Freewriting

21:28. Tuesday night. In my bedroom while Joe sleeps. The lights are off however the windows are open and, this being June in Scotland, it's still easily bright enough for me to type. On my Macbook. No soundtrack as Joe is asleep. Just the sound of the birds tweeting away outside.

As part of the Academic Writing Summer School on the MSc in E-Learning which commenced yesterday (Monday 2 July) I've been asked to 'freewrite' for ten minutes on a subject of my choice. Any subject. I don't need to share what I write at this stage (and perhaps not ever). 

One of the topics for discussion at the beginning of the Academic Writing course has been to identify barriers to writing. Almost accidentally, I came to suggest that the barriers need not be entirely to do with the cognitive or mechanical process of writing itself but instead the product of the environment in which we find ourselves writing. The example I offered was having to write against a deadline - and for the record this isn't a complaint about deadlines (in fact in some ways they provide the necessary 'full stop' to make us sit down and stop talking (to misquote Winston Churchill).

My point though is that writing isn't just writing. It's writing in a particular space. In an environment that surely shapes how, what and if we write. It's not just a case of sitting down to write - it's sitting down to write in a particular environment.

This struck me today as I strolled (well, paced) down to Moray House for a meeting. I'm contributing to a paper with a number of E-Learning colleagues and want to be able to do the best that I can. However this isn't just about wanting to be able to do well or even my ability or talent to do so - it's about external conditions allowing me to do so (and I ackno

[22:00. It's darker now and the birds seemed to have turned in. I didn't complete ten minutes of freewriting as Joe awoke at 21:36.]