Karyn's erratic learning journey

Unbe-flipping-lievable

2011-05-27T09:43:00.000+01:00

A rare emergence from hibernation for me, which just goes to show how strongly I feel about this matter.

I have just received the weekly newsletter from my younger son's school. Said son is in the throes of exams for the lower sixth form (the first of two years of non-compulsory further education which serve as a springboard for those who wish to go on to higher education).

The very first article in the newsletter focusses on the kids the year ahead of my son. In other words, those in the upper sixth. It includes the following:

Students seeking work or higher education places after Sixth Form have never before found the competition so tough. More students across the country are competing for fewer available places and many of our students must obtain A grades in a number of subjects (even A* in some cases) for university entry.

Our recent experience is that universities will not bend the requirements if students miss a grade. The need for students to revise really thoroughly has never been so vital.

It's all about grades! Other things get taken into consideration, sure, but only if you get the grades in the first place.

My son's results earlier in the year were very worrying. His teachers were at a loss: his homework is always submitted on time and is always 100% correct. But his exam results didn't even qualify for the word 'disappointing'. 'Terrifying' would be closer to the mark.

We are currently spending a fortune on private tutors in attempt to help this boy learn some exam skills, so that he can reproduce under exam conditions the levels of competency he demonstrates in the classroom. If he doesn't succeed at that, his lifelong career dreams will become even more difficult to achieve.

How can this be education?

William Nicholson wrote a trilogy called Wind on Fire. The first book starts off in this utterly ludicrous society in which people take regular assessments all the way through their lives. Where they live, what clothes they wear and every single factor of their lives is governed by the cumulative assessment scores of the family.

It is frightening how close we are to that. And I feel quite literally sickened as the parent of two sons who don't 'play the exam game' with any great skill. Nor can I help them there, because I have never been great shakes at it myself.

What kind of a dysfunctional society are we inflicting on these kids? And at what cost?

So long, farewell....

2011-03-10T18:22:00.000Z

For the past few months, I have been winding up my business, while also looking for a 'proper' job. The business was officially/legally wound up yesterday. But I am still hunting for alternative employment.

Since I am not currently working in the field of L&D, it strikes me as being somewhat hypocritical to keep sharing my perspectives here. I don't feel as if I have anything to offer the practising L&D professional from here, and I would feel rather like the couch potato yelling advice at the honed athlete on the screen.

Things advance so quickly in this field, that my firsthand experience will quickly be outdated.

So, for now, I am putting this blog on hold. Should the day ever come when I am back in the saddle, you will no doubt see me back here again.

I'd like to thank you for your company on my journey. Particularly those who have stuck by me since the very beginning, those who comment here, on Facebook and on Twitter... and those of you who email me or phone me to give me a blast when I say something you don't agree with. It has all been a rich and exciting learning tapestry.

Happy hunting.

I argue because I care...

2011-03-10T11:20:00.000Z

If you saw a woman walking down the street with her skirt caught in her knickers, obviously as a result of a post-restroom-visit 'wardrobe malfunction', would you tell her? No? Why not? If the woman was your wife/mother/sister/daughter, would you tell her?

What's the difference?

If you overheard a stranger at a bus stop saying they were going to X place, and then noticed that they were about to get onto the wrong bus, would you tell them?

If the harried mother in front of you drops her child's shoe, do you pick it up and return it to her?

If someone is unknowingly making an absolute prat of themselves in public, can you sit there and laugh at them?

If your best friend's spouse/partner is cheating on them, do you tell them?

If you're in a conversation and someone makes cites a piece of information that you absolutely know to be inaccurate, do you contradict them?

To me it's all the same thing. If you care enough about that person, you tell them. You overcome your own embarrassment, your own distaste for confrontation, your own cultural dictates and you let them know. If they choose to continue along that chosen path, at least you can be sure that they are making an informed choice.

I am often told that I am argumentative. What people don't realise is that I argue because I give a damn. Seriously. I don't set out to be difficult. It matters to me. All of it. I want you to know that we have recently discovered that the earth is round, that it revolves around the sun, that learning styles are bogus, and that your fly is open. I want to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on you when you're choking and I can't stand around and watch you embarrass yourself in public.

So let's say I make a strong statement and you go off and mutter to your friends/colleagues about how misinformed I am, but you don't tell me how misinformed I am. When I find out about it, I am going to assume it's because you don't care enough to set me straight. To engage with me. To argue with me, even.

Is my fly open?

When it all comes together by fluke

2011-03-08T14:27:00.001Z

You may or may not know that I have signed up for the 365 project this year. The plan was to restore a sense of balance after the disastrous tail end of last year skewed my perspective on the whole year. When I come to look back on 2011, if there is pictorial evidence of the wonders of some days and the total ordinariness of others, perhaps the bleak days will seem less significant. That's the theory, anyway.

Initially, I set out just to capture a moment from each day, journal style. But then I saw the quality of some of the work in other people's projects and found myself trying to emulate their standards, when I had neither the equipment nor the skills to do so. After a few failed days of that nonsense, I reminded myself to 'run my own race' and went back to the photo journal idea. I chose to follow other members with the same sort of approach, to keep things in perspective.

But yesterday, I surprised myself.

I took my dog for a walk along the River Nene that runs through our town, and took photos as I went. If you're a Facebook friend, you can see the whole set. When I got home, I popped the camera card into my laptop to look at the photos and was really very impressed with the result. Even with just a little point and shoot (Kodak DX6490) my first picture of the day turned out to be as near perfect as anything I have ever done.

The water looks wonderful. The swan is beautifully positioned and reflected. The pose is perfect - like something out of a fairytale. There is even, if you look really closely, a single drop of water that has fallen off the end of the bird's beak and landed with a sploosh in the river - that sploosh is captured exactly at the moment of landing.

So there are two ways of looking at this.

Either: I have no idea how I achieved that, so I learned nothing. This is entirely true.

Or: I have stumbled upon evidence that I can actually do good work. Really good work. Knowing that I can, inspires me to try to do it again... only on purpose next time.

A little accidental success goes a long way.

Social media etiquette conundrum

2011-03-03T18:29:00.000Z

From time to time, I have noticed an interesting development in the space where face-to-face relationships bump into online relationships. In my extensive network are many people whom I know both on- and off-line. In some cases it was online first and then a personal encounter. In others it was the other way around. Some of the relationships are purely personal, others are largely professional. Some have become a blend of both.

I have noticed that some of the people with whom I have both and on- and off-line relationship are competent at conducting a single relationship in two spaces. Others less so. In some cases, there is a strange split. There is one relationship going on online and another offline, and that it seems to be 'not done' to break that wall. So you might have an exchange of messages online in which something deep and tragic is shared, or a disagreement is aired but the next time you see each other, no reference will be made to he online conversation, and there seems to be no enhanced understanding demonstrated offline based on the revelation online.

I recently had an experience that has puzzled and bemused me. Totally by chance, I discovered that I have been 'unfriended' on Facebook by someone I encounter face to face on a regular basis. Her behaviour towards me does appear to have shifted very slightly, but superficially the 'all is well' signals are being beamed bright and clear. She has given me no indication as to what the problem might be, which has left me unsure as to how I should behave toward her.

I recently felt compelled to unfriend someone on Facebook that I have known since childhood, although we were never close. However, before doing so, I made it clear that it was due to her repeatedly aggressive behaviour towards my other FB friends on my page. She might not agree that I had just cause, but at least she knows what it was that caused me to reach this decision.

In the situation where the boot is on the other foot, I am totally clueless, and it leaves me feeling disempowered and slightly bewildered.

My relationship with my husband has many facets, but it is one relationship. We talk on the phone and continue that conversation when he gets home. I forward an email to him from the school, we exchange emails a few times, and then perhaps pick up the phone. We interact on Facebook, as we comment on photographs, one another's status updates and so on, and tease each other about that when we meet up. We connect in many spaces, but it remains one relationship. If he suddenly stopped talking to me, or touching me, the rest of the relationship would be affected. Of course, it would. And I would be looking to find out why. But here we have someone who is prepared to sever one aspect of a relationship and to continue the others as if nothing had changed, without discussing the action.

In cases where people pursue two separate relationships with me, I have come to regard that as a sign of an inability to assimilate an online space into an existing relationship. An indication that there is a level of maturity still to be gained. By and large, this two relationship experience tends to be restricted to those for whom social media tools are little more than toys.

I am struggling to formulate this as cogently as I would like, but I would be interested to learn whether others have had similar experiences.

Learning about grief

2011-02-28T13:02:00.001Z

As I muddle along through this lifelong, lifewide learning journey, I find that the toughest lessons are the ones about being human. About human experience.

A friend of mine recently lost her sister to cancer. She had been doing very well, and then suddenly she was gone. My friend and her family are grieving. This is the normal way of things. Hard as it is to deal with, this is how we more or less expect it to happen. Which is not to say that it's neat and tidy. Far from it. But it's more or less 'the norm'.

Another friend miscarried twins and then, just as she was coming to terms with that loss, lost her father. Once again, her sense of loss was in step with the loss itself (although some of her friends considered the extent and duration of her grief over the twins to be self-indulgent, and broke contact with her). On Facebook and Twitter, she started discussions about the different models of loss and grief, and the stages one goes through.

But that got me to thinking about the times when the grief is out of step with the loss.

I recently learned that a friend of mine from college days died of drug abuse (I haven't had all the details) about 15 years ago. The fact that I only learned about it now is an indication of the fact that we had lost contact. But we were friends, once. So I found myself... 'grieving' is perhaps too strong a word, but I did experience sorrow, about 15 years after the event. It felt odd being out of step with the people who shared the news with me. They had been there at the time. They had grieved when it happened. For them it is a healed wound. For me, the process is just beginning.

It made me think of the experiences of one woman I knew whose (widowed) mother had dementia. Whenever she visited the nursing home, she found her mother anxious to get home to prepare her husband's dinner. Initially, she would gently remind her mother that her father had died many years previously. But the staff at the home advised her against this approach. They explained that, because of the dementia, every time she heard the news was like the first time, and the grief was sharp and present, rather than a memory. Instead, they suggested that she simply reassure her mother about her late father's dinner requirements and move on to other topics.

On Friday, I learned that another friend has terminal lung cancer (note the ubiquitous cigarette in the photo in the link) and lymphoma . Although we are Facebook friends, it has been many years since we were the sort of friends who spent easy hours in each other's company, and who performed musical revues together. I will probably never see him again. So, although he is still alive, I find that my grieving process has already begun.

Grief is a slippery thing. It doesn't colour inside the lines, and it doesn't progress as it should. Just when you think you have a handle on things, something happens to open that Tupperware cupboard, and it all comes tumbling out. It was fully ten years after my maternal grandmother's death before I stopped thinking, "I must ask Granny..." She was the person to whom I turned with all my questions about cookery and needlecraft. Even twenty years after she was gone, I made a mess trying out her Christmas cake recipe and was in floods of tears because I couldn't ask her what I had done wrong.

Being human is very complicated, very messy and somewhat unpredictable. But we insist on coming up with models to try to tidy it up.

If you're grieving today, whether it is in step or out of step, whether it is appropriate or not, and even if your friends have utterly lost patience with your inability to 'pull yourself together', consider yourself hugged.

Frustrated by a non-learning moment

2011-02-24T13:43:00.000Z

So I recently got some new specs. Two pairs. Because I'm that old. One pair for reading. One pair for getting through the day without falling over or having a car crash.

The latter pair cost an arm and a leg, and comes complete with designer label... among other things.

Starting from top left of the picture and working our way down we have:

The case, with a Velcro strap thingy which can convert into a nifty little handle (although I can't think of a single situation in which I would need to use a handle to carry my glasses case!),
the specs themselves, all gorgeous and pink,
a little booklet, containing the guarantee information in about a gazillion languages,
a little lens cleaning cloth, pristine white (with logo, of course) in a little plastic bag, and...
???

Let's take a closer look at the mystery item.

It's a little resealable plastic bag containing:

Here we have about 25cm (10" give or take) of cat gut and about 15cm (6") of 4mm wide, white florist's ribbon. There are no instructions, no labels.

I have posted that last picture on Facebook and Twitter, but no-one has yet said, "Oh yes! I know what that is. It's a...." One person did suggest that it was meant for running repairs in the future, which is entirely possible, but I can't imagine what repairs I might carry out using these bits and bobs. I have visited the D&G site (which takes quite a while to load), but there doesn't seem to be a page on which I can find the purpose of these items.

I hate not knowing stuff!

Do I throw these things away? Do I store them in my jewellery box?

Any suggestions?

Addressing client mindsets

2011-02-21T16:57:00.005Z

Over the past few weeks, in a range of different situations, I have bumped into a few assumptions that I have had to challenge. Working as a consultant, I regard it as part of my job to challenge existing mindsets where necessary. I also have no qualms about doing so within my community of practice.

So let's take a look at some of the issues I've addressed... and how:

"We need to track learning"

First of all, you can't track learning. The only way you can tell whether somebody has taken something on board is to observe their behaviour in the workplace. If it changes to incorporate the new material/process/whatever... then they have learned something. The best thing you can do is track access to learning materials. This is no indication that learning has taken place. If person X simply clicks 'next' every few seconds and keeps going right to the end, your LMS is going to tell you that they have successfully completed the course.

It is true that certain levels of tracking will allow you to check how long a user spent on each page, from which you can draw realistic conclusions about whether or not they actually read the material on each page, but whoa! Who is actually going to do this job? Whose time can you afford to allocate to this task when there is so much real work to be done? And once they have identified that person X failed to spend long enough on pages 12, 45 and 67, what then? Are you really going to go after them with a big stick and force them to go back and do those pages again?

"We must have an assessment"

Let's just make one thing totally clear: a series of multiple choice questions with options such that even the average Joe from off the street could select the correct answer, is not an assessment. It's an attendance register. Okay?

If yours is a regulated industry and you are obliged to have some kind of butt-covering tick box, then fine. But let's not pretend to each other that it is anything other than that. If this is not the case, why exactly do you want an assessment? You could provide a few thought provoking scenarios. I'm all in favour of that, but do you really need to record some kind of test score? Would something along these lines not suffice?

Once again, the best way to assess whether people have learned anything is in the form of observable behaviour change on the job.

"People need to know this"
Really? Why? Because they need to observe it? Ah. So what you're actually after is not that they should know something, but that they should do something, right? Can we agree that knowing is not necessarily linked to doing? How many people know what the speed limit is in any given area? How many people observe it? Knowing isn't the goal.

Besides, let's face it, most 'policies' are pretty much common sense recorded in formal language with too many commas. In cases like this, I refer people to Cathy Moore's action mapping post. I've lost count of the number of people with whom I've shared that post!

"We need a half-hour elearning course on xyz"

Mostly when L&D people get this sort of request, they just nod and get on with it. I'd like to encourage them to push back. C'mon people: add a little value, already! Ask these questions:

Why?
What is it for?
What will people do differently afterwards?
Which of the organisation's strategic goals are being addressed, here?

Do you really need an 'elearning course'? Could not just distribute a pdf? When I suggest this, I am often told that the people don't read pdfs. Well, let me share a little secret with you: people don't read information dump-type elearning courses, either. So don't go that route. This takes us back to the Cathy Moore post I referred to above - a far better way of addressing policy changes.

"How can we design this so that it fits with what we can do in Articulate/Packager/X-tool?"

I get really uncomfortable when people adopt this approach. When they have a hammer and try to figure out ways to turn everything into a nail. Does it have to be shiny? Sometimes the answer is absolutely yes, but not as often as we are led to believe. Sometimes all you need is a simple roadmap diagram, or a list of procedural steps with a list of links to user generated screen capture videos or testimonial video clips taken with web/flip cameras.

Relieved of the need to think

2011-02-15T12:16:00.000Z

I was recently at an event planning meeting in which I heard that the local doctors in our town find it very hard to live up to the expectations of the very large Polish population we have. Apparently, "Their expectations are very high," and their confidence in British doctors very low. I was the only non-British person present at the meeting, and it was pointed out with some surprise that Poles know "the names of all the different types of doctors" and expect to be able to access these directly.

It sounded rather as if the Polish medical system was not dissimilar to the one I knew in South Africa. If you have a skin disorder, you make an appointment with a dermatologist. If you're a woman, you make a routine annual visit to your gynaecologist. Until your kids are 12, you are just as likely to take them to the paediatrician as the GP. You know your radiologist from your oncologist, and your ear, nose and throat specialist from your cardiologist.

In the UK, the practice is that you go, in the first instance, to your GP. Always. You will then be referred to a consultant. And that process can take months. Been there. Done that. Nine months for me, last time.

When I expressed surprise that the well-educated, otherwise knowledgeable people present at the meeting didn't know "the names of all the different types of doctors", one person rather proudly pointed out that, with the way the NHS works "we don't have to!"

I had often wondered why all specialists were rather generically referred to as 'consultants', but this explains it. You see a generalist. The generalist refers you to a specialist. The specialist's secretary sends you the details of your appointment. You attend. The specialist reports back to your GP. Your GP reports back to you. You don't ever initiate contact with the specialist. So you don't need to know what sort of specialist s/he is.

I find this approach quite disempowering. I don't feel the need to be looked after in this way. I feel quite capable of identifying the specialist discipline needed in each instance and making an appointment. I feel quite capable of providing said specialist with an accurate history and conducting a conversation about my ailment/condition.

Many Poles obviously experience the same frustration, because they are quite prone to taking their ailments back to (as one Polish woman puts it) "a proper doctor" for a diagnosis that they feel they can trust. This doesn't really help, though, because when they come back from Poland, and feed the information back to the local doctor, the local doctor will not accept histories or diagnoses from abroad, and wants to go back to the start of the process again.

I can think of so many situations in which traditional workplace practices reflect a similar approach. I would far rather see individuals given the freedom to run their own initial diagnostics and then to access to the resources they believe they need in order to get the information/support required, apply it and move on with the day job. Of course they will get it wrong from time to time. That's part of learning, too.

Too much second-guessing can result in a culture where people are waiting to be taken care of, to be told what to do next, have no idea which kind of person/resource holds the solution they need, instead of taking charge of their own lives and figuring out their own 'what nexts'.

Sometimes, taking too much care of people is even worse for them in the long run than taking too little care of them!

On value and the eye of the beholder

2011-02-14T12:09:00.000Z

I often come back to this topic, because time and again I am struck by how unpredictable and subjective the issue of value is.

This was brought home to me by something that happened on the 365 project. I don't pretend to be a photographer and my decision to sign up for the project was part of my self-help initiatives after the annus horribilis that was 2010. I decided not to try to take brilliant photographs, but instead to create a photo journal, publishing a photo that recorded something meaningful about each day. The results are of varying quality. Yesterday, I discovered to my my surprise that one of my photographs has been 'favourited'. Not the one with the accidentally excellent mood lighting, or any of the passable ones of historical buildings in my town. Not the one showing the symbolic snowdrops blooming bravely, or the accidentally good shots of my pets. Nope. Instead it's the shot with which I was least satisfied of all.

I was trying to do something interesting with the water in the bottles, but I have neither the camera nor the skills to succeed. If I had taken a single other shot worth using that day, this one would have been binned. But this is the one and only photograph in my collection to have been favourited. I don't know why. I don't know what the person in question saw in it. Maybe it serves as a 'what not to do' example for a photography course they're delivering. Who knows?

If you think about it, diamonds have no intrinsic value, but because of their perceived value, a whole industry... several whole industries have built up around them. People die in the quest for them. And yet they are solid carbon, just like coal, which we hardly value at all... until we are in danger of freezing to death, that it is. Then, suddenly, a diamond is worthless and coal is inestimable.

Wall-E, the animated feature film, shows a (semi?)sentient robot coming across a diamond ring in its little box. He throws the ring out, and keeps the box, because it intrigues him... and because he wasn't programmed with our value system.

We seem pre-programmed to think that anything or any skill we possess must ipso facto be of lower value. And, for those of us looking to develop a learning culture that is a hive of user generated content, this means we are going to have to work really hard at spotting the nuggets, the treasures, the diamonds in the rough and encouraging their owners to see their intrinsic/potential value to someone else.

That trick that you learned in Excel/Photoshop; that activity that you do with your class; that piece of advice you give your staff members; that lesson you learned the hard way... these are the things that people can use. Because you discovered/developed them, you assume either (a) everyone knows how to do them or (b) nobody would be interested.

I think you'd be surprised!

I once developed a wiki to be used by a group of people embarking with me on a new venture. The idea was that we would develop a glossary of new terms related to the shared endeavour, as well as a recommended reading list, with reviews. When I mooted the suggestion, it was greeted with much enthusiasm: everyone was mad keen to have such a resource. However, once it was created, very few people were bold enough to add to it, and those who did tended to make additions in the form of questions: adding a word with a question mark after it... which no-one replaced with anything helpful. And yet these people were reading voraciously, and debating matters in class (an on the online discussion forum), they were each applying their own perceptions of the terms we were learning on a daily basis. They were more than happy to help one another on a 1:1 basis off-line, but actually sharing something in a space where others could see it? Not so much.

This culture of undervaluing the things we know/can do is going to take a long time to overthrow, and we're going to have to work hard at. Until then, if one more person tells me "if we build it, they will come" I think I might scream. If we build them (up), then they might just come, but we have a long way to go, methinks...

Twitter in the surgery

2011-02-11T12:29:00.000Z

I'm posting this fresh off the back of last night's stimulating #lrnchat on Twitter. I don't watch Grey's Anatomy, but Jane Hart shared this fantastic extract from a recent episode, showing the use of Twitter in surgery. Just look how the walls of the OR melt away and surgeons and hospitals from hither and yon get on board to save a patient's life!

I still have friends who tell me that Twitter is a space for the idle chatter of egotists. I wish I could just show them its potential.

Social tools in the workplace... when they fail and why

2011-02-10T11:51:00.003Z

Jane Hart has written an excellent article about the top-down implementation of social tools for workplace learning and why that approach is doomed to failure. As she points out, top-down is the traditional approach for implementing a new initiative, but in respect of social media for learning:

Those that are already collaborating, sharing and learning with one another, will resist attempts to force them to use other social tools or platforms in order to track and control what they are already doing. This may well push their activities even further underground.
Those that have yet to experience, understand and feel comfortable with social media will not want to be forced into sharing and collaborating when they are not ready for it, and are likely to resist attempts to make them do so.

Hart suggests a more bottom-up approach. Providing support to those who already are sharing and collaborating with one another. I would also recommend a performance management attitude that gives kudos to those who are seen to be supportive of their colleagues. In this post in December, I talked about the value of the enabler within your team. Give these people kudos and the space to 'do their thing' and you stand to gain a great deal. As Hart's article says, "autonomy is a powerful motivator" and "better results come from getting out of the way".

I wonder how many managers have considered that the biggest barrier to excellence in their team's performance might be their own attitude to people management (and people, come to that).

It's funny how these things go in waves, because yesterday, Aliza Sherman published an article called 5 Reasons why Corporate Social Tools Fail. Top of the list for her is the lack of a social culture. As she says, mandating the use of x and y tools isn't going to change anything if you don't already have a culture of mutual support and collaboration within the organisation. Too many organisations make this very mistake. It's not about the technology. The technology is a just a conduit, a tool. You can give your 17 year old a car - that won't make him a competent driver! But, if he is already a driver, having his own car will enable him to do so very much more.

It has to start with culture. So we find ourselves back at Hart's article which identifies the need for more autonomy and more getting out of the way. Less micromanagement and more belief in your people.

Facebook hospitality

2011-02-09T14:58:00.001Z

Because I originally signed up to Facebook as part of an experiment to see how it impacted my learning experience, I took a deliberate decision to treat it as a melting pot. This is less true of other spaces my great big digital feet tread. For example: I have two blogs (well, three, but we won't go into that third one right now), and I address two completely different groups of people. In my mind, I am writing for a person, an archetype, if you like. On this blog, you're it. On the other, it's someone else entirely. While I have LinkedIn contacts who are personal friends, I look on that as a purely professional space, and use it to pursue purely professional interests. I have two separate Twitter accounts: one for personal and eclectic bits and bobs, the other for learning-related contributions.

