LPoD - South African visitors to the UK

Who says Facebook isn't a learning tool? One of my FB friends, a fellow South African ex-pat, most of whose family is also still back there, posted some information on her page that has become today's learning point.

Essentially, it seems that the UK issued an ultimatum to several countries to tighten up security around the issue of passports (you may remember that I recently posted that during 2007, 6000 Chinese nationals are said to have entered the UK on genuine South African passports obtained 'under the counter' for £5000 each). It seems many of the other countries affected such as Botswana, Brazil, Malaysia, Mauritius, Namibia, Trinidad and Tobago took heed. South Africa, it appears, did not.

As a consequence, all South African nationals will now need a visa to enter the UK - even just for a holiday. Apparently, according to a South African based immigration group called 1st Contact the process of obtaining this visa is cumbersome and lengthy. Also according to 1st Contact,

There is also a newly introduced bio-metric component attached to this new regime. It has been alleged that South Africans will be required to complete a 10 page application form, incur fees anywhere from £ 65 (for holidays Visas) to £ 600 (for business Visas) and then still make their way to VFS (Visa Facilitation Service) office, for finger printing and retina scans. The biometric scans are then sent to the British High commission along with the application to review, before the granting of Visas takes place.

Some of these measures have already been introduced, with the balance expected to be in effect in mid 2009.

Historically South Africa has made up the 5th largest tourist group in Britain. According to an article published in the BBC, in 2007 419 000 South Africans legally visited the UK, comprising of 168 000 tourists and 46 200 business visitors, where over 3000 South Africans were even granted work permits.

It seems the point of these measures is not to curb the number of South African visitors, but to strengthen the UK's borders. However, many South Africans, and other Commonwealth citizens are expressing a different view under their breath. Now that several eastern European countries have joined the EU and their citizens can legally move to the UK without the need for visas, the number of immigrants from these countries has rocketed. Since the UK is powerless to change this, there are those who feel that the UK government is taking what action it can, and that Commonwealth countries are the chosen target. I'm not prepared to make that judgement one way or the other, just yet.

The immediate effect for me is that the cost of these visas is very high when you're paying for them in Rands, currently at a little under ZAR14 to the Pound. This effectively means that the once slim chance that members of my family may be able to visit us in the UK is eradicated. And since we were hoping for a gathering of the clans to mark our elder son's entry to adulthood later this year, this is a heavy blow for me.

My mother has implied that she would be prepared to come over and 'do' for me, should I have to undergo surgery to my neck (which unfortunately seems to be indicated at present), but I suspect that her offer might have to be withdrawn under these circumstances.

Articulating a response

On Wednesday, I posted about my struggles with Articulate Engage interactions and Quizmaker quizzes. And, in the interests of fair play, I would like make the following known.

The folks at Articulate Towers obviously have their finger on the pulse of social media, because there was a swift response from them in the form of an email from a team member, one Dave Moxon, with an invitation to get in touch by email, outlining the problem.

There was a prompt response to my email, and an invitation to teleconference. Yesterday at 5pm my time, I was in conference with Dave, who gave me presenter rights and got me to show him my set up and to demonstrate what went wrong.

Of course, as is always the case when you visit the doctor or get through to the helpdesk, everything worked perfectly!

What Dave did identify as a potential problem was that I was storing my Engage interaction files (.intr) and Quizmaker quizzes (.quiz) in the same folder as my published projects. This, apparently is a Bad Idea, so we created a new folder called Published Projects and did a little housekeeping.

Dave also considered the possibility that two other factors might be at play:

1. The computer that I have been working on has four log-ins. One for each member of the family. All four of us have a space on the C: drive, but, for example, my space is known as the K: drive. The partitioning may have had a role to play in the problem, but...
2. ... the more likely culprit appears to be the fact that we have an external hard drive onto which our computer automatically backs up every day.
   

The call ended with an invitation to get back in touch right away should this ever happen again.

We didn't find a definitive solution, but the point of this post is to acknowledge Articulate's alertness and engagement with their users, and their level of customer service. Wouldn't I just be a Mother Grundy if I only ever reported what went wrong?

So, going forward, I will:

• work on my laptop instead of the shared computer
• back up to a stick to make up for the loss of the external hard drive and auto backup facility
• create folder hierarchies for each project before I start, and keep my Articulate files separate from my published projects.
  

Superhero me

Thanks to Mark Oehlert for the link to the Hero Factory. This, by the way, is my alterego. I rather like the fact that the date in the top left corner of the image is my birthday! At first I wondered where it had picked up that piece of data, but Mark's has the same date on it.

Criteria for successful completion

A while ago, I was walking my dog with my elder son. We were following the route I normally take when I walk her on my own, when he turned a different way. In a purely interested, non-critical way, I asked his reason for the different route. "It's a short cut," he explained. This of course led to a discussion about the point of the walk - completion versus process.

That conversation has been pottering away in the back of my mind ever since, popping up its head every now and then.

It made me think of the gym, where you will see these two approaches to exercise (among several others, no doubt). Your personal programme may include work on some of the resistance machines. Some people do the exercises with slow control, while others race through. Those who are going slowly have probably understood the point of the exercise is to really work those muscles. Those who race probably have their eye on completion. Get this done. Go home. Have a beer.

My sons have both always had chores around the house (I know, I know, I'm a battle axe and a harridan - I've heard it all before). Variations on this conversation have happened countless times:

Me: Look at the state of this mug, why is it in the cupboard?
Son: It came out of the dishwasher like that.
Me: But it's not clean!
Son: I can't help that. I washed it.

I have lost count of the number of times I've said something like, "When I ask you to vacuum the carpets, the job is done when the carpet is clean, not when you have run the vacuum cleaner once over the whole area."

I related a while back how my elder son claimed to have taught well in a session about javelin, even though his learners hadn't learned anything. His attitude was along the lines of: I have done what I was asked. The fact that it bore no fruit is out of scope for me.

One of the things primary school teachers often relate in respect of set work is that boys tend to complete the set work as quickly as possible, while girls complete the work as correctly and beautifully as possible. I'm not sure to what extent the gender thing really applies, but I certainly noticed the allegedly typical male behaviour pattern in both my sons in primary school. My elder son still tends towards this when it comes to written work, although his verbal reasoning is in a different league. Since reaching high school, my younger son has become more concerned with presentation, but this may have something to do with his interest in visual art, which is one of his chosen subjects.

Surely the completion thing comes down to understanding and buying into the criteria for success?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this line of reasoning, but it's an interesting conundrum, and I don't think the box ticking approach to education/training, whether in school or at work, is going to result in meaningful learning. It strikes me as being little different from the attitude of my elder son that I mentioned a moment ago. But my son is 17 and has yet to gain a sense of perspective. What's our excuse?

LPoD - Narrative inquiry

I wish I could write enough about this point to reflect how much I have been thinking and learning about it lately. It isn't really the learning point of a single day. It is an on-going process. Because I am adopting a (first person) narrative inquiry approach for my dissertation, I have been trying to find out as much as possible about it.

This is the way I go about things. I didn't know that there was an established methodology called first person narrative inquiry. I just felt very strongly that this was the right way to go about presenting my work. Only once I was defending my case to my dissertation supervisor did I learn that others had trod that path afore me. She sent me in search of materials to reference in my rationale.

I came across a few choice pieces:
Clandinin, D Jean and Connelly, F Michael. 2000. Narrative Inquiry - experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass. ISBN 0-7879-4343-6.
Farrands, Robert Miles. 2007. Excitement, bewilderment and emergence: exploring a life world through writing as first person inquiry
Whitehead, Jack. 1988. Creating a living educational theory from questions of the kind, 'How do I improve my practice?' Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol 19, No1, 1989, pp 41-52. Accessed online 12 November 2008.

