Category: music

River Taff Meditations… and the joy of working radio

At the start of the year, I shared my intention to find more joy in music and radio. Music is a great way to brighten up busy days, especially at this time of year. The days are long and grey, the sun is only slowly making a return to early mornings and evening after work. I don’t know about you, but I can use every bright spot I can find just now.

Now, plenty of us listen to the radio or to music as we work, so I don’t think you’ll be surprised to hear that I, too, love a few tunes to cheer up my Monday mornings. In my case, I have a couple of different ways to enjoy music at my desk:

There’s background beats and meditation music to start with. Whether I listen to Lou Reed’s Hudson River Meditations, the sounds of rain against a window or lo-fi background beats, a calm soundtrack is usually part of my daily routine. My dog Posey settles down in her basket next to my desk as soon as she hears the low music start to flow through my office. She knows that this is the signal that I am going to be lost in spreadsheets or working on a new course design for a few hours.

Then there’s listening to albums and playlists. I usually prefer to listen to vinyl on my record player, which is about 4 feet from my seat. There’re some practical advantages to listen to records rather than digital music: I need to get up every so often to flip the record, which is good for my body. Also, the play time of the record is limited, rather than endless as it would be on a digital platform, prompting a break from work to decide what next to play. I might walk downstairs to get another record and make some tea. It’s a healthy disruption.

I do also listen to digital music, usually playlists, and that can be an excellent way to find the right soundtrack for a particular time of the week. Fridays for example I often listen to beach/holiday themed playlists.

Commercial radio is rarely my choice of listening, mostly because I find the disruptions of talking annoying, but I do love indie internet radio.

Talking of radio, I am a big fan of working radio, playing and sharing tunes with colleagues, and I am very lucky that the folk I work with at Reclaim are into this, too. Cue a lot of afternoons of random tunes on our in-house radio station. To me, it’s a fabulous way to connect with folk across timezones. Especially if you are all distributed across the globe, radio can be a powerful way to connect.

For this blog post there is a special podcast with tunes that you can listen to on Spotify. Alternatively, I have listed the songs in the show notes for the episode so that you can listen along on the platform of your choice. Enjoy!

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06/02/2024
Festive Karaoke. Reclaiming online fun…

I love being online, and I love the communities I am part of online. As someone who relies largely on the internet to sustain long distance relationships with family and friends as well as collaborating with work colleagues on a daily basis, I am very invested in my corners of the web.

It takes a lot of effort however to keep those spaces good spaces to be in, on platforms like Discord and Mastodon, as well as this blog – my own domain for the past twenty years. In one of my favourite blog posts of the year, my partner Martin Weller reflected on the fragmentation of social media landscape to the tune of 70s disco tracks.

For me, the ‘secret sauce’ that keeps the network I am in truly fun, inspiring and genuine is the work happening in and around open education. From the OER Conference to working across various Open Education initiatives and group publications like this one from earlier in the year (Openness in Education as a Praxis: From Individual Testimonials to Collective Voices). For me, for the past 10+ years that usually involves the folk from Reclaim Hosting, the people who help you (and your students) get – and keep – a domain of one’s own. Incidentally, I have been digging into the archives and came across this gem of a post, from 2014, in which Jim Groom recounts how:

…we are still hoping to team up with Audrey Watters and Kin Lane to start realizing the vision behind “Reclaim Your Domain” as an extension of the Reclaim Hosting environment. Not just commodity hosting, but a space to synch, archive, and own your social presence around the web, while at the same time developing crucial web literacy skills.
Over 1000 Reclaims

Domains have been reclaimed, and ten years into the making there is no sign of letting up – Reclaim is thriving through technology as well as community. The community bit is the part I am especially excited about, and getting to work with the team that makes a packed calendar of events happen is a privilege as well as a lot of fun.

So this month, as we near the end of 2023, there is a whole host of activities to get involved in, as well as a very special session of festive karaoke, which is happening on December 22nd!

You’ll be able to watch the show on Reclaim.TV or listen in on Reclaim Radio… and if you let us know that you’d like to join us, then you can sing your festive favourites to your hearts content.

Me, I live in fear of karaoke, and unfortunately there’s a lot of evidence of how true those feelings are on YouTube. However, there must be a song by The Cure that I can co-opt as “festive”, and I am really looking forward to joining in, and reclaiming a bit of online fun before I head off into the holidays.

See you there!

05/12/2023
Music therapy, hope and joy.

Over the past few years I have been listening to A LOT more music. I have been to see live bands once again, I have bought newly released records on vinyl (for which I blame my partner entirely), and I have listened to hours and days of music online. After a less musical decade in my thirties, my forties have seen my passion re-ignited.

