What is datafication? And how does it affect education?
These questions make me anxious. Mostly, because it is the driving theme behind my dissertation. With less than 100 days to go before the clock turns to 2024, I am still no closer to completing my research. At least, it feels like I'm treading water. 🫠
The Long Game
Every action is a step toward the short game or the long game. You can’t opt out, and you can’t play a long-term game in everything. You need to pick what matters to you. But in everything you do, time amplifies the difference between strategies that work in the short term and ones that work in the long term. The long game allows you to compound results. The longer you play, the bigger the rewards.
When you focus on the outcome, the gap between where you are and where you want to go seems large. To cover ground quickly, the tendency is to look for a hack or shortcut.
The problem is that no one who got the outcomes you wanted used a hack or shortcut to get them. Instead, they consistently inched forward.
Instead of focusing on the ultimate outcome, focus on the next move. There is always something you can do today to get a little better, to move a little closer, to put yourself in a better position. It's not pretty. It's not sexy. It's not fast. It doesn't even make for a good story. But it works.
You don't build an empire in a day. You build it brick by brick. Day by day.
Consistent daily progress for a long period of time.
–from some self-help email selling me their writing program
Good news! I have finally realized why my dissertation research and writing has stalled. I am neither flourishing nor suffering–I am stuck in the middle, languishing. Step 1 is identifying the problem. Step 2 is taking action to solve the problem. Right?
A brief taxonomy of wellbeing states
People often think of mood as a battle between wellbeing and illbeing: either you feel good or bad. But if you don’t feel much of either, that’s the territory of languishing. To further understand languishing, it helps to recognize that an absence of ill-being does not mean the presence of wellbeing. But if you don’t feel much of either, that’s the territory of languishing. It’s ‘the neglected middle child of mental health’, as Adam Grant put it in The New York Times in 2021. Whereas depression is active ill-being – feeling sad, powerless and drained – and flourishing is active wellbeing – feeling engaged, excited and empowered – languishing sits in between. It is a sense of stagnation where nothing is too wrong or painful but everything feels a bit boring and uninteresting. The world is grey.
Psychological research has shown that positive and negative feelings are partly independent processes – even neurologically and biologically. In moments of flourishing, you are high on excitement and joy, and low on negative feelings. In moments of suffering, there is not much joy but only sadness in our life. But there are also bittersweet moments where we feel strong positive and negative emotions simultaneously – such as feeling excited about one’s new job while feeling sad about leaving the old work community. Then there is languishing – moments when we don’t feel much of either. Languishing is thus about feeling low – but low on both positive and negative feelings.
From the article How to Get Your Mojo Back