As I have been reading these, I have become enthused all over again for the narrative approach. I was excited almost to the point of tears (pathetic, isn't it?) by the title of Whitehead's paper, because this is exactly the question I have wanted to explore in respect of my own professional practice: How has the use of social media affected my professional practice? In particular, I want to look at it from a learner's perspective, since altogether too much research addresses the teacher's perspective.

There are great wadges of text I would love to lift right out of Clandinin's book, but that would leave little place for my own writing in between! Take for example, these gems:

"Educators are interested in life... learning and teaching and how it takes place...the leading out of different lives, the values, attitudes, beliefs, social systems, institutions and structures, and how they are all linked to learning and teaching"

"For Dewey, education, experience, and life are inextricably intertwined. When one asks what it means to study education, the answer - in its most general sense - is to study experience."

"People live stories, and in the telling of these stories, reaffirm them, modify them, and create new ones. Stories lived and told educate the self and others, including the young and those such as researchers who are new to their communities."

"People are individuals and need to be understood as such, but they cannot be understood only as individuals. They are always in relation, always in a social context."

Can I get an Amen? Tell me I'm not the only one who wants to stand up and cheer... please?

And, of course, because I think in analogies, this immediately brings to mind a vivid image for me. Because research tends to pick a narrow focus, you get a whole load of in-depth, highly detailed pictures, like exquisitely wrought beads. But narrative inquiry provides the string that turns those beads into a beautiful necklace. Each bead has its place among the other beads, and each either complements or clashes with other beads on the string.

My head is brimming and buzzing with stuff on the subject, but I think I'll do a more complete exploration in the dissertation itself.

I'm such a geek. This stuff really gives me such a buzz!

I know I've said it before. It isn't about the learning. It's about the learner. The person.

Contented geeky sigh.

Articulating my woes

I have been using Articulate to put together an e-induction for a client with a global staff complement. It was the client's express wish to use this product, as they are hoping to be able to do their own maintenance going forward. I was well-impressed with Studio '09 and its extra features, and I don't take that back.

However, there is one aspect of Articulate that has not improved. Not even slightly. It's sticky and stubborn!

Let me explain. Using Articulate Engage, you can create interactive screens for the user to explore aspects of the learning material in different ways. Of course, the first time the client sees these, there is bound to be something that needs to be changed. X happened in 2008, not 2006. Y's name is mis-spelled. The URL attached to Z piece of text is wrong. That kind of thing. So you duly make the changes and republish the resource. No problem.

Except, for some reason best known to itself, Articulate re-publishes the old version of the interaction screens. So you go to your browser cache and empty it. You delete old versions of the resource from your system. You hunt down all the 'temp' folders in your file structure and purge them.

You republish. Again. And yet again, Articulate republishes the old versions of the interaction screens. You are unable to find a trace of these old files anywhere on your system. But hoo boy! Articulate not only finds them, but uses them.

The same problem applies to Quizmaker quizzes.

So... if you're me, and your client is champing at the bit, you delete and re-insert every single interaction and quiz in the resource. Then redo the Slide properties on each and every one to make sure the menu structure is correct. This takes you the better part of a day. And this day is after your IT expert husband has burnt the midnight oil for two nights running trying to find where the system is getting its data from.

When you have paid over £1000 for the licence, this feels a bit off-side. So, if anyone out there has a solution, please... I'm all ears!

pic of the day - 900 years

I took this photo this evening on the way to the athletics track with my elder son. I have two reactions to this image.

First, I am in awe of a place with a recorded history that goes back 900 years. Coming from a so-called 'young' country like South Africa, it seems incredible that there are buildings that go back that far (mind you, if you come from an even older country like Greece or Egypt, where there are structures that go back thousands of years, this must seem pretty paltry).

My second reaction is more cynical. 'Living' history? What other kind is there? Responses on a postcard...

LPoD - teenagers and their sleep patterns

Fascinating! I just happened to be driving back from Oxford today in time to hear a radio interview with a Dr Paul Kelly regarding recent research into teenage sleep patterns. Kelly referenced this programme on the BBC, in which he appears (hopefully this will be available to non-UK residents - please let me know if this is not the case).

The research question was something along the lines of: are teenagers just lazy or is there a physiological explanation for their tendency to sleep until 11am?

It seems that, from the onset of puberty until the age of 21 in boys (19.5 in girls) there is a genuine physiological shift in their body clocks which results in a change in the pattern of the release of melanin into their bodies. At around 10am, the hormonal shift from sleep to wakefulness starts to kick in.

Kelly was talking about a school which plans to shift its school day to run from 11am-5pm instead of 9am-3pm.

Of course, there was an instant outcry from the listening public who opposed the idea. With the show being aired during working hours, you can imagine that the bulk of the listening demographic comprises pensioners, most of whom were thoroughly indignant, it seems. There was a lot of "When I were a lad" and "Never did me no 'arm". Teenagers were roundly criticised for being lazy and out of touch with the real world. Only one woman - the mother of 3 teenagers - dared support the idea.

If there is to be resistance to the concept, I would prefer to see it based on sound reasoning, rather than "that's 'ow it's allus bin done". One opponent did cite the logistical issues around teachers' working hours and child care issues, which would obviously have to be considered.

As the mother of two teenagers, and, as an erstwhile teenager myself, I would have to say that my observations are as follows:

• My husband and I have always been night owls, preferring to stay up late and sleep in, whenever possible. We're not teenagers any more (you'll be astonished to learn), so are we anomalous? On the other hand, we are able to rise at a 'respectable' hour and function normally, whereas it seems that teenagers demonstrate a quantifiable improvement in cognitive ability later in the day.
• Our elder son has also always been something of a night owl. Since he turned 16, he no longer has a bedtime. However, we do find it necessary to stick our heads around the door and say, "Erm, Sweetheart, it's almost midnight and you have a first session tomorrow. I suggest you get your tail into bed."
• Our younger son was the solitary lark in the family. While the rest of the family was deep in blissful slumber, he was ready to start the day with a smile and a twinkle. I have a niggling worry that our grunted "Unh-unh!" at him every morning has done damage to his psyche, since he lacks the easy self-assurance of his brother. Be that as it may, with the onset of puberty, even our lark has taken to lie-ins whenever possible.

On one side are those who argue that we need to establish good time-keeping habits rather than indulging our teenagers, because they won't be indulged once they begin working. On the other side is the idea that they might perform better if the school day were timed to fit their body clocks.

As the interview progressed, I could picture in my occasionally photographic mind just about every exam timetable my kids have ever had. Almost without exception, the start time for their exams has been 9am. So not only do we have a ludicrous system for assessing a child's competence in any given subject, the mechanism is scheduled to take place at the worst possible time for our teens. Hmm.

From my own perspective, I have no problem with moving the teenager's day forward by two hours. Of course, I'm not a teacher, whose life would be disrupted by this change.

pic of the day - I wandered lonely as a cloud...

The daffs in my neighbour's garden opened this morning for the first time, and I simply had to get a photo. They've made an appearance in this project before. As you can see, I got right down to their level. I hunkered down as low as I could get. Sadly, I wasn't able to find a vantage point from which to get them face on. But I rather like the fact that the daffs seem to be ignoring me in their single minded focus on the sun - our houses (which are semi-detatched - very common in the UK) face due east.

pic of the day - impaled!