By contrast, my Facebook friends include people from my youth, people from my career path, people from my church, people from my leisure pursuits... and people that I've 'met' on Facebook, of course. And it has been fascinating to watch them interact with one another in reaction to something I've posted on my page.

But one thing has come home to me with a vengeance this past week, and that has to do with hospitality and the respect or abuse thereof.

My husband and I are rather hospitable souls who enjoy nothing more than having a house full of people to feed. We head up a team called Connect in our local church, where we take it upon ourselves to meet anyone new to the church and find out a bit about them. We then introduce them to other members of the congregation who share their interests or who are at a similar life stage. If you know me in person, you will know how perfectly suited I am to this role. The initial meeting with new folks happens in a small room off the main hall, where we serve coffee/tea and something to nibble... something I have baked myself. We like to treat people as if they are our guests.

We then take this one step further. Once a quarter or so, we host a dinner (a very informal dinner, mind) at our home, to which all recent visitors to the Connect room are invited, together with a few likely candidates for them to get to know. Once again, we have the host/guest thing going on.

But what has this got to do with Facebook, I hear you ask. Well, rather more than I would have thought, actually.

You see, I wouldn't expect the guests in the Connect room to be rude to us or to one another. I wouldn't expect visitors to my home to pick a fight with one another. Disagreement is fine, but healthy, respectful conversation is not an unreasonable expectation, I would have thought. And I feel the same about my Facebook page. After all, it is my Facebook page, and if you're there, you're there at my invitation. As my guest if you like. As I am, when I visit your page.

Recently, I felt I had to 'unfriend' someone I've known for more than 30 years. For the too-many-eth time, she mounted an aggressive, irrational attack on someone else on my page. Someone who didn't know who she was and who was too polite to retaliate in kind. She threw out insults left and right, many in shout-implying capital letters. She even took a few side-swipes at me.

Now, I don't want people being reluctant to come to my home because they're afraid my dog might attack them, or because they're afraid that X person will also be there. Similarly I don't want people being unwilling to comment on my Facebook posts for fear that one of my other friends will tear into them.

I love introducing people to people. I love to see those people form a new relationship that is independent of me. But if some of those people cannot respect my hospitality, I have to withdraw the invitation.

Not so?

Craig Taylor's open letter

2011-02-09T10:02:00.000Z

Craig Taylor is a comparatively recent convert to social media as business tools, but he has taken the bit between his teeth. He spoke about the use of social media tools for workplace learning at the recent Learning Technologies conference, delivering one of the most engaging presentations I have seen in a long time. The guy's a natural!

His recent blog post has attracted a fair amount of interest. Well it would, wouldn't it, with a title like "An open letter to those organisations who block Social Media sites…"?

What makes the post particularly interesting is that Craig is using Livefyre for his comment stream. This alerts people who have been mentioned in the comment-versation. Paul Simbeck-Hampson decided to test this by mentioning me and a few others in a comment:

...and of course, I weighed in with my response, as did Jenna Langer and Jordan Kretch - the people behind Livefyre (I suspect that they won't be able to keep doing that if their app gains traction). Later, Kate Graham mentioned Jane Hart and hey presto, she popped in, too.

It's an interesting way to tag people and invite them into a conversation. I do have concerns that there might be some misuse, and that some users might resort to emotional blackmail/passive aggressive tactics to try to attract specific people to their sites. It remains to be seen.

But Craig's post (and the ensuing comments) could do with a little exposure to those who delude themselves into thinking that they can control staff behaviour by blocking access to social media spaces as a matter of course. To prove his point, this post was generated from his organisation's gents' room, using his phone.

On stating the bleedin' obvious

2011-02-08T10:26:00.000Z

One of the criticisms of my (ahem) academic writing, is that I made (make?) too many assumptions on the part of my readers. My course supervisor once asked me "Why are you so reluctant to state the obvious?"

To me the answer is: because it is obvious. If it is obvious, why do I need to say it? Why do I need to sacrifice part of my precious word count saying something well-duh-ish?

Of course, the response to that is "Because it's obvious to you. It might not be obvious to your reader."

I always took the view that, if you're reading this paper, you have a level of interest in this field. This is not likely to be the first paper you ever read on the subject. Of course, if the paper is electronic, you can include links to definitions and explanations, without having to sacrifice word count. But when it's an old fashioned paper-based submission...

"Just pretend I don't know anything at all," they told me, "and write from that standpoint."

But that's nonsense too, surely? If I assume you know nothing at all, I have to start by explaining the basic concepts to you, such as what workplace learning is and why we do it... before I've even got halfway through that, I've used up my word count.

So I must assume you know something. The trick is knowing where to draw that line.

This is a challenge facing learning designers, too. Do we start by covering the basics? Do we assume that the learner knows the basics?

During my years as a classroom based trainer, this was always the balancing act. Where do I start from? What if one person in the class doesn't know the basics, and everyone else does? What then? All the years I taught spreadsheets, I would find myself also teaching basic maths. Because it's pointless learning about formulas if you don't know how to string together a mathematical sentence. And almost without fail, the ability to construct a mathematical sentence was conspicuous by its absence. I could probably teach the BODMAS rule in my sleep!

Ah. Did you spot what I just did there? I included a link to an explanation of what the BODMAS rule is. If you already know, you don't have to follow it. But if you wondered what I was blethering about, you could follow the link and bring yourself up to speed.

This is one of the things I like about designing online learning resources. You don't have to tell people stuff they might already know! You can include a link and let them choose.

Of course, many is the traditional e-learning designer who will trap that poor learner in a tunnel of back and next buttons and lash them with information they already know, holding all the 'good stuff' to the end... only to be seen when they have jumped through the requisite hoops.

I find the whole collaborative-pull learning such a fantastic fit, here. You can look things up when you need to. If you find that there is no definition/explanation/demonstration of the thing you're after in your organisation's learning space, you can track one down elsewhere and add a link to it for the next person. Or you can create one yourself as you learn-by-experimenting how it's done. People don't need to waste their time sitting through a whole day of stuff they already know, or to trudge through page after page of elearning that adds no value to their lives.

The bleedin' obvious can be stated, but on an optional basis... and everyone is catered for. What's not to like?

Of course, none of this is going to turn me into a brilliant academic writer as long as paper-based submissions are required!

A lot of it is in the handover

2011-02-07T12:02:00.001Z

When I was in high school, I was a regular in the 4x100m relay team. My specialist distance was 400m. I did occasionally compete over 200, and even more occasionally over 100m. I wasn't quite fast enough to make the cut for the 100m individual event on a regular basis, but as a 400m runner, I had the bends down pat. And this is important in a relay team. You have to remember that your team is going to have to handle two very long bends. Sometimes the very best 100m runners are utterly useless in a bend. So a good coach will experiment with combinations until s/he finds one that works.

All well and good. Now we have four sprinters, including two who run a kick*ss bend. So we're sure to win, right?

Erm.... maybe.

There is the little problem of the baton. It's all about the baton.

The team starts with a baton and crosses the tape with that baton. That means (a) that the first runner is hampered by the need to hold the baton in one hand during the start and (b) there are three handovers during which things can go horribly wrong.

To make things even more complicated, sprinters tend to have egos the size of planets. Have you watched the Olympics? Have you seen them strut? It's an important item in their toolkit, and something they cultivate. But it does mean that working as a team is very difficult for them.

But the bottom line is: you can have the fastest team in the world, but if that baton doesn't make it over the finish line, your team doesn't win. End of.

I was once called in to address the learning and development needs around a new process. The problem was that the new process was being driven by the new systems that were to be implemented. And the systems were not really joined up. At no point had a proper business analyst been involved. Dangerously, I was the nearest thing to a business analyst to have come into contact with the project. Of course, in my line of work, there is some natural crossover into business analysis, but it wasn't enough by a long shot. Time after time, meeting after meeting, I tried to explain that there were gaps where things were going to get lost, but I obviously wasn't using the right language, because the stakeholder team simply could not see the problem. I was repeatedly told it would have to be addressed as a training issue, and began to gain a reputation for being obstructive.

I felt as if I were being asked to make a wedding dress for a girl who hadn't even been born yet. And like every L&D professional knows: when it fails, it's going to be our fault. It's going to be because the 'training' wasn't up to scratch.

Then came a Very Important Meeting. The development team was going to give a demo of the new procedure in action. Enough bits of the system had been completed to make this a viable possibility. The entire stakeholder team assembled in one room, including the biggest wigs. The team leader outlined the first stage and things got off to a great start. Then we started talking about phase two. This was my moment. I asked the team leader how a deliverable would move from stage one to stage two. His response brought the whole demo to a halt. That part had not been defined by the stakeholder team and was currently out of scope for the development teams.

Finally. The penny dropped. A few heads rolled. I felt like such a tattle-tale. But I also realised that it had been necessary. Without a workable process, the organisation wouldn't have a business.

You simply cannot go out there and get the best products in the business and expect things to work. The system(s) should support the process, not drive it. So it's very impressive to be able to say on your website that you use Blahblah technology version X.Y. In the final analysis, if the new bells and whistles whatever-it-is isn't going to help you make more widgets with a lower reject rate, then it's a waste of money. Surely? So you need to have the process defined first. You also need to know that the hand-offs between phases of the process and system applications have been... not just adequately addressed, but exhaustively researched and catered for.

Our relay team used to sit one behind the other along the aisle of the bus as we headed to competitions, passing that flipping baton forward over and over and over again. We used to get out on that track and practise that handover. Again. Again. Again. Each of us knew how to run. Like the wind, even. But that was no good whatsoever if the baton wasn't passed smoothly from hand to hand. And even with all that practice, we sometimes failed. We tripped, we dropped the baton, we missed the markers, we stepped out of our lane. We lost races. But we were just kids, and no-one's livelihood was at stake.

A relay race isn't a series of four runners putting in their best performance. It's a team of people getting a baton from the start line to the finish line. And much (most?) of that is about getting those handovers right.

Stephen Covey talks about starting 'with the end in mind'. Athletes repeat this mantra in various forms over and over again. And their entire training schedule, diet, everything is organised around that end.

So the process needs to be designed with the end-goal in mind. The systems need to support the process, so that the end goal is achieved. The people need to be supported so that they know (or can find out) what they're supposed to do at each stage, in order that the end goal can be reached.

And if the process is full of holes, or the system drops the baton... there's no point blaming the L&D team.

Just sayin'....

On the 'zone of absurdity'

2011-02-04T10:37:00.001Z

In my last job, I worked with a director who was a font of witty labels. One of these was the 'zone of absurdity' (the other labels in the graphic are mine), which arose during a discussion on the stages of performance support.

Initially, we bumble about in the dark. Things aren't going quite as they should, and we're not sure why. During this phase, the biggest obstacles are

the people who refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem at all
the people who are part of the problem and are frantically trying to deflect blame onto someone else
the people who know where the problem lies, and consider it a personal triumph that their team isn't it (this time)

During this stage, the important thing is to find out what is going wrong, not to attach blame.

When we figure out what the problem is, we move into the zone of potential. Now that we understand the problem, we can figure out how to solve it. The AA and various other support organisations will tell you that admitting what the problem is, is the most important step. In a blame culture, it is hard to achieve this stage, and even harder to stay in it. In this stage, we need to stay focused on finding a solution. What have we already got that we can use? What do we need to set in place? What resources do we need? All that malarkey. We're aiming for that optimal, target zone.

This is not to say that everything runs smoothly in the target zone, but we stand a far better chance when we're all in the know. Of course, this is an almost mythical zone, because before we get here, the challenge changes and we start again.

But my biggest bug bear is the zone of absurdity. The zone in which the solution is known, although the problem has not been defined. Sensible people like you have never even visited this zone, of course, so you can't even imagine what it looks like. Well, I encountered a small example of it yesterday, which I will share with you.

I was in the grocery store picking up ingredients for last night's dinner. I had only a few items in my basket, so I headed for the self-service checkouts. One of the items was a single Granny Smith apple. I weighed it and placed in the bagging area, as instructed by the faceless lady who voices the tillpoint programme. But it seems she wasn't really ready for me to place it in the bagging area, because she had a slight seizure. The supervisor came over and set about impressing me with her speed and efficiency... dashing headlong into the zone of absurdity.

She didn't even look at the instruction on the screen. She didn't even pause to listen to my explanation of what had happened. She logged in with her magnetic key thingy, pressed this button and that button and sashayed off again, not even noticing that a completely different error message had appeared on the screen. I had to call her back. With equal speed, and with similar lack of interest in the details, she pressed a second sequence of keys. At this point, there was no error message, but I now had a Granny Smith apple in my bag, although I hadn't been charged for it. I removed it from the bag and gave the voice-over lady another seizure. She begged me to return the item to the bag, even though doing so meant she would be giving it to me free of charge.

As the supervisor headed to my till for a third time the security guard standing near me said, "She isn't really paying attention, is she?"

I'm sure the supervisor lady thinks she's very efficient. She bustles about, pressing keys faster than anyone. But she makes no effort to identify the problem before she applies a solution. Net result? Three visits to a single till to resolve the issue of one Granny Smith apple worth 27p.

Sigh.

Absurd.

Mom's tuck shop

2011-02-03T13:18:00.001Z

While I was adding a new recipe to my cookery blog this morning, I remembered the little tuck shop that I had for my kids when they were really small. I remembered it with great fondness, but it occurred to me that it might fill some people with horror that I was prepared to take money from my children. In fact, it was a wonderful learning experience for us all, so I thought I might share it here:

When the kids were little, I chose not to go back to work full time, operating instead as a freelance training consultant with a few other odds and ends thrown into the mix, and working on an ad hoc basis. This choice meant that money was tight. So we couldn't really afford to give our children large amounts of pocket money, but we did want them to learn about having money, spending it, saving it and so on. We knew that they would want to buy sweets, but a single packet of sweeties cost more than we could afford to give them. So I hit on the idea of Mom's tuck shop.

I would buy packets of sweeties and empty them into a large Tupperware cake container. I also used to make things myself (one of which is on my cookery blog today) to go into the container. Then, each day after lunch, I would open Mom's tuck shop. I would stand one one side of the kitchen counter, and they would stand on chairs on the other with their coins clasped in their little fists and select individual sweeties from what was on offer. There was a whole role play thing involved. I would call them 'young sir' and talk to them as if they were terribly important customers whose patronage was the highlight of my day (which, I don't mind telling you, it was - I'm all choked up, just remembering it!).

Of course, the sweets were heavily subsidised. I didn't want to make my money back. I wanted them to experience the purchasing process. Looking back now: the early spending patterns are still in evidence. My elder son was somewhat tight with his money. He carefully figured out how to get the largest return in his investment, and would often choose to go without rather than part with his wealth. This is still the case today. My younger son bought two of everything: one for him, and one for "Daddy, when he comes home." I don't think Daddy ever tasted anything sweeter! My younger son is still generous to a fault, and will happily blow everything he has on a single gift (but he is learning a little caution).

Of course, they sometimes wanted to buy things that weren't available from the tuck shop. Then they would have to save up to go to a real shop. And this meant standing by while the other child bought his daily sweeties - going without for the sake of the reward being saved for. It used to break my heart to see the longing, but it was an important lesson, so I clenched my teeth and took a big girl pill.

I have to confess that the interest rates on savings accounts at the Bank of Dad were brilliant: save for five weeks and you'll get double! My elder son often went that route. My younger son, not so much.

Mom's tuck shop didn't form part of our lives in England - by then both boys were at school, and the English school day goes on into the afternoon (unlike the South African school day which ended at lunch time). When they were 13, our boys were switched from pocket money to an allowance, with which they had to buy their own clothes, airtime, toiletries, etc. (except for anything to do with school or sports club commitments) we carry those costs.

When they hit 18, the allowance is increased to include train fares, and they have to learn to budget for the termly expense.

But I will never forget Mom's tuck shop. Maybe I will introduce it with my grandchildren one day...

Choosing whom to follow on Twitter

2011-02-02T15:12:00.000Z

I can always tell when there has been a learning event somewhere in the world, because I suddenly get a whole raft of new Twitter followers coming through at once, instead of the trickle that is the daily norm.

I don't use any auto-refollow tools, so there is always a bit of a lag as I catch up, because I go through the list 'by hand' and decide whom to follow (or not).

I tweeted about this after the recent Learning Technologies conference and was asked:

This is a question I get quite often, so let me give a comprehensive answer in a space that affords me more than 140 characters for the purpose.

First, and almost without saying - no spambots, as David mentions. It isn't always easy to tell a spambot right off the bat - they're getting devilish smart. But a few indicators are:

Their names are often firstname+number. So Maxine1234 (or something like that) would have me doubting her humanity from the outset. However, I do have some Twitter friends whose names are something along those lines, so it's just a rule of thumb, not an absolute.
They tweet the same flipping thing (or a few very similar flipping things) over and over and over again.
They have no biography.
They follow thousands of people (and may be followed by a similarly large number), but have only ever tweeted a handful of times.

Second, I like to see a bio, and the more interesting or quirky it is, the better. For example, my Twitter friends' bios include such lines as:

Dad, entrepreneur, and Star Wars freak (@dbswe)
I'm all about learning, fashion, football, social media + cricket, not always in that order :) (@kategraham23)
Often laughing. Always learning. Collaborating nonstop. You ready? (@marciamarcia)
I'm passionate about training, L&D. I also bake fantastic chocolate cake. (@susiefinch)

You see? You know something about these people already. You know that Dave (@dbswe) takes being a Dad more seriously than he takes himself. You know that Kate defies stereotypes with girly girl interests and a love of sport. You know that Marcia is all systems go, and she'll take you with her if you give her half a chance. You know that Susie doubles as a homebody and would be good company over a cup of coffee. Real people. Just like you.

I also prefer a link to a blog/website, so I can get an idea of what floats your boat. If there is no bio or blog link, only a kick*ss series of tweets will get me following you.

If you're following me on my @learninganorak account, it must be because we share a passion for learning (I have a personal account for more eclectic musings). So I will visit your page, and see what you tweet about. If you only ever tweet quotable quotes, homilies and truisms forget it. I want to know what you think! If you only ever retweet (RT) what someone else has posted, hmm... probably forget it, too. I can read those things first time around. Don't get me wrong, I use the RT feature a lot myself, and I appreciate it when other people do, too. But if that's all you do, what value are you adding?

And if you only ever tweet about one narrow subject, such as LMSs or PSS or whatever, then after a couple of days, I'll probably have read everything you're likely to say.

Twitter is a conversation. A hectic, everyone-talking-at-once conversation, and it is my number 1 personal learning tool. So... contribute already.

I don't choose to follow only those people who agree with me. How boring would that be? I could sit at home and talk to myself (yes, you're right - I do that, too!), but if you're going to disagree (with me or anyone else), be grown-up about it. I can't be doing with name-calling, peeing contests (to put it politely) and slanging matches.

I think that's about it, really. I know it sounds like a lot, but I'm not really that precious. I do follow over 900 people, and keeping up with them is a tall order. How people manage with thousands, I have no idea! Maybe I'll find out one day.

Learning Technologies 2011: initial reactions

2011-01-28T17:17:00.001Z

I have a semi-official job to do in respect of the recent Learning Technologies conference in that I have to collate the Twitter stream and the various blog posts into some kind of coherent report. It is going to be a fairly immersive task and I realise that it will change my perception of the event. So I have decided to set down my own, utterly subjective view of things before that happens.

As always, I noticed a significant disconnect between the conference upstairs and the exhibition downstairs. As someone put it during the post-event reflection yesterday evening: "the thought leaders are upstairs, looking at the future, while the vendors are downstairs, selling the past". Upstairs, people were saying 'content is a tyrant,' 'social is the way forward' and 'the LMS is dead', while downstairs, people were saying 'content is king' and (as Jane Bozarth put it) 'we've added social to our LMS'. Of course, the vendors will sell what the buyers want to buy. And the buyers don't know what they don't know, so they go with what they (think they) do know. Attending the free exhibition does not expose them to the messages coming out of the conference, which has a fairly significant price tag. I am increasingly convinced that we need to find a way to get the conference message to the exhibition attendees and will be putting some ideas forward to the organisers.

There were two themes that came out of the conference for me, both of which aligned with where my own head has been for a while.

Firstly, and fairly overwhelmingly, was the message that the value of failure has been hugely underestimated. We all know that we learn more from failure than from success. In fact, I paraphrased the key message of one speaker as 'the fear of failure is the enemy of success'. The problem is that L&D departments have been told that the whole point of us is that we are supposed to make sure that nobody fails. Ever. And when people do fail, we just know for a fact that it's going to be our fault, right? And some of us have only gone and believed this message. And so we've decided that we need to produce numbers to show what a difference we're making. And SCORM tracking to show that we did train them, but if they want to be stubborn/stupid/clumsy, well it's hardly our fault, now is it?

If people are punished for failing, the fear of failing will prevent them from 'having a go', from being creative, from exploring alternatives. I overheard one person saying that within Virgin, people are rewarded for having ideas and making suggestions...whether they work or not. Now that sort of culture engenders creativity. When people aren't afraid of, of.... and you know what? This is where my vocabulary leaves me in the lurch. What is it that follows failure in a culture that doesn't tolerate it? Do you get fired? Do you get laughed at? Do you get passed over for promotion or a salary increase? Well, whatever it is, it is clear that it needs to stop. People need to be encouraged to be brave, to be creative, to use their own initiative. Because it is these attitudes that will bring the results.

It is also these attitudes that are essential for an effective implementation of the other key theme, namely embedded learning. Increasingly, we are seeing people looking at ways to take the water to the horse, of putting the support where the people are. Mobile learning and social learning tools are part of the way that this can happen. They are the tools that help Joe Bloggs to go from the moment we call 'identifying a learning need' (and he calls 'oh hell, I can't remember how to do this') to finding a solution then and there, implementing it, and getting on with his life.

Picking up on the contrast between our name for that moment and Joe's name for it, another, less strident theme for me was speaking the language of the business. L&D needs to be aligned to the organisational business goals and express itself in those terms to the SMT/board. Intead of going in there half cocked with words like social learning and connectivism and twitter and all that malarkey, further convincing the decision makers that we are from some other breed who have no strategic advice to offer, we need to be expressing ourselves in terms of performance indicators and increased productivity and improved efficiency and such.

No doubt other bloggers will add their perceptions of both the conference and the exhibition, and I look forward to reading those. If you're one of them, please use the #lt11uk tag so that I can find yours.

The off-side rule

2011-01-25T13:47:00.000Z

I recently had a rather public run-in with an old school friend. She had posted a photograph on Facebook of a mother and child behaving in a way that most of us would find socially inappropriate. But the exchange of comments on the photograph offended me far more than the subject matter of the photograph. The implication was that, as members of a different racial group, these people were in fact, subhuman, which explained the behaviour. I guess I realised that some people still held onto those archaic, offensive and unfounded views, but I was surprised to find them among relatively intelligent people. People I thought I knew. And stated publicly, to boot.

I expressed my objection. My son asked me why I didn't just leave it and 'walk away', but what you tolerate, you endorse, I reckon. I have since walked away, but I simply had to make an opposing view heard first. I thought I was being the voice of something closer to reason, but I was advised by the old school friend that I was making a fool of myself, and indeed, much mockery of me ensued, including invitations to try to live with people who behaved in this way.

Then we find ourselves dealing with outdated sexist remarks about female officials in sporting contests. The online discussions abound, ranging from shoulder shrugging, to outspoken objection from women to 'how can you judge an offside from the kitchen' (I kid you not).

