Lockdown – Weeknote #56 – 27th March 2020

Dunes
Over the weekend we went to Brean Sands, won’t be going back for a while….

The office was still closed and Jisc had asked all staff to not to travel for work. It certainly felt like all the days were merging into a muddle of days. Even though I work from home a lot compared to others, I still had quite a bit of structure to my week, being out and about at least once a week if not more.

Last week I was supposed to be in London three times for example…. The week before I was in London for one day and Birmingham for two. This week, all at home….

This was also the day that all the schools were closed and as might be expected, school online learning services such as Doddle and Hegarty are not really coping with the demand for their services. Creating extra stress during these stressful times. We also need alternatives.

There was considerable strain on these services, which meant that I suspect a lot of children gave up and may not even try again.

I had a meeting discussing the Education 4.0 roadmap that I have been working on, this meeting was booked weeks ago, I was going to to Manchester to do this face to face, but of course now it was done online via Teams.

The concept of how the just-in-time approach was impacting on supermarkets, was explored in this article.

“Thirty years ago, the UK’s food retailers carried 10-12 days of stock – now they have just 24-36 hours of stock

Supermarkets have had a fair idea of what stock to carry and what they needed to order, with the challenges facing them, can we be surprised that we see empty shelves as people who wouldn’t buy stuff, now do, as well as those who go over the top and panic-buy. The systems can’t cope.

Both the schools and supermarket systems have lessons for those at universities and colleges to reflect on. Just because your systems worked before, doesn’t mean that they will work in this new world, with added pressures, increased demand and completely different circumstances and utilisation.

We sat down and listened to Johnson on the TV at 8:30 as the entire country was put into lock-down. It didn’t feel, it felt like something out of a TV series or a film. Here was our prime minister, instigating basically a state of emergency, even in some respects martial law. Our freedoms were been curtailed in order to avoid pressure on the NHS.

On Tuesday the so-called emergency texts went out, my daughter got one first, I got one on my home mobile (same network) a few hours later. On my work mobile I didn’t get it until Wednesday. This has since been followed up by lots of fake and scam texts (though we didn’t get any of these). I am reminded when my eldest got his first mobile phone and got a spam text about him being involved in an accident, it freaked him out. This kind of thing will impact on people’s wellbeing especially those who are anxious about the whole thing.

As we start to move deeper into lockdown, and more of us are working and learning online,  we are starting to see articles like this one.

‘Avoid using microwave to get faster internet’

People should avoid using the microwave at the same time as their wi-fi, media regulator Ofcom has said, as part of advice to help improve internet speeds.

Posted this thought to the Twitter.

Thursday was 13 years since I joined the Twitter. I wrote this blog post thre years ago after being on the Twitter for ten years.

Ten Years on the Twitter

This was my first tweet from 13 years ago today…

…and in case you were wondering, the first tweet about coffee was the very next day!

My top tweet this week was this one.

Leave a Reply