You couldn't do this kind of thing on purpose! I accidentally elbowed an apple off the top of the pile in the fruit bowl, while the dishwasher was open. It landed sweetly as you please impaled on the tines of 3 forks.

As evidence of how my kids have bought into the pic of the day project, the first (coherent) words fom my younger son were "Pic of the day! Pic of the day!" My elder son was sent to retrieve the camera from the car... and there you have it.

Choice

It's a Saturday afternoon. My husband has gone to the office to do something or other to a server - as IT types are inclined to do every now and then. My elder son is washing and vacuuming his Dad's car in keeping with a Christmas commitment. My younger son is playing World of Warcraft (he can now wield two-handed axes for those in the know). So I am pottering around online.

One of the things I did was to check out the updates on my Facebook groups. In the process, I visited the group: People for Replacing the Public Education Model, and I came across a link to this post from Stephen Downes. I'm puzzled as to how I missed it when it first appeared.

It was a reproduction of a magazine article and as such a break from the normally concise blogging style of OLDaily. It captured my interest because of its first person narrative style. I love stories.

Anyhoo, in the article, Stephen's key point in respect of education can be wrapped up in one word: 'choice'. My own choices of subject in high school were severely limited because I attended a school that prided itself on its standing as an academic institution. Drama (my great passion at the time) was unavailable as a subject. It was purely an extracurricular pursuit. Music was available only on a peripatetic basis, although I seem to remember that an exception was made just once for a phenomenally talented student through whom the school stood to gain kudos. Likewise art was not officially on the menu beyond grade 8.

My cousin, in an entirely different part of the country, had to apply for special permission to break the strict zoning policy in order to attend a school that offered the subjects she wanted. And permission was only granted because she was a straight A student.

There is a private school in the UK which boasts a body of students drawn from all over the world. These students are affored the opportunity to take their home language as a subject for their final exams... whatever it may be. A teacher will be sourced for that child. I learned this from a friend who worked at the school. In fact, it was through the school that I sourced a Swedish tutor for my family. I'm willing to bet that none of the state schools offer the myriad non-native English speaking immigrants that luxury.

A common thread here is that of high achievement and/or money. Rules were bent for those who are likely to produce top marks or those with means. Mediocre students need not apply. Students from average income families or less need not apply.

What message does this convey to our students and, by extension, to their families? Why should an average student be denied opportunities? Why should money be a deciding factor as to what a child may and may not study at school?

My husband and I have made it a policy to expose our children to as wide a range of hobbies and activities as possible. After all, how are they ever to know they have a talent for abseiling or a love of ice hockey (for example), if they never get to give it a go? The wider we cast our net, the greater the chance that each of our sons will find the thing(s) that light the spark in their eyes. Children whose lives are small and narrow, may wind up living out their days in desultory ritual, and we see altogether too many such people in our daily dealings.

Sadly, the education model has a way to go before it is able to accommodate this broad approach. I look forward to the day when education offers divergence rather than convergence: an ever increasing breadth of experience, rather than a whittling down process. There's plenty of time for whittling down once you know for certain what it is you want to focus on. I maintain that the teen years are too early to make that choice.

Did someone say 'Dream on'?

Sigh.

Designing learning resources like dog food?

I think about odd things while walking my dawg, I confess!

Have you seen the ads for dog food? Have you noticed the varieties available? It has been a rich source of material for many a stand-up comedian that dog food should come in flavours like 'Neighbour's cat', 'Park squirrel' and 'Disgusting smelling dead thing found in the bush', rather than 'Roast lamb and mint' and 'Beef and gravy'.

It never occured to me until I became a dog owner to wonder why some dog foods come in multi-coloured chunks. Dogs are colour blind! The multi-colours are to appeal to the dog owner. The person paying, rather than the 'person' consuming. Now this wouldn't be a problem, except that those colours are usually achieved by adding artificial colourants to the food which are not good for your pet.

If you buy dog food based on your own preference, you will buy the tinned stuff that looks more appetising to you, with tastier sounding ingredients.

But if you buy dog food based what's good for your dog, you will buy bags of uniformly coloured grey 'kibble' type things. Your vet will tell you the hard food is better for your dog's digestive system (I won't go into the gory details), and the absence of preservatives and colourants is far healthier.

When we design learning resources, are we designing them to appeal to the buyer or the user? I'm not suggesting we should design uniformly bland materials - let's not push the metaphor that far. What I'm getting at is fitness for purpose. If we can please the buyer while serving the purposes of the user, well and good. But what happens when serving the purposes of the user will not please the buyer because (s)he is unable to consider things from the user's perspective, and just wants lots of whizzy stuff, like the 'excellent course' (s)he saw at such-and-such a place (referring to something with magnificent graphics and the worst instructional design you've seen in a decade).

This is when our consultancy skills are tested! This is when we need to explain why the design that we are putting together is better for the user than the thing (s)he wants. This is when we need to know our stuff, and be able to present a cogent argument (and I use the word in its broader sense) based on a solid foundation.

After all, surely the litmus test for both dog food and learning resources is: does it do what it is supposed to do? And does it do it well? Is my dog healthy and fit? Is my staff member able to do his/her job with confidently and well?

'Fit for purpose' didn't become a cliché by chance.

pic of the day - crocus

A pity about my shadow in the frame, but I had to stand on a park bench to get the vantage point, and the only one available resulted in this shadow. If I were a more professional photographer, I would no doubt have rejected this shot, or never taken it to begin with. But I am a sun-lover, so I decided to go the glass half-full route and celebrate the fact that there was enough sunshine at 9-ish this morning to cast that shadow!

Just look at these brave little flowers. Right after the snowdrops, hugging close to the ground, even in the bitter cold, up they come. They don't need a flowerbed or any tending. A harbinger of spring. I know it sounds churlish, but I get a little tired of yellow in the spring time, so the purple and white of the crocus blooms are a great delight to me. I suppose it doesn't hurt that purple is my favourite colour!

pic of the day - a boy runs

I tried so hard to get a decent shot of my elder son practising sprints tonight, but I failed miserably, even though I set my camera to 'sports'. This was the best I could do. However, I also managed to capture him on video.



He has been so miserable lately. Having gone from Mr Popular to whom his bullied little brother turned for succour and support, he has become the target of victimisation in his own turn at the new school. Largely because he is so very sporty and competitive. It was such a pleasure to watch him run tonight. Unlike longer distances, there is no space for thinking in a sprint. It's just all about getting those arms and legs moving as fast as you can so that you can get across that finish line as quickly as possible!

Oh... and whoever it was who twittered me recently to say you'd love to hear me laugh (later edit: I believe it was Clark Quinn) - you can just catch the raucous sound on the very end of this (short) video. The shout that made me laugh was not an expletive but one of the sprinters shouting "Track!" which is how one clears the track ahead of dawdlers during a practice. (Later edit: what was funny about that was that there was no-one on the track - he shouted as a force of habit)

pic of the day - untitled

This is a piece my younger son is submitting for his art course work. He was very pleased with it until he added the yellow border. Now he is thoroughly depressed, because he thinks he's ruined it. I rather like it, but would have preferred a deep burgundy or cobalt blue coloured border.

Two stories from southern Africa

My grief grows.

Robert Mugabe's recent 85th birthday bash cost an estimated £105K, while his country suffers hyperinflation of an order that recently saw the release of a 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar note! This after lopping 3 zeros off the end of all denominations in attempt to curb the spiralling figures. It is to be noted that the country's unemployment level is estimated at 94%. Of course, this presumably means taxpaying employment. No doubt there is a great deal of informal employment going on, with services being paid for in kind. Many Zimbabwean businesses no longer accept their own national currency, and instead demand South African Rands, US dollars or British Pounds.