The original comments were actually rather laughable in the light of the fact that the English women's football team enjoys far greater success than their male counterparts. The women's rugby and cricket teams have also shown themselves to be forces to be reckoned with.

When I posted a link on my Facebook page to the newspaper article linked to above, one Facebook friend mentioned his own objection to a current advertisement from Boots. The ad shows two women with streaming colds meeting in the street. They update each other on their incredibly hectic schedules and then one explains that she's just had to pop out and get some medicine for her husband who is in bed with a cold, poor thing. They part company on this note. Back to their superwoman routines. It seems this advert may have gone one step too far for male viewers, and I can't say I blame them.

The campaign started a few years back with the theme tune 'Here Come the Girls' and it took a humorous look at the different approaches of the two genders to things like the office 'secret Santa' and Christmas party. Now that it has spread into life in general, and the men aren't being painted in a very flattering light. I guess Boots has identified that their customer demographic is overwhelmingly female and has decided to play to that.

This is what has been called 'reverse discrimination' (which is in itself a discriminatory term, in my view). And it helps nobody's cause. Having been subjected to discrimination for so very long, one would hope that people would not subject others to treatment they found unpleasant. But it seems we have a long way to go before we acquire the sort of grace shown by Nelson Mandela on his release from prison and his appointment as President.

I guess we're still off-side. We still have a lot to learn.

Psychomotor learning

2011-01-24T10:53:00.003Z

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a freezing hour and some change on the side of a very muddy rugby pitch watching my son's team take on the team with the worst reputation for dirty play in the league. It was a good, hard game which threatened to spill over into violence a few times but never quite did.

I was struck by a few things about the learning involved in a psychomotor activity like playing a sport.

There is unavoidably a fair amount of behaviourist learning that goes on. Twice a week the team practices for a couple of hours. Over and over and over again, they practice the drills. Pass this way, kick that way, tackle this way, lay the ball off that way. Again. No, not like that. Like this. Again. Better. Once more. Now you're getting it. Again.

And last week, my son enjoyed the fruits of this kind of learning when he scored his first try. He was running down the left wing, following their outside centre (who is one of the most gifted young players I have ever seen). Alex had the ball and was running, whippet-like for the try line. My son was exactly where he should be. Alex got tackled. The ball popped up and my son picked it up beautifully and dotted the ball down for a try.

Torv's perfect take

He was in the right place at the right time and, thanks to the drills, he did the right thing. He told me afterwards how it 'all just came together'. He had been prepared for exactly this eventuality. He saw the point and the benefits of the drills and will work at them all the harder now.

He believes.

Yesterday, I was chatting on the side line to one of the coaches (the father of the prodigy, Alex), who pointed out that my son needed to develop his skills at 'looking for work'. I explained that he had come rather late to the game of rugby, and was still learning the ropes. The fact that he makes the team with gaps in his knowledge is testimony to the fact that he has a lot of raw talent, but it needs to be developed. The coach promised to help him in this area and offered to get his son on the case as well.

Shortly thereafter, he stepped up to the line and yelled to my son, who was close by "Torv! Look for the inside ball." Torv looked for the inside ball. A little while later, he could see that the other team was preparing to kick the ball out to touch right where my son was standing on the left wing. In these situations, there is the possibility that the winger could hoick the ball out of the air and start a run for the try line. André yelled, "Torv! Get ready for the kick!" Torv got ready for the kick.

Because he really wants to improve, and because he has high regard for the coaching he gets, Torv responded to this touchline guidance.

And my face lit up like a beacon.

All that coaching, all those drills? That's the 'just in case' learning that you have to have in place in a psychomotor situation. But those calls from the touch line? That's 'just in time'. That's embedded learning, that is. That's learning while doing.

And it works.

What a happy geek I was: on a Sunday afternoon, watching my 17 year old son and his friends demonstrating the outcomes of two different approaches to learning and taking a 20:15 victory in the process.

Learning about learning through cooking with children

2011-01-20T10:55:00.005Z

I recently started a cookery blog, the reasons for which are explained on the blog itself, should you be interested. Obviously cooking is about cooking and learning is about learning. So it's easy to keep the two blogs separate. Unlike with my two Twitter accounts (one professional, one personal), I am unlikely to find myself double posting something in both places.

However, a friend of mine recently asked me to post recipes that would be possible for her to make with her children. This prompted a post on my cookery blog - the first non-recipe post - that would almost do just as well on this one. In fact, I have almost certainly mentioned some of its content here before.

The core of the matter is that, when my children were little, they used to act up in the supermarket during the weekly shop. Yup. Just like anyone else's. And I hit on this idea to keep them from getting bored. Each week, each child was given a £5 budget to buy the ingredients for a meal for the family. They then had to make this meal one evening. They were allowed to ask for as much assistance and advice as they liked, and I handled anything hot or sharp, under their direction.

When talking to parents about cooking with kids, I always remind them of two things:

There will be mess. Lots of mess. Accept that and deal with it...afterwards
They won't do things as quickly or as well as you could. Get over it. Don't be tempted to take over from them. They will learn far more from doing it imperfectly themselves than from watching you do it brilliantly.

And you know, this is true of just about any learning experience, regardless of the age of the learner. The first time around is almost inevitably going to be messy. If the goal of the experience is only a nicely turned out whatever-it-is, then the mentor/teacher/guide/manager/whoever is going to want desperately to step in and make it pretty, make it right.

But I'd suggest that's a short-sighted goal.

Next time, you want the learner to be able to do more on his/her own, surely? You want to be able to step gradually backwards until the point comes when you can quietly step out of the picture altogether on that particular recipe/task and know that it will be done as it should, with the added personal flair of the individual who now owns the task.

And let's notice, too, that I didn't take my kids to a different room two days before and talk them through how the dish was going to be prepared. I didn't even demonstrate it for them. We did it together. In real time. And some of the results were disastrous. But that's okay... because we all learnt as much from them as we did from the successful meals. Maybe more. Probably more.

Some of the disasters cost us money. That is inevitable. But the £5 budget wasn't for the meal. It was for engaging my kids. It was for providing them with the opportunity to achieve something. To do something that was a real contribution to the day to day business of the family. And it was cheap at the price.

The sense of accomplishment each child had as the family sat down to a meal he had prepared, was priceless. And, of course, they had to explain to Dad exactly how it had been done, because, of course, he was desperate to know. And, of course, Mom's contribution was talked down and their own was talked up. Which is as it should be.

Learning isn't something that happens in a classroom. It is something that - like life - happens while we're making other plans. All. The. Time.

But we have to prepared for the mess. We have to be prepared for imperfection the first few times.

We have to get over ourselves.

We also have to realise that it isn't enough to just speak a thing and expect it to have results. On which note, I'd like to steer you towards this post by the Goldsmiths.

On measuring empathy

2011-01-17T12:29:00.003Z

The second episode of The Brain: A Secret History explores the issue of emotions: what they are, what role they play, etc.

It was interesting to note the conclusion that even 'rational' decisions are based upon emotional response, and that our ability to rationalise is impaired when we lose the ability to feel emotional responses.

But I was particularly interested in the area of empathy. Probably because I have a tendency to feel the emotions of others so powerfully, that it can have a disruptive effect on my own life. Michael Mosley was tested for empathy and found to be far from as empathetic as he had believed. But I would question the results of the test, and here's why.

The test involved exposing Mosley to a series of video clips of people being subjected to mild-to-moderate pain experiences (mainly being pinched on the back of the hand), and then being subjected to a comparable experience himself (he was smacked on the back of the hand with a ruler). His brain activity was measured during both activities and then compared. To what extent was the brain activity of his own pain replicated when he witnessed someone else's pain?

One major flaw in the experiment for me is the following: during the video clips, he did not seem to be shown the faces of the people being hurt. Just the physical act of the pinch. If empathy is about emotion, I suspect the replication sought would be more obvious if the subject were to see the manifestation of pain on the faces of the filmed subjects.

Furthermore, if empathy is about emotion, it is far more likely that an empathetic response would be exhibited when observing a subject experiencing emotional, rather than physical anguish. While I don't think I'd be terribly impressed to see one person pinch another, I can be utterly incapacitated by someone else's emotional trauma. The episode began with Mosley climbing into a small, dark, underground space, where he experienced genuine fear. I found my own heart rate and anxiety to be significantly elevated while watching him.

Of course, the tricky part here is that in order to assess the level of empathy, the subject has to observe someone else in emotional distress, and then be subjected to emotional distress him/herself.

This brings an issue of ethics into the story. One can hardly publicly humiliate people or give them news of a fictitious bereavement in the name of science. But perhaps it would be possible to ask for volunteers to enter the 'fear cave' after watching others do so. Perhaps one might also be able to establish a benchmark of the brain areas activated after a bereavement, and then to record brain activity of people watching someone who has been bereaved. It would be difficult, but surely not impossible to obtain suitable data and material without being unethical.

Just wondering....

On academy status

2011-01-14T09:55:00.003Z

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on this subject. Quite the contrary, in fact! But my son's school is in the process of considering Academy status, and they're currently holding meetings with parents who want to learn more. I confess that, since my son is already in sixth form, I feel somewhat remote from the whole business and haven't given it too much thought. However, for parents with kids lower down the school, there are a lot of questions - particularly in the light of the fact that ours is a faith school.

I came across these materials on teachers.tv which I thought might shed some light for teachers and parents at schools considering going down this route.

I have heard positive reports from struggling schools that have switched to this model. But I have no idea what happens in the case of schools that are not struggling. I guess only time will tell. And my inner cynic (yes, even I have one) tells me that we will encounter problems no-one has thought of or catered for beforehand, some of which may prove to be showstoppers.

Your very first conference?

2011-01-12T13:36:00.007Z

I have been chatting to Don Taylor about the upcoming Learning Technologies conference. Via the wonder that is Twitter, I have discovered that some of my tweeps are coming along to what will be their very first conference and they're feeling a little apprehensive.

Of course, screeds of stuff has been written about conferences and how to make the most of them and and and, so this is just me adding my twopen'orth.

So many of us attend online events these days, even if it's just a tweetchat. So we've grown accustomed to swooping in for the designated hour or two and swooping back out again to return to life-as-usual (which may even involve going back to bed, if the time difference was unkind). Since the technology exists to attend conferences online, I would suggest that it is very important to home in on the value-added of a face to face event, and capitalise heavily on that.

You can attend presentations in an online conference. You can take part in the group-wide back channel text chat. Sometimes, you can fire off a private message to an individual attendee (depending on the platform being used and what the moderators are doing with it). You can raise questions.

But now you're travelling a few miles, or a few hundred miles. As well as your travel costs, you may be running up a travel and subsistence bill. You are also (if it isn't too indelicate of me to point it out) increasing your carbon footprint. So, I suggest, you put in a little effort to make it a worthwhile exercise.

So what can't you do (readily) online?

During/after sessions

Introduce yourself to the people who sit on either side of you. Exchange business cards/v cards.
Go up and introduce yourself to the speaker.
Take note of the person who asks the question/shares the anecdote that resonates with you, and go and exchange business cards/v cards at the end of the session.
Participate in the small group discussions. Don't deprive the rest of the group of your perspective - you might just provide someone's lightbulb moment.
Ask questions/make observations. While you can do this online, my experience is that people are more reluctant to take the mike, and will make almost exclusive use of the back channel (although some find that distracting and disable it)

Use breaks/evenings to

Put faces to names. Discover that the person you consider lofty and exalted is just human.
Get eyeball to eyeball with the person/people with whom you've had a long running exchange of views online... or the person you've been following from afar (don't be shy, you may never get another chance).
Hole up in a corner with a few people who face similar challenges to your own.
Have a tweet up.
Introduce yourself to presenters of sessions you're not attending. There is usually a speakers' room, so if they have work to do, they'll take refuge there - if they're in the common area, they're fair game. ;o)
Go out for lunch with someone who can serve as a sounding board for your latest wacky idea.
Take a stroll around the exhibition (if the conference coincides with one).
Take in local sights - especially if you've travelled abroad - preferably with someone local.

I'm sure there are several more things you can do. But those are my 'starters for 10'. And if you're coming to Learning Technologies, come and find me and say hello!

A formative learning experience

2011-01-07T14:10:00.004Z

A post bubbling out from today's earlier offering.

My mother was a bookworm. She was also a single, working parent from fairly early on. The education model in which I found myself during the earlier years of my school life involved a great deal of independent, investigative learning. Since it was a logistical nightmare to get me to the library to access reference books, my mother set about creating a reference section in our home library. This involved purchasing a set of encyclopaedia (World Book of Knowledge, if I remember correctly, since anything more upmarket was out of her reach), various text books and - joy of joys to my little heart - the Time Life Nature series.

From the age of about 7 or 8, I pored over those editions. I forget which one it was that explored things like colour blindness, dwarfism/gigantism and psychology (I think it was Evolution), but that was my absolute favourite. It literally fell apart from use. And I wanted to know more. I regularly hauled it out and subjected my poor mother to my own theories about the content, as well as myriad questions.

When I started studying learning theory as an adult, I found I already knew about Pavlov and Skinner. I had read and reread about them in my precious Time Life books. When I shared this with my lecturer, I was informed, with raised eyebrows, that I must have been a most precocious child.

I don't remember that being the case at all. I just remember being fascinated.

One of the experiments that featured in the book was Harry Harlow's work with baby Rhesus monkeys. These were taken away from their mothers and placed in enclosures where they had a choice between terry cloth or wire frame 'mother'. In one group, the wire mother was fitted with a milk bottle. In the other, it was the terry mother that was thus equipped. Without fail the monkeys preferred the covered option, even when it offered them no food. I remember reading the conclusion about the preference for a tactile experience and wondering whether the monkeys perhaps preferred the covered version because it offered them a hiding place of sorts, rather than because it was more cuddly.

It's very frustrating to be 8 and have no-one to ask about such things. But I remember wanting to know. I remember that drive. That endless exploration of a series of books which constitutes a landmark in my learning experience, and experience which carries on to this day.

How thrilled I was to find several photographs of the Time Life Nature series... with Evolution in every single one!

The secret history of the brain

2011-01-07T10:29:00.002Z

For those who are in a position to access BBC programmes, either in real time, or on iPlayer, I would like to recommend that you catch BBC4's The Brain: A Secret History. It is a documentary about the history of experimental psychology, and the first of three episodes ran last night at 9pm GMT.

As I had expected, it was simultaneously enlightening and deeply disturbing. There was coverage, including direct video footage of several of the experiments we've read about or studied: Pavlov, Skinner, Milgram et al.

The cruelty to animals and the breathtaking lack of concern for people's human rights beggars belief, as always; and the views expressed by some of the experimental researchers in their heyday fills me with impotent rage. At one point, my husband had to leave the room. I think I might have followed if this were my first exposure to the concepts. As it is, my exposure to the work of the likes of Pavlov and Skinner dates back to the Time Life Library series which my mother acquired when I was about 7 or 8, and the issue that addressed this subject was one I returned to so many times that it eventually fell to bits.

I was an by the time I first heard of Stanley Milgram and his eponymous experiment. My very first reaction was to ask whether the naieve subjects were given counselling afterwards to help them cope with the revelation of what they were prepared to do to another human being. I mean: how do you make peace with such knowledge about yourself? Last night's episode included an interview with one of the few surviving subjects, and it was plain that the man is still traumatised, nearly 50 years later! There are times when one doesn't want to be vindicated. For me, this was one of them.

Coverage of electroshock therapy included a case study of one young woman institutionalised for brain reconditioning by her mother because of arguments about a new boyfriend. This involved interviews with the (now much older) woman herself... well, suffice to say I was seething. Nevertheless, it is heartening to see that the human mind is more resilient than expected.

The show is presented by psychiatrist Michael Mosley, who at one point takes a hallucinogen as part of the programme. His passion for his subject is infectious, although I might be the wrong person to make that call, since I had a pre-existing fascination with the subject.

Did anyone else catch it? What were your views?

On living the one-buttock life

2011-01-06T13:45:00.004Z

If you're a regular reader, and you have an ounce of insight into human character, you will have surmised that I am going through a rather discouraging period, right now. And being who I am, my lows can get pretty low...after all, my highs are somewhat stellar.

Knowing this about myself, I have had to learn over the years to take myself in hand, to put myself in the path of waves of inspiration, instead of wallowing in the Slough of Despond, as I am often tempted to do.

Sadly, one can learn some rather hard lessons about people when the going gets tough. Where one expects to find a 'Barnabus' (an encourager), one sometimes finds an accuser, or a lecturer... which is no help at all, you can take my word on this! Sometimes, even the Barnabuses have a grace period: when the solutions they have suggested, or the advice they have given, or the succour they have offered yields no change, they move on, unable to bring themselves to stick around for the long haul when things don't turn out as they expect.

One of the places I can usually find something to lift me, is TED talks. Yesterday, I was reminded of this one by Benjamin Zander, and I have been immersing myself in Zanderness ever since. I have been tracking down everything of his that I can find.

I find myself affirmed in the passion with which I approach my life. I am compelled to acknowledge that the heart on a sleeve must inevitably take more knocks than the guarded heart. But I remember that I do not do what I do because of what it will or won't mean to my own heart, but because, as Zander puts it in this and other clips:

Our job is to awaken possibility in other people. Who are you being that your people's eyes aren't shining?
We are about contribution. That's what our job is. It's not about impressing people.
The voice that says "No," is actually not very interesting.
In contribution, there is no 'better' and that is all.

Zander says on his website:

The best review I ever got was not from a music critic, but from my father. He was 94 years old at the time and completely blind. He attended a Master Class I gave in London and sat there in his wheelchair for about three hours. When it was over, I went to speak with him. He lifted up his finger in his characteristic way and said, "I see that you are actually a member of the healing profession." It seemed to me the highest accolade.

I agree. These are the accolades that I long for. And - bless all your lovely hearts - I get a few that bear some resemblance. The tragic reality is that I can't take the good will and the encouragement that so bouys me to the bank. But, at a time when I find myself inclined, out of desperation, to make compromises in order to pay the mortgage, Zander reminds me that I am already doing my job. Like so many of the other worthwhile jobs I do (wife, mother, local community member), it doesn't come with a salary cheque. But, also like those other jobs, perhaps it can co-exist alongside one that does. Let's hope so, because I am simply not designed to lead a two-buttock existence!

This is the man who gives all his students an A at the start of the year, on the condition that they write him a letter as if from the end of the year, that begins "I got an A because...." describing the person they could and would become if only their enxiety and the little voices that say "No" didn't get in the way. How's that for a radical and empowering approach?

There is just so much I could say about Benjamin Zander, but you have access via your search engine to all the very same materials I have watched and read over the past 48 hours, and, because you're in a different space from me, perhaps you might find inspiration in bits I didn't even notice. But I encourage you to carve out a little moment of Zander-immersion for yourself today - especially if you're a discouraged member of the learning profession.

Let me know how that goes...

Personalised leader boards

2011-01-05T15:01:00.005Z

When I was 10 years old, I started at a new school. It was in a different province from my previous school, and therefore subject to a different local authority.

All the new standard fours (grade sixes) gathered together. The three teachers had decided on their own method of splitting us up among themselves. They placed us in order of average percentage from the previous year's exams and then counted us off: 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3....

All the 1s went with Mr W, all the 2s with Mr S, and all the 3s with Mr K. I didn't even know what an 'average' was. We didn't have those at my previous school. So I just opted to use my maths result (90%) and wound up in Mr W's class.

In my previous school, we didn't have such things as 'class positions'. I had been in what would probably now be called the gifted and talented stream (in our school, it was called the 'achievement' class), and probably fared a solid middle of the range performance overall. But I'm guessing. Achievement stream teachers experienced a freedom to engage in personalised/differentiated teaching that today's teachers can probably only dream of. The only person who ever compared my performance to anyone else's in the class was my mother (long story).

The new school was very much about competition.

For the first term, we were seated in order of those 'average percentages' from the previous year. This put me about 3rd or 4th, I think. The child with the highest average sat front left from the teacher's perspective, with the second placed child next to her and so on, so that the front row contained the 6 highest performers from the previous year. The lowest achievers were placed in the back of the class, because they were deemed lazy.

At the end of each term, we were tested on every subject (this was the norm in the South African education system in those days, so I tend to smile wryly when British parents complain that their children are over-tested with their four-times-in-twelve-years system). Each child's results were averaged out, and the great shuffle began. One term, I was placed 6th and so on the very edge of the first row, in imminent danger of moving back a row if I didn't look to myself. What pulled me down were my results in Afrikaans: a much higher level of fluency was required in the Eastern Cape than had been the case in Natal, and my proficiency wasn't up to the task (it soon was, though - my Afrikaans granny was mortified at my poor skills in the language, and addressed them forthwith).

I can't tell you how stressed we were around exam time. Little poppets of 10 years old, getting into a right state about dropping down the order. And the teachers relished it. They felt it was good for us. The top three achievers in our class (whose names and faces I still remember as if it were yesterday) were in very close contention. Their stress levels were the highest. How Louise sobbed when she dropped into third place one term!

Looking back now, I can't see how any of that benefited anyone, to be honest. And I wonder about the boys (because they were all boys) in the back row. The 'lazy' ones. Mark, Shaun, Tony... I wonder what they went on to do with their lives. I wonder if they continued to be 'lazy' and/or 'stupid'. I wonder if they opted out of the race at that point, or if it pushed their 'I'll show you' button.

And, of course, the same thing was going on in Mr S's and Mr W's classes. So, when Louise was in third place in our class, she may well only have been in 4th or even 12th place over all. And as for how she might have fared across the whole city, district, province, country, world.....Who knows? Ours was such a tiny pond. But the competition was so fierce, it was all we focused on.

Take, for example, the leader board on the game of Word Twist, as seen from my perspective:
How smug might I feel to be so close to the top of the list? How hard did my oldest friend, Cathy (we've known each other since January 1974) work so that her name could sit above mine on that list? Does she sit at the top of her own leader board? Does Nathan (my daughter's boyfriend) sit at the top of his? Does he have other friends who have outperformed him? And how would we fare when compared against the global results? Will I ever manage to oust Nathan from top spot?

Does it matter?

No. Not really. It's a bit of harmless fun, and the competitive aspect serves as a prod.

But I am an adult. I know that this is not Important. I know that, even if I trounce Nathan soundly, I will still feature nowhere on any global achievement list. I also know that, even if I did, it wouldn't change anything.

But when I was 10 (and 11 and 12 and...), it mattered a lot. And nowhere near as much to me as it did to some of the kids who wanted to get into medical school or whose parents bribed them with rewards or threatened them punishment.

I wish I could go back and find out what model that earlier school followed (if any) that resulted in a situation where none of us knew or cared where we featured in the class rankings. We only knew that we had done better or worse than the previous term, and that our results in maths were stronger or weaker than our results in art (or whatever). We knew who else in the class was gifted (or otherwise) in the subjects we excelled at, because of the points at which they got to spend time on self-directed projects.

I know. Life is competitive. We compete for the interests of the object of our fancy, we compete for the job we apply for. But making a leader board out of learning?

And don't tell me it doesn't happen any more. It does. Maybe not in your kids' school, or the school at which you teach, but it happens.

Choosing perspectives

2011-01-02T21:04:00.006Z

It's no secret that 2010 took a sudden left turn in July and became an annus horribilis for me. One thing after another went wrong. When it came to Christmas time, I decided to put it all behind me and focus on making the festive season as pleasant as possible under the rather trying circumstances, and address my life's crises from a fresh perspective in the new year. But the year had one last sting in its tail. My mother phoned me a few days after Christmas to tell me that my super-fit, ultra-marathon running uncle had had a massive heart attack while on the treadmill at the gym. While under sedation, he developed pneumonia. He only regained consciousness today. When I heard the news, I could only groan, "What next?"

