that challenge me, rather than avoid them?

So, here I have written 4 messy brain dump paragraphs, to introduce a new drawer to my filing cabinet – Articles and pages that I’ve copied (usually excerpted, but retained URL links to full copies) according to whatever is forefront in my mind at the time, and with occasional annotated notes or ideas in how I might use/develop these.

Saturday 1 May, 2021