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Critical Cadence.

The picture heading this post is a photograph I took this morning. It’s my favourite river oak that stands tall over the River Taff along my morning run route. I love this tree and the way in changes with the seasons and I especially enjoy taking a moment to pause and watch its reflection in the the river.

The current attempt to return to running is going quite well, thank you for asking. It’s either my third or fourth since 2020 and so far the plan is holding together. I am ‘training’ for a 5k race, which I arbitrarily set for mid December, in the hope that I would manage that distance by then and also my desire to reach a milestone before the holidays. Currently I am running 3-4 miles three times a week, gaining a bit more fitness as the weeks go by, and I have even signed up for an actual 5k Santa run for December. I am determined. And yet I have been here before and I know that there’re a lot of factors that can easily derail this effort like the others before it. So fingers crossed.

What my morning runs have done happily, is give me lots more space to think and walking and running, moving through a landscape at my own pace, has been on my mind. You will have already gathered that from the coaching walk project I recently completed (yay!), but this week my interest is taking a new return as I have started to craft my submission for an upcoming conference I hope to take part in:

Education after the algorithm:
Co-designing critical and creative futures

20th and 21st of February, 2025 – Dublin City University
Dublin, Ireland

The theme that I am most interested in is ‘Unplugged, low-tech and lo-fi approaches to digital education and research’ which includes outdoor learning and rewilding learning. One of the core questions the course related to the conference aims to address is “How can we be open, creative and even wild in our digital learning design and teaching work?” and I am really curious about how the metaphor and practice of moving, through walking for example, can be helpful here.

Both in learning and at work the frantic pace of productivity is determined by the speed of digital tools. Notifications, comments, emails and other content arrive ever more quickly and demand a piece of our attention. Digital noise can easily lead to digital overwhelm and our senses suffer. I have started to explore the embodied perspective of hybrid working (and learning) in previous posts, and for my conference submission I am keen to build on that work to consider strategies of how we can change the cadence of our digital lives to be a little more… human. A pace of thinking and working and learning that is more conducive to reflection, to criticality. Hence the title ‘Critical Cadence’.

I’ll share the finished piece when it’s done, but for now, I shall go and get writing. At my own pace.