Therapy

I have learnt a lot about how I can best foster my mental wellbeing over the past five years and when I am feeling particularly anxious or stressed, I find silence or white noise most restful and reassuring. In order to enjoy music I have to have some emotional capacity. When I do, music can be a wonderful escape into other moods, and a distraction from stress.

Background beats can are a wonderful way to lighten the long, dark home-working days of winter and help relax or find a flow state of concentration.

Music helps me connect with who I am and what I feel, and it contributes to my mental wellbeing in many ways.

Hope

Over the past few years I have discovered a lot of new artists who are releasing new music now. It gives me such hope to listen to and buy albums by contemporary artists and bands. I LOVE listening to music from now, rather than bygone decades.

Growing up all the music I felt passionate about was from the past, from the 60s or the 70s or the 80s even. I would tell someone about my favourite bands or a song I had just discovered, only to find out that their ‘best’ gigs, the best moments were in the past. I had missed them at their peak, their authentic best moment. The singer was long dead, or ‘worse’ had sold out.

I still love music from those decades of course, but nowadays most of what I listen to is new. Released this year, last year… it’s being made right now on this planet, sometimes in this country, or even this city. Last weekend I discovered a new band that is local to where I live. I am SUPER excited about seeing them live. Listening to their songs from… right here!

In this post-pandemic, cost of living crisis, strikes, bad weather, climate catastrophe reality, new music gives me hope. Hope for creativity, hope for the future.

Joy

Seeing a band live last year I felt the music in my whole body. Even my feet were vibrating even though I was standing still. Joy is a wonderful part of seeing a concert live, of experiencing the music, the rhythm, the dancing… or in my case the bobbing along happily on the spot.

It gives me great joy to experience music, and to see the artwork, read the lyrics, discover new things about the artists and bands I like. Some of my music listening happens entirely on my phone, some happens live, some happens on record players. I don’t collate it, count it, track it or set goals. It’s something I simply do because I enjoy it.

18/01/2023
A love letter to #DS106radio emergency broadcasting

Tomorrow’s the big #ds106 #ds106radio marathong and I can’t wait for 24 hours of broadcasting on my favourite radio station.

I came late to this great endeavour and only really got into DS106 Radio in 2020, when my friends Tannis and Anne-Marie and I started broadcasting every Sunday throughout lockdown from Canada and the UK respectively. If you’d like to get a flavour for what we got up to, then head over to this post from July 2020 or hear us chat about it in this video Hope on the Airwaves from the OERxDomains21 Conference in April 2021.

I got a lot from this and many other ’emergency’ broadcasts on DS106 since March 2020. I listened hungrily to voices of distant friends and colleagues, who were sharing their own trials and tribulations along with a varied and inventive playlist of tunes both old and new.

Last year was a year of loss for many and one of the things the broadcasts have given me a renewed appreciation for, is how each individual in their particular is contending with a whole lot. The pandemic might have stopped many activities across the globe, but it certainly didn’t feel like a break for anyone working in EdTech.

Anne-Marie and Tannis got me through some of the roughest patches of a very difficult year and we found some respite from the demands of being an adult woman in pandemic times through our collaborative playlists.

Ladies, thank you for the laughs and tears and love. See you on the airwaves.

22/07/2021
Sound of scale: songs for a MOOC #ocTEL
Tomorrow’s the first day of the #ocTEL open online course that alongside a group of members and staff of ALT I have been working towards delivering over the past 6 months. So while in my professional capacity there are all sorts of things to think about, a more personal question I have on my mind is what such a course sounds like.
Around 900 people have signed up for this course, and while it is not massive compared to some others, there is likely to be a fair number of people around the world, using some sort of device to participate. So whether at desks, in offices, on sofas or on the move, people will be logging in, typing, watching, searching – and listening. But with only about 1 hour of live sound to listen to each week and maybe a few videos to add, what will we be listening to in the meantime except the tapping of keys or fingers?

So, here is my playlist for the next 11 weeks, one song per week:
- Week 0: Road to Nowhere, Talking Heads
- Week 1: Shiny Happy People, R.E.M.
- Week 2: Wild world, Cat Stevens
- Week 3: Lost in the Supermarket, The Clash
- Week 4: That’s Entertainment, The Jam
- Week 5: One Step Beyond, Madness
- Week 6: Bleeker Street, Simon & Garfunkel
- Week 7: Tonight’s the night, Neil Young
- Week 8: Solitary Man, Johnny Cash
- Week 9: Changes, David Bowie
- Week 10: School’s out, Alice Cooper
03/04/2013