If you have an interest in the story that is unfolding in the country once called the breadbasket of Africa - get it first hand from an insider.

Moving just across the river to my own homeland, we learn that a campaign of violence has been initiated by the ruling African National Congress against opposition parties ahead of next month's election.

Ahead of the 1994 elections, observers around the world predicted bloodshed. But the churches of all colours took to their knees and prayed. The people from all communities determined that they would prove the world wrong. And so they did. Standing in line to vote together for the first time, Black, Indian Coloured and White (for those were the racial classifications within the country) people were peaceable. They elected an ANC which was led by Nelson Mandela, a man of noble grace respected the world over.

But the age of Nelson Mandela is past. The man who now leads the African National Congress is a man without even a complete primary school education. A man who will assure a group of Afrikaans farmers in Bloemfontein that the Afrikaner heritage will remain and that their contribution to the economy and the future of the country is held in high regard. Shortly thereafter, that same man will assure a fulminating group of young activists that land redistribution in South Africa will follow his election as surely as night follows day. Many have taken delight in pointing out that Zuma has several wives. To me, this is an irrelevant matter - a legacy of his culture. Without looking it up, I would hazard a guess that there are other national leaders with more than one wife. What bothers me far more is that this is a man skilled in the art of saying exactly what people want to hear in order to secure the presidency for himself. Frighteningly, he seems to have no personal values which he holds sacrosanct.

No charges brought against him appear to stick, and one wonders, once he occupies the office of president, whether it will still be possible to level criticisms and/or accusations against him at all!

The southern African subcontinent appears to be going to hell in a handcart. More than once, ex-patriots have been heard to express the view that, had Zimbabwe had even a drop of oil, the US would have invaded them long since in order to depose the dictator and restore democracy.

Well, South Africa has several drops of oil - much of it produced from coal, not to mention gold, diamonds, steel, uranium, platinum and a plethora of endangered fauna and flora. So you never know!

So I've had a diagnosis at last!

About 4 months after I hurt myself, I have finally had a diagnosis. The MRI scan shows a prolapsed disk in my neck - C7 for those in the know. Oddly enough, when he saw me shortly after the incident, my dentist predicted that it would turn out to be a prolapsed disk.

Since it has taken this long to reach a diagnosis, during which time there has been no improvement, it seems the only recourse is surgery. Unless I opt to go the private care route (which I can't afford), there is likely to be a lengthy delay.

Now that I have been diagnosed, I have doctors tutting at me, saying "You must be in a lot of pain." Funny they should mention that, because that's what I've been trying to tell them for 4 months. It seems pain isn't taken seriously until it has been verified by a medical consultant. Your own claims to be in agony are probably just you trying to jump the NHS queue, or looking for attention, or trying to get your hands on drugs... or all of the above.

My best friend in high school became a surgeon. She is still my friend today, I wonder if she can be prevailed upon....

Nah. I guess that wouldn't be right. It's not quite the same as asking a mechanic friend to look at your oil filter, is it?

pic of the day - glass

One of the unfortunate but inevitable results of an economic downturn is an increase in vandalism as the dispossessed vent their anger. One of the ways in which this anger is expressed in my town (a town which was pretty low down the economic food chain to begin with, and has been hard hit) is that broken glass has appeared all over the pavements.

This photo was taken this morning as I walked my dog. It is one end of a pedestrian walkway between two houses. The entire walkway is so littered with glass shards as to make it almost impossible for an unshod, four footed beastie to avoid stepping on several. There is another area - the parking lot of a thoroughly vandalised, abandoned parade of shops - where the glass is so bad that, even with my agonised shoulder, I carry my 26kg dog for 20metres.

You might ask why I don't take a different route, to which I have to answer, to my sorrow, that every route to the park where I can let my dog off the leash for a few precious minutes is equally littered. The council assured me, when I phoned yesterday, that it would be cleared up within 24 hours.

It hasn't.

Sigh.

Stephen Downes: the monkeysphere

Stephen and I approach things from very divergent starting points, and I am simply not the polymath he is, yet we seem to share many hot buttons.

In this post, he vents his spleen about the current economic downturn.

Somewhere (I forget where) I heard that Stepehn has taught himself the art of 'one take' writing. The result of this is the odd typo and malapropism. The thing is, with his sense of humour, one can never be quite sure that the malapropisms, at least, are not intentional. For example, in this post, he refers to 'the idyll rich' which conjures up a wonderful image of people living in let-them-eat-cake-land, with absolutely no grounding in the reality of the life we lesser mortals face every day.

If I were to sum up the post, which would be to oversimplify it appallingly (so don't take my word for it), I would say that the Downes is looking at the situation and telling us: We've got to care about each other, dammit!

I concur. In fact, one of the reasons most people prefer to interact with me in small doses, is my propensity for climbing onto that soapbox at the least provocation.

The thing is that that much caring can be too much for a human mind to bear. Perhaps we have taken refuge in the monkeysphere in an act of self-preservation, in much the same way as the mind has the ability to take refuge in catatonia, or to shut off certain intolerable memories.

Perhaps.

But we ought at least to give it a shot, no?

LPoD - starting blocks

I have probably mentioned this more than once before, but, in my youth, I was a 400m sprinter. As was my husband. Not surprisingly, we have spawned a sprinter in our elder son. At the moment, his distance of choice is 200m. Fortunately he runs a good bend - absolutely critical if you're a 200m sprinter!

When my husband and I were competing (not against each other, of course), it was practically unknown for athletes of our age to use starting blocks. In fact, it was quite common for kids to run barefoot (remember Zola Budd? It was Africa, after all!).

Nowadays, even teenage sprinters use starting blocks when they run for a club. Our son has had to learn to set his blocks - something we were unable to advise him on. This was a new experience for us. Between us, we have been able to advise him on almost every other aspect of his sprinting: faster starts, best lanes, better strides, improved arm movements, shortening the bend, leaning into the bend, breathing, focusing the eyes, relaxing the neck and face so as not to divert energy from the arms and legs, head position, keeping your rhythm... you name it.

So we have been fascinated at this new arena. It seems that this is how a simple approach to setting your starting blocks:

• Place the knee of the rear leg opposite the instep of the front foot
• Move forward with the hands until the body weight is directly over the hands and the arms are vertical
• Ideally the angles of the legs in the "set" position should be: leading knee 90 degrees, rear knee, 120 degrees.

There are more mathematical ways of doing it, but I suspect you would be better off focusing on what works best for you, rather than on playing it by the numbers!

Take your marks....!

March's big question - workplace learning in 10 years

The Learning Circuits Blog's big question for March is

What will workplace learning look like in 10 years?

I hate being asked to predict stuff, because I genuinely don't feel up to that task. I'm just not at a high enough vantage point to have a wide enough perspective, a big enough picture.

I like this conversation between Jay Cross, Harold Jarche and Clark Quinn. Totally raw, all the natural blips left in, rather than being edited out to leave a seamless, slick video. I suspect we might see more resources of this kind serving as learning materials going forward.

I also like Harold's post, which takes a look back at what learning looked like in 1999. It is important not to lose sight of that disconnect between home and workplace technologies. We also need to bear in mind that, while that disconnect is disappearing or even swinging around to the opposite corner for us in some developed countries, those in developing (or even less-wealthy developed) countries are still going to be experiencing a gap for some time to come.