My uncle is one of two remaining influential male figures in my life who have been there from the very beginning. The other is also an uncle, but of the 'by marriage' sort. The two of them have known each other since they were teenagers and, during family Christmas holidays when I was growing up, they tended to forget that they were no longer in their teens, and got up to all manner of mischief. They loom large in my childhood mental photographs, and the thought of losing him makes me feel physically ill.

Up until that phone call, I would have said that my most urgent desire for 2011 would be to secure a source of income. But suddenly it has become far more urgent that my uncle should recover. Completely. And run the Two Oceans again.

Although we aren't much into New Year's resolutions as a family, we have adopted the practice of setting ourselves goals for the year ahead, which we share over our New Year's day lunch. At this point, we also reflect on the year that has passed, and I realised that some great things had happened during the year. With everything that had gone wrong, it had been all to easy to forget the things that had gone right. And all the many days that had been wonderfully ordinary and uneventful. All the days which had included little triumphs of the sort so often, so easily forgotten.

So I decided to sign up for the 365 project (I hope that link works - the site is being a bit iffy. Let me know). Having a daily record of the year: the little moments, the big moments - will keep things in perspective should (God forbid) the wheels not reattach themselves, or fall off again.

I don't have a wonderful camera, and I'm not a gifted photographer. But the project isn't just for those who can tick both those boxes.

Perhaps you'd like to join me on this journey. Or perhaps you might like to start one of your own.

Moving forward to an older model

2010-12-23T13:28:00.007Z

It's perhaps appropriate that I should be formulating these thoughts at Christmas time. According to Christian beliefs, Jesus was a carpenter before he embarked on his three years of ministry. Why? Because his Dad was a carpenter. That was pretty much the way things were done all those many years ago. When you were old enough, you went to work with your Dad and you learnt his trade from him. I'm not quite sure what happened if you were the son of a carpenter, but you really wanted to be a farmer. Perhaps, if you had understanding parents, they went and had a word with a local farmer and arranged an apprenticeship for you.

Of course, there were gender inequality issues, and certain choices were only available to one gender or the other, but girls learned from their mothers how to dye cloth, make clothing, prepare meals, etc.

There were no exams.

In the middle ages, it was much the same. Experienced stonemasons taught would-be stonemasons, skilled glassblowers taught apprentice glassblowers, and so on. People learned their craft from someone who already knew how it was done. No doubt there were those with great potential and those with less. No doubt there were those who quickly outstripped their teachers, and no doubt said teachers reacted with varying degrees of grace (or lack thereof). No doubt some teachers were kind, while others were cruel.

Today's employee is (hopefully) more empowered than the apprentice of yesteryear, so perhaps the vagaries of the 'master's' temperament can be thus addressed. And there is so much that can be achieved with the implementation of a variation on this model. Learning from someone who is more experienced has got to be more effective, more timely than waiting weeks before going on a generic course. Progressing at your own pace with your own personal mentor, who gains kudos from your achievements. Asking the bloke at the next desk leads to an answer which can be implemented right away: quick win, uninterrupted workflow. What's not to like?

With the speed of change and technological innovation, who's got the time to put together a slick learning resource before something changes again anyway?

My thoughts along these lines put me in mind of a conversation I had recently with some L&D leaders about redundancies.

Think about it like this. The economy is rough. You've got to lose half your team. You've got two senior members earning an fair amount, and several inexperienced folks who are still learning the ropes. After a fair amount of thought, you are able to identify the stronger performers from among the more junior team members, and you cut the rest. But you still have to lose one of your senior members. One of them churns out work like a machine. The other seems to a spend a fair amount of time chatting to the newer staff members and his work rate suffers as a consequence. So you decide to keep the one with the higher work rate.

And it turns out to be the biggest mistake you've ever made.

Why?

Because when he was 'chatting' with the more junior staff members, what he was actually doing was helping them come to grips with the system, teaching them a few skills, mentoring them, coaching them, turning them into productive team members. Once he goes, the morale of the whole team plummets, and the workrate follows suit. Even your star performer's workrate suffers because she's not getting the handovers from the rest of the team.

In marketing parlance, this is 'below the line' training. It just happens, because your newly unemployed staff member is naturally an enabler.

What if you turned that into a KPI? What if you actually set the expectation on every team member to contribute to team morale and development? What if you had a system by means of which team members awarded one another kudos points (or gold stars or thumbs up or something) every time they helped one another out? What if it became enviable to be the person on the team with the highest number of kudos points? What if management realised that the enablers on the team might in fact be more valuable than than those with the highest measurable output?

What if everyone shared what they learned with everyone else. What if the young techno-wizard on the team were encouraged to look at innovative ways to tackle things? What if he got to share his ideas at the weekly team meetings? What if he spent time teaching the wonderfully creative, but slightly techno-challenged member of the team?

What if everyone was teaching and everyone was learning...all the time?What if the L&D team stopped being the bottle neck, and started being the team that helped people help each other - going from being the only goal-scorer on a low scoring team to being the person with the highest number of assists on a high scoring team?

What if? What if?

An operational attitude towards learning

2010-12-17T16:18:00.003Z

You've probably heard me say this before, but I am increasingly of the view that the workplace training/learning/L&D (whatever they're called in your organisation) team should be moved out of HR and into Operations.

Why?

Well, HR is responsible for looking after people: their payroll, their working conditions, their treatment under employment law, etc. and has no direct accountability in terms of the organisation's business objectives.

L&D's job is all about performance, and performance is an operational thing. Our job is to help the organisation meet its business objectives by helping people do their jobs.

While L&D remains under the umbrella of HR, it remains okay to take people out of their workspace and put them into a learning space, and then to put them back into their working space again at the end of it.

An operational view of learning means that learning needs to be situated in the workspace, because it's part of the job.

Let's take the research and development bods at a sweet factory. I pick this example (a) because I'm a bit of a chocoholic and (b) because my mother worked at a sweet factory for over 30 years, so I have some vicarious insight. They don't know before they start working on it whether their new idea for a confection will work. They don't know whether the new flavour of toffee will enjoy favour with their customer base. So they experiment a bit. They find a recipe that works, and they send out a bunch of the new flavours to the children of all the staff members. They ask the kids to identify what each flavour is and to mark it out of 10. They also ask the kids to suggest some flavours that they would like to see added to the range. My reponse said that flavour A was 'mint 8/10'; flavour B was 'chocolate 9/10' and flavour C was 'soap? 0/10' (it turns out flavour C was actually grape). I suggested licorice as being a flavour they should look into.

The R&D team gathered back all the results and decided to go with the mint. They also developed a licorice version (obviously other people had suggested it, too), and they eventually took those two flavours to market.

In fact, the whole process was a learning process. They learned how to make the new toffees. They learned what the consumer reaction was to the different flavours. They learned what other flavours consumers would like to see. They learned how to make those.

Once they knew how to make the new flavours, and the products had been given the okay, the R&D team passed on the information to the factory. The manufacturing staff then learned what changes needed to be made (and when) in order to produce the new flavours.

Work is learning. We can seldom say we know how to do a thing before we need to do it for the first time. And when we come to do it for the first time, we might

experiment, based on past experience/existing knowledge
watch someone who already knows how to do it
look it up
get some advice from someone else who may have some ideas

All of this is learning, and it simply forms part of the workscape.

Too many of our learning solutions require people to separate themselves from the very context in which the learning applies. Now I don't doubt that there are some tasks for which this will remain a necessity, but, applied as a blanket approach, this ensures that learning is an interruption of the workflow, instead of facilitating it.

I know it's a gross generalisation, but the COOs I've met have always been driven, results focused individuals. This is where I believe L&D needs to position itself. Learning should be viewed as a strategic function, one that contributes directly to ensuring that the organisation meets its targets and achieves its vision. It's not something you do in order to ensure that union requirements are met.

BBC 4: The Joy of Stats

2010-12-13T23:41:00.003Z

The BBC occasionally turns out some cracking documentaries. This one is no exception. Hans Rosling is an animated and passionate presenter who loves numbers. The clever use of animation is hugely informative. Although the comments on the BBC's site make it clear not everyone agrees with me.

One of the visualisations used in tonight's episode was David McCandless's billion dollar-ogram, a diagram designed to help people get their heads around the huge numbers that get bandied about in respect of the cost of this war or that oil spill. The result is very interesting!

If you are able to access BBC programmes via a feature such as iPlayer, I strongly recommend this - particularly if you're keen on facts and figures.

A stumbling block to collaborative learning (and working)

2010-12-09T15:00:00.002Z

A recent post from Doug Belshaw, in which he quotes extensively from Steve Shapiro got me thinking about a conversation my husband and I often have, out of sheer frustration.

One of the things South Africans in the UK are often accused of is being gung ho. This is because of a different formative workplace experience. I don't know what it's like now, but during the years that we lived and worked there, actions would be allocated during meetings, and the owners of those actions would be expected to go away, do the job and come back with the completed chart, project, design, whatever. If you needed help doing X-thing, you spoke to the person with the skills or the access or the authority and you got it done. If you had a meeting with your line manager or your team before the task was complete, you would report on your progress and then get back to it afterwards. If you needed to escalate the matter to your line manager because you weren't getting the results you wanted, you did. But you owned the task.

So when we moved to the UK, we adopted the same approach... and it didn't go down at all well!

As an example:

I once worked at a company as the in-house IT trainer. I should point out at this stage that it was explicitly stated that they wanted me to be able to hit the ground running, because my line manager (the IT director) had a big project looming, and wouldn't be able to allocate much time to training. At a meeting with the stakeholders, it was decided that everyone in the company needed to have (among other things) certain Excel skills. Now of course, the skills that were needed day to day by the people in that company weren't the same as the skills needed by people in another company. So we identified the core actions that were likely to form part of pretty much everyone's day job within the organisation. We also identified a set of additional Excel skills that a subset of employees would need. These we would address separately. It was decided that everyone should be invited to attend a core skills workshop, but that, initially, at any rate, only those who used the additional skills would be asked to attend that workshop.

It seemed pretty clearcut to me, so I did what I thought I had been asked to do. I hit the ground running. I designed a core skills workshop. I set up exercises using familiar spreadsheets that users were likely to encounter on a day to day basis, in order to provide context for the features being covered. I created a manual, using screen grabs as signposts. I created an index, so that attendees could refer back to the manual after the workshop. I spoke to the in-house print team, and got them to do a nice layout for me.

We had already drawn up a very nice questionnaire which served as a base level TNA, and we had a clear idea where the greatest need was.

We had also kitted out the training room with the equipment needed.

So, we were all systems go. I invited my first batch for the pilot session of the workshop... and all hell broke loose.

Apparently, I was supposed to check back with my line manager at every step of the way. Each step needed to be approved before I could move on to the next step. Since no-one above me on the food chain had the remotest idea about learning or training... and were singularly lacking in people skills, I was completely non-plussed. We had already decided everything that needed to be decided, surely? I had been given my actions, and I was, well, actioning them.

My husband's experience is similar. He will be asked to write a report on X thing, but the report is sent back umpteen times, with minor changes and edits, sometimes to changes and edits made earlier.

And it is this ethos that I think stands in the way of the successful implementation of social business, collaborative working and collaborative learning. I have been in situations where it has fallen to me to create a shared space for a certain project (for example, a wiki). Immediately I have done so, the rest of the team has then deferred to me as the owner of such space. Instead of editing material entered, they would send me an email, identifying suggested changes. I have also worked with organisations that have introduced systems such as Sharepoint in order to encourage collaborative working, but then immediately locked down all the permissions and so on, so that only management approved materials can be published in shared space.

So, I would suggest that, if social business is to become de rigeur, then the offline attitudes and culture need to be addressed, too.

When you give someone a task to do, you need to trust them to do the task, and empower them to call on such resources within the business as are needed in order to do so. You need to trust them to manage their time, to assist others with other projects as and when it is appropriate. You need to allow them to have an exchange of emails without CC-ing you in all the time. You need to be available to them, if they need your help, but not hanging over their shoulders to make sure they do the job as you would do it (if you don't have anything else to do, maybe you should have done the task yourself, huh?). You need to let them make mistakes and ask them what they learned and what they would do differently... then let them try again. You need to let them take credit for what works and own up to what fails without feeling that they are failures.

In other words, you need to trust yourself, too. If you hired them, because you believed that they could do the job, then let them do the job and appreciate the time it frees up to let you do yours!

In most of the organisations I have worked with, the nature of online relationships replicates the organisational culture offline.

Until we start to give people a bit of room to breathe, I think we're not going to be able to properly harness the power of social business.

...or that's what I think, anyway.

Jane Hart's journey to social business

2010-12-09T14:20:00.003Z

Jane Hart has shared her journey from elearning to social business in this blog post. Her journey has similarities to my own... and perhaps to yours.

Jane is probably one of the best known advocates of the use of social media for business performance. She and the other members of the Internet Time Alliance (Jay Cross, Clark Quinn, Harold Jarche and Charles Jennings) are running a workshop in London next week. If you're an L&D professional (other than a consultant to whom the invitation is not extended), you might want to find out if there are any spaces open.

This could change your professional practice.

Seriously.

Learning about guilt

2010-12-07T12:06:00.003Z

Have you ever noticed how, whenever you're going through something, everyone always knows exactly what you should be doing and how you should be feeling?

New mothers with tiny infants are told exactly how they should be handling the business of being a Mom and how they should feel about all the things their new babies do. Newly bereaved people are told exactly how they should be responding and are given only X amount of time before the good graces of friends start to wear out because they really should be over it by now.

And my situation is, of course, no different. Everyone knows exactly how I should be feeling. And it seems the one thing I should not be feeling is guilt. "You've done nothing wrong!" they assure me. And they're right... in a way. But that changes nothing.

I guess I've known on some subconscious level that there are different kinds of guilt, but right now, I'm neck deep in it, and am intimately acquainted with it.

As a practising Christian, I subscribe to the notion of sin, repentance and redemption. I do. And when I sin, I experience guilt. So I seek forgiveness. And - I believe - I get it.

But that doesn't have bearing here. Because, of course, not all failings are sinful. And, if I were the only one to be impacted by the failure of my business, I could handle that.

But I'm not.

Yes, my business is a limited liability company, and so my personal assets are not forfeit to the collapse of the business. But, the collapse of the business has meant a loss of income. And my failure to find an alternative source of income does place our personal assets at risk.

And this is where the guilt comes in.

You see, my husband works extraordinarily hard. He always has. It's the nature of the man. He currently commutes two hours each way, every day. Scooter, train, tube, train, walk. He would prefer not to, and when he started at the company, the plan was to move his role to a town 20 minutes' drive from our home. But the recession put paid to that idea. So he continues to commute, two years later.

He hasn't failed at anything. He continues to work to the same standard. He continues to earn the same salary. But he still stands to lose his personal assets (including, under extreme circumstances, his home).

Now you can paint that any colour you want, but I did that, and I have to live with it. He is not angry with me. Good grief, what kind of man would he be if he did? He fully supports me in every way.

I have been harangued fore and aft for feeling guilty over this. I have been told I shouldn't because it doesn't make sense on a logical level. I have even been told that my guilt is unChristian and sinful, because it is tantamount to saying that I don't accept God's forgiveness. I simply cannot get people to understand that I don't believe I need to be forgiven.

I tried to explain it to one person like this:
You are told that you have to hold out two 5kg weights at arm's length and at shoulder height. The moment you let them drop, someone large and powerful is going to slap your husband (wife, son, daughter) humiliatingly in the face and kick him in the stomach. So you hold those weights. You hold them beyond endurance. But eventually, you simply cannot. You are not capable. You reach the end of your ability, and you are forced to let them drop. Your husband is duly slapped and kicked.

Now tell me you don't feel guilty.

You didn't sin. But you did fail. The task was beyond your capability, you were not able to perform it, and he paid the price.

Okay, it's a simplistic analogy, but please tell me you get my drift. Sometimes you fail without sinning/wrongdoing. But you still fail. And you still feel guilty when your failure hurts the ones you love.

Surely this is perfectly reasonable?

On a side note, permit me to brag. My husband had a long talk with our younger son (the older one is out of the country on a gap year) about the possible implications of our situation. He asked him what worried him most. Did my 17 year old talk about the loss of the nice big house? Did he express concern that his driving lessons could be forfeit? Did he worry about not being able to afford the lifestyle he currently enjoys? No. He said he was worried about the impact on my well-being. He was concerned that I would feel like a failure and that my confidence would take a knock.

In the midst of everything falling down around my ears, that strikes me as a success story, wouldn't you say? We must have done something right. I am so proud of his lack of selfishness that I could just burst.

On money-related irony

2010-12-06T16:49:00.005Z

Just lately, I have been thinking about some of the ironies inherent in our financial systems.

When we lived in South Africa, bank charges were very high. You paid a cash-handling fee when you deposited large sums of cash. You paid an admin fee every time the bank processed a cheque of yours... or one from someone else that was made out to you. You paid for a new cheque book when the old one was empty. Basically, you paid for everything. Walk into the bank and breathe, and they charged you for the air. This is something that people in the UK simply can't relate to. Here, many bank transactions are still free. But we'll come to that in a minute. Back to South Africa for a moment (sorry, are you getting whiplash?).

If you agreed never to drop below a certain balance, your banking became free. And the balance was not just a few Rands, either. So, basically, if you were flush enough not to need every last cent you had, you could have all your bank services free of charge. If, however, you were balancing on a knife edge, and needed every cent you earned, you had to pay to access this money. And it's no small matter, either - total bank charges could be among your larger expenses.

It gets worse. Let me relate an anecdote that I witnessed on more than one occasion. Person X, let's call him Thando Sijawe, came into the bank to draw some money. He couldn't use the hole-in-the-wall, because, like many South Africans, he was illiterate. He explained to the cashier that he wanted R10, and she wrote out the withdrawal slip for him, which he then endorsed with his thumbprint. She gave him his R10 and he went on his way. What he didn't know was that the bank charged him R7 (I kid you not, that was the exact figure) for this service. If he had drawn out all his money at once, this might have been less significant but crime levels were (are?) high in South Africa, especially in the poorer areas where Thando lived, so the tendency was only ever to carry money enough for your immediate needs, taxis, buses and the day's food supplies. People like Thando had to deal in cash, because their illiteracy meant that they couldn't use the pay-by-card option.

So, not only did Thando get penalised for being poor, he suffered the double whammy of being further penalised for being uneducated, too.

But it's not just Thando. And it's not just in South Africa.

In the UK, much of our banking is free. The flip side is that it is also slower. Everything takes longer. And you can do so much less at the hole-in-the-wall. But you learn to live with that. However, if you're having a bad month and one of your standing orders bounces, there is a fee of £22 that is levied. So basically, they're fining you for being broke.

As I have already (very publicly) stated, my business is being declared bankrupt. This morning, I was advised that I need to pay £2500 for this process. It seems I am too broke to go bankrupt. Go figure.

I'm not sure what happens next. I am going to see an insolvency adviser to discuss my options.

I apologise if this transparency makes you feel uncomfortable. I just hope that it will prove helpful to others who may be having a tough time of things, right now.

I also think it's important to shine a spotlight on some of the things that strike me as being out of balance in society. After all, the fat cats of the banking industry are the ones taking home the huge bonuses.

Everyone knows my understanding of accounting is negligible, but I can't help feeling the wrong people are paying for those bonuses.

Hans Rosling: 200 years of health and wealth in 4 minutes

2010-12-06T12:43:00.003Z

Professor Hans Rosling waxes enthusiastic as he shows an animation of world health and wealth over the past two hundred years. It's an excellent video and he ends it on a very positive note. Perhaps you have to be African, though, to grieve over the fact that the back end of the continuum is almost entirely blue.

Crossing the language divide using online tools

2010-12-02T18:17:00.003Z

I'd like to tell you a true story about something that happened to me quite recently.

We keep getting mail for the previous owners of our house. We have lived in this house for more than two and a half years, so mostly, it's just junk mail. But there's one rather serious-looking envelope that keeps arriving from Paris. It's addressed in French and indicates it contains official documents which require a signature. I think it has something to do with tax, but I'm not quite sure what gave me that impression.

I have repeatedly done a return to sender, but the documents keeps returning, each time with a more urgent looking message on the envelope. Last time, I wrote on the envelope in large letters: Mr Bloggs has not lived at this address for well over two years, please update your records.

The documents came back last week.

I was tempted to open them to find some contact details, when I noticed what appeared to be a phone number on the front of the envelope. Nothing ventured...

I used Google translate to find out how to say, "Is there anyone there who can speak English, please?" and practised it a few times.

When the phone was answered, I stumbled through "Est-ce qu'il ya quelqu'un qui parle anglais, s'il vous plaît?"

The lady told me that there was not.

Hmm. How was I going to explain my situation to her? I know enough French to say "Je ne parle pas francais, mais une moment, s'il vous plait..."

I typed into the translate box, "You keep sending me letters for Mr Bloggs." followed by "But he hasn't lived in this house for more than two years." I then used the 'listen' button to play this to her through my phone.

She figured out (more or less) what I was doing and spoke very slowly back to me in a combination of French and English. Eventually, we managed to establish that I no longer wanted Mr Bloggs's tax demands (or whatever they were), that I didn't have a forwarding address for him, and that she should stop sending his mail here.

It was clunky, but you know what? It worked. Now where's my flipping babelfish?

If I were measured by the company I keep...

2010-12-01T22:56:00.003Z

I am very blessed to include among my friends, some extraordinarily talented people. Two of them feature in this post.

The first is Jeremy (Jerm) Nell, a South African cartoonist of note. I have known him since he was just a boy, and have watched his talent blossom into something that has made people around the world sit up and take note.

Jeremy recently got married. And this is where the other half of today's equation comes in. Justin de Reuck is an exceptional photographer, and he did the photos for Jerm and Janel's wedding. Oh... and Jeremy would like to make it known that he was not crying in that photo of him first catching sight of his bride, 'kay? Yeah. Right.

Both of these men have the uncanny ability to see things in a way that others might miss, and then to draw that perspective to our attention. Jeremy casts a cynical eye over situations and lampoons them mercilessly in single frame political satire cartoons, then proves he has a whimsical side with his Biggish Five strip.

Justin sees potential in angles and lighting and goodness knows what all else and captures a fleeting moment. His photographs of his own family and friends are achingly beautiful, and his wedding photography is among the best I have ever seen.

Top ten tips, my eye!

2010-12-01T14:08:00.003Z

Being in the job market has made me the target of many 'top ten tips' type articles and posts. Just do these five/seven/ten things, and you'll have a new job in no time. If you don't it must be because of something you're not doing.

As a few of us were saying on Twitter yesterday, this is more than just a little disingenuous. With unemployment figures soaring in many places, and some industries/sectors being harder hit than others, it only serves to make people feel even more like failures when they load their weapons with silver bullets... and still remain unemployed.

Signing up for automated searches on some of the larger sites automatically means that you receive their regular little homilies about what you need to do better. And, if you're serious about looking for work, you read them, and try to follow their advice, in the hopes that it will make a difference. But after you've tweaked your CV, and honed your cover-letter-writing skills, and tapped your network, and pro-actively approached the people you'd like to work for, etc. etc. What then?

If everybody follows the 5-steps to a standout CV, recruiters still wind up with a slew of CVs with none that stand out. Because, to quote Syndrome in the rather Rand-ian The Incredibles, "Everyone will be special, and then no one is."

The fact remains that there are many more job-seekers than jobs out there, and being over-qualified turns out to be just as much of a disadvantage as being under-qualified. And the job-seekers range from those looking for minimum wage, all the way up to those who have worked at C-level.

Let me share a personal perspective:

My CV has been professionally reviewed
I write (if I do say so myself) a pretty kick-ass covering letter
I have more than 20 years of experience in my field
I hold a Masters' degree
I'm not exactly a global mover and shaker, in terms of innovation but many of the global movers and shakers know my name and are on hug-terms with me (so perhaps I could be called part of the second wave)

Doesn't that sound pretty darned employable to you?

