disproportionate presentation preparation

Hey look at all the 'p's in my blog title.

I think I've probably spent about 10-16 hours on the 20minute presentation I will make at Lille on Thursday. And this doesn't take into account the time it took for someone else to do the French translation. I'm still working on the presentation and need to do a few time trials, so the hours keep stacking up.

I don't think its right to spend such a disproportionate amount of time on such a short presentation. Everytime I go through the presentation I find 'something' that just doesn't sound right and I cant seem to stop myself from continually tweaking the freaking thing.

 I wish I were more confident about what I want to say and simply have a couple of rough notes that accompany each slide and then just wing-it. This would certainly reduce the amount of preparation time. Will this approach change the overall message of the presentation, does all this preparation substantially add value to the final performance? I know what I would have told my students - practice makes perfect, the more time you put into it, the more reward you will reap. But personally I don't see a correlation in my recent presentation experiences. 

Last night it dawned on me that I have 2 years left to complete this PhD and I was filled with a sense of urgency and respect for time. I hope this respect for time becomes a more engrained feature of my daily practices because I do feel I take time for granted and worry that I could be caught out.

rain rain go away

Its been pissing down all day and its gloomy too. Last night I sat under a blanket in front of the TV and threatened to turn on the heating - but my budget minded, or no, energy saving conscience would not allow me too - I just put on some socks and a warmer fleece.

I'm sitting at the OU watching the rain come down. I've just collected a stack of photocopied books from the printing department that I had neatly bound. The stacks represent the research methodology reading I need to familiarise myself with over the next couple of weeks. On a more positive note, I also completed my Lille presentation today and sent it off to be translated into French, a requirement for the conference. Next week this time I will be in France, hopefully gaining more insight into the notion of literacies within HE. Last night I was reading around the area of Critical Literacy and Critical Language Awareness and it took me way back to my HDE and adult education days - when I wanted to be a critical educator helping my students to become aware of the the unequal world in which they lived and to question assumptions about power, ideology and injustice. It seems such a long time ago and I wonder if I still share those ideals or if they have been recontextualised into a form I can no longer recognise.

I'm thinking of working at home tomorrow - its the start of the long weekend here and it seems like the thing to do in such boring and gloomy weather. On Sunday its the Nottinghill Carnival in London and I plan to go with the rest of the family - hoping the weather will play along. Tonight I'm going to try to recreate my mother's green-beans dinner made with special home grown green beans courtesy of one of my colleages.

With the weather and the green beans, if I sit quietly for a moment, maybe I'll be able to transport myself back to Cape Town and feel all safe and comfy.

Athlone cooling towers

Just realised that the towers in my header photo are no longer. How sad is that - a part of my life landscape - gone. Maybe I will have to take another photo at the same location without the towers taking up their mighty position. Will it be the same?

some quick thoughts

Its Tuesday, the sun is shining in Milton Keynes (although I got caught in a series down pour yesterday and had to change out of my wet clothes) and I am working at home today. I HAVE to finish my Lille presentation. I leave for France next Wednesday. Before then I need to finish and revise the presentation and then get it translated into French. So I'm feeling the pressure at the moment. I've also been collating resources for my review of the research methodology literature which I need to make my focus for October and November. Strangely as August is drawing to a close I can feel the end of the summer and the 'holiday' feeling that pervades this time of year. While I haven't taken holiday I've been in a holiday state of mind, gently getting on with my work without clear deadlines and I can feel a soft shift from this disposition.

Also I've been looking at the cost of flights back to Cape Town for my fieldwork - Oh my goodness - out of this world the prices. Small consolation;  I don't have to pay for it, but it comes out of my research grant for the year and so will completely kill it off in one swoop. I need to firm up my dates so I can make a booking before prices hit the roof. But thinking about flights home also means I have to start thinking about loads of other logistical nightmares to come, not least what to do with my current home and where I might stay in Cape Town. As usual I'm less worried about my Cape Town arrangements - I know I can rely on my support network to make the landing oh so soft. But on this side I still have to think through all the options and get comfortable with whatever decision I make and then act on it. I guess the positive out of all of this, is that I only have to worry about Milton Keynes and in that respect the thought of coming home for 6 months is oh so sweet.

sent the darn e-mail

Yes! Indeed, I sent off the e-mail that contained my article submission. I could hear my heart thumping in my chest as I typed the address in the To: window. I couldn't quite understand why I was feeling nervous.