And it is here that I would like to focus my contribution. As the organisational, sector and national boundaries come down and we see online conferences being attended by a global mix of people, we are going to be increasingly impacted by the gap between the leading edge and the developing masses.

For example, I regularly attend (and enjoy) George Siemens's online conferences, but it has always saddened me that we have so few delegates from Africa. Previously, there would be just one or two. This last time around, there was a much larger number. This is an exciting indication that an increasing number of people in the developing world are gaining access to the technology necessary for them to join us in these synchronous online events.

BUT

their connection speeds made it difficult for them to attend some of the sessions. So, having finally got the wherewithal to attend - perhaps having had to persuade a few powers that be that it wasn't a waste of time, they found themselves restricted to the outer courts.

Let's consider an analogy: There's a kid who always has to watch the others speed off on their bikes to have adventures and make all sorts of wonderful discoveries. He doesn't have a bicycle of his own, so he can't go. His parents tell him he's too young. Then the day of his birthday rolls around and he wakes to find a bicycle all his very own at the foot of his bed. Hugely excited, he dashes outside to join the others as they set off for yet another adventure. But he can't keep up. His bicycle isn't fast enough, and the training wheels keep catching on things. He has waited all his life for this moment, only to watch the others speed away from him.

So, should the kids with the fast bikes slow down so that he can keep up, now that he has a bike? Or should they keep going at their own speed, leaving him to follow as best he can in their wake?

In other words, as the late adopters begin to trickle on board, with technologies or skills that can't keep pace with our own, are we going to be prepared to slow down so that they can keep up? Are we going to restrict the technologies we use to things that their bandwidths/connection speeds can cope with? Or do we keep doing what we're doing as a way of encouraging them to leapfrog intermediate stages and join the party... bearing in mind that some of the constraints will be outside of their control?

I predict that this is an issue that is going to face us with increasing regularity over the next 10 years.

You might argue that open conferences constitute a separate issue from workplace learning. I don't agree. I suspect that many of the responses to this question will talk about how the organisational boundaries are going to come down and people are going to connect with each other in neutral spaces. So how do we address the provision of learning resources in the face of this kind of inequity?

We can't just stick our fingers in our ears and shout "Lalalalala". The problem isn't going to go away. And it is our problem. We talk about collaboration and connecting and all that malarkey. This is where we get to prove just how committed we are to those ideals when the playing field isn't level.

And it isn't level. Not by a long shot.

LPoD - Happy birthday Dr Seuss

I didn't know that today was the 105th anniversary of Dr Seuss's birthday. But that's the beauty of social media. I discovered this nugget on one of the blogs I read on a daily basis. I have to chuckle at Jeremy's poetic tribute, although those less familiar with the current state of affairs in South Africa might not 'get it'.

I've done a course - whoop de doo

A few days ago a man I know proudly told me that his wife had done a cookery course. I love that the man is proud of his wife. I love that he brags about her. But I'm not sure that the fact that she has done a course is a guarantee of anything. Those who know me well will be astonished to hear that I held my tongue.

Don't get me wrong. I have sampled the lady's cooking and it's pretty good. But I don't know how good her cooking was before the course. I also know several excellent cooks who have never done courses. I don't know that I qualify as excellent, but I'm not half bad myself, and I've never done a course... unless you want to count the handful of diabolical cookery lessons I was forced to take at the age of 12, with a teacher who took out on me her anger that my grandmother's cakes always beat hers in the church fete baking competition.

"I've done a course" has a ring to it that people still cling to. But that bell is cracked. I know because I've done a first aid course. And I have a certificate to prove it. Oh yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's the truth. So next time you sever an artery or break a bone in my presence you will be able to tell all your friends that your injury was so severe that even a qualified first aider fainted. Because sure as eggs, that's what I'll do.

I've done a course.

Really? And did you learn anything?

Monday smile - reality check

Sandy Heierbacher posted this video on her Facebook page. Nice reminder. Makes me think of Jonah and the vine (Jonah 4:5-11)

pic of the day - cornucopia

Today my husband and I took a little trip to a pet shop in a nearby village. It is so jampacked with stock, that you can barely move inside. It really is a cornucopia of delights for the pet owner... at pretty good prices, too! Anyone who has seen the series Open All Hours would find themselves drawing comparisons to Arkwright's emporium.

Pushing the quaintness quotient even higher is the owner's pet rabbit which has the run of the store and greets customers as they arrive. He was doing a fair imitation of a doorstopper today.

One step behind

Almost two weeks ago, I finally went for an MRI scan on my injured shoulder, but I was advised that it would be a month or so before the orthopaedic specialist got the results of my scan. So here we are, closing in on 4 months since I hurt myself and we still don't even have a diagnosis, let alone a course of treatment.

The situation in my shoulder continues to deteriorate, and my GP - powerless to do anything else - has continued to up my painkillers until I find myself on the swallowing end of stuff some of my classmates at drama school would have given a body part to get their hands on.

The thing that troubles me is that, by the time my consultant gets to see the results and decide on a course of treatment, he will be making this decision based upon information that is a month old.

I can't help drawing a parallel with my dentist. Let's say I have decay in one of my teeth. Let's say, too, that this decay is spreading rapidly. Imagine if my dentist x-rayed my tooth and then, a month later, looked at the x-ray and prepared a filling for the hole in the x-ray, rather than the hole in my tooth at that point.

Ludicrous!

How do things work in your organisation? Is there so much red tape involved in getting a learning solution off the ground that, by the time you implement it, the need it addresses has changed or disappeared?

Talk about a waste of resources!

pic of the day - chüngel

This evening, I hosted a games evening for the ladies in our church. As well as the better known games like Rummikub and Balderdash, I set out our Chüngel board. Apparently the word chüngel is Swiss German for 'rabbit' - any explanation I gave as to why would be pure guesswork on my part.

We first came across this game when attending a staff Christmas do at John's boss's home in Cape Town more than 17 years ago. We enjoyed it so much, we vowed to buy one at the very first opportunity. Opportunities proved scarce as stockists of traditional toys and games in the UK told us we had dreamed the game up. One guy had the nerve to tell us that, if he hadn't heard of the game, it didn't exist!

We eventually wound up ordering one from Switzerland, where they are handmade. I'm not going to tell you how much it cost, but it was a lot. We decided it was an heirloom in the making and, if you should come and stay over with us at some point, you will be press-ganged into a game. I defy you not to have rather loud fun. My best friend astonished everyone by shrieking and banging her mallet as she played (she's not usually so much like me).

LPoD - Whitehead on living educational theory

I found this paper by Jack Whitehead some time ago and tagged it half-heartedly in Diigo. I was in the Slough of Despond at the time and only just had the presence of mind to realise that this was an important paper.

Today, I've been reading it through again and am so pleased that I tagged it to come back to. Whitehead argues:

that a living educational theory of professional practice can be constructed from practitioner's enquiries of the kind, 'How do I improve my practice?'

And that question comes up time and again throughout the paper: how do I improve my practice here? As responsible learning professionals, this is a question we should be asking ourselves time and again. And it is in the ongoing, iterative search for the answer to that question that, as Whitehead puts it "a living educational theory will be produced"

Let's consider that this paper was written in 1988. Is it fair to say that his prediction has been realised in Connectivism?

One of the issues which is hamstringing me in my research paper is that of validity. In several spaces (including this one) I have asked for pointers to rigorous research being conducted into the theory of Connectivism. Thus far I have heard not a squeak. Does this mean that no-one is researching the theory? If this is the case, how do I address it in the conext of an Academic paper?

