Spotting the gifted child

I recently stumbled on this site explaining how to spot the gifted child - apparently quite easy to do if you have a trained eye.

My elder son is not included in the G&T (gifted and talented - not gin and tonic) programme at school in spite of the general consensus that he should be, because he didn't score well enough on the test. As it turned out, he was ill the week the tests were taken and had to try to complete them in the back of the room during normal lessons on his return. This might have had something to do with his scores. On one level, I'm kind of sorry - the G&T kids learn thinking and learning skills. On the other hand, this kid already has so much going on in his life - do I really want to add extra lessons at breaktime (recess) to the mix?

The whole thing struck a discord with me on so many levels. First off, because the test was written. Allegedly, gifted children are impatient and just want to get a thing done. A written test is therefore probably not totally conclusive. Quite apart from which, there is no guarantee that a gifted child will be free of learning disabilities such as dyslexia which will hamper his/her performance in a written test. Nor is there any guarantee that a gifted child will not be one of those who goes to pieces under "exam conditions". They don't always have the march on confidence.

To be honest, I recognise my elder son in almost every point on both the positive and negative sides of this document, but I'd still like to know how they came to these conclusions. I was also tickled to see that the gifted child:

• "Demonstrates strong abilities in math" - what if s/he's gifted as an artist, not as a mathematician?
  
• "Displays unusual academic achievement" - how can this be the case if they're also "off task", "disruptive", "sloppy", "forgetful of homework assignments" and inclined to "leave projects unfinished"? From what little I know of it, it is just as likely that gifted children will underachieve - quite spectacularly at times.

I'd be interested to know:

• How G&T kids are identified in other schools?
• How reliable is this selection method?
• Does it benefit or stigmatise kids to be included in the G&T programme?
  
• Does anyone else think that this might morph into David Cameron's idea of a grammar stream in every school?

Constructs, perceptions and perspectives

A little over 50 days ago, the UK was rocked by a terrible piece of news. A little British girl called Madeleine McCann, aged not quite 4 was taken from her room in the family's holiday accommodation in the Algarve in Portugal while her parents had dinner a short distance away.

Thus far, all searches and leads have led nowhere, and the little girl is still missing. Everyone is carefully avoiding articulating the worst imaginings of their hearts (including me, so that's as much as I'll say on that point).

The plight of her parents has remained in the forefront of the British consciousness since that gutwrenching day, and people avidly follow the story, desperately hoping for good news, for resolution. This is illustrated by the fact that it is impossible to go anywhere in the UK without encountering a poster showing Maddy's picture and recounting the details of her disappearance. Ostensibly this is in order to encourage people to be on the lookout for the little girl with the characteristic anomaly in the pupil of one eye. The problem is that the posters are all over the UK. Maddy disappeared in Portugal. So I suspect that it is in reality a desperate attempt to fend off the sense of helplessness that we feel at being unable to change reality.

Many people assume that the entire European continent and beyond is in a state of equal alert. This is how we are about things that loom large in our perceptions. We assume that things that are important to us must carry weight in the wider context. We cannot, will not conceive of a perspective that does not take cogniscance of the things that matter to us above all else. Sadly, my husband's dealings with business interests in both Italy and France would seem to indicate that few people in those two countries are even aware of the drama that is playing out here and in Portugal.

I remember South African politicians during the time of apartheid defiantly telling us how the "eyes of the world were upon us" - upon this insignificant third world country. Perhaps they were right, but since settling in the UK and travelling abroad, particularly to the USA, I have come to doubt the truth of this assertion. The general populace everywhere I have been is seldom aware that there is even a country called South Africa. Many assume that this is a geographical description, and don't appreciate that the second largest continent contains over 50 countries. To most people, "it's all Africa, isn't it?" And yet, South Africa is the country in which the last 5 generations of my family have lived out their lives, raised their children, earned their living and been laid to rest. It shaped me, it moulded me, it nurtured me. I was born there, I was schooled there, I knew enormous heartache and loss, I found love, I was married, my sons began their lives there. My blood pulses with the rhythm of a cowhide drum. And when I left, although it was by my own choice, I felt as if my heart had been ripped out. No matter how long I am away, for better or for worse, I realise that the memory of it will always be home, long after the place itself has ceased to be. How can the world not know of this place? How can something so important, so seminal to me be a non-issue for the vast majority of people on the face of the planet? How can those who know little of it, not be desperate to learn as much as they possibly can? How can their blood not be stirred by the sounds of its music?