And I haven't been over-selective. I have applied for some fairly humble posts, which have offered the opportunity to make a real difference to an organisation. After all, I don't need to be rich. I only need to be able to meet my commitments. But I do need to be fulfilled at work. I am not a person who is prepared to do something I hate day in and day out in service of Mammon. I don't measure success in Sterling.

So let's just take a look at one of the jobs I've applied for. It's fairly local, and they're looking for an 'innovative L&D manager'.

You will support the business to drive performance through the effective design or management of the design, of learning solutions globally. In order to build their internal capability you will need to deliver learning solutions to help support their strategy and ensure methods and content utilised within design reflect leading edge practices and deliver the learning outcomes specified in the design brief.

The role requires a high level of competence in learning design and evaluation methodologies and in training delivery skills.You'll also have the ability to manage multiple projects concurrently and deliver on time and to quality and to manage and influence multiple stakeholders.

Anyone who actually knows me, would think I was a shoo-in for the role. But within 90 minutes of my application, I received an email telling me that they had received an unprecedented number of applications for this post, and several of them more closely matched the skills and experience required by the advertiser. Since my covering letter had taken their description and identified how I had every point covered, I didn't see how this was possible... and I emailed them to ask for feedback on these grounds. I respectfully requested that they give me guidance as to how I might better demonstrate, next time around, that my skill set and experience did in fact map across to what was advertised.

No response. Not a squeak.

And to make matters worse, that job continues to be advertised, week in and week out.

I have been advised by people who claim to know about these things, that some (many? most?) of the jobs advertised on the really big recruitment sites are bogus, and that this appears to be one of them. What they would stand to gain from such a practice?

And how do they have the temerity, in the light of these bogus posts on offer, to keep publishing these silver bullets that tell us that the onus is on us to do better?

In which I become a disabler...

2010-11-29T14:05:00.003Z

I have identified a situation in which I am anything but an enabler.

My younger son is learning to drive. He's doing very well, and his instructor speaks very highly of his progress. Whenever possible, I let him drive me around. On short jaunts to the shops and such, this is fine. It's the longer trips that are the problem.

The other night, I let him drive to rugby practice. It's a distance of some 8 miles or so, along a minor road. He has a tendency to drive rather close to the left side of the road (this is the UK, remember, where we drive on the left), and, when he changes gear, he tends to drift even further.

I'm sure his instructor deals with this kind of thing day in and day out, and is inured to it (judging from the utterly unscientific sample of my two sons, this seems to be a fairly common tendency). I, however, am less accustomed to it, and my rising stress levels were doing nothing for my son's confidence.

Eventually, he pulled into a side road and instructed me to drive the rest of the way. I was mortified.

It seems that when I fear for my personal safety, I am unable to be the unfailingly encouraging person I would like to be.

L plate image by canonsnapper

On why we should be generous

2010-11-29T12:40:00.002Z

Those who still adhere to an older business model are puzzled by those of us who engage in the various social spaces with people who, in effect, are our competition. Happily, we advise each other on the best way to tackle this or that problem, and we take uncomplicated pleasure in the knowledge that we have helped one another.

Today, courtesy of a new Twitter follower, Indira Balki, I was reminded of this poem which reflects much of this attitude:

One Star Fell and Another by Conrad Aitken

One star fell and another as we walked.
Lifting his hand towards the west, he said–
–How prodigal that sky is of its stars!
They fall and fall, and still the sky is sky.
Two more have gone, but heaven is heaven still.

Then let us not be precious of our thought,
Nor of our words, nor hoard them up as though
We thought our minds a heaven which might change
And lose its virtue, when the word had fallen.
Let us be prodigal, as heaven is:
Lose what we lose, and give what we may give,–
Ourselves are still the same. Lost you a planet–?
Is Saturn gone? Then let him take his rings
Into the Limbo of forgotten things.

O little foplings of the pride of mind,
Who wrap the phrase in lavender, and keep it
In order to display it: and you, who save our loves
As if we had not worlds of love enough–!

Let us be reckless of our words and worlds,
And spend them freely as the tree his leaves;
And give them where the giving is most blest.
What should we save them for,–a night of frost? . . .
All lost for nothing, and ourselves a ghost.

I have nothing to add to that.

On Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T13:50:00.003Z

I'm sure you already know that we don't have Thanksgiving in the UK. That would just be silly. But I have many American friends, readers, followers, etc. in the various spaces I occupy online, to whom this holiday is very important.

This post is for you. I would like to wish you a happy Thanksgiving, although I'm sure you have better things to do than read my blog today.

Americans tend to be much-maligned in the UK, but my own (entirely unscientific) observation is that the very people who thus malign them are often equally guilty of the characteristics they disdain so very vocally.

So may I say that I am thankful for you?

Thank you for your warmth, your acceptance, your support, your enthusiasm. I am glad you and I have crossed paths.

Assessment model blues

2010-11-24T12:18:00.002Z

Last night was 'parents' evening' at my son's school. It isn't officially called parents' evening anymore, and hasn't been for some years, because the students themselves are a very important part of the three-way meeting. Nevertheless, the name has stuck on a colloquial level.

Our younger son is a grafter. Always has been. Every single one of his teachers spoke highly of his work ethic. This was no less true in the subjects where he is struggling. His classwork is always done, as is his homework. He contributes to class discussions, and raises excellent questions. He participates wholeheartedly in group work.

For the duration of his school days to date, every teacher (bar one) has found this child a joy to teach.

And it has been a joy to address his education as a parent.

This may have something to do with the fact that he has known since he was just three years old that he wants to be an explosives demolitionist. Of course, when he was three, he didn't know that it was called that. We didn't either. But as his commitment to this career path has remained strong for the past 14 years, we have learnt a lot about it along the way.

The problem for him at the moment lies with the assessment model. Particularly in respect of pure maths. In order to take Maths with Mechanics, which is essential for his future career, he has to take Pure Maths. And he isn't doing terribly well in the tests. In fact, it is fair to say that he is doing poorly.

Part of the problem is that he was placed in a rather low set for maths (over our objections, just by the way) and that set did not cover some sections of the syllabus. As a consequence, what constitutes revision for the rest of the class, is totally new work for those who were in that set.

But the teacher (Ms Verity who has previously made an appearance in this blog), has said she only wishes he could produce the same work in the test situation that he does for homework. His homework, apparently, is excellent.

The difference is that, when it comes to homework, he can open the text book (yes, they still use them) to the example page, and adapt the worked example to the problem(s) at hand. Or he can look it up online. If he struggles to make sense of the example, he can contact a friend via text message or instant messaging and they can work through it together. He has identified a study buddy, and he checks in with this kid, if he's unsure of his workings.

This sounds rather a lot like life, or like the reality of a working environment to me. Don't you agree?

In a test situation, you're deprived of those options. You can't research the solution and then apply it. You can't get a friend to check your work. You can't ask for support from someone with particular skill in this area.

But I think he is demonstrating a very mature, resourceful skill. A skill that will stand him in great stead for the rest of his life. A skill which far outweighs being able to manipulate surds... whatever the heck they are - I don't think they had been invented yet, when I was at school ;0).

Sadly, we haven't yet figured out how to assess that particular skill. We have only figured out how to subject kids to sensory deprivation and expect them to work purely from memory, and fail them on their inability to manipulate surds under these conditions.

You might think that I feel this way just because this is my son we're talking about, here. But I hope that my track record on the subject of assessment stands on its own merit.

In order to better equip my son to meet the current assessment criteria, we have decided to hire a private tutor (as an aside here, I should point out that the school has laid on extra lessons to help kids like ours catch up, but that these clash with rugby practice and we consider his sporting interests to be a valid component of a well-rounded school education).

Oddly enough, the tutor himself has made his own appearance on this blog before! Thanks to his background, we believe that this young man will be the right person to help our son make up the deficit. Of course, this is going to cost a fair amount of money, but our son has amply demonstrated over the years that he is more than prepared to put in the work from his side. Like I said: a grafter. And he needs this, if he is to get into the university he has identified, to get the qualification he has chosen in order one day to "blow stuff up and get paid for it". Because of that, we consider the money well spent.

But it doesn't mean that it sits easily with me. It is a little like training a performing monkey.

But I am satisfied that my son already demonstrates the sort of characteristics that an explosive demolitionist requires: he is sensible, responsible, hard-working, resourceful, determined... Put that on a report card!

Job hunting with social media

2010-11-19T10:49:00.002Z

As you know, I have been job-hunting lately. And I've been thinking about the history of job-hunting... or at least my experience of it.

My first few jobs were part-time or holiday affairs while at school and drama school, and they were a case of word of mouth. I was advised by someone in the know that John Orr's was looking for holiday sales staff for the Christmas rush. I was advised that Communikon School of Performing Arts was looking for part-time drama teachers. I was advised that the provincial board needed adjudicators for drama eisteddfods. This was in the very late 70's and early 80's.

Once I graduated from drama school, and while I was waiting to be discovered by Hollywood (or at least the SABC), I found a couple of jobs in the small ads of the local newspaper. This was in the early 80's.

My first office job was found via newspaper ads, again. But this time, it was a feature ad. The same applied to my next office job.

In much the same way (feature ads in the newspaper), I found a job at a theatre agency in Cape Town, but I treat this one separately, because this job led to my getting a few photographic modelling assignments and a contract as a TV presenter (at which I sucked, royally).

During this phase, I met and married my husband. For a year after this, I tried and failed to find a steady, 'proper' job. Of course, my efforts were never enough to please the in laws, who felt that I was sponging off their son. This was in the late 80's, and my search consisted of cold-calling and responding to newspaper ads. It was soul-destroying. But I took every opportunity to upskill, and did run the occasional computer applications training course (as they were then known) during the dry spell. This was to prove the best move I'd ever made. After nearly a year, I finally landed a job working in a learning centre... and found my vocation. The company that had set up the learning centre was way ahead of its time for the market, and the initiative didn't take off. I found myself back on the job market within 16 months. But this time, I had built up something of a network and a reputation.

I went freelance. I tapped the network for opportunities, and they came. I worked as a freelance training consultant until we left South Africa, fitting my career around my children. During this time, I got to work with some of the big names of South African industry, as well as taking on ad hoc overflow work for specialist training organisations. I was offered a few chances to take full-time posts with some of my clients, but, with my husband's full support, I opted not to accept them. I will never regret having been able to be a hands-on Mom, even though it almost certainly impacted my career development.

When we arrived in the UK, in 1999, I took a year out to settle the family in to our new home. By the time I started job hunting again, it was via the local newspapers. I took a part time job at an FE college. We had pretty much decided that I would go back to work full time only once both our sons were in secondary school. However, I continued to scan the papers for opportunities. When a 'perfect fit' full time job came up earlier than expected, we decided to take the plunge. The office was 3 miles from home. I could make the trip in 7 minutes. Our kids were 11 and 9, and would be home alone for 1.5 hours each afternoon. We lived in a safe neighbourhood. This was 2002.

During this period, the Internet began to come into its own as a place to go job hunting. I found and applied for my next job via the world wide web. I felt so modern! This was 2005.

In 2008, the wheels fell off and I found myself at a crossroads. I decided to take the plunge and go back to being self-employed. But it had got a whole lot more complicated since my last shot at it. And I was under pressure to earn more, because our commitments had been based on what I had been earning while working for 'the man'. That was in 2008. I did look for alternatives, and didn't find a whole heck of a lot, so the Learning Anorak was launched.

Now that that venture is coming to an enforced close, I am job hunting again.... and it looks very different.

I have automated searches in place with several of the biggest recruitment agencies. Almost daily, there are jobs I can apply for. Sadly, as I have mentioned before, the first-line screeners are not the very clued up. They are utterly unable to identify that skills in X map across to requirements for Y. So I get turned down for a lot of jobs I could do blindfolded... sometimes within minutes of submitting my application.

I also check out the online vacancies pages of some of the organisations I am consciously targetting. This is a huge plus.

But I am also able to be far more pro-active than before. When I was job hunting way back in 1988/9, I was at a loss as to what else I could do. Other than cold-calling and responding to ads, what was there? Especially in a city in which I was unknown (ergo, no network). This time around, I have put feelers out across the network, which is global. I have made my position known on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I have written a blog post. And all of those have taken several hits.

The support from my beloved community, while thus far not yielding anything, has been enormously comforting. Harold Jarche even created a hashtag for me on Twitter (#YesYouShouldHireKaryn). Okay, so it didn't get a lot of take-up, but the fact is that he did it. It was a very kind gesture from someone who has become a real friend, even though we have never met face to face. This is the beauty of the network. And it didn't go unnoticed. Someone, a complete stranger to me tweeted something to the effect that he didn't know who this @karynromeis person was, but she must be worth hiring, based on the support she's getting from Twitter "big hitters".

I have had several job offers, actually, but all of them have been spam, bar one. The one genuine job offer I received was at a lower rate of pay than I was getting 5 years ago, and involved 3 hours of commuting time every day. It wasn't easy to pass up on the bird in hand, but I decided that I had to. The level of sacrifice by my whole family simply wouldn't be worth it. Fortunately, my incredible husband has been staunchly supportive. He simply will not have me sell myself short. He has always had more faith in me than I do in myself.

It remains to be seen if this method of job hunting yields something more quickly than previous methods have done.

Watch this space.

Amber Naslund on the ROI of social media

2010-11-17T13:17:00.003Z

Here is a woman whose point of view very closely reflects my own. There are some things that simply cannot be quantified.

I can’t believe nor understand how many companies can’t also accept the fact that deeper and broader personal connections can net stronger business ties, too, whether or not you can capture the data proof points that bear that out. It’s been that way since the dawn of time.

Read the whole post here.

Putting myself out there

2010-11-17T12:07:00.005Z

As you probably already know, I have been dealt a series of severe professional blows since July this year. The consequence of this could very well be the demise of my business (barring a miracle, that is). As a consequence, I have been applying for 'proper' jobs in order to keep paying the bills, while - hopefully - being able to continue doing the job I love (although I am quite open to considering alternatives). This has been a very interesting exercise.

I have made full use of automated searches to track down potential jobs, and - to be fair - there have been several likely candidates every day. What has been disappointing is the realisation that the first line screeners on the other end are totally ill-equipped for the job. Of course, they probably know nothing about my field, and so they are utterly unable to say "Ah! She has oodles of experience of X. That maps across perfectly to the advertiser's requirement for Y." To them, X only equals X. As a consequence, I have had 'bong' emails in respect of jobs I could do standing on my head with one hand tied behind my back, jobs that may as well have included my name in the job description... sometimes within minutes of submitting the application.

So the method has its flaws. As a consequence, I thought I'd put the boot on the other foot. It may or may not work. I thought I'd advertise myself as a potential employee, and see whether that works any better.

My CV is online, so I won't bore you with that. Instead, let me tell you what I'd like to do and where I might like to do it:

As my pseudonym (learning anorak) implies, I am passionate about learning, and passionate about learners. I am an enabler 'tot in my murg in', as we say in Afrikaans (down to the marrow). I will go to great lengths to help people reach a new place in their journey, whether it be personal or professional. Can there be a better way to end a day than to know you gave someone a leg up to something they couldn't access before? My husband and I head up a ministry in our church that seeks out and gets to know visitors and first timers, invites them over for a meal, and introduces them to people with shared interests. This is not unlike my approach to learning solutions. Find the people. Learn about them: what they do, what they need. Put them in touch with the right people and/or the right information.
I can see myself helping an organisation streamline its learning and development provision, un-bottle-necking the L&D team, and embedding learning in the workflow. Taking learning to the point of need so that when Joe Bloggs hits a bump in the road during his day job, he can access the answer, implement it and get on with his life. That would be my dream job!
I'd love to work with people/organisations who are venturing out into the realms of using social media, either for corporate/commercial identity purposes, or as learning tools. I would like to help people overcome their fear. For many years, I taught rank beginners how to use computer apps, and found it enormously rewarding. I have a knack for taking the unknown and relating it back to the already known.
I have worked with and for global non-profits, collectives, small-to-medium private businesses, public sector organisations, a further education college and FTSE100 blue chips. I have no objection to going back to any of those sectors. I have never actually worked for a university, but, during my Master's degree studies often thought how much I would love to help faculty members move into the spaces their students already occupy (and some that they don't), to harness the learning potential of those.
I'd like to work at the Open University. I visited them some years ago, and was struck by how much everyone seems to enjoy working there. I remarked on this to one manager, who agreed, saying "We have our fair share of part-timers, full-timers and never-go-homers." I relish the idea of working in an environment where people get so caught up in what they're doing, that they occasionally forget to go home. Being something of a workafrolic myself (yes, you can 'borrow' that term, I did), I can relate to this.

So there you have it. Any potential recruiters out there looking for a person like me, you know where to find me.

Edublog awards 2010

2010-11-12T12:28:00.005Z

The 2010 award nominations are now open. Nominations are invited in the following categories:

Best individual blog
Best individual tweeter
Best group blog
Best new blog
Best class blog
Best student blog
Best resource sharing blog
Most influential blog post
Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion
Best teacher blog
Best librarian / library blog
Best School Administrator blog
Best educational tech support blog
Best elearning / corporate education blog
Best educational use of audio
Best educational use of video / visual
Best educational wiki
Best educational podcast
Best educational webinar series
Best educational use of a social networking
Best educational use of a virtual world
Best use of a PLN
Lifetime achievement

You will notice that the list includes things like wikis, Twitter, webinars, podcasts, PLNs, social networking and so on.... so it's no longer just about blogs, per se.

Nominations can be made in a variety of ways. Find out more here.

On shame and honesty

2010-11-10T15:50:00.003Z

At the time of writing, I am preparing to close down my business and declare bankruptcy. This has been on the cards for some time, now. While I have been open about the state of affairs, I have been very guarded about the effect it was having on me. I have been very busy presenting a brave face and looking as if everything is just fine.

It has meant that I have had to pull out of all the conferences I was scheduled to attend and/or speak at. It has meant that I have had to turn down invitations to all manner of interesting sounding events. This, in turn, has left me feeling largely excluded and marginalised.

Deep down, I have been feeling like an abject failure, and burning with shame that my ineptitude looks set to change the life circumstances of my husband and sons. My husband works unbelievably hard, and commutes two hours each way, every day. The thought that - through no fault of his own - he might lose his home, has been almost more than I can bear.

Finally, I confessed this in an email to a friend/colleague, and her response has overwhelmed me:

No Karyn, please do not feel shame, stand proud, you have never robbed anyone nor done anything underhanded, you have worked honestly and with sincerity, and you have done your best...and you are such an inspiration in yourself! i always felt lifted when talking to you and seeing your spirit.

Yes, dammit! I have never robbed anyone (although a few have robbed me). I have never been underhanded (although - again - a few have been underhanded with me). I am sincere and honest. And I have done my best. I am able to say with certainty that I have inspired some people along the way. Many have been kind enough to tell me so. And yes, I am by nature an encourager.

I know. I am naive. I have admitted it before. But I will not apologise for that. Nor can I see it as a fault. I would rather be naive, than be conniving, grasping, and looking-out-for-number-one-at-the-cost-of-everyone-else. I don't see how anyone could be in this business if that was how they rolled.

So, yes. Learning Anorak looks set to close its doors at the end of this month. And, no, I'm not handling it at all well. But as of today, I can add defiance the things I feel.

I'll let you know if that turns out to be a Good Thing ;o)

On specialist roles

2010-11-08T12:52:00.005Z

Warning: this post contains a lot about my favourite sport (rugby union).

About half my lifetime ago, probably even less, if you had unloaded a rugby union team off a coach in front of me, I'd have had a pretty good chance of identifying the position of every player without needing to see the numbers on their backs.

Don't believe me? Watch me. Rugby is in my blood.

Anybody with cauliflower ears is pretty certain to be a forward (# 1 to 8), and will be involved in the scrum. Let's look at them first.
Those two Sherman tanks are almost certainly the props, (# 1 and 3). They will be the ones who prop up the hooker (more of him next) in the front row of the scrum. Don't expect much speed from them, but don't get in their way, either. They will charge right over you. Or through you. The one with two cauliflower ears is the tighthead. The one with only one cauliflower ear is the loosehead.
That square block of a man with no neck and a crazy glint in his eye, is the hooker (#2, known in the US as 'hook'). He has got to be a bit nuts (not unlike the guy who counters instinct to fling himself into the path of an oncoming hockey puck) - he gets picked up by the two biggest guys on the team and shoved face first into a pack of 8 opposing beefcakes bent on destruction.
Those two giants? Well, they'll be the locks (#4 and 5). They also form part of the scrum, hence their heft, but they are also great jumpers who will try to win the ball during lineouts.
Those two slightly shorter guys, with the great musculature are probably the flankers, (#6 and 7), aka wing forwards. They'll be pretty quick on their feet, but not the fastest by a long shot. They'll probably be first away from the scrum when the ball comes out.
But hang on. We still have one big guy here. Well, he'll be the eighth man (#8, obviously enough). A bit like the running back in American football. He is quite often also tall and fairly quick for a big guy, and will be off after the flankers when the scrum breaks up. He'll be one of the first on the scene when there's a ruck.
Now we come to the littlest guy on the team. In days gone by, this guy could be really titchy. But quick and slippery, like a wet bar of soap. This is your scrum half. This is a guy with a real rugby brain. He sees the bigger picture. He gets the ball from the forwards to the backs (where the speed is). Every time there is a scrum, a ruck or a maul, a good scrum half will be right there. He gets the ball out and feeds it to the team whippets, who come next.
Those lean guys, built like 100m sprinters? Those are your wings. #11 is your left wing, #14 on the right. These guys can run like the wind, and have an awesome side-step. These are the guys to whom to the scrum half will be looking to pass the ball, because they have the best chance of outrunning the opposition and making it to the try line. If you were picking yourself a dance partner for the prom, these were the guys to go for - they'd be the best on their feet... and they're often the best looking guys on the team, anyway!
The guys who are most difficult to classify on appearances alone (for me, at any rate) are #10, 12, 13 and 15. You'll know they're not forwards, because they're not so beefy. They might even be as good looking as the wings. They look as if they could be pretty quick, too. They are, in numerical order, the fly half, the two centres and the full back.

But, as I said, that was a while back. These days, it isn't so easy to tell. I guess the most standout moment of confusion for me was when Jonah Lomu first burst onto the scene. He was built like a brick outhouse, but was said to run the 100m in 10 seconds flat. I watched him run. I believe it. At 6' 5", he looked like a lock, but he played wing. In his early career, he was pretty unstoppable. He could keep running, with several opponents attached to his waist, he could side-step like a dancer, and could execute a hand-off second to none. He was a contradiction. No. He was several contradictions. He could do it all.

These days, the back line seems to have beefed up. The forwards are often deceptively quick. The scrum half (with a few notable exceptions, such as Ireland's Peter Stringer) is no longer diminutive. Increasingly, team members play out of position to cover for one another.

Is it such a stretch to say that this is what I think has happened, or is beginning to happen in some cases, in the workplace?

People have become adept at using the technology that used to be the province of the IT team. Individuals collaborate without needing to be instructed by their managers to do so, or with whom to do so. People have identified experts within different arenas within the business and are quite happy to go to them for help rather than approach the L&D team.

It takes one set of skills to train a rugby team of uni-disciplinary specialists, it takes an entirely different mindset to train a team full of players prepared to have a go anywhere on the field, should that prove necessary.

In the same way, I reckon we need to be looking to the skill sets traditionally required by management and the L&D team, and consider how different these need to be going forward, with a bunch of people far more comfortable at thinking on the fly and adapting to changed parameters as necessary.

How free can a 'free school' be?

2010-11-03T13:43:00.004Z

I haven't really paid too much attention to the recently introduced concept of 'free schools' in the UK, other than to be vaguely pleased that the opportunity now existed for a different educational model.

