Month of Charlie 19 Oct – 19 Nov 2010

12 Nov 2010 Status Report

Majority of my time investment since the beginning of the month has gone into making cash as a golf caddy, ice hockey referee and temp for RAM. That includes both time at said jobs/in transit as well as mental energy thinking about how I can make money.

One reason I’ve come to want more scratch is I’ve been exploring the Chicago after-dark world, especially clubs (cf. Chicago Clubs on Le Dive). It takes money to go out, buy drinks and other supplies, travel (trains, buses and cabs).

For the last week plus of October I wrote a paper about my recently completed P2PU Course with Joe Cornelli about how paragogy fits into Learning Analytics [LA]. We finished and submitted it for a February conference in Alberta about LA. Also in the teaching realm, Kitty and Hannah have submitted an articles each I’ve published and given them feedback on. I’ve also acquired two books in preparation for my CELTA studies next month in “the city”. I also manged to get the majority of semester two lesson plans uploaded for the research I am doing on my year teaching in China.

Besides money, partying, writing and teaching related activities Issue Six of The Uncertainty Principle was published, the Freak win the world series, the Bulls are evolving, bears confounding and hawks potentially crumbling.

Now, there are a lot of things I planned I have not been doing. First is spending an hour or so writing fiction daily. This is something I have been building up to for a long time with steady growth (in terms of time writing) and I thought this month I’d finally be able to do it regularly. I’ve been writing every day, but way less than I hoped.

My room has been a state of managed disaster for seven-esque years now, and while I have developed a routine to keep it from getting any worse, I have not gone through the years of my life scattered around me and organized it physically. Something I am postive if I did, would allow me to much better organize my waking day to day life outside the room.

One of the things I’ve been doing since childhood and took big steps towards building with my ventures abroad was my network. I have a wide-ranging, organic entity here that I am refusing to nurture. It could be something that makes my life easier and opens new directions in ways I haven’t imagined (e.g. meeting Joe at Wikimania 2010 and writing the paper with him), but I refuse to show it the proper love. Its like a bonzai tree with a lot of potential gone awry due to neglect.

Related to both of those things is an organization of my day to day responsibilites. On that note, thanks an article I read for the paper by George Siemens, the conference organizer, titled I started a learner profile. In theory it’ll outline what I am currently trying to learn and how I’m going about making it happen. This is still in the infant stages and the biggest benefit is an awareness of what I am actually doing.

My biggest goal now before the month ends is to do the same with the other ways I invest my time.