Journal
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Teachers' Day
Today is Teachers' Day so hopefully, you were extra kind to your teacher today. Believe me when I say that I (and all other teachers I work with) give everything every single day to provide the best lessons to our students despite being limited by our digital-only interaction.
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Summer Vacation - July (2020)
July marks the end of the study year at CMD Amsterdam. It's time for a well received summer vacation after teaching fully digital for a couple of months. This break is a great time for me to work on unfinished side projects, play my backlog of video games and tinker with sensors and coding projects. This month was also the end of the Basic Teaching Qualification course which I passed with flying colours. I'm 'officially' a teacher, I guess.
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My Birthday - June (2020)
Yesterday was my birthday. Strange times. It was a slow and quiet birthday with family playing board games. Students sang 'happy birthday' in my virtual classroom. I could only hear their voices, no faces. I also bought some home office upgrades; a file cabinet, a microphone arm and a pair of new studio monitors as a gift to myself. From September onwards most of the education will continue online so I might as well invest in good gear for my desk.
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Online Education - April (2020)
Due to Covid-19, there is no physical education at the Amsterdam University. I've been teaching completely online for the last couple of weeks. Virtual Classrooms (and maybe online teaching in general) feels a lot like live streaming. It drains your 'teacher battery' quickly but I'm amazed at how well students handle the situation. Next week two new classes will start fully online. I will teach a whole new class without ever meeting them in 'real life'. That's probably a good 'experiment' to see how far you can go with online connections.
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2020 - March
This year (for the second time) I'm part of the Ladies That UX Amsterdam mentorship program! The mentorship program is open to everyone and absolutely free. It's a 4 months program where mentors will be matched with mentees based on their preferences and on what they want to learn. If we are matched we'll meet for 30 minutes every two weeks to talk about what you want to learn.
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2020 - February
Today was my first day of the Basic Teaching Qualification. What struck me was that all of us encounter the same 'problems' and there are a lot of similarities when teaching that are not related to specific course subject content. Our group has about +20 teachers that all work in different programs of our university. That difference and diversity of people's views and opinions about teaching is really inspiring.
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2020 - January
The holidays are over and I'm slowly picking things up again. Spent the days between Christmas and New Year to do my annual review in which I set new goals. A lot of things that were 'plans' in 2019 will become reality in 2020.
I also did a lot of planning in November and December last year;
collecting ideas, reaching out to people and cancelling things to create more time to work on exciting projects in 2020.Year in progress: ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 1%
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Exhibition volkenkunde - December
Last Friday students from the 'tech-track' information design at CMD Amsterdam finished their projects for Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden! They created interactive data visualizations on the web with data from the Dutch Digital Heritage Network.
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Launching Voight(ware) - November
In Notion I keep a list of side projects I want to work on. This list grew quickly in the last couple of months. 'An idea without execution is nothing.' So I decided to just start and launch a couple of them.
A few days ago I made a GitHub organization for Voight(ware), a small software company where I want to work on open-source themes, boilerplates and other modules and packages.
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CMD Computer Club - November
During the Autumn Break I gave a 4-day workshop called 'the computer club'. Hacking student laptops with tools and utilities to get more out of their system. They learned about how to secure their laptops and online accounts, navigate the web without being tracked and never losing homework by backing-up their devices.
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Tech Track CMD Amsterdam - October
Me and Laurens started with the Tech Track. A technical course in our program helping students to create web applications using a framework. The next couple of weeks we'll focus on interactive data visualizations.
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Kick-off CMD Amsterdam Study Year (19/20) - September
Astrid Poot gave a fantastic talk about the power designers have and how to convert that power into positive work. Vasilis van Gemert gave his talk about Exclusive Design from his master thesis.