Then, last night I was talking to someone who heads up an organisation that is applying to establish one in his local town.

We were talking about what his leadership team had in mind for the school. What they envisioned. How they planned to tackle the concept. He had some great ideas, looking at working with the local business community, and calling upon the expertise of real, live working people to contribute regarding the sort of work they do, and the skills required to do it successully.

I was thinking: what an opportunity! After all, many of us in this space agree that the current education model is broken. That repeated tweaking is not going to fix it. That it ought to be scrapped and a new one developed from the ground up.

My contention is that we should start at the end. We should ask ourselves what the ideal school leaver looks like: what can s/he do, what does s/he know, how does s/he approach challenges... all that stuff. And we shouldn't just make up our minds in a vacuum on this point. We should engage with entrepreneurs, business leaders, community leaders, etc. We should ask them what school leavers need, and then work backwards from that point, figuring out how we're going to help them get there.

I thought my companion was ideally situated to exactly that. To come up with a model of education that actually prepares young people for life and for the workplace. In theory, the establishment of a Free School would enable his organisation, as a charity, to lead the school as they see fit while being completely funded by the government.

BUT... the practice isn't going to be that straightforward.

The school would have to meet the same standards set by the government for all schools in the UK and as such will receive the same OFSTED inspections.

And it's this bit that worries me.

How far are these free schools going to be able to stray from the government appointed model, if they still have to jump through the same hoops?

For example, I envisage a model of education that more closely reflect real life and the workplace. People working together on a project and the end result being, well, the end result. People working in teams with a mentor who serves as a guide on the side, rather than a sage on the stage. People being encouraged to explore and to share their learning with each other. The teacher being on the journey with the students. No-one ever being shut away in a room and subjected to sensory deprivation, being expected to rely entirely upon their own memory, seasoned with understanding, to demonstrate in the space of 90 minutes that they are conversant with material they have spent the last x number of years studying.

But, if they are going to have to meet the same KPIs as existing schools and sit the state exams at the end of it anyway, in order to be placed on a bell curve and evaluated via the same mechanism as the production line model... well, is this really going to be possible?

I sincerely hope that they give it a jolly good try, and am certainly willing to contribute if called upon to do so, but I wonder if the term 'free' is entirely accurate. It sounds a little tethered to me.

Siemens: Questions I'm no longer asking

2010-11-02T18:05:00.003Z

This post is so brilliant, I wish I'd written it myself! George Siemens has absolutely nailed it with this one. While many people are still squabbling over the scraps like the gulls in Finding Nemo (see below), George has long since reached "ah shaddup" point.

The questions he's no longer asking are:

Is online learning more or less effective than learning in a classroom?
Does technology use vary by age?
How do learning styles influence learning online?
What role do blogs or microblogging [insert tool in question] play classroom or online learning?
How can educators implement [whatever tool] into their teaching?
Is connectivism a learning theory?

I won't steal his thunder by revealing the answers here - go and read them on his blog. You won't be sorry.

And now for those gulls...

On being Google-able

2010-11-01T12:07:00.003Z

Today my Twitter stream includes this observation from Rob Brown.

Being anonymous does not serve your purposes. If people find nothing about you online, they move on to the next candidate.

I was surprised that this has been his experience. It is certainly not mine. Although my CV contains links to various parts of my digital footprint, I have found that these are seldom followed. When applying for jobs or bidding for work, I openly invite people to research me online to gain fuller picture of the person behind the application/bid/tender.

On one occasion, I applied for a particular job at a large organisation which claims to be progressive and innovative. The man who would line manage the role set up a phone interview. In preparation, I googled him, and partway into the interview, I asked a question based on something I had learned from this research.

He was slightly taken aback and asked, "How did you know that?"
"I googled you," I explained.

There was a pause.

"You did what?"
"I googled you. I did a search on your name on Google. I had already researched the company, and I wanted to learn a bit about you. After all, we would be working together."

The whole interview changed after that. Not only had he not done any research into me, but he was affronted that I had taken this bold step. To him, what I had done was tantamount to stalking. I might as well have rifled through his garbage can and taken photos of his wife collecting his kids from school.

I wanted to have the argument with him. To explain that, if you put stuff out there in public space, it is with the tacit understanding that people can and will access it. I wanted to point out how much more he could have known about me, had he reciprocated.

But there seemed to be no point. There was no way he was going to hire me after that. Besides, I wasn't sure that there would be space for me in an organisation which didn't seek to leverage every available means of effective talent management.

Bearing in mind that I work in the field of online learning, and the beneficial use of social media in the workplace, you would think that my (very) public profile would take a lot of hits from people considering doing business with me.

I wish.

Free animation and 'tooning tools

2010-10-29T16:53:00.002+01:00

While I am not a school teacher, I know that many of my readers are. It is with these readers in mind that I share this.

I came across this post by Anya Wood today, and I immediately had visions of kids making cartoons and videos about stuff they were learning in school.

Of course, there's nothing to stop the teacher using these tools to seed lessons, either, but the idea of the kids being able to create and share media appeals to me. It just extends the learning beyond strict subject boundaries, and it embodies the whole notion of the individual as a creator of web content, not just a consumer thereof.

Pretty

2010-10-27T16:44:00.004+01:00

I came across this slam poetry video via the Facebook page of Ruth Demitroff. My sap rises every time I watch it... and I have watched it many times.

Be aware that it contains a single profanity, entirely warranted in my view.

Every little girl (and big girl, for that matter) should hear something along these lines.

The blame game is counter-cultural to learning

2010-10-27T15:42:00.006+01:00

Beth Kanter wrote a post that set me thinking about blame culture and the making of mistakes. One thing we loudmouths learn early on is that the blame culture is alive and well...and the loudest mouth makes for the easiest scapegoat.

At school I was (as the expression seems to have become) all mouth and no trousers. I talked a good line in rebellion, but I obeyed the rules as if I were on rails. It made no difference. I got into as much trouble as if I were a complete hellcat. Teachers approaching our classroom from down the corridor would hear some kind of kerfuffle and enter the room declaring what my punishment was to be. The fact that I was more often that not frantically trying to finish the homework that had been sidelined by my innumerable co-curricular and extra-curricular activities made not the slightest bit of difference.

This followed me to college, where the matron once grounded me for three weeks for breaking curfew, when I had been stuck in a lift all night at a friend's hostel. No amount of offers of evidence of my innocence would suffice. On another occasion, I was awoken late at night and ordered to her office to be told, "I can hear you from here! I can't get a wink of sleep with all the noise you're making!" I didn't endear myself to her by apologising for snoring and blaming it on catarrh. As I said: all mouth.

My first 'proper' job was a very junior role in the customer service department of a blanket factory, run by a petty tyrant who screamed (no other word will suffice) at people on a daily basis. He was a real piece of work and no-one wanted to be on the humiliating receiving end of one of his tirades. As a consequence, finger-pointing (and outright lying) was a regular feature of the business culture. On one occasion, there was a huge to do, because the distribution list from one of our biggest customers detailed despatch to their various stores in multiples of 14, but the goods - thousands upon thousands of blankets - had been packed in multiples of 12. Mr Tyrant went ballistic and starting tearing strips off people left and right. And of course, the finger-pointing began. The dervish entered my office, already well on his way to bursting a blood vessel and yelling at full volume before he even crossed the threshold.

I wigged out.

I was already known as 'Bof' (bundle of fire) because I had stood up to him (and other members of the senior staff) in the past, so it was not entirely without precedent that I yelled, "That. Is. Enough! Shut up and let me talk!"

I asked him what kind of operation he ran that would put a 21 year old office junior in charge of making senior management decisions about logistics. I pointed out (loudly - and probably colourfully), that there were people a lot higher than me on the food chain, earning more in a week than I did in a month, whose job it was to make these decisions. But because he was such a bully and a tyrant, none of them was prepared to acknowledge having made this mistake, so they just kept pointing fingers until it came to the bottom of the pile and I had no-one to point at. I told him that, if he had spent half the energy on finding a solution as he had on trying to find someone to blame, the blankets could by now have been repackaged and on their way to the client. By this time, there was dead silence in all the neighbouring offices.

To give him his due, he burst out laughing and told me that I had more chutzpah than a shiksa had any right to.

But that spectre follows me even to this day. A couple of years ago, I made a decision that put me in the firing line and, instead of coming to my defence, my manager served my head up on a platter to soothe ruffled feathers higher up the food chain. The mouth is silenced when the head is plattered.

But this is something I have known since before I had wrinkles and greys. It doesn't take wisdom, just common sense:

A blame culture saps energy. It distracts from solution finding. While everyone runs around trying to find out who was to blame, in order to mete out punishment, things cannot move forward.

If, instead, energy is spent on finding a solution, lessons can be learnt, deliveries made, damage controlled, etc. etc. And, in such a culture, it is far more likely that people will acknowledge having screwed up, thus uncovering mistakes before the knock-on effect gets out of hand.

Can we instead work towards a culture of "Oh hell. I screwed up. Can we fix it?"

Please?

On being a black sheep

2010-10-26T11:14:00.004+01:00

My Twitter stream this morning included a link to a blog post by Abhijit Kadle of Upside Learning. That, in turn took me to this article in the McKinsey Quarterly (registration required) covering an interview with Brad Bird, talking about the importance of innovation.

The stand out thing that served to hook me in was Brad Bird's name (non sequitur: Brad Bird is listed on IMDB as 'aka Bradley Bloody Bird'. I love that. It makes me feel better about my own sometime nickname, to wit: 'that emasculating bitch').

May I just confess that I love animated movies? Not all of them, of course. But so many of them are cleverly wrought. And Brad Bird's work is right up there, in my opinion.

When my children were little, I used them as an excuse to see all the animated movies, and to buy them on video (yup, it was a while ago). When they reached a certain age, I had a decision to make: I either owned up to the fact that I was going to the movies because I wanted to see the films, or I gave up on the big screen experience of animated feature films.

I took a big girl pill and opted for the former.

Fortunately, I was not alone. There are many of us out there, happily consuming animated movies.

And my kids have never outgrown their love of animated movies, either. They are completely unfazed at the idea of going to a cinema to see Up (highly recommended - take tissues), or The Incredibles, or whatever. I suspect that this is partly to do with the fact that games console games are animated and decidedly un-childish; and partly due to the influence of The Simpsons (which is also a Brad Bird thing, by the way), followed by all manner of animated definitely-not-for-children TV shows, such as South Park, American Dad et al.

But I digress.

Brad Bird's work pushes boundaries. And I love that. Producers of animated series often confess that they experience frustration during brainstorming sessions, as every 'new idea' they come up with has already been done in The Simpsons. Bird went there first.

In the McKinsey article, one section jumped out at me:

Bird discussed the importance, in his work, of pushing teams beyond their comfort zones, encouraging dissent, and building morale. He also explained the value of “black sheep”—restless contributors with unconventional ideas. Although stimulating the creativity of animators might seem very different from developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs, Bird’s anecdotes should stir the imagination of innovation-minded executives in any industry.

Yes. Yes. And yes.

It isn't easy to be the designated sandpaper in any equation. To be the person who challenges the status quo. Who pushes back on the preconceptions and assumptions. Those of us who find ourselves in this position (and I am relatively fine-grained sandpaper, compared to some of you brave souls), are often told that we should stop being so difficult. The assumption is made that we do so just for the sake of it.

But we cannot just lower our heads and traipse along the well-worn paths, and still look ourselves in the mirror. We're just not made that way.

And occasionally, just occasionally, we stumble across evidence that there is a good reason to be the way we are. That we serve some purpose, other than driving people nuts. This interview with Bird is one such.

But let's look for a moment at the role of the executive (Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter), here. They were the ones who were brave enough to unleash Bird on their empire. Off the back of huge blockbusters that we animated movie fans have all watched countless times, they took a chance on Bird whose latest project (The Iron Giant) had been less than stellar (although I, of course, loved it):

“The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency—feeling like we have it all figured out. We want you to come shake things up. We will give you a good argument if we think what you’re doing doesn’t make sense, but if you can convince us, we’ll do things a different way.” For a company that has had nothing but success to invite a guy who had just come off a failure and say, “Go ahead, mess with our heads, shake it up”—when do you run into that?

Don't you wish you'd get a mandate like that? And don't you wish you'd get more of that 'good argument'? When you're thinking out loud and making suggestions and exploring possibilities, don't you wish that people would argue with you if they disagree, instead of sitting there looking mutinous?

Argh! Engage, people. Engage! Disagree. Make your case. Fight your corner.

If I'm wrong, talk me out of it. But don't just cling to the wreckage of the default position because 'that's how we do things around here'. Why do you do things that way? If you have a reason, tell me. If it turns out that your reason has passed its sell-by date, perhaps we can find a more effective way of doing things. Together. But we can't do that if you don't add your ideas to the mix, now can we?

And, just to finish off with - does the man's talent know no bounds? Having failed to find anyone to voice the delightful Edna in The Incredibles to his satisfaction, Bird was talked into doing it himself. I had assumed, when I saw the movie, that they had somehow talked Yoko Ono into doing the voice, and was somewhat incredulous when the credits rolled.

I later saw an interview with one of the team members, who shared how it had come about that Bird voiced this character himself. Apparently, he was advising Lily Tomlin on how to voice the character, and she suggested that he had nailed it so perfectly that he should do it himself. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Edna Mode:

Things my father taught me

2010-10-22T12:20:00.003+01:00

Today would have been my father's 70th birthday. Except that he didn't even live to see 60. He committed suicide when he was 57.

I have no illusions about the kind of man my Dad was and I am not superstitious enough to 'not speak ill of the dead'. I am honest with myself and others about my father's failings.

He was no manner of Dad, really. He longed for, but never received his own father's approval. He was still too desperately waiting for his Dad to say "You done good, kid" (or some South African equivalent thereof) ever to be able to look beyond himself and build us up as children. After our parents' divorce when I was 6 and my sister just 2, we saw him increasingly rarely. He chose not to be involved in our lives and then cast himself in the role of victim when he wasn't involved in our lives (if that makes sense).

But he did teach me a few things of value.

He taught me that you decide whether or not you like a food by tasting it. No other criterion counted. "If you want something that looks nice, go eat the Mona Lisa."

He taught me that nature should be valued and respected. "People go around shouting "Africa for the Africans." Well, reckon it should be "Africa for the animals." It's the people who *&^%$ things up. They should force all the people out of the continent and leave the animals to get on with it." I pointed out that that would mean we have to leave, too, but he wasn't interested in minor details.

He introduced me to Victor Borge. We didn't have television in South Africa in my childhood, but we had vinyls of several of his shows. We used to sit in my grandparents' lounge and laugh uproariously. The link is to one of my favourite clips.

But most of all, he taught me about love. Sadly, not in any positive way. He taught me that love can be measured in inconvenience. Hear me out.

You can tell your kids "I love you" with every breath you take. But they will never believe you if:

you don't pick up the phone when you receive the copy of their report
you don't contact them when they get selected for the first team, or cast in a lead role
you don't keep your promises
you don't know what things matter to them
you don't occasionally make a long journey to surprise them by pitching up at prizegiving (or some such event)
you criticise them for the lack of closeness in your relationship
you refuse to attend a landmark solo performance in your own city because it takes place in a church... and you're an atheist

I still believe that if you love someone, you put yourself out for them from time to time. You do something inconvenient to yourself to support them or to make them happy.

This is why women like to get flowers from their partners. It's not the flowers. It's the out-of-the-comfort-zone effort.

Strange as it may seem, I am grateful for this lesson. So, in memory of my Dad, I am putting aside a pressing job to take my younger son out to his favourite restaurant for lunch (fortunately, this is the reasonably priced Nando's!), and I am going to get up at 8am tomorrow morning to skype my older son in Australia (I don't normally surface until 11 on a Saturday).

Can I challenge you, on this Friday afternoon, to do something inconvenient to show someone else you care?

In praise of the malcontent

2010-10-21T10:39:00.004+01:00

Last night, in a context completely unrelated to the business of learning, my husband made the following observation, "If you don't know what you can have, you'll settle for what you've got."

That remark has stayed with me, and its relevance to just about everything keeps reaffirming itself.

Think about it. If you buy a new pair of boots the very first time you spot them in store A, you might never discover that you could have had them for half the price from store B.

If you don't make enquiries, you may never find out that your student card entitles you to use a certain gym free of charge.

If you're a classroom-based, chalk-and-talk trainer who has never heard of e-learning, or learner-driven learning, or user generated content, or... okay, you get the idea... you'll just keep standing in front of the class, delivering your material to them in as engaging a way as you can, knowing full well that they'll have forgotten most of it by the time they find themselves in a situation in which they need to apply it.

Or maybe you won't.

Maybe you're one of those people who wonders if maybe, perhaps, possibly there isn't another way to do things. Maybe you're one of those people who experiments, who explores, who asks questions. Maybe you'll come to find out that there are other ways to skin this cat.

It seems to me that the essential ingredient is curiosity. And curiosity is not really the province of the contented. The serenely contented person has no interest in what lies behind the doors labelled 'what else?' and 'what if?' It is only the thirsty horse that will drink when led to water. In fact, the thirsty horse will set off to find water.

In my last job, my life was made miserable by a colleague who was utterly unable to conceal his antipathy for me. I'm sure there were many reasons he'd rather have had a slug dropped down his neck than spend time in my company, but the one on which he was the most outspoken was my curiosity. It drove him completely nuts. I thought I was showing interest in things (and people). He thought I was nosy.

The problem is, my nosiness has served me well. It has caused me always to wonder if there isn't another way to do things. It has led me to information that has caused me to re-examine existing practice.

I used to stand up in front of a group of delegates and work my way through the set material (even when I was the one who had set it). Then I wondered if there wasn't a way to make the material more relevant to the delegates, so I started using examples drawn from their daily lives to make my point.

I found that no matter how much the penny dropped in the classroom, it was often MIA when the delegates came to apply the principles. So I wondered if there wasn't anywhere to put examples so that delegates could refer back to them after the fact.

My boss refused to buy me an elearning authoring tool, so I wondered if I could cobble something together using clever tricks with PowerPoint and a cheap screen capture tool. I colluded with the helpdesk to make sure I covered the hottest FAQs.

We didn't have an LMS, so I wondered if I could put the thus-cobbled-together resources somewhere where people could find them, and I found the public folders of Outlook extremely useful!

I didn't enjoy having to plough through materials in a set order using back/next buttons like some kind of mindless sheep. So I wondered if there wasn't a way to make it possible for a user to plot his own route through a resource.

I was unfamiliar with the machinations of a certain application, but needed to include screen capture videos in a learning resource I was designing. I wondered how I might overcome this problem. Would I have to become expert in the application, or was there a more effective way?

These are just a few examples drawn from my own life. Situations in which dissatisfaction and curiosity have combined to send me down a new path.

I don't know what else I can have, but I certainly hope that my reluctance to accept the status quo will drive me to find out.

So to all the malcontents, who are subjected to a hail of criticism for being the squeaky wheel: hail fellow, well met!

Jane Hart's top 100 tools for learning

2010-10-20T14:51:00.005+01:00

Jane has finalised this year's top 100 tools for learning, as identified by, well... you.

The composition of this list makes it clear that there is no real boundary around tools-for-learning as opposed to tools-for-anything-else. Just about anything can be used for learning, really.

The Internet is not America

2010-10-20T12:29:00.002+01:00

Okay, the temptation became too strong. I tried not to write this post, but it would be written. And it is a bit of a rant. Sorry.

I got an email this morning, asking me to blog about a certain matter. Nothing unusual in this. I often get such emails. People want their cause/event/publication promoted and approach bloggers who address related issues, asking them to give the cause/event/publication a plug. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't.

On this occasion, not only will I not, I have taken offence. On this occasion, the writer didn't even bother to check whether I was a suitable candidate, or whether this blog was a suitable vehicle for his cause.

The email mentioned someone that I (and you - yes, you were mentioned too, albeit not by name) had probably not heard of but should have heard of (apparently), because he's done something rather marvellous... in America.

All manner of issues relating to US politics were cited and (apparently) I should consider these things terribly important. So important, that I should do you the service of bringing them to your attention. I was even offered the opportunity to interview this person for your benefit and edification.

So let us pause for a moment and consider how desperately a South African girl living in England wants to delve into the machinations of American politics.

The answer - of course - is not at all.

I know that I have American readers, and if you're one of them, I hope that you're not offended that I have chosen not to try to inform you about the future of your own country. If you are not American, but are fascinated by their politics, I trust that you have far more reliable sources of information than this blog.

If (like me) you are not American and have only a passing interest in US politics, then perhaps (like me) you are irked by the occasional assumption that cyberspace is US territory.

Downes on change

2010-10-19T10:35:00.003+01:00

This article by Stephen Downes in the Huffington Post is getting a lot of exposure. He explores personal learning environments, networks and knowledge (PLENK).

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know exactly who Stephen is. The problem is, while there are pockets of people who are familiar with his work and actively engage in the debate sparked by his posts, there are great swathes of people who should be thinking along the lines that Stephen addresses, but don't... and have no idea who he is, either. As a result, they continue to churn out the same old same old.

The expression goes, if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. These days, with change and progress being as fast as it is, I think if you do what you've always done, the best you can possibly hope for is what you've always got, but even that will be a stretch.

Hopefully, articles like this will take the ideas into the mainstream.

More about QR codes

2010-10-15T12:11:00.005+01:00

Thanks again to Paul Simbeck-Hampson for the link to this video about a creative use of QR codes.

Forget about the content of the book in the example. Think laterally. Consider the possibilities! Here we have the potential for a book that self-updates. Just as you do with web pages, when something changes, you update the source material, and the user accesses the most up to date information.

Just in time information.

As a teaching and learning resource, this is dynamite!!!!

Later edit: At Paul's suggestion (see comments below), I am including this video which shows some of the potential usage of the technology:

Playing with QR codes

2010-10-14T13:56:00.003+01:00

I have just been speaking to Paul Simbeck-Hampson (he gets around, doesn't he?) about QR codes and both of us have been waxing enthusiastic. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he posts about them too!

In case you're not familiar with them, a QR code is a kind of variation on a bar code, only instead of bars, it has tiny squares of black and white, in which information can be embedded. The information can be text, or a URL, or even audio.

With the means to scan these codes, all manner information can be shared. Paul and I have both loaded an app onto our smartphones that reads and generates these codes. He has an Android, while I have an iPhone. If our conversation is anything to go by, the Android version seems to be better.

Also, Google translate has a QR feature (and an app for Androids). Using the smartphone, you can scan and decode the code for the word you have looked up.

We were discussing possible learning applications for these codes and I shared about a speaker at the eLearning Africa conference in May (it pains me that I can't remember his name, even though he and I spoke at the same session), in whose organisation QR codes are being used to overcome language barriers. The code may be placed upon an item of furniture, for example. When scanned, this reveals the name of the item of furniture in the desired language, together with an audio of the correct pronunciation. I guess you could link to a list of the words for that item in any number of languages.

Similarly, the codes are being attached to informational posters in the office, containing a translation of the content in the user's language.

Just think about the potential applications:

shipping consignments
museum exhibits
tourist attractions
bird identification rings
...

I reckon the list is only restricted by the imagination! Talk about ubiquitous learning!

What a fabulous learning experience!

2010-10-14T12:29:00.000+01:00

The learning journey embarked on by both father and son here is worth so much more than the outcome of the exercise can begin to reflect. This pushes all my geek-parent buttons!

The loneliness of the long-distance worker

2010-10-13T12:16:00.003+01:00

(With apologies to Richardson, Redgrave et al)

Tomorrow, Learning Anorak Ltd begins its third year of existence, so I thought I'd share some reflections on the journey to date.