And yet, this is how it is. Little is known about Africa, beyond her own shores, even less about South Africa, other than the name of that greatest of all South Africans, Nelson Mandela, and the world is by and large content that it should be thus.

Similarly, the British population aches with the significance of Maddy's disappearance, while, in the rest of the world, it is business as usual.

I started this post with the intention of drawing from these accounts a few parallels to perspectives in learning and learning provision, but I find I have lost the heart for it. Please understand as I leave it there and allow you to draw your own parallels and analogies as you see fit.

Reflecting on Stephen Downes's Trends and Impacts of eLearning 2.0

I have just worked my way through a combination of the video of Stephen's presentation in Taipei, together with the slides. I suspect some of the slides may have been missing from the end, but by that time, I didn't need them anyway.

A couple of observational nonsequiturs to start with:

• I noticed that Stephen was enunciating very clearly and carefully, especially at the start - presumably out of repsect for the fact that Enlgish would not be the first language of many of his audience
• I don't know whether it was due to the setup of the sound recording system, but the audience seemed very quiet - no laughs, no heckling, no interruptions, none of what South Africans call "chirping from the peanut gallery". I imagine this is a cultural thing and, if previous recordings I have heard of Stephen's presentations are anything to go by, it must have been quite a novel experience for him!

Much of what Stephen had to say was not really new to those of us who have been involved in this amorphous conversation for the past while. However, it was interesting to hear it all packaged together and presented as a journey.

And although he never once mentioned the word as far as I can recall, he sang my song: the song of learner empowerment. I wax lyrical and come over all misty-eyed on the subject of learner empowerment. I have this almost protective passion for the learner, and I tend to husband their cause with vim, vigour and volume.

What really cracked it for me was the realisation that, in my current projects, I have been designing solutions that aim for exactly what Stephen is describing and I have instinctively striven towards all the D's Stephen lists at the end of his presentation:

• Decentralisation
• Distribution
• Disintermediation
• Disaggregation
• Disintegration
• Democratisation
• Dynamism
  
• Desegregation

Yes, yes and yes. All of the above. I won't bore you with the detail, but I could explain how my solutions tick all those boxes. I love it. So I tend to bounce all labrador puppy and jolly hockey sticks into the meeting with the client and all but shout "Tada!" as I unveil the concept. But you know what? They seldom like it. Much of the market doesn't seem to be ready to embrace 2.0 just yet. To them user-driven online resources are an information resource, not a learning resource. They want it wrapped for elearning. They want courses.

I am so sure I know what they should have, what they should do, but they have a different certainty - they know what they know... and they sign the cheque.

Scott Adams does it again

This is too good to miss! I haven't even read the rest of the post, yet, but the opening paragraph of a post rather dubiously titled Who Will Kill All the Senior Citizens, Scott Adams (he of Dilbert fame) provides one of those moments when all is right with my world:

"...I was doing some research on the Internet. And by research, I mean I clicked on a link that led me to another, then another, until I was reading something written by a stranger with no credibility. That’s how I learn."

Beautiful. Just beautiful. eLearning 2.0 in a nutshell.

I have nothing further to add - I must now go and read the rest of his post to find out if it lives up to that gem.

Some interesting 3D tools

My non-blogging (don't ask me why) colleague Brett sent our team the links to these interesting resources today. Some of them I have seen before, others are new to me, but it's quite fun to list them all together and think about their potential application within my field of corporate learning solutions design. I think I would need a client who wanted a fair degree of whizziness!

• Google maps' interactive streetview feature - click the streetview button(c'mon Google peeps, let's jack that up to include a few cities outside the US - there's a whole world out here!)
• Papervision 3D - this one gives me vertigo, like those virtual rides or the iMax, but it's quite fun
  
• And the two examples at Blitzagency - I can see so many uses for the second one in particular
  

He also sent another link to some material on Microsoft Photosynth that I have so far not managed to get to work (note: it apparently only works with IE - being a Microsoft product and all) but many people have probably already seen this video of Blaise Aguera y Arcas's demo at TED in March this year. I like the fractalness (if that's the right word!) of Photosynth - it's a sort of visual version of what I understand Dave Snowden's fragmented narrative to be.