I think Whitehead might again have come to my rescue in his response to questions 4-6 in his paper, although I confess I am still trying to get my head around what he's saying (bear of little brain, you understand), but this section gives me hope that this paper will serve as counsel for the defence of my first person narrative inquiry methodology:

Questions of validity are fundamentally important in all research which is concerned with the generation and testing of theory. Researchers need to know what to use as the unit of appraisal and the standards of judgement in order to test a claim to educational knowledge. I suggest that the unit of appraisal is the individual's claim to know his or her educational development. Within this unit of appraisal I use methodological, logical, ethical and aesthetic standards to judge the validity of the claim to knowledge (Whitehead and Foster 1984).

Whilst most researchers may find it strange to take a unit of appraisal as their claim to know their educational development I think the unit is clearly comprehensible. My commitment to this unit owes a great deal to the work of Michael Polanyi. As I read Personal Knowledge (Polanyi 1958), and reflected on my positivist approach to research (Whitehead 1972), Polanyi's work fulfilled its purpose of, "stripping away the crippling mutilations which centuries of objectivist thought have imposed on the minds of men".

Because what I delight to call my research tends to be a bit airy fairy, and boasts all the depth and profundity of a pondskater, I think the only crippling mutilations I suffer at the hands of objectivist thought are the external hindrances of what will pass for academic rigour. Trying to put together a paper about the web 2.0 social media and their influence on my professional practice is a bit tricky when the whole concept is embodied in an aggregated cloud of communal thought and experience - singularly difficult to reference using the Harvard method.

Andy Roberts and his dead skunk

Andy Roberts and his partner, Linda Hartley are two people with whom I am connected in several spaces. Distributed across some of these spaces, we had a conversation about a song. It was a song I knew when I was on the peripheries of a Bluegrass band years ago. I had never encountered anyone else who knew it, but I mentioned it to Andy and he not only knew the song, he could tell me a bit about its history. Perhaps I served to nudge him, because here he is, singing it at a folk club, accompanying himself on his Chinese lute (to be honest, it needs a banjo, but the lute makes a viable substitute).



The reason I post this here is because of the example of a distributed conversation. Somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, Andy, Linda and I have had a conversation which has had this outcome.

Cool, huh?

LPOD - writing as inquiry

Today, I came across this doctoral thesis which explores writing as first person inquiry for a research project. I won't draw out individual points, because there is much in it that I find useful an interesting - especially the first chapter: Writing as an emergent process of inquiry. Helpfully for me, it is written in the form of a first person narrative, so I can cite it as part of my rationale for adopting first person narrative inquiry for my dissertation.

pic of the day - wild killer sheep

Whenever we're driving through the countryside, my husband will remark on the wild killer sheep, or the wild killer cattle on the hillsides. Today, I went out for coffee with our pastor's wife to a little place on a farm not far outside of our town. This was the view that met us. She offered to take my picture sitting on a hayrick, but I declined.

As we were leaving, she asked me if I wanted to take another picture, which was just as well, because I then realised I had left my camera in the loo at the coffee shop (as you do), and was able to nip back and retrieve it.

@Granumentally

Christian Payne is a young man who doesn't live very far from me, although we've never met. He Twitters under the name Documentally. According to this site, he's the most followed Twitterer in our county. I am one of his many followers.

Christian contributes a vast amount of material to the aggregation of personal perspectives that constitute the cloud, but one of the things I admire most about him is the enormous love he has for his grandmother, something which comes out loud and clear in his tweets.

During the Obama inauguration, he and his gran were watching together and he was twittering some of her remarks. Many of his followers expressed the view that she should have her own account. Trouble is, she doesn't use a computer herself. So she and Christian hit upon a plan. He would be her fingers during his frequent visits to her. And Granumentally was born.

In the process of acting as her amanuensis, Christian learned all sorts of amazing things about his gran, such as the fact that she was a partisan who smuggled messages under the seat her bicycle right under the noses of the German soldiers. Hear their touching story as part of this podcast from CBC radio (Canada)'s Nora Young.

pic of the day - world's most dangerous cake recipe

A friend of mine recently emailed me something known as the most dangerous cake recipe in the world. I thought I'd see if it works. It does, but I recommend using self-raising flour, even though the recipe doesn't say so. I didn't and my cake was the worse for it.

4 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional)
a small splash of vanilla extract
1 large coffee mug

Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well. Add the egg and mix thoroughly. Pour in the milk and oil and mix well. Add the chocolate chips (if using) and vanilla extract, and mix again.

Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts (high). The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don't be alarmed! Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.

EAT! (this can serve 2 if you want to feel slightly more virtuous).

And why is this most dangerous cake recipe in the world? Because now we are all only 5 minutes away from chocolate cake at any time of the day or night!

Let me know how yours turns out ;o)

LPOD - giving v sharing

Today's learning point arises out of a recording of a conference, but I'm blowed if I know which conference! I can't even remember who Twittered the link (I did try to find it again, honest). It seems to have been attended largely by secondary school teachers.

Update 26/02/09: Alec Couros advises that the presentation formed part of his graduate course and points to this post for further info.

Anyhoo, I picked up this link to a presentation by Stephen Downes.

He made a point that resonated completely with me, even though I had never formulated the thought quite so coherently.

He explained that communities share knowledge, they don't give it away. He explored the difference between the two. Giving something away free of charge as a philanthropic or charitable act implies a position of superiority to the giver over the recipient, whereas sharing takes place between equals. So giving is a downward/vertical action, whereas sharing is a horizontal action.

I like this.

In much the same way - as an attendee (delightfully known as 'plugusin') pointed out - to convince someone of something implies a downward action, an intimation of the superiority of one position over another.

As Harold Jarche put it during a recent Skype conversation, much of the time, when I make contraversial statements, I am looking for engagement. Nothing annoys me more than people muttering to themselves about how wrong you are. For goodness' sake, speak up. Your view carries weight, too. Let's discuss this in open forum and come to a conclusion... together. That's the whole point of social media... isn't it?

When enforcement is more dangerous than infraction

A while back, I was driving my son to athletics (track) training. It was dark. I was on a dual carriageway, where the standard national speed limit is 70mph. However, one particular stretch of the road has a restriction of 50mph. Because I know the road well, I wasn't paying that much attention to the signs, and I hit that stretch doing 57mph.

Now I fully acknowledge that not paying attention to the signs is not a defence. I fully acknowledge that I was in contravention of the law.

My view is that you don't go around breaking the law just because you don't agree with it. If it is the law, you abide by it, but if you disagree with it, you agitate for change, using the legal avenues at your disposal.

So I am willing to pay the fine that I incurred. Indeed I have already paid it - no argument.

The bit I am not happy about is that, as I was driving along this rather tricky section of road (hence the reduced speed limit), I was suddenly blinded by the flash of the gatsometer. I nearly had a flipping heart attack. For a nanosecond, I thought a motorbike was coming towards me on the wrong side of the road, and I swerved reflexively. Fortunately I didn't prang the car, but it was a near thing, and it was several minutes before I was able to shake off the retinal burn. During those minutes of impaired vision and increased heart rate, I was probably a far greater risk to other traffic than when I was driving at 57mph in a 50mph zone.

This is not the first time I have seen enforcement that constitutes a hazard.

I'm not sure what they should do instead. Perhaps if they introduced some rumble-strips in that section to serve to slow you down, rather than blinding drivers who travel too fast.

There are so many parallels here for learning, but I'll focus on just one.