I have found the flexibility of being able to work my own hours enormously liberating. At one stage, I had a project that had overrun (not my fault, honest!) and two more that had just begun. One of them was a small piece of work, while the other two were pretty hefty. By dint of putting in stupid hours, I was able to meet the (revised) deadlines on all of them. Because of the way invoicing works, there is mileage in doing this. However, when you work for 'the man', you get paid what you get paid, regardless of the hours you put in. Also, once you start putting in hours like that, the expectation will be that you continue to do so, which is not good for your health or your family life. I knew that my contracts would come to an end and that there might be a quiet period to follow.

I have been able to attend a morning Pilates class once a week, and ferry my sons to and from the station for school. When my Mom came over for my graduation, I was able to take time out to spend with her, and we travelled hither and yon, taking in the sights.

My own learning journey has been more flexible, since I don't have to apply for time out or budget every time I want to sign up for something. On the flip side, however, without a behemoth L&D department with learning resources (and yes, even courses) on offer, I have had to track down my own, and this isn't always easy or quick.

I have found the isolation difficult to deal with. Those who know me personally will know that I am a gregarious soul, not designed to spend huge chunks of time alone. When I am rushed off my feet, this isn't too much of a problem, but when I have down time, it can be quite dire.

I am also frustrated by my own limitations. If something falls outside of my skill set, it falls outside of Learning Anorak's skill set. Of course there are ways around this situation:

I could join forces with someone who already has those skills or I could sub-contract that work to someone/an organisation who specialises in that area. There is a subtle difference between those two things, and I belong to a massive international, informal network (of which you are part, by the way) with all manner of possibilities. But sometimes, there isn't the time to find someone or to negotiate a contract with an organisation before an answer is needed.

I suck monumentally at the accounts side of the business. So I engaged a firm of accountants. We got off to a very shaky start and have only just hit our stride after a very frank meeting yesterday afternoon. It has taken a while, but I now have confidence that I am in the hands of someone who understands and will cater to my level of ineptitude.

One of the most significant experiences was earlier this year, when I was right royally played by a wilier organisation who used me to gain a foothold in Europe. That was the beginning of a very lean period, during which my accountant even tentatively used the L-word. I have been advised by many people who know about these things, that I had a case to take legal action. However, I knew (as did the other party, no doubt) that being 'just me' meant that spending time on building my case would mean taking time away from the pursuit of much needed work to take up the slack that now faced me. We also both knew that I didn't have the readies to appoint a lawyer, whereas they probably have several on retainer. The fact that we are based on two different continents added another obstacle. I decided to let it go.

I also find that being 'just me' means that, when I hit a personal rough patch, my business hits a rough patch. I am able to zone things out if I am working on a specific project, but if I'm just fiddling about with admin-type things, it's easy to lose motivation.

On a personal level, being home-based also means there is a danger of not leaving the office. It takes real discipline, when I'm 'in the zone' (for want of a less cliched term), to down tools and go and prepare dinner for my family. I'm a pretty good cook and I enjoy preparing food, but, when I'm caught up in something, it's a real wrench to set it aside. I consciously remind myself that my family is the reason that I work, not an intrusion upon it.

At this moment, I have just begun a new project which will keep the meter running for a few months. But the process of drumming up new business is also something I find daunting. Once contact has been made, I'm fine. It's the identification of leads I struggle with. In this, I have truly come to value my network. Most leads are referrals from people I know.

So there you have it, two years and counting. A no holds barred account. If you're also a solo act, much of this will be known to you (please share). If you're thinking of going it alone, you may have thought about these things already (please share), but if you haven't, I hope that I have given you some food for thought.

Revelling in bookwormish geekiness

2010-10-12T17:36:00.002+01:00

Some time ago, I came across The Literary Gift Company, and was instantly hooked. I have since passed my addiction on to several of my friends and family-members who are similarly afflicted with the bookworm disease.

This year, we have to get some of our Christmas shopping done early, because gifts have to be sent abroad.

These guys are going to be making a lot of money out of me, I fear!

I share this here, because I know that many of you are hopelessly addicted to books, and thought you might enjoy a browse.

On planning

2010-10-06T14:37:00.002+01:00

The town I live in is currently being subjected to the most extensive disruptions imaginable. The centre of town is being revitalised or some such thing, so we have all manner of roadworks and diversions in place. At the very same time, BT or British Gas or someone is doing an upgrade of something or other, so there are holes all along the road past our part of town, each with a flimsy barrier around it.

We suffered with these holes all down one side of the road recently. Instead of digging one hole, or one section of holes at a time, all the holes had been dug at once. And you never saw anyone working in or near any of them.

Then we saw a bunch of people beginning to fill the holes in, and take away the barriers. "Wahey!" quoth we, "Have you finished, then?"

The response almost took our breath away.

It turns out that these chaps had been subcontracted to dig the holes in order for the work to be carried out. So they dug them all at once, because they are the hole-diggers, and that's what they do. BT/BG/whoever then never actually got as far as doing the work for whatever reason. But the time had come, according to the contractual agreement, for the hole-diggers to come and fill in the holes and take away their barriers.

They then proceeded to dig the holes on the other side of the road, where they now stand, surrounded by their flimsy little barriers, devoid of any workers. Perhaps, in a week or so, the hole-diggers will come and fill them in again and take away their barriers.

In a few weeks' time BT/BG/whoever, will finally be ready to do the work, and they will have to either dig the holes themselves, or hire someone else to do so.

The waste is utterly ridiculous.

And sadly, not unique.

I once knew a man who worked on what is now known as the O2 building, but used to be called the Millennium Dome. His job had to do with flooring. At some point in the project plan, the wiring and plumbing and such like was to have been done, after which, the concrete floors could be poured. When the time came in the project plan to pour the concrete for the floors, the wiring and/or plumbing had not yet been done, because this aspect of the project was running behind schedule. In full knowledge of this, the contractor poured the floor anyway, because that was what they had been contracted to do and this was when they were contracted to do it. When the teams were ready for the wiring/plumbing, all the flooring had to be broken up.

I don't even know how to frame my thoughts on this. I find myself goldfishing madly, going, "Surely....But... You mean..." and getting no further.

I can't understand (a) how the overall project manager can allow this happen, (b) how the contractors involved can be so shoulder-shruggingly unconcerned about the bigger picture (c) how the impact on time and cost (not to mention quality... ooh, my ex-boss would be proud - he always wanted to turn me into a project manager) can be tolerated by the commissioning client.

Stephen Downes often uses jumbo jets as an illustration of distributed knowledge in action: no one person knows how to design, build and fly a jumbo jet. Yet they are designed, built and flown... each aspect of the operation falling to an expert or team of experts. And this is a Good Thing. But when the knowledge has become so distributed that people are able to shrug their shoulders and deny ownership of the bigger picture, something surely needs to be done and butts need to be kicked somewhere along the line.

Only, who gets to do the butt kicking, if nobody is in overall control anymore?

Hmm.

Jane Bozarth: Social Media for Trainers

2010-10-06T12:44:00.004+01:00

This new book by Dr Jane Bozarth is currently enjoying a 'blog tour'. Today is the turn of this blog.

I'm not going to make any attempt to do a full book review. However, I would like to suggest that this is an important and timely publication.

In my line of work, I come into contact with many classroom based trainers who see social media as something 'other' having nothing to do with them. One of the primary reasons the book needed to be written and now needs to be read, can be found pretty much within the very first paragraph of the books itself:

Those in need of information need it—and need to know how to find it—in the moment, not when the training department happens to offer it. And they have learned to find that information from one another, rather than depend on traditional, slow, inefficient, and often inaccurate top-down means. It is critical, if workplace trainers intend to remain viable and credible, that they understand how to participate in the networks and use the social media tools to extend their reach and enhance the development of the employees they are charged with developing.

The book starts with the basics of what social media are, how they can be used in training and which ones to select.

It then moves on to looking at a few social media in greater depth: Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Wikis, as well as a few 'other tools'.

The book can be found in print and as an ebook at the following places:

Pfeiffer
Amazon UK (it also available at Amazon US and Amazon Canada)
Barnes & Noble
Borders

There is also a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a Twitter hashtag (#SoMe4Trainers).

The challenge (as always) is to get this book in front of the unconvinced. Fortunately, Christmas is coming! ;o)

Children will learn to do what children want to learn to do

2010-10-05T13:27:00.002+01:00

Thanks to Paul Simbeck-Hampson, I came across this recording of a TED talk by Sugata Mitra. I don't think I need to add much more to it, really. You're an intelligent person. You will draw your own conclusions.

You've probably been making observations of this nature yourself for years. Perhaps this evidence will serve to strengthen your resolve.

You've probably also realised that, while they have acquired a greater capacity for doing things they find distasteful, adults are not so very different.

Where the heck have I been?

2010-10-04T14:34:00.004+01:00

You find in me in not such a very good place, right now.

A sequence of events - both good and bad - has taken place at such breakneck speed as to leave me little time to think or breathe. Life has been lived in a purely reactive mode, and only the noisiest wheel has been oiled at every moment.

I have hardly blogged. I have Facebooked only superficially and largely only socially. I have Twittered only sporadically. I have not worked at all. There has been neither the pressing need, nor the time. Instead, I have graduated. I have taken my mother on day trips hither and yon. I have prepared for a momentous event (more of that anon). I have taken a family holiday.

But now the dust has settled.

The problem is that is has left me space to reflect far too much on the most recent and most momentous of the events, namely my elder son's departure for his gap year in Australia.

Another of the events that took place was the loss of a major contract that was to have kept me busy for about 12 months, while supplying a source of income for the same period. The loss of that contract - under slightly fishy circumstances, to say the least - has left me with the double bogey of financial concerns and too much time to grieve.

Because it is grief.

Even though my son has only gone for a year, his departure has left such a great, gaping hole in my life that I found (find) myself bereft.

Even this provides the opportunity to learn. Geek that I am.

I have learnt about a parent's capacity for self sacrifice and for simultaneous multiple heartaches.

For much of their lives, we have encouraged our sons to take a year out after school to go and work abroad. To try out the parental value set for size and adjust it for a more personal fit. To discover what it means to have to earn and pay your way. To see a different culture going about the daily business of doing things that you have always done a certain way by default.

I always viewed it from the perspective of my sons and the benefits they would reap from such an experience.

However, as the departure date for the first of these experiences loomed nearer, it dawned on me what the experience was going to be like for me. I'd never thought about the impact on my life. I began to dread it. I changed my mind. I didn't want my boy going to the other side of the world, where I couldn't reach him in an emergency. Part of me realised that this was part of the point. Another part of me realised that I was going to be learning about letting go as much as my son was going to be learning about becoming independent. I could only think about how un-prepared he was.

But I learned through bitter experience many years ago, that "it is possible to do something important for someone precious, even while it rips your heart out". These were the very words I recently wrote to the 'someone precious' who was at the heart of that first bitter lesson. And I also learned that I have a parent's capacity to take on personal pain for the benefit of your kids. I was rather pleased at this discovery. Looking back over my life, there has been ample evidence of it before. It is only now that I have formally recognised it for what it is.

In the midst of all this, there is my younger son. He was inconsolable after his brother left, and I felt his grief in addition to my own. Every time I found him in tears, I would realise afresh the extent to which a parent can carry two griefs simultaneously.

I also realise that my younger son is being forced to witness in advance the impact of his own gap year departure on us. My husband is stoic and Scandinavian, and bears his pain much better than I do. So it is my grief that is the danger. I so desperately do not want my son to decide that he cannot bring himself to be responsible for such heartache... especially since his departure is likely to result in an empty nest, leaving his parents rattling around their rather large house.

I have watched my younger son try to step out of his more naturally self-contained mode to supply the hugs and cuddles that are his brother's habit to bestow upon me - not because it is in my elder son's nature to be tactile, but because, with the alarming insight that he has always had, he identified early on that I needed that physical contact.

I always knew that this was going to hurt like the dickens. I have learnt over the past week just how much a dickens hurts.

I have always known that parenting is difficult. I am discovering just how difficult it can be, and realising that it could be way worse.

I am grateful for Facebook and Skype and text messages. These things have turned the world into a much smaller place, and I am able to have real-time and almost-real-time contact with my son quite frequently. These technologies that I tried to look at so hard as professional learning and development tools (and they are, I haven't changed my stance on that), are also a way for keeping families intact across the miles.

Of course, I should have realised that, since I also swanned off to the other side of the world, leaving my own mother behind. But it tastes a different colour from the parental perspective.

What I now need to learn is how not to try to be awake during the waking hours of both my sons when they live 7 time zones apart.

Zzzzzz.....

On irony

2010-09-02T15:41:00.002+01:00

Regular readers may remember the trauma we experienced with the maths department in respect of our elder son. At the time that this was going on, I was venting to a friend (let's call her Rachel) with kids at the same school. She could relate to my situation, because her own experience of the maths department with one of her older sons (let's call him Tim) was not a happy one.

Tim, Rachel tells me, is one of those people who takes a little longer to grasp a new concept. But, once he's got it, he's got it good. Having done well at GCSE maths, he had opted to take the subject at A level. But things were not going well, and he was becoming steadily more discouraged. At the first progress meeting, Rachel was advised that Tim should give up maths because he was simply never going to get it.

This pushed Rachel's 'I'll show you' button. When it comes to her kids, the mild-mannered Rachel gives me a run for my money in the tigress stakes!

She found her son a private tutor and enlisted the support of the same Ms Verity I have mentioned before. Tim passed A level maths strongly and went on to study it at university.

He has just taken up his first post as a maths teacher... at the very same school he attended himself.

This means that Tim and the teacher who wrote him off will be colleagues... and this is not the first story of this kind I have heard.

Teachers please take care. I have personal experience that crow and humble pie don't taste very good and egg makes an uncomfortable facial accessory.

The same teacher who was so discouraging of Tim, recently advised my younger son - during 6th form induction - not to sign up for maths A levels. This after an impassioned speech to the whole group about how it was the most important subject in the curriculum and an absolute must, yadda yadda. What changed her tune was that she learned that my son and one other child present had been in set 5 of 9 for GCSE maths, and she felt that they would 'struggle'. She had apparently already advised all the kids in set 6 and below against attending the talk on maths at all.

The daft thing is that, 5th set or not, he sat exactly the same exam as the kids in the top set... and he got a solid B. What's wrong with that, I ask you?

He returned from the induction full of doubt, and started casting about for an alternative subject. I was livid, nay, apoplectic. Those of you who know me well can just imagine how this played out.

This is a kid who, since the age of 3, has wanted to be an explosives demolitionist. Never once has he wavered from this goal. If he is to realise this ambition, he will need to study structural engineering. One of the entrance requirements is a solid pass in maths at A level. He knows how hard he is going to have to work, and is prepared for the challenge.

As my husband said, "So, he may struggle. So what? Is there a rule against struggling somewhere? If he struggles, we'll find him some extra help. That's what parents do."

We get the impression that the department - or at least, this teacher - is only interested in kids who are going to sail through and score the sort of results that will keep the school in its lofty position on the local league tables. My mother in law has a sticker on her fridge that says, "The forest would be a quiet place if no birds sang but the best." Our kids may not be among the best, but, by 'eck, they're going to get to sing! To put a (slightly) more polite spin on a South Africanism, that woman does not get to urinate on our son's campfire! It may be that he changes his mind about what his career choice (our elder son did exactly that, shortly after starting 6th form) but it is to be his choice to make! It is not to be foisted upon him by someone with an agenda.

So, tomorrow, he goes into school to sign up for his A level subjects, and maths (with mechanics) will be one of them. He may well struggle, but (as the great Gretzky says) you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Not all parents are as determined, as resource-rich, as stubborn, as supportive, as teeth-clenchingly bloody-minded as my friend Rachel and me. My heart sinks as I wonder how many young people are giving up on their life's dreams because of what a teacher has said.

Let's be enablers, folks.

A tip for Articulate users

2010-09-02T14:04:00.005+01:00

I came across this today, courtesy of a link from one of my Twitter friends. I forget which.

For those who use Articulate and like to try to find ways to push the boundaries of what it can and can't do.

I have tried umpteen times to embed the video in this post, but, while I can see it perfectly in preview, it simply refuses to play ball when I publish. Sorry.

On value: perceived and intrinsic

2010-08-31T15:15:00.004+01:00

Those of you who are Facebook friends will know that I lost something during my recent holiday. It was something of no intrinsic value, and yet I treasured it enormously. It was something that has been featured on this blog before. It was the bangle my father gave to me for my 17th birthday.

It was the only truly personalised thing he ever gave me, and the only times I wasn't wearing it were the times it was broken. It occupied pride of place on my right wrist through thick and thin for about 30 years (albeit with the aid of several repair jobs). If you have met me in person, you have seen it, even if you haven't noticed it.

It has been swimming, climbing and jetskiing... and survived it all.

But one day during our holiday, my elder son playfully grabbed me by my wrists in the sea. As I felt it move on my arm, I yelled, "My bangle! My bangle!" It took my son a moment to understand the import of what I was saying, by which time the bangle had fallen off. We could see it clearly through the water, lying at my younger son's feet. In distress, I yelled at him to pick it up for me, but he couldn't see it, and - as I watched in horror - accidentally stepped on it, burying it in the sand.

Although we borrowed goggles from kindly people nearby and spent the next 40 minutes or so searching for it, we finally had to accept that it was gone.

I am unashamed to say that I wept huge, wracking sobs for the loss of it. I felt hollow. I even dreamt that night that it was returned to me. I still keep absent-mindedly trying to adjust it on my arm, and there is a faint tan line where it used to be.

Someday, maybe, someone else will find it: a badly made, shoddily repaired silver bangle cut in the shape of an unusual name not their own.... and it will have absolutely no value to them.

Will they even be able to tell that it had once had enormous value to someone else? Will they know as they hold it that there is a woman somewhere out there whose delight would know no bounds if they were to find a way to return it to her?

So it is with learning. Sometimes we share things in this space that have inspired us, or from which we have gleaned enormous value. Sometimes we wax lyrical about something we have found or made or seen... to a round of utter indifference.

And what of it? Does that diminish the value to the beholder? I certainly hope not. There is space for a wide range of value systems and measures.

As learning providers, we need to be careful not to denigrate certain resources simply because they hold no value for us. One man's meat, as the saying goes...

On enablement

2010-08-10T10:44:00.004+01:00

I have blogged about this story before (and probably got the details wrong), but it blipped on my radar again today. It is the most standout story of Olympic 400m sprinting for me. Even though 400m was my distance, and it remains my favourite event of the Olympics, I couldn't tell you off-hand who won that year... but the name Derek Redmond stands out in my mind.

I want to draw your attention to the Dad in this video. Watch him fight his way past the officials. Watch him shoo them away so that his son can cross the finish line.

I want to be that person.

On belonging

2010-08-09T15:33:00.007+01:00

Like most people, I have a strong need to belong. To feel accepted. Like most people, I am also picky about where it is that I am accepted and by whom.

When I originally started blogging, I stood in awe of the likes of Kathy Sierra and Stephen Downes (among others). I hovered on the sidelines of the spaces they inhabited and then grew brave enough to contribute my twopenn'orth to the conversations they were having. For different reasons, neither of these two people are particularly strong on responding to blog comments - Kathy (who no longer blogs, to my knowledge) received so many comments that she was physically unable to respond to them all; Stephen believes that his readers' comments have validity in and of themselves, without needing his affirmation or validation (or so I seem to recall from somewhere... blowed if I can find where he said it). At one point, I posted something that took an opposing stance to something Stephen had said and almost fell off my chair when he spread a little link love and referred to my post in his OLDaily the next day.

It was this kind of acceptance that made me feel as if I belonged. And social media are great for this. They are such levellers. For example, to extend the Downes story for a moment, the nature of the relationship I have with Stephen has become increasingly relaxed over the years, as we have become connected in a wider range of social media spaces, to the point where we engage on personal issues as well as shared professional interests.

Switching tack for a moment, let's look at this belonging thing from a slightly different angle:

Because of a quirk of genetics, I always found it very difficult to find clothes that fitted me. I was the woman who hated clothes shopping, because after three stores full of nothing that fitted me, I began to feel like a freak. Things that fitted here, didn't close there, and things that closed there, hung like a sack everywhere else.

Then a wonderful woman called Sarah Tremellen established Bravissimo, an outlet for... well, check it out for yourself.

I don't know who developed her marketing plan, or whether she is naturally insightful, but she has formed a community for women who - like me - had to put up with all the strife that goes with being the shape that we are: quite apart from the struggle to find decent clothing, there are the assumptions about our morals and our intelligence levels, the ribald remarks, the failed attempts to conduct professional conversations with men who later wouldn't recognise your face if their lives depended on it.

I was an early adopter of Bravissimo and am a fan of just about everything about it: the decor in the stores, the defiant quotes on the walls, the professional fitting service. But most of all, I love that I can walk out of their stores feeling like a shapely woman, rather than a freak.

Recently, I was in one of their fitting rooms, when I overheard a woman in the next cubicle make a discovery: due to significant recent weight loss, she no longer fell within Bravissimo's target audience. The store no longer catered to her. She was utterly crestfallen as she said, "It looks like I'm just not a Bravissimo girl any more."

Why do I relate this story?

Because, in spite of the fact that the woman in question had achieved goal weight and all the attendant health and aesthetic benefits, in spite of the fact that she could now buy clothing from any high street store at a significantly lower price, she had effectively ousted herself from the community, and that was causing her genuine distress. And yet, one becomes a member of the Bravissimo community in the first place as a consequence of being excluded from all manner of other communities.

The difference is that Bravissimo deliberately fosters that sense of community, that sense of belonging.

As we build our learning environments and create our communication spaces, let's look for ways to foster that same sense of being part of something that make a person feel special. Something they will be reluctant to leave.

On being powerless

2010-08-03T11:31:00.003+01:00

For the past few weeks, I have experienced a level of powerlessness I have not known for a long time. The frustration it has caused me and my family has spilled over into other areas of my life.

It caused me to think again of the workplace learner.

My frustration started with something as pleasant as the prospect of our family holiday. We decided to go to Lanzarote, which (for those who don't know) is a Spanish territory, and therefore within the EU.

Because I am married to an EU citizen, I have never before had problems getting a visa to travel in the EU. Things were different this time. The visa service has been outsourced to an organisation which appears to have become a law unto itself.

Previously, because I was already on record at the Swedish embassy, I could apply for a visa through the mail and would receive it within seven days. No problem. This is no longer the case. The requirement now is that I should attend an interview in London and there were no available appointments until after the start of our holiday. When I contacted them to point out the problem this presented, they were utterly unsympathetic. "Reschedule your holiday," was the solution they offered, as if this were the easiest and most obvious thing in the world.

I began casting about for ways to get my visa more quickly when I came across EU directive 38/2004 article 10 which states that, as the (1) spouse of an EU citizen and (2) having indefinite leave to remain (permanent residence) in an EU member state, I am allowed to travel anywhere within the EU in the company of my husband for a period of up to 90 days.

I contacted the visa service with this information. They already knew about it, it seems, but they still insist that I need a visa and they are still unable to assist me. So much for another provision of the directive which says that the spouses of EU citizens will be given priority treatment.

I was sure that they were mistaken and tried to contact the Spanish embassy for confirmation. They never answered either their phones or their emails.

My husband and I searched online and found all manner of precedent:

The visa agency remained unmoved.

We were advised by various sources that it would be illegal to prevent me from boarding the plane and that I should take my original marriage certificate and a copy of the EU directive with me. But I had my doubts about the effectiveness of these pieces of evidence on the person on border control with no authority and a set of rules handed down from on high.

I have made a host of telephone calls and have at last been advised by the border control folks at the UK airport that they will not stop me from boarding the plane. I have also been advised by the folks in Lanzarote that they will not stop me from entering the island.

I don't think I will actually believe it until I am safely ensconced in my villa!

But this saga isn't so very different from the experience of someone trying to upskill in order to be able to do something differently or better in the workplace. We've all been there.