To paraphrase an oh so American expression: Have a great play! ;-)

Parent teacher meetings

Yesterday I attended parent meetings with some of my sons' teachers at their school, and the following are my observations of what transpired. Please note that I do not agree with the current system of assessment, but it's what we have, so I feel that it is important for my children to do as well as they possibly can under this system in order to be considered by the universities of their choice. Perhaps some people might see that as a sell-out of my principles, but I am not prepared to risk my children's future because the system fails to meet my expectations.

These curriculum progress meetings are designed to afford an opportunity to check progress. An afternoon is set aside during which 10 minute appointments can be made with any teachers a parent might feel that it would be of benefit to see. In my case, the meetings were all held at the request of the teachers. No fewer than 7 teachers asked to see me. No parent wants to know that no fewer than 7 teachers are unhappy with the performance of their children. I only managed to squeeze in 5 and will have to make other plans for the other two. One of the things I respect about the school is that these meetings are not only conducted with the child present, but the child is expected to be an active participant. My older son has always had the ability to speak up for himself, and he adapted very quickly to this concept. My younger son is still battling a little, but seems gradually to be finding his voice.

Nevertheless, when my older son's English humanities teacher made an assertion about the amount of work he was putting in and his lack of adherence to assessment requirements, he agreed with her. This in spite of the fact that I had seen him sitting and working his way through the requirements and ensuring that he had met them all, and in spite of the fact that the low marks he had scored had generated howls of "What does she want from me? I did everything she asked and it's still not good enough!" This says a great deal about how the traditionally authoritative role of the teacher is still in place in this supposedly non-traditional school. I pulled him up short. "Hang on a minute! This is a discussion, not a lecture - you don't have to agree." I prompted him to remember the things he had said to me about the work and the discussion took a more fruitful turn. We established that there was a disconnect between what he thought was expected of him and what actually was expected of him. He realised that some of the ideas he had had and rejected as being out of scope would, in fact, have secured him a higher grade on the coursework. It frustrated me that the teacher had not had this conversation with him much earlier, that my intervention had been required before his voice was finally heard on this matter. A plan of action was duly set in place and we hope to see some more positive consequences going forward.

Most of the other meetings consisted of this is where things are good, this is where things are bad (both my boys talk too much and lose focus in lessons - shades of their mother!), this is what is needed. I did not miss the opportunity to voice my concerns about the gradual decline of my younger son, reminding them that they were talking about a student, while I was talking about a whole person, and that pressurising an already anxious, possibly depressed child for improved academic performance was not going to bear results.

However, and this is the doozie, I learnt something in the last meeting of the day that rocked me back on my heels and is, if I am totally honest, the main reason for this post. My younger son had indicated something that was happening in one of his science classes and I was sure that he must have misunderstood the situation. This meeting revealed that he was absolutely on the money. It seems the children take regular tests, and are then seated in order of their scores until the next test is taken. So the kids with the highest scores sit on the front row, while the kids with the lowest languish at the back of the class. On one occasion, more children had higher scores than my son than had been the case on the previous test, and he was made to move a few desks down the pecking order, with a sad, "Slipping a bit, there" from the teacher. I was incensed. I thought that kind of teaching had gone out when I was a child (we had the same deal in my Grade 6 class over 30 years ago) or was restricted to fiction of the order of Malcolm in the Middle. Sadly (or perhaps fortunately, because I can't guarantee I would ahve held my temper) the teacher I spoke to was a different member of the team and not the one responsible for this atrocity. Not only was I angry for my own son, who is a fairly high-level achiever, but I was furious on behalf of all those kids at the back of the class for whom the results they got might have represented a major achievement in the light of their own capacity and potential. How dare she make them feel that their gutbusting effort to get 10/20 was less worthy than the child who sailed to an easy 20/20 without breaking a sweat? Can you tell that I am working myself into a lather all over again, just thinking about it?

