Saturday 28 March 2020

Extraordinary times (week 2)

I already noted key experiences from the first week of enforced working from home. At that time, we could still go out. This week, it has been lockdown, with just one walk a day and essential trips (mostly food shopping). The weather has been bright (if a little chilly) all week so it has felt surreal: everything feels fine, almost like a staycation, and yet things are so much more difficult for many other people:
  • the healthcare professionals (including paramedics, porters, cleaning staff, teachers of key workers' children...) who are keeping the healthcare system functioning and putting themselves at risk for all of us.
  • the people delivering essential services (including food, refuse collection, internet and more) so that it can feel like a working staycation for those of us working from home.
  • people who find themselves in isolation or separated from loved ones or stuck in the wrong country as borders closed.
  • people whose income has dried up, whose businesses are threatened, who aren't sure how they will pay the bills.
  • parents now managing home schooling on top of everything else, and/or people supporting eldery relatives who are living independently.
  • and of course people who are having to deal with the worst of Covid-19, experiencing the loss of family or friends or feeling like they have been "hit by a train" (can't remember who described it like that) themselves.
So it seems like the best way to apply my skills is to maintain "business as usual" for the students and colleagues I work with. And to stay at home to do that. In many ways it has been a mundane week.

Monday's teaching was challenging. The topic was "global healthcare" – I could not have anticipated quite how we would be viewing this topic when I planned it six months ago. I could record the lecture ahead of time, but I really wanted the students, particularly those who had experience of other healthcare systems, to share their insights. But with over 30 students joining remotely, some with very dodgy internet connections, it was impossible to involve them all, even though I'd included a "google slides" document for people to contribute key points. It all got particularly stressful when my own connection got flaky and kept dropping the audio channel. About three weeks ago, I lost my voice (laryngitis) in class, and now my internet connection was delivering virtual laryngitis. And I still haven't worked out how to make group discussions work well with 30+ participants spread around the world.

We did our first sessions of remote yoga and Pilates at home.  All furniture pushed to one side.It worked amazingly well, probably helped by the fact that we knew the teachers and most of the moves pretty well already.

On Tuesday, I had my first remote teaching session with the grandsons. The older one was keen to learn; the younger was just tired. Kahoot! quizzes were great, though I've found that creating ones tailored to the children are better than using other people's quizzes. When I invited them to do and show me a drawing it was challenging to see it, particularly since they weren't sure where the camera was at their end. But we can learn and get better. This week, the themes will be rainbows, light and eyes.

On Wednesday, I chatted with my mum over facetime. She was out in the garden, enjoying the sunshine, and seemed happy. But the sun shining on the screen meant that she couldn't really see me, so it was more like a phone call than video. I remain relieved that she is in good hands.

On Thursday, I was teaching a smaller group who all seemed to have reasonable internet connections. We shared photos and sketches of multimodal interactions in our homes, from ovens and toasters to toothpaste tubes (since we couldn't access a surgical simulator, which was the original plan), and it worked really well. I'm still not sure what the surgical equivalent of toothpaste is, but I'm sure there must be one.

That evening was the first online Zumba class. This didn't work as well as the Pilates because the Zumba experience depends more on the sense of other people around one, and also requires more space, but it was still lovely to dance like no-one's watching. Which they weren't (since I had to turn the video off to maintain the internet connection).

So it seems that people who are afflicted by Covid19 are reliant on the health service while those of us who are fortunately well so far are reliant on our internet service providers. Plus food and loo rolls. Thank you to all!

There's a short update about week 3. Things are becoming normalised until there's a major change...

Monday 23 March 2020

Extraordinary times

Two weeks ago (Monday 9th March), I stood at the front of a class and said "In the unlikely event that UCL closes before the end of term..." and within a week all face-to-face teaching had been cancelled. Such is the experience of exponential change. I know I'm not alone in realising that views I held a matter of days ago were untenable. I am guessing that this process of revising beliefs and attitudes isn't over yet.