You're not eligible to attend this course. Yes, I know what the employee's handbook says, but you're still not eligible.
You can attend this course, but the next one is running in 6 months. You'll have to reschedule that project.
You need an enrollment key/password to access that material, but we aren't issuing any at the moment.

In the end, we go subversive, or we find ways around the obstacle.

Or, at least, some of us do. I have never been very good at taking no for an answer. I have pushed back all my life. It's one of my most annoying characteristics. But I have seen 'impossible' things happen. Documents that should take 12 weeks to obtain have miraculously appeared with 24 hours. Jobs that have supposedly been lost have been reinstated. Doctors who are unavailable have suddenly become available. Doors that are supposedly sealed shut have swung wide. Of course, there are times when I deem it best to cut my losses and turn away, but these are conscious choices.

But I am stubborn and bloody-minded.

What about those who are not? What about the more gentle-natured people in the organisation? When they identify a development need and are stonewalled, what are they to do? This is a surefire way to generate a team of 'jobsworths' who punch the clock and look forward to retirement.

I can't bear the thought of willingness to learn going to waste. We simply have to find ways to empower people to access the learning that they need in order to do their jobs and do them well, or to upskill to take on another role, if they so desire.

We need to prise open some creaky doors. Of course, there will be resistance, but that's why there are people like (you and) me in this field: to push back against all that 'no-ness', to ask 'why' a lot until the lack of good reason causes the obstacles to crumble.

Ugh! I'm feeling right rebellious today.

Multilinguistic monolingualism

2010-07-16T16:58:00.003+01:00

I've been thinking about the different forms there are of a single language, and how we need to master so many of them during a lifetime.

For example, the language I use at home with my family isn't the same as the language I would use in an academic paper (not that I ever mastered that particular form of English, it has to be said!).

My kids happily use 1337 (leet) speak online with their friends and even in their text messages to one another. Occasionally, they will use elements of 1337 when texting me. Elements of 1337 have informed lolcat (follow the link and have a bit of fun, I dare you!). Even my pedantic septuagenarian mother has adopted some of the shortcut spellings when sending text messages (her most recent message to me included the word 'fite', for example... I never thought I'd see the day!).

My last employer owned the rights to a few courses in business English in a range of delivery media.

Here are some anecdotes that illustrate misapplication of contextual terminology:
A neurosurgery theatre nurse recently told me about a wonderfully talented Vietnamese neurosurgeon who had very little English when he joined the team at the hospital where she works. Being an intelligent and determined man, he learned quickly by listening to and imitating his colleagues. But he learned the hard way that it is inappropriate to tell a patient's family, "Oh, he's toast."

When my husband arrived in South Africa as a child, at the prompting of his classmates, he went and told his teacher to "Go jump in the lake" (although you can be pretty sure what he actually said was "gaw yump in de lake"). She remembered that with fondness when he phoned her some 25 years later to wish her well on her retirement.

A pastor friend of mine went to preach at a church in Mexico, where one or two teenagers, passionately devout about their Christian faith, sported T-shirts with the most profane of slogans, utterly oblivious to the meaning of the words writ large across their chests.

If there are this many forms of the language of which I am a native speaker, goodness knows how many forms there are of the languages of which I am not a native speaker. I wonder how many times I have put my foot in it. I know of one occasion when I politely advised a Swede that my Swedish was poor, but that I could follow if only they would speak 'more badly'. I'm sure there have been countless other occasions.

As national and cultural boundaries are breached by social media, we find ourselves in daily contact with non-native speakers of our language. We might need to remember to cut them a little slack... there may be times when they say something grossly offensive without meaning to do so!

Learning Anorak... deified?!?!

2010-07-15T19:00:00.002+01:00

I had to chortle. I have a Google alert set to look for references to Learning Anorak (well, I can't have you lot talking behind my back, now, can I?). Recently, this returned a reference to this post about Warhammer.

It seems the god of learning in this fantasy world is called Anorak, and it was he (he?) who taught the humans magic. Sadly, he was killed using the very magic that he had taught these ungrateful wretches.

But how deliciously ironic!

I only wish that there had been a picture to share with you. Failing that, you'll have to settle for my picture, as the living learning anorak ;o)

Keeping a promise

2010-07-12T23:23:00.002+01:00

When there was about a year to go before the football/soccer (choose your name) world cup in South Africa, I visited the country and had grave misgivings that things would be pulled together in time to make the event successful. I expressed these misgivings publicly. Not in any finger-pointing, accusing way, you understand, but with a heavy heart. I thought my homeland had taken on more than it could chew.

I also said that nothing would please me more than to have to admit - after the event - that my fears and doubts were unfounded.

May I take this opportunity to state publicly (as I have done on my Facebook page) that I was unequivocally wrong.

I believe the event was a resounding success. I know there were complaints about the ball, but that was FIFA's problem, not South Africa's. I know that there were complaints about the incessant sound of the vuvuzelas, but (to borrow an Australianism for just a moment) suck it up, princess. They provided a uniquely African soundtrack to the event, just as the steel drums did to the T20 world championship in the West Indies. Oh, and friends and family back home tell me that foreign visitors were just as responsible for the noise levels as the locals... and not just in the stadium, either... vuvuzelas abounded in the streets, in the malls, on the beaches.... everywhere!

South Africans came out in support of the event and their Cinderella team in a way that made my heart swell. Even after their own team was knocked out in the group stages, South Africans chose a team for every game, and supported them with all their hearts. My mother, who has never supported or been interested in a sporting event in her life, not even when I was competing, bought a bright orange T-shirt to show her support for the land of my stepdad's birth.

One thing South Africans can always be depended upon to bring to the party, is passion. It is the single thing most lacking in my daily life since I moved to the UK eleven years ago. I miss that buzz and vibe, and time has not diminished that loss. And it was evident in all its uncynical, unbridled glory throughout the weeks of the world cup competition.

Ndiyaba, abahlobo bam. Ek het my misgis. I was wrong.

Reflections on learning: USA 2010

2010-07-06T15:33:00.003+01:00

Apologies for the long silence, and a warning that I am thoroughly jet-lagged! I have been to the north-western USA. The first week was an abortive business trip, the second was spent visiting family.

I felt the need to share my reflections of the differences I noted between this trip and my last visit to the same area in 2004.

Of course, everyone tells me that I have a "cute little accent" and asks me where I'm from.
Last time, when I told them I was from South Africa, the response was invariably, "Oh, Africa." The word 'South' was simply ignored as being meaningless. There was no concept South Africa as a country - most people seemed to think Africa was one large country and, in fact, had little concept of how very large it is!
This time, when I said I was was from South Africa, (almost) everyone knew what that was, even if they didn't know where it was. One woman promptly told a colleague that I was from South America, but then, perhaps she saw this news report. Most noteworthy response : "Ah. That's where our soccer team is at, right?"

Last time, no-one knew much about soccer beyond a game their kids played.
This time, people were keeping ludicrous hours in order to watch the games being played halfway around the world, and many were calling it 'footie' or even 'football' (but only when talking to those of us from outside of the USA, I hasten to add). This surely contributed to the improved understanding of African geography, since there were many African teams in the early stages of the competition.

Last time, if I said I lived in England, most people called England 'London'. If I was absent-minded enough to say I was from the UK, some complimented me on how well I spoke English and asked me if it was widely spoken there.
This time, they were comfortable with terms like UK/United Kingdom as well as England. No-one asked me whether they speak English there. One or two people did use London and England interchangeably, it has to be said.

But my favourite encounter was in the gym with the chap on the static bike next to mine. We were discussing the upcoming 4th of July celebrations and I was regretting the fact that I hadn't thought about them when I had made my travel reservations, with the result that my return flight was booked for 4th July, rather than the day after. "I guess it doesn't really feature large enough on my radar," I explained. Having reassured me that it was "just another reason for folks to get drunk," the man said, "So folks don't celebrate the 4th of July in England, then?"
Me: I'm afraid not.
Him: Why's that, then?
Me: Well, let's think about that. What do you celebrate on July 4th?
Him: Um...?
Me: It's Independence Day, right?
Him: That's right!
Me: Independence from whom?
Him: I don't know.
Me: Independence from England.
Him: Really? I did not know that! Thank you for telling me.

...and no, he was not being facetious. It was a very sincere conversation. But I hasten to add, he was the exception!

Exam time again :o(

2010-06-09T15:58:00.004+01:00

With one son busy with GCSE exams and the other with A2 levels, I am surrounded by the detritus of exam-time at the moment. Both my sons' girlfriends are also busy with GCSEs, which simply adds and extra dimension to the stress. Snapping and sniping and the occasional bout of near-hysterical laughter at nothing-in-particular are the order of the day.

I have shared before my antipathy towards exams as a means of testing competency in a subject, and we once again find ourselves reaffirming our every negative feeling on the matter.

My younger son recently sat a maths paper, the first half of which was based around a single scenario. Sadly for him, he didn't understand the initial scenario, so half the total marks for the paper were placed beyond his reach in one fell swoop. Students were presented with a quadrilateral of some kind and given information about a 'transection'. My son is familiar with the word 'transect' in daily language, but assumed that, in this case, it was a mathematical term with associated formulae and methodologies and so forth that he had somehow missed (like integration, for example).

Can you imagine his mounting stress as question after question referred back to this diagram that he simply couldn't fathom? Mentally adding up the marks that he was effectively barred from earning must have been gut-wrenching when he had been doing so well in the subject to date. By the time he reached the first question unrelated to the mystery diagram, his stress levels were through the roof and he could barely think straight. He knew he had to get practically full marks for the rest of the paper to be in with a hope of passing, and this placed him under additional pressure.

My elder son had a very similar experience last year with a statistics paper which centred largely around a single case-study. He got 37% for that paper, after having fared better in stats than any other subject throughout the year. He promptly betook himself to a tutor (okay, we betook him... and paid the extortionate rates) and got an A on the resit. He didn't learn any more about stats from the tutor. He learnt about exam papers... and went from 37% to 80+% in the space of a couple of months.

Now let's think how that scenario might play out in the work place (or anywhere else in 'real life'). Somebody gives you a diagram or a scenario and tells you to perform certain calculations on it which are pertinent to the situation. You can't figure out the diagram/scenario. What do you do? Well, quite clearly, you get some assistance. You ask someone to explain it to you. You look on YouTube or Google or Wikipedia. You look up unknown words in a dictionary. You phone a friend. You ask the audience. Whatever.

Then you perform the calculations and present them back to the person who needed them. Or you buy the floor tiles. Or supply the correct does of the required medication.

Nobody locks you in a sensory deprivation chamber and expects you to do it all on your tod from memory.

Ugh.

So irrelevant.

Pet topics at LSG10UK

2010-06-09T09:49:00.004+01:00

Yesterday was the Learning & Skills Group members conference (do I sound Very Important if I mention that I am a founder member?), when over 400 people gathered for a follow up event to the Learning Technologies conference held in January.

If you follow me on Twitter, you will have been inundated with my observations of some of the sessions already. Internet access in the main auditorium was (as always) patchy at best, so I was unable to share much from the sessions that took place there. In fact, perhaps this is an appropriate place to mention that, of the two most recent conferences I have attended, I experienced better connection in Lusaka than I did in London!

One of the things I often note about conferences is that the speakers tend to say things that I have been saying for years... only when I say them, no-one pays the blindest bit of attention. However, when luminaries like Charles Jennings and Jay Cross say them, they cause a huge stir. During discussions with my neighbour in Charles's session, I found that I am not alone in this. It's frustrating for us nobodies!

As always, a few of my pet topics came up. Learner empowerment. Permanent beta (aka rolling with the punches). ROI. Aligning with the business.

Jay's keynote addressed the subject matter of his new book, Work(ing) Smarter. He talked about the speed of data generation and touched on the power of the individual to change the market, citing the example of United Breaks Guitars. Even though I had seen it before, and even though country and western music sets my teeth on edge, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being with people watching the story unfold for the first time. That YouTube video has taken over 8.5 million hits, and United's share price took a massive hit of its own as a result. Never question the power of the individual to change things! He touched on cluetrain manifesto, and I was surprised at the relatively low number of hands raised in answer to his question as to how many had read it.

This addresses the fact that people react very publicly to things. We might think it's a bit rude, or a bit unfair or a bit whatever, when people express their disapproval for all the world to see on FB and/or Twitter, but that attitude isn't going to change anything. We simply have to face up to the fact that that is how the world works now (as predicted by cluetrain) and develop strategies to engage with a public that has a voice and isn't afraid to use it.

As I have been saying for a long time now, if we adopt the attitude that all learning/staff training/call it what you will must be officially developed, sourced and/or sanctioned by the L&D department, we will forever be running to catch up, and we will turn what should be an empowering service into a bottle neck. Several times yesterday, we were reminded that L&D should serve the business. That we should talk in the language of the stakeholders and serve the agenda of the organisation, instead of talking the language of learning to support the agenda of the L&D department.

It would be doing Charles Jennings a huge disservice to say that he talked about ROI. He did touch on the subject, though, and it was implicit in so much of what he said. Since it's a pet topic of mine, I probably heard the ROI message louder than anything else he had to say. I like Charles's no nonsense approach. I am only sorry that he and I have never had the opportunity to work together professionally. He reminded us that the value of anything at all is determined by the buyer. The seller may set the price, but it is the buyer who decides whether or not to pay it. When it comes to learning solutions and/or environments, while it may be the HR department or the CFO who signs the cheque in monetary terms, the real buyer is the user, the learner, the consumer (or not) of the koolaid. So producing a series of numbers that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt (or not) that the training is a Good Thing, does not address the needs or represent the opinions of the user populace. Those things do not have numeric values and can therefore not accurately be reflected in the ROI model. How do you attach a number to things like staff morale, for example?

Furthermore, Charles cited research that demonstrated a chasm between CLOs' perception of their roles and the measures of success and the rest of the C-level suite's perception of the CLO's role and the measurement of success. Startlingly, the C-level suite is so accustomed to making huge decisions with a shortage of quantitative data, that they are utterly at ease basing critical decisions on nothing more than experienced intuition. They have little interest in the numbers. ROI is not regarded as important. So, while the CLO is frantically trying to justify his existence, the rest of the CXOs are quite happy to accept on faith that the CLO performs a necessary function within the business are happy to let him get on with it.

I suspect that ROI becomes important when the L&D department is fighting for its life in the face of huge budget cuts. Those numbers will be what are trotted out in a desperate bid for survival. But, if the CXOs make their decisions intuitively, I suspect they are unlikely to be swayed by the numbers at this point.

Charles also produced some figures which explored how senior managers themselves learn. These majored on (ahem) radical ideas like Talking To Peers. The suggestion is that, when solutions to learning and support needs within the organisation are being addressed, those same affordances be made available to the entire staff complement.

Corporate Learning at eLearning Africa

2010-06-01T16:32:00.004+01:00

Edit note: Please note that I have just discovered that my carefully recorded voiceovers in the PowerPoint presentation below don't work in SlideShare. If anyone has a suggestion as to how to fix this (since my slides are meaningless without audio), please let me know!

By contrast with ICWE's annual Online Educa in Berlin, eLearning Africa focused predominantly on formal, institutional learning. Corporate learning didn't occupy a lot of space either on the programme or within the venue. Our session was scheduled for what f2f trainers call the graveyard shift (straight after lunch) on the first day, and we did have a few dozers, it has to be said.

The first speaker was Mads Bo-Kristensen from Videnscenter for Integration in Denmark. He spoke about tools in use in Denmark to assist immigrants in gaining proficiency in 'business Danish' to enable them to communicate within the workplace. I can see enormous potential for a tool like this within Africa. It is a hugely multilingual continent. Every country boasts innumerable 'local languages' and speakers of all these languages must work together within large organisations. Quite apart from this, aid workers coming to the continent could fare much better with skills in these local languages.

Next up was Mehdi Tounsi from Gatlin International in France. Mehdi is Algerian and we found immediate synergy in the fact that we hail from African countries that often do not refer to themselves as such... and in the fact that we both consider ourselves African in spite of this. Mehdi spoke about a sustainable and affordable business model for e-enabled learning in Africa.

To my surprise, the challenge to both their presentations came from the young, outspoken delegates who have been educated abroad. One of these told us that Africa is not ready for elearning because the generation currently holding teaching posts had not learned to use computers at school. Another told us that Africa was not culturally suited to elearning. I promised to address both these points in my own presentation. I have recorded more or less the same words over the slides (I didn't really use notes... as usual), so here it is:

Putting the learner in the driver's seat

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During the question and answer session that followed, one of the young bucks was arguing a point about learning, when I realised that he was referring to an academic situation. I tried to explain that I was talking about workplace learning. Learning on the job. The young man knitted his brows and looked at me blankly. And he was not the only one. If it isn't an academic course of study with an accreditation at the end of it, it fell outside of the frame of reference for many of the people present, even though I had so carefully crafted my story about Abi and his workplace learning needs.

The other started up again about his contention that older people in Africa had not encountered computers in school, so I pointed out that I was an older person, educated in Africa without computers... and yet I did this stuff for a living. I was a bit irked that he was prepared to write off his entire continent as beyond e-redemption based on this flimsy fact and it must have showed, because the chairman had to pull me up.

I maintain that social learning absolutely fits with African culture, but like the rest of the world, Africa has to break faith with the idea of the instructor/teacher/whatever as sage on the stage. One teacher in a pre-conference workshop emphasised the social structure of the classroom dynamic and spoke of the need to retain it. This is not unfamiliar territory to those of us who have been championing the social learning cause for a while, but these traditions run perhaps a little deeper in Africa than elsewhere.

One young man informed us in our corporate learning session that we must walk before we can run. I was disappointed. I had hoped that my anecdotes of TV and passenger flights had demonstrated that this was not a requirement.

Who knows? Next year perhaps the ethos will be subtly different.

It is worth noting that there were several delegates on Twitter and Facebook throughout the conference, using these tools with the easy confidence of seasoned social media pundits.

Jumbled early reflections of eLearning Africa

2010-05-28T13:40:00.006+01:00

I am shattered at this point, and unlikely to be coherent in my writing or organised in my thinking, but here are my early impressions of my first eLearning Africa conference. I will unpack some aspects in greater depth in due course.

Of course, everything runs on 'African time'. The shuttles are late, the dignitaries are late, the food is late. The queues are long and the sun is hot, oh, and impala stroll around the grounds of the conference centre. This is very definitely Africa.

There is a craft market on the grounds as well, but my only visit to it resulted in my being mobbed on all sides by insistent, wheedling vendors, each with a sob story about transport money or sick mothers/children. I struggle to cope with that kind of thing, so I fled empty-handed, to my deep disappointment.

Also, there have been displays of drumming and dancing every day. The costumes are charming and the skills demonstrated are impressive. The Europeans in attendance were entranced. But one bishop standing behind me in today's lunch queue labelled it an embarrassment. He considered it irrelevant both to elearning and progress in general. I guess he saw it as a perpetuation of the stereotype from which Africa is trying to escape. He was adamant that this tradition was unhelpful to the nation. I guess I can see his point.

The shuttles have been utterly haphazard. Each one is manned by a driver and a... well, I don't know what the other guy is, to be honest. I do know that the 'other guy' on our shuttle is about the most efficient man in Lusaka and his frustration is running high at the ineptitude. We often arrive at one hotel (having been sent there by the handlers back at whatever co-ordination centre exists) only to find another bus (or two) at the same place, while frantic phone calls from other delegates indicate that their hotels have not been visited by any buses at all.

The lunches have also proved tricky, due to the fact that hundreds and hundreds of people arrived unexpectedly to enrol for the conference, causing a major headache for the organisers.

This has proved by far the biggest eLearning Africa conference to date. The Zambian government is enormously proud of this fact, but I'm not sure that it is an unequivocally positive fact. African culture is one of natural deference to elders in society. As a consequence, many of the attendees are, well, venerable is the most polite term I can think of. It is evident that they have little or no connection with the subject matter under discussion and several of them seem to doze their way through the sessions.

At the other end of the spectrum, for some reason, the minister of education has seen fit to have hordes of children in attendance. For almost all these children, English is their second language and both the content and the language used in the presentations are highly unlikely to be engaging for them.

My biggest surprise has been the source of the most active and outspoken resistance to the concept of using elearning in education. It has been the intelligent, articulate, savvy early-20s crowd who have stood up and declared that Africa is not ready for elearning, or that the culture of elearning is not a good fit. I will unpack this in greater detail in a review of my own session at a later date.

I have also been surprised at the complete lack of understanding of the concept of 'workplace learning' or 'corporate learning' (pick your simile). Not just the term, but the 'thing' itself... even when you call it staff training. If it isn't formal education conducted by an accrediting institution, it isn't learning. More of that anon, too.

But everyone is incredibly friendly. Total strangers chat like old friends. The Zambians are astonishingly gracious and willing, but they are hamstrung by the fact that an awful lot of stuff just doesn't work... or doesn't work properly, from the Internet connection to the power supply to the roads (oh, and don't bother trying to cross the road at a pedestrian crossing, those white stripes appear to be no more than just a fashion choice!).

I have readily been accepted as an African, which took me by surprise. I call myself an African woman, which is unusual for a white South African (it also very unusual for people from the extreme north of Africa (Saharan and supra-Saharan Africa). For many, even in Africa, African = black, but when I introduce myself as and African girl living in England, this has been accepted without question and with a great deal of approval in some cases. Just today at lunch, I was chatting with two Zimbabwean women who were seated beside me, when a Kenyan man called out from the other side of the table, "You know, you are a very African woman!" He explained how, watching my body language and listening to my intonation, he was suddenly able to see beyond my fair skin. I assured him that I saw myself in the same light and that I took this as a huge compliment. The conversation at my table flowed fast, and in numerous directions simultaneously.

The food has been very much local fare, and no explanation is forthcoming as the ingredients of any of the dishes. I asked what was in a dish called chiwawa and was told, "Chiwawa". I was at a loss to explain that I already had this much information, and needed more (I have since learned that it is made of pumpkin leaves with onion and tomato).

I have made many new contacts, but I am doubtful as to whether it will lead to business opportunities.

C'est la vie.

It's been fun.

Learning from the British

2010-05-21T16:36:00.003+01:00

There is much that is amiss with British culture, but there are times when things happen to make me deeply appreciate the things that are so very right with it.

I would like to relate a true incident to highlight this.

At a recent conference, a prominent American speaker had cause to summon a delegate onto the platform. In a largely white audience, this delegate was one of the few black people in attendance. The speaker explained that, in America, he would call this man African-American, but he didn't know what term to use in the UK. "What do I call you?" he asked the man. To resounding cheers from the by now very uncomfortable audience, the man answered, "I'm British."

I have always wondered how 'African American' is a less offensive term than 'black' because it amounts to pretty much the same thing. It is a term which serves to divide a society on the basis of skin colour. What's wrong with 'American'? Why does there have to be differentiation at all?

Oddly enough, the one person I can think of to whom the term can accurately be applied is President Obama, since he has one African parent, and one American parent.

But the 'African' bit is somewhat misleading, anyway. I play squash once a week with a friend. Let's say two people were watching us play and person A asked, "Who's winning?" If person B answered, "The African woman is behind by 6 points," person A would probably think I had opened a can of whup-ass on my friend. But under those circumstances, they would be dead wrong. You see, she's black-and-British, while I am white-and-African.

Some time back, I related how I had been hounded out of an online group for Africans on the basis of my skin colour. To add insult to injury, the ringleader of my virtual lynch party was an American woman who had never set foot on African soil.

It doesn't work.

In recent years, I have noticed increasingly racist tendencies on the part of friends and family back in South Africa, as the problems in the country fuel the racial tensions and give rise to all manner of blame-game tactics. I have heard the most pejorative terms coming from the mouths of people I love, people from whom I never expected to hear such talk.

And I want no part of it.

I far prefer a society in which a person of any skin colour whatsoever can say unequivocally, "I am British."