Labels and semantics

Recently, I engaged in a discussion on Facebook with the friend of a friend. The topic of the discussion was autism. It wasn't unfriendly, but there was disagreement. And I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

The FOAF - let's call her Tanya - is on the autistic spectrum. In the UK, in terms of the Disability Discrimination Act and its associated guidelines, we are discouraged from referring to people like Tanya as 'autistic' or 'suffering from autism'. We are to say 'people with autism'. Because to say that someone is autistic (or diabetic or cerebral palsied or whatever) is to imply that they are defined by their condition. To say that they suffer from autism (or diabetes or cerebral palsy or whatever) is to imply that they are victims defeated by their condition. I mentioned this in the exchange.

Tanya was not impressed.

She referred to herself as autistic. And she had a fairly strong and succint argument as to why.

She pointed out that the very political correctness around the way that labels are used is in itself discriminatory because - and here's where she completely took the wind out my sails - labels that we perceive as not implying any shortcoming are not applied in that way.

We say the slim woman, the athletic man, the intelligent child, the blond woman, the healthy man, the honest child. We don't get hung up on saying things like 'the woman with slimness', the man with athleticism' and so forth.

She also took another stance I found unexpected and interesting.

I mentioned that I have long considered autism to be a spectrum we're all on somewhere.

She didn't like that.

For her, discovering she was autistic was a revelation. It explained why some things were a challenge for her, that came easily to others. Better than that, autism enabled her to do things that other people can't do. She was unique. She was special. And she wasn't about to give up on that to some warm and fuzzy liberal who wanted to paint the entire human race in varying shades of her colour.

Fair point, Tanya. Fair point.
 

Are we becoming too well informed to think?

Today I came across a newspaper article in which we read how a body builder/personal trainer was advised by an NHS nurse that her BMI (body mass index) was too high and that she should eat less and exercise more. The newspaper article was accompanied by a picture of the body builder. She is what my sons call 'stacked'. Maybe you don't like that particular kind of body shape, and that's fine. But this woman has clearly worked very hard on getting her body to look the way she wants it to look. I'm pretty sure her body fat percentage is very low, but muscle weighs far more than fat, so a very muscular person, on the basis of BMI alone will register as overweight or even obese.


I think it's safe to say that the nurse in question made no effort to address the woman's unique case. She unquestioningly followed a single set of guidelines as issued by the NHS.


We seem to have guidelines for everything these days. So much so, that I wonder whether we're in danger of giving up the effort of thinking for ourselves.


Sometimes guidelines are treated as inflexible rules. I mentioned once before on this blog about a friend of mine whose baby was struggling with reflux problems. She was worried about him, because when she laid him down to sleep, he would spit up and start choking. Because I had a son with a similar problem (apparently it's quite common for baby boys to have a slightly underdeveloped valve between the end of the oesophagus and the start of the stomach - it usually resolves once they become able to sit up by themselves), I suggested that she try laying him down on his side with a rolled up towel behind him to hold him in position, so that if he spit up in his sleep, it wouldn't get caught in his throat. Her response was "Ooh, no. We're not allowed to do that. The health visitor says we have to put him down on his back." Not allowed to. Not allowed to make a decision in respect of your own child that is contrary to what the health visitor has recommended based on the guidelines handed down to her by a faceless organisation that has never met the individual child in question.


A few years back, we read glowing obituaries for a traffic engineer in Europe (I wish I could remember more details about him) whose view was that more information to drivers made roads less safe. He was credited with revolutionising traffic safety by removing most of the information given to drivers and allowing them to take ownership of their own driving habits.


Now that I have health and safety guidelines that tell me it isn't safe to stand on a chair on top of a desk to change a light bulb, and warning signs over the hot taps in public facilities telling me that the water is hot, and labels on bags of nuts telling me that they contain nuts... do I need to do any thinking for myself? Perhaps the rationale is that it frees up my brain for important things. But I maintain that the more we are protected from the possibility of making stupid choices, the less likely it is that we will make inspired ones.


