Franklin Sayre

I’m the Makerspace Librarian at Thompson Rivers University and also Co-Chair the Librarians’ Department. These days I am particularly interested in creating active learning spaces that foster belonging and encouraging sustainability and critical thinking about technology and information.

1 minute read

Weeknotes are a type of thinking-in-public writting and planning. The idea is to explore ideas without worrying about them being perfect. They are meant to be riddled with errors and provisional.

A year ago the idea of a six-month sabbatical felt like a long time. Not so much anymore. There are 19 weeks left in 2025, but lets be honest about those last weeks in December, and I am planning a week hiking at the end of August. So really what I have left is 16 weeks. 4 months.

This week is about planning around that time constraint.

Sabbatical goals this week:

  • Submit new ethics application based on the “Bag Sabbatical” plan.
  • Clean up my information buckets related to this project. This includes highlights from books and articles (read and unread) in Readwise Reader and Zotero, notes in Obsidian, and all sorts of random things in Todoist (Which I tend to use as a dumping spot to quickly capture things). There is a lot there and it’s a mess, but it also represents years of gathering material related to these topics. I am unfortunately a magpie and a hoarder when it comes to information, covetous of anything that might slip past me. My goal is to feel like overwhelmed by these buckets. The danger is that I go down too many rabbit holes while sorting and lose a lot of time. Maybe this is an argument for treating these buckets more like a river, dipping in, grabbing what jumps out at me, and leaving the rest alone.

Side projects:

  • Successful Students Project: my ethics application was approved last week, so I can get started on this micro-project about what makes successful students in makerspacess successful. I will have more to say about this soon.

Making:

  • While I am not ready yet to start creating any of my sabbatical bags, I do want to get back into sewing. My first project is going to be a small glasses/phone/etc. pouch based on changes I want to make to the one I made and used in Japan and Thailand. This is going to clip onto a harness for a Nalgene. I am calling it “The Thirsty Walker”.

Other:

  • Create a timeline to see if my sabbatical plans are possible while still:
    • Getting back into swimming
    • Learning to cook Thai food

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