The last day I was in the office was just two days after that wildly incorrect assessment. I'd planned to work at home the end of that week anyway. Since I work at home quite often I was already set up for most things, but there were a few items I hadn't brought home. The most critical turned out to be my interoperable collection of "so 1990s" Filofaxes. I ordered one. I've lost continuity in my note taking, but by asking all my team to remind me what we'd agreed in our previous meetings I'm catching up quickly. Home delivery worked brilliantly too.

Improvised desks are sprouting up in our house, such as a standing desk made up of an old bookshelf with a small "laptop desk" which is located right next to the wifi router for use during the more critical online meetings.

I had to do a rapid rethink on all my teaching: lectures got recorded ahead of time so that I wasn't totally reliant on our home broadband at the critical time (that worked easily once I'd mastered the uploading software for the virtual learning environment). Class quizzes worked well remotely. Class discussion with over 30 students was challenging. When I had a smaller class a few days later, I mercilessly brought each student into the discussion, keeping a list of who had contributed and who hadn't yet. Not as good as face-to-face, but not bad either.

This coming week, I'd have liked to do a discussion exercise with digital postits in class. I considered several alternative tools for this; some required too much set-up for a single session; some work better asynchronously than in real time; I've ended up just sharing an online document that all students can contribute to, and we'll see whether we can build a discussion around that. It's all a bit of an adventure.

Many of our MSc students are having to rethink their projects for this summer because we have to assume they won't be able to travel or to do any collocated data collection. That's yet another challenge. But at least we can all access library resources from our homes because of all the work that has been done to make them remotely accessible.

I seem to be spending most working hours in online meetings. Many of these work as well as traditional meetings. More importantly, we're using the same videoconferencing technologies for social events: for sitting around in the evenings with friends and family – not just one-to-one like phone calls, but collecting in groups, socially close while physically distant.

None of this would have been possible, even a few years ago. Even if the foundations of the Internet were established in the 1960s and the early World Wide Web around 1990, the tools that we're now using on top of these structures have all been developed within the past few years. And they are getting easier to use and to fit into our lives very rapidly.

If SARS-COV2 had emerged three years ago, I don't know how we would have dealt with ageing parents who believed that they could live independently but actually needed a lot of support (to which they were unrelentingly hostile). Since then, my father has died and my mother is now in a care home, living with advanced dementia. I wouldn't want to visit (even if permitted) for fear of passing on COVID-19 to the wonderful residents or staff. So last week we tried using FaceTime to chat (with support from Jo the manager). I wasn't hopeful that Mum would engage at all, but she seemed to recognise me (at least as a close female relative, if not necessarily as her daughter). We had a good few minutes' surreal chat interspersed with Mum singing then, as I made to say goodbye, she leant forward and kissed the phone. It was strange, and yet poignantly lovely to have this kind of connection when we can't be together. Even if both the phone and Mum's lips then needed a clean!

On Friday, we had a take-away. It seems important to support our local restaurants as they are forced to close and take-aways are the only option. I wonder whether it will continue to be a safe option at all in the coming weeks.

Schools closed on Friday (20th March), which is going to add to the stresses of our children continuing to work while also home schooling. Family have been recruited as remote teachers. Granny will be doing reading and writing; Grandad is starting with some "horrible history"; Auntie will be teaching French; and I'm concocting some science lessons. If we thought remote teaching of students was challenging, remote teaching of small boys ia likely to be substantially more so, but at least it will mean regular contact, and we'll all learn something new in the process.

There are also lots of online classes sprouting up: I'm looking forward to yoga and zumba this week even if they will require us to reorganise furniture even more (in addition to the improvised desks) to make space to move.

We know we are really lucky: we can work fairly effectively from home and we have a garden for fresh air. Mum is safe and well looked after; the rest of the family are all well so far, even if the youngsters are restless. We are aware that many other people have much greater challenges and stresses and grief to deal with. I am truly grateful to all key workers: in healthcare and in keeping essential services (including food, medication and internet provision!) available.

Footnote: Week 2 was still a period of adjustment...