When we're providing a learning resource that is intended to enhance performance or increase productivity, we need to be careful not to focus so narrowly on the learning event as to forget to explore what the fallout of said event may be. Does the learning intervention in fact help or hinder performance/productivity?

I would argue that taking people away from their desks, placing them in an environment that has much in common with a vacuum in which they do whatever it is your design dictates they will do, and then sending them back to the real world is often counter-productive.

The learning needs to enter the flow of the working environment, where it can be contextualised and relevant.

The gatsometer is an effective answer to the question "How can we catch the people who drive too fast?" This, I would argue, is the wrong question. The right question is "How can we get people to drive more slowly - and therefore more safely - along this stretch?"

In exactly the same way, we who design and deliver workplace learning solutions need to ensure that we are starting with the right question:

• How can we improve X?
• How can we increase Y?
• How can we encourage Z?

One of the things I have something of a reputation for among my clients is pushing back and... well, challenging may be too strong a word, but only slightly. Words like 'bossy' and 'stroppy' have been used... usually good-humouredly, fortunately. But the thing is that subject matter experts and stakeholders can get very caught up in what they would like learners to know, to the extent that they lose sight of the core question. The subject is very dear to them and they may be inclined to be a bit precious about it. I see it as the role of the learning designer to maintain the focus on the original question.

I can think of a good few learning resources which qualify as a hindrance. Some even as a hazard. I confess that some of them have been resources that I designed! But I will continue to make every effort not to design any gatsometer learning events in the future!

Ten things f2f trainers often forget

Having visited the learning designer yesterday, I decided to look at the realm of the classroom based trainer today. I was a classroom based trainer myself for 17 years, and I have sat through innumerable f2f sessions delivered facilitated by other trainers. In no particular order:

1. People have had to leave their day jobs to attend. Make sure it's worth their while.
2. Shock. Horror. A delegate might not want to be there. One of the worst things as a trainer is having to deal with people who have been 'sent' to your workshop. Good grief, we're dealing with adults, here. When I have been faced with such a person, I have had a private chat with them, offering them the option to taste-and-see until the first break, after which they were free to leave. In one case, I actually asked the delegate to leave. Let's face it, if they're determined not to, they're not going to learn anything, and they will simply sabotage everyone else's learning experience. I would far rather explain myself to one manager than waste x number of person days!
3. Shock. Horror. A delegate might only have come for a day away from the office. At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who sign up for absolutely every workshop/course/whatever, because it gets them out of the office. These enthusiasts can be a help sometimes, but they can also be a hindrance if they set out to demonstrate to everyone else present exactly why they don't need to be there in the first place.
4. Some people may only need part of the workshop. Why not offer them the opportunity to do something else until you're ready to cover the bits they need? Similarly, some parts of the material may not be of interest/use to anyone at all. Why not establish this from the outset and spend more time on relevant material? If you're proactive, you can use pre-workshop online tasks, wikis or discussion forums to establish this.
   
5. The collective knowledge of the delegates is in all likelihood greater than your own. Don't miss opportunities to give them their due. When you're covering material that some people in the group already know, you could enlist their aid as small group discussion facilitators, or in helping others complete a task.
6. Your workshop is not the be all and end all of the learning experience. Give the learners resources they can take away with them: a quick reference card, URLs of helpful resources, the names of articles and books that might be of interest. Teach them to use online help facilities and forums. They might also like to stay in touch with each other after the session to provide mutual support. You could get them to exchange email addresses, or set up a closed discussion forum?
7. You're allowed to say "I don't know". If you don't know the answer to a question, say so. I have lost count of the number of times a trainer has 'blagged it' and talked complete piffle. This doesn't help the learners or you. Increasingly, there is almost certainly a device in the room with Internet browsing capability. Use it then and there to find the answer. This not only relieves the learners of the perceived burden of remembering everything, it encourages them to use existing resources.
8. You don't have to have a PowerPoint presentation... and if you do, bullet points are not compulsory. If you absolutely have to have a PowerPoint and it absolutely has to include bullet points, do NOT read them to your learners. Either they can read it for themselves - in which case, reading it to them is an insult to their intelligence - or they can't read at all - in which case you shouldn't be using text at all. You are a living, breathing human being, not some voice over for a slideshow!
9. Even adults like to play. Serious does not necessarily mean humourless. There is no need to have everyone sitting in their desks facing forward for the entire workshop. This is not a Victorian school room. Get them out of their desks and moving around. Give them post it notes, coloured pens, string, ice-cream sticks... whatever. Give them the chance to be creative, to experiment, to explore, to laugh. In one workshop I ran about mindmapping, I had people lying flat on their bellies (in their suits) creating A0 mindmaps of their lives with coloured felt tip pens (but you have to gauge your audience).
   
10. Low tech is okay. Not everything has to be accomplished by means of 2.0 technologies. Heck, I used to explain absolute references in spreadsheets by doing a little dance! The low tech items I mentioned above generate movement and get the blood pumping oxygen to the brain far better than spending the entire day on their butts, eyes forward.

Any other suggestions?

LPOD - early symptoms of Alzheimer's

Apparently the early symptoms of Alzheimer's are as follows:

• Memory loss, in particular short-term memory
• Difficulty performing familiar tasks such as getting dressed or preparing a meal
• Language problems, such as forgetting simple words or an increasing tendency toward malapropism
• Disorientation such as getting lost in familiar places, or forgetting where you are and how you got there, possibly confusing night and day
• Poor/decreased judgement, such as wearing the wrong sort of clothing for the weather
• Problems keeping track of things, such as being unable to follow a conversation or keep up paying bills
• Misplacing things, such as putting things in inappropriate places (e.g. spectacles in the fridge)
• Changes in mood/behaviour, showing more or less emotion than was previously the case, and experiencing inexplicable mood swings
• Personality changes, such as seeming different from your 'usual self' in small, often indefinable ways - perhaps becoming irritable, suspicious, anxious, apathetic, etc.
• Loss of initiative, perhaps sitting for hours in front of the telly and shwoing no interest in normal hobbies and pastimes

Many of these symptoms can also be attributed to other, temporary causes, including stress, medication and hormonal fluctuation.

pic of the day - drugs!

It's been some time since I injured my shoulder - more than 3 months, I think, maybe even 4 months. I am still awaiting a diagnosis and have been on the receiving end of demonstrations of just how overstretched and inefficient the NHS and its procedures have become.

In desperation, I went back to my GP who has taken ownership of the situation. I finally feel as if there is someone fighting my corner for me.

In the meantime he has had upped my pain medication. He assures me that these are not addictive, but there are inevitable side effects - one of the most significant being drowsiness.

I am also being sent for additional blood tests which will, among other things, identify whether it will be necessary to conduct further screening for Alzheimer's. It is, of course, entirely possible that my symptoms can be attributed to some other cause, but from the fact that the tests are necessary at all, I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Yesterday's LPOD and pic of the day

To my surprise, I gather that my learning point of the day and pic of the day posts are being well received by some of my less 'vocal' readers. And so I apologise that there were no contributions yesterday. The reason for this will become clear when you see today's pic of the day....

Reinventing the has-been

As a sort of continuation to this post.

There is a series on the BBC at the moment (which I can't bring myself to watch) in which pop idols of yesteryear are tracked down and given an extreme makeover to see whether they can still wow an audience.

The first outfit they tracked down was a duo I had never heard of (but then I wasn't in the UK in the '80s, when they were in their heyday). This pair had both inevitably aged. And why is this a bad thing?