I have no research to go on here, but I wonder if it isn't a bit like a sine wave. The ubiquitous 'they' are trying to remove the bottom half of the wave, but actually what's happening is that the entire wave pattern is getting flattened as the top half is reduced proportionately. Spike Milligan is reported to have hated the medication that took away the swooping lows of his bipolar disorder (or manic depression as it was known back then), because it also robbed him of the soaring highs. The two things aren't directly related, of course, but I wonder, if in the process of trying to move the whole wave upward, we don't actually just reduce its amplitude. And if we reduce it enough, will we all just, well, 'flatline' a la the movie Serenity?


Surely being allowed to make a few stupid mistakes, will encourage us to think a bit more? Surely looking at a competitive body builder, a nurse can set the BMI guidelines aside? Surely the mother of a baby with reflux can experiment to see what works best for her own baby?

Throwing away the labels

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed how there seems to be an increase in the number of people identified as being autistic. Any number of theories have posited as to why this may be. I'm not going into that today. I'm looking at a slightly different angle.

A while back, you might have seen this TED talk by Jacob Barnett. Let me refresh your memory:



I hope you found that inspiring (and a little challenging). But, had it not been for his mother, this lad might never have even be able to function in a socially acceptable 'normal' way. Here's some insight into how this woman threw away the labels, rejected the professional prognoses and adopted a child-led approach to learning.

You might notice during the video clip in the link, that Jacob appears to be slightly uncertain as to how to hold himself when he is being spoken about, but not spoken to. But there is nothing about him that announces that he is a person with 'learning disability' or a 'special need'. In fact, I'd say he's a lot less socially awkward than most fifteen year olds!

I have observed in my own sons - and in myself, truth be told - some markers of the autistic spectrum. None of us has ever been formally diagnosed (or even assessed), but none of us fitted comfortably into the educational model. I only wish I had had this woman's courage when it would have made a difference. In the absence of that, may I encourage parents not to allow labels to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Not everyone can go on to win a Nobel Prize, or even to be predicted to win one. But wouldn't life be so much more fulfilling if we were able to explore the thing that lights the spark in our eyes, rather than the thing some official board says we need to know? 

Yves Morieux on increasing simplicity in a complex workplace

Yves Morieux delivers this very interesting talk about counteracting the increasing complexity of the workplace. My favourite quote from it comes from Jørgen Vig Knudstorp (CEO of the Lego group) "Blame is not for failure. It's for failing to help, or ask for help."

It's been a while

You may or may not have noticed that I've been out of the loop for a while.

Since I am now in a new role, where the majority of my clients are late adopters of digital learning, I thought that it would be fitting to go there my first time back in the saddle.

There seems to be an assumption that moving into the digital space is a big, scary deal. But consider the mistakes that have already been made, that the late adopter can avoid. If - that is - the late adopter is prepared to learn from the experience of those who are further down the path.

I have found, though, that some late adopters are reluctant to go that route, so they wind up dealing with poor uptake for the very reasons early adopters struggled. But the early adopters persevered and found all sorts of ways of making digital resources more engaging. The wheel has been invented. We have figured out a lot of things along the way.

We've figured out that throwing content on a screen does not constitute elearning. We've discovered that people don't actually read screens for the most part - they scan them. So we've learned to work with that.

We've figured out that workplace learning is more about what you want people to do than what you want them to know. So we've learned to design solutions accordingly.

We have moved past the idea that e-learning needs to be the complete solution. In the early days of 'blended learning', there was precious little blending going on. We were so excited with our digital goodie bag, that we abandoned everything else for a while, there. We're getting better at it now. It finally dawned on us that (and I forget who originated this expression) if you want to learn to swim, you're going to have to get wet at some point. So we learnt how to look at a learning requirement and allocate modalities as appropriate.

We figured out that throwing the boring stuff online so that we could do the cool stuff in workshops also didn't work. If it was boring when it was in a workshop, it was going to be way more boring (and way easier to opt out of) on a screen.

We've figured out how to go mobile. We can use tablets, smart phones, mp4 players... all that stuff.

We've rediscovered the value of point of need support, and figured out how to design digital performance support tools.

We've come to realise that we don't need to be precious. That the 'bloke at the next desk' is a valid and valuable resource. Some of us even factor them in to our solutions.

That's not all, but it's a pretty good start. And instead of following the trail to where the early adopters now find themselves, the late adopters can simply choose to be airlifted into that space and join the conversation. It's an exciting journey...and I'm curious as to where it's going next.

How about you?

Unbe-flipping-lievable

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....

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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

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

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

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!