Anyway its off and now may the gods or universe or the fairies be with it on its journey. I sat with a colleague of mine yesterday as we discussed her comments on my paper. She had agreed to read and provide feedback on the coherence and grammar of the paper. It was really useful to see someone else point out sentences that don't make sense or ask questions about assumptions that I take for granted. We worked through some of my sentence constructions, with S suggesting alternatives and reasons for her suggestions. I'm always nervous about my grammar and it felt really reassuring to ask seemingly stupid questions and get an honest, but informative and non-judgemental reply.
 I keep wishing I had paid more attention to the grammar lessons at school - but this is a very interesting 'thing' that I am doing here in academic literacies terms - I am ascribing my concerns about my writing as grammatical problems or inaccuracies, with the assumption that if I 'fix' the grammar, my writing will be improved or be better. An academic literacies practitioner worth his or her salt would identify this kind of thinking/assessment as an ideologically informed myth associated with academic writing. Good writing has less to do with grammar and is almost always about understanding the very context specific ways of structuring your writing and language so that it is recognised as appropriate for your field or discipline or supervisor. Funny that I know this, I've even spoke to one of my supervisors about this very tendency I always seem to slip back into; this way of judging my writing as being in deficit of something. Maybe this highlights just one of the many complexities that surround the act of academic writing.

Otherwise - its been a good couple of days. I needed that 'off' day on Wednesday to spur me on to better and brighter things. I've realised August is practically over and I reckon I'm about 2 weeks behind my intended schedule. My conference presentation in Lille, France is next on the agenda and I have to get it translated into French (oh la la!) so really need to pull my finger out. If I want to discuss it with my supervision team next week, so looks like I need to put some extra hours in tomorrow.

Not such a great day

It's been one of those. I woke up feeling a bit like death warmed up, but then again I went to bed feeling a bit like death warmed up. And so the day started. I had plans of course, but had to put them aside and decided to stay in bed, sleep and try to shake the death-warmed-up feeling. I had a short little break of about 4 days last week and was back in the academic saddle by Monday evening. But its been a slow transition back to work, with me longing for my 'normal' 9-5 existence yesterday - I'd like to be in a place where my whole day isn't devoted to abstract, conceptual thought that are so difficult to measure and if I only write one page I feel as if I've been completely unproductive.

The editing of my paper continues, and continues and continues - when will it freaking end I ask. I found some comfort in reading my colleague's blog earlier - he was lamenting (positively) about the act of writing and the endless revisions, revisions, revisions and I've decided to draw inspiration from his positive outlook on the whole process - I just want it to be quicker, faster...but I don't think that will ever be the case. Now my paper just needs a revision of its conclusion and then I will be ready to send it to a colleague for comments and then off to the journal - hopefully by the weekend (if I can shake this death-warmed-up feeling). Like SP says

1. The worst that could happen is it gets rejected without comments. In that case I can send it to a smaller journal and I’ll have just lost about three months.
2. They could reject the article with some constructive criticism.
3. They could ask me to revise and resubmit.

I visited Oxford last week - think I like it more than Cambridge, although I cant say why. I think my appreciation for the place was helped by the fact that you don't have to pay to visit most of the colleges here, unlike Cambridge - a big plus in anyone's books.

In one of the gardens in Oxford

No its not a gargoyle, outside the main Theatre

Seems even in Oxford they have rubbish

blank...

My head is blank - maybe its the weather (its a blue sky day with some warming sun), maybe I'm feeling some inappropriate solidarity with the celebration of a public holiday in South Africa today, maybe its just a blank head day, today. I can't think and I need to think. I'm trying to restructure my HECU paper for journal publication following the feedback I received from my supervisors last week. I've been reading more articles this past week trying to get at some of the 'underdeveloped' areas in the paper, but I had to stop and just put my thoughts to paper. Now I can't see where the hell this paper is going and what the hell I want to say anyway. I'm going home now, maybe some distance will help create some clarity.

I'm going 'on leave' from Wednesday for just under a week so I need to make some serious progress otherwise this incompleteness will threathen to ruin my little bit of holiday. Nothing like a deadline to get the intellectual juices flowing...or not!

African blue skies

Walking to the OU this morning I was overcome with the heaviness of the grey cover above me - a small sliver of blue tried hopelessly to make its presence felt. Its been almost four week since the sun and blue sky went away. It hasnt been raining but its just grey, grey, grey. It's the grey skies that's most depressing thing about living in England for me. It forms this oppressive greyness blank that feels like its closing in on you and you can't escape.

Casting aside the depressive clouds - I feel rather light this morning, today. A sense that I can deal with whatever change I encounter. I also accepted today that even when you make a decision, one which you know is the right one, you still get haunted by feelings of doubt and uncertainty - as if your body and soul still need to adjust to the decision your brain has already made. So it takes a while for you - the whole you - to get comfortable and committ to the idea. I often struggle with this liminal period - after I've taken a decision, even when I know its the right one - its like I'm having  mini fights inside me, with contesting views and contradictory feelings and actions almost surfacing unconsciously. Why am I saying all of this then? Well things are changing in my life and I'm working through those changes and little by little I'm getting used to a future that is very different than my present.

Blog written, now on to the serious business of the day - discussion about the format of the online post-graduate forum, supervision meeting notes to compile, revisiting my paper for publication (yes this is now firmly on the agenda and my supervisors gave me some insightful feedback and encouragement yesterday) and reading a couple of pages from Multimodality - a social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Sounds like an exciting day.