In this teaser for the series, the male half of the duo just about broke my heart. Not because he was overweight or middle-aged (I see overweight and middle-aged every time I look in the mirror!) but because his face looked positively Mickey Rourke-esque. As if he had spent the past 20 years engaging in heavy drinking and then trying to improve things with a facelift that had exactly the opposite effect... and this was before the extreme makeover began! I confess I have no idea how successful or otherwise the makeover was.

So what has this got to do with learning?

Simply this. When a thing is past its prime and has had its day, repackaging, rebranding and relaunching it is not going to make it what it was in its prime. It just makes it ridiculous. The audience demands have changed.

Chalk and talk has had its day. Using a medium like Second Life to deliver a chalk and talk session is not a move forward. Let's not try to nip and tuck the old bird into something hip and modern. Let's not make her ridiculous. Let's just be gracious about this and let her fade gently into obscurity, dreaming of a bygone era and muttering to herself.

And instead, look for ways to use the newer media to deliver meaningful learning appropriate for today's audience.

And let's recognise that it, too, will have its day and then be supplanted by something else. That's just how it is.

'Knowing Knowledge' ahead of its time?

On Wednesday last week, I ordered a copy of George Siemens's book Knowing Knowledge. I read it online when it was first published, but (for various reasons I won't bore you with) decided I needed a hard copy after all.

Yesterday, I received an email telling me:

Shipped on Sun, 22 Feb 2009 via Flat Rate
All items in your order have been dispatched.

Nothing so strange about that.

Except that the book arrived on Saturday morning.

So it's official - George's theory is light years ahead of its time!

This collaboration thing

A conversation has been developing around the subject of collaboration skills in the AACE community. I was thinking about this today as I heard an interview with Clive James and Pete Atkin. They collaborated on many songs, some of which one writer rather dramatically calls

the soundtrack to a private adolescent intellectual awakening, burned into memory and carried into adult life like a secret tattoo on the inside of the back of my brain

They were discussing the song 'The magic wasn't there,' made famous by the inimitable Julie Covington who was a friend of theirs in their student days, when they began writing together. The interviewer asked them "Why did you sit down together and decide to write songs?" and, talking over one another in that comfortable way that old friends have they talked about skills they both had, the creativity they inspired in one another and then one of them (I think it was James) said "A lot had to do with conversation," explaining how their collaboration was born out of a conversation about popular music and show tunes.

So there it was: conversation. At the heart of successful collaboration. And it got me to thinking; what characteristics does a successful collaborator need to have?

So, in no particular order:

• Vision. You have to know what you're working towards, even if it is a voyage of discovery. There must be some idea of how you will know when you have reached your destination.
  
• Passion. You have to believe that the thing you're collaborating on matters. Unless the project lights a spark in your eyes, you are unlikely to carry your weight.
  
• Contribution. This is a brass tacks point. Each person must have something to bring to the table.
• Confidence. Each person has to believe in the value of the thing that they bring to the table.
• Humility and a thick skin. You are bound to encounter some criticism of your ideas or some disagreement with your suggestions. You have to be able to put the success of the project ahead of your own sensitivity.
  
• Respect. You have to believe that everybody else has something of value to offer, too. You also have to accept that people work in different ways, and to be prepared to allow your collaborators the space to work in their way.
  
• Discipline. You have to make the time to work on the project, to read through everyone's submissions, amendments, suggestions, etc.
• Patient perseverance. There will be times when everything seems to grind to a halt. You will need to be able to hang in there, even when you feel like just throwing in the towel.

Any others?

Ten things learning designers forget

I like collaborating with other learning designers on a project, because that way we increase our chances of covering one another's blind spots. I've been thinking lately about the blind spots we may have. Sadly, these are often the result of little, if any contact with the target audience. Most of our interactions tend to be with the subject matter experts, the stakeholders and he-who-signs-the-cheque. As a consequence, we may overlook some factors that could and should impact on our design (note; this is not meant to be a definitive list!):

1. Users may already know a fair amount about the subject. They might not need the basics. Forcing them into a learning tunnel is not going to serve their best interests. There needs to be a way for them to circumvent the basics.
   
2. On the other hand, self-taught people often have gaps at the basic level, even when they have some fairly advanced skills/knowledge. It should be possible for them to cherry pick the bits they've missed out on.
3. A user might not go through the whole resource in one sitting. This means return visits. So it must be possible for users to return to the materials without being subjected to the prior knowledge assessment, or the 'why we're doing this' section, or the video of the MD's rah-rah speech. No matter how inspiring that speech, it will get old after the third go round.
4. People may not want to use your resource. Astonishing as it is for us learning geeks, some people don't see why they should have to have any training. "I've been doing this job since you were a twinkle in your Daddy's eye!" Your resource (perish the thought) may just be a hoop they have to jump through or a box they have to tick in order to demonstrate compliance to the satisfaction of some or other regulatory body, or to qualify for a promotion, or to keep the job they have already. For the unwinnable soul, there needs to be a way to get through this as quickly as possible.
5. If you're putting together a resource which addresses basic skills like hygiene or some such, bear in mind that people who require basic level training are not necessarily stupid. Ignorance and stupidity are not the same thing. It is important that the materials are not pitched as if you're talking to an eejit.
   
6. Similarly, if your learners are not native English speakers, be careful of talking down to them. This is similar to the battles experienced by those teaching adult literacy - there is precious little material that tackles topics of interest to adults while using the vocabulary of an early reader.
7. Learners may disagree with the content of the material, or they may have a better idea. There needs to be a space for them to say so.
8. A user may return to your resource in search of just one piece of information, "I know It's in there - I just can't remember where." It should be possible for them to be able to zoom in on that one piece of information and then get back to the day job.
9. People may prefer to talk to people. If possible, there should be a way for them to do so. A list of acknowledged experts in each field. A discussion forum. User profiles. That sort of thing.
10. Some people may be interested to learn more than your resource contains on a specific point. It's a good idea to include links to additional resources.

LPOD - xylitol is poisonous for dogs

Fortunately, we haven't learned this the hard way, but it seems that the artifical sweetener used in sugar-free gum is highly toxic for dogs. I read about this in a rather badly produced newsletter from some or other doggy bunch, and raised my eyebrows. But I have checked several websites on the subject and it seems that it may well be true.

This blog seems to be fairly credible, and, while it is not as sensationalist in its prognosis as some of the sites I encountered, it does sound a sober warning:

Dogs that eat significant amounts can develop a sudden drop in blood sugar, which can cause weakness, lethargy, loss of coordination, collapse and seizures.

It goes on to say:

Recent studies also suggest that there is a strong link between xylitol ingestion and the development of liver failure in dogs.

No doubt it is also toxic for cats, but cats are not the scavengers that dogs are - and they tend not to eat some of the unspeakable things that dogs consider a legitimate source of nutrition. Unless there is something meaty to be retrieved, a cat is unlikely to be found with its head in the wastepaper basket. And of course, those of us who chew gum after a meal or after coffee, are likely to dispose of it in the wastepaper basket - perhaps wrapped in a tissue or till slip - where it is likely to be found by a nosy dog.

Of course, we are all supposed to teach our dogs not to eat anything we haven't given them permission to eat, but, until they've learned that lesson, it might be a good idea to dispose of gum some other way.

pic of the day - hockey time

He's hoping to get back to being able to play every week, but, until that happens, my husband treasures his occasional forays back out onto the ice.

belated pic of the day - sunshine!

Yep, folks! Feast your eyes - that's sunshine streaming through my lounge window. Sorry about the late posting - I took the picture without a memory card in the camera and struggled to find a download cable!