What I’ve been doing
It has felt like a busy week. My actions were urgent/time constrained ones which isn’t so much the case usually.
Tim is off to Luton next week to film our ‘Generative AI in education: Have your say - workshop in a box’ being delivered and I’ve been handling the logistics planning of that with the school and the videographer. I think everything that can be pre-empted is done now…I’ll be interested to see what comes out of the recording.
We’ve also had the PAIRS abstracts review deadline so there’s been some chasing of reviewers and organising Track Chairs meetings (for next week) to make their selections. Always tricky to co-ordinate diaries of different people within different organisations (and different levels of autonomy to engage with their PAIRS ‘work’) but adding in global timezones made it truly entertaining. It’s largely all sorted - but I will have to be in two places at the same time for one meeting - let’s hope Zoom breakout rooms is up to the job!
Otherwise I’m trying to progress logistics for the PAIRS in person event (or more specifically enabling people to get there) and preparing for launching event registration with associated donations. It’s been payroll week and newsletter mailout week too.
What I need to take care of
Next week is the first week of the month so I need to do reconciliation and we’ve two new income streams to build into the budget.
There’ll be (hopefully) bits for me to help with around the generative AI in education workshop feedback and definitely ‘tech support’ for the final ‘training’ webinar.
And in addition to the PAIRS Track Chairs review meetings there’ll be the launch of registration (I hope). There’s almost a full house of project check in meetings and in particular one will discuss our March conference so I’m keeping some wriggle room for actions relating to that.
What I’ve been inspired or challenged or moved by
I have been lucky, connected to a freelance gig I have, to start participating in a ‘white accountability space’ hosted by Dr Claire Stewart-Hall. It was the first session yesterday and I’m still thinking about it today (which is part of the point). It feels important to keep stretching myself in my efforts to be anti-racist and a lot of what I’ve done to date has been self-learning (particularly in the last two years). So being in a space with other people and facing their challenge and being accountable to the space…well, I already know it is going to have an impact. You can read more about Claire’s work here.
What I’ve been reading
Bit cheeky here as I haven’t really read much over the last couple of weeks but I have recorded a very short video clip about Lucie Hartley, a coach I used to have, and wrote a blog about operations support that has been published by the WRKWLL team that I work with in a freelance capacity.