I would be interested to hear from readers - particularly those who teach high school - how they respond to both the incident of my elder son and his experience of disconnected expectations and my younger son's science teacher's methods of motivation.

Physical and virtual - to divide or not to divide?

There has been a bit of a debate lately between Dave Snowden and Stephen Downes on whether there is in fact any difference between virtual and physical realms. If you use my links, don't miss the comments on these two posts. Dave also continues the debate here.

Both of these men are people for whom I have a high regard and of whose intellect I am more than a little in awe. They tend to operate on a different plane from me, and I often feel a bit like Hansel as I try to keep up with their reasoning, only to turn around and see that the birds have eaten my trail of crumbs and I am thoroughly lost!

Nevertheless, this physical v virtual concept is one that I have visited myself earlier this year (here and here). While I am not yet ready to consider that there is no line between virtual and physical. I do think that the line of separation has either blurred or moved or both.

This digital native/immigrant thing

On Wednesday night someone in the chat channel of the FOE2007 conference made a comment that caught my attention. The speaker was talking about digital natives, and the concept had the chat channel buzzing. Is it relevant? Valid? Will people who were born into the era of the computer be noticeably different from those who had to "migrate" to the technology?

Then someone said, by way of a metaphor, that we have all had TV all our lives. You know what? That's not true. TV only arrived in South Africa when I was in high school. 1975 I think it was. The National Party government fought hard to keep TV out for as long as possible - in fact, it was referred to as "the devil's box". When TV first arrived, it was heavily censored. So, if I am a digital immigrant, then I am a TV immigrant, too. Yet no-one uses that term. No-one thinks in those terms.

In 1982, the kids starting school in South Africa were the first intake ever to have been exposed to TV since birth. There was a flurry of interested speculation - how different would these kids be? Within a very short space of time, it became evident that they were not somehow magically more able to use the TV or interact with the content presented than those who were not born to the technology.

Is there anything at all about me that tells even the most diligent observer that I was born into a TV-less world, whereas my younger cousins were not? That they are natives, while I am an immigrant? I very much doubt it - our usage of TV is indistinguishable.

So I don't think the flurry of speculation about the divide between the so-called digital natives and immigrants will carry much weight either.

There is another analogy to draw from South Africa's late adoption of TV. They didn't start with the old black and white valve powered sets of the first world's yesteryear and follow the path taken by the trailblazers. They jumped straight in with state of the art technology and (for one thing) their sports coverage was recognised as being world class, pretty much from the off.

I see no reason for things to be any different in respect of web 2.0 technologies either. Why should late adopters have to start where the innovators and early adopters did? They'll jump straight in at the point that these leaders have reached, and pretty soon be indistinguishable from them!

Why not?

Growing up - will I ever get around to it?

Years ago, my mother read a definition of youth as that stage in your life when you take umbrage at perceived injustice whether or not you are the victim. I distinctly remember her declaring that by that definition she was still a youth. I am probably at least as old now as she was then, and I guess that I, too, am a youth by that definition.

That said, I don't know that I agree with the definition, I think youth is more likely to be a time when your self absorption is often a hindrance to noticing injustices to others. Don't get me wrong, there are good reasons why teenagers are self-absorbed and it is a normal and natural phase of growing up.

But when do we get to the end of those "phases"? When can we categorically say that we are grown up? My sister in law considers me very grown up. She says so often and she gets in touch with me when she wants a grown-up opinion on something. She is 9 years older than I am.

When I was 16, I used to say, "I am looking forward to being 30. I reckon at 30, you know who you are, you know what your limitations are, and you are comfortable with them." I was 30 a long time ago, and it is true that I had pretty much made my peace with what I was and what I was not by that time.

What I only recently came to appreciate is that it is one thing being comfortable with your limitations. It is quite another to be comfortable with other people's recognition of them!

Yesterday, I was having a discussion with my line manager about a difficult project that I am working on. I said that I felt that part of the problem was that I am not politically astute. I have mentioned before my tendency to naievete in dealing with people. Also, because of the lack of boundaries in my life, I tend to speak to clients the way I do to everyone else. Some clients really like that - they feel they are dealing with a "real person". Others presumably find it unprofessional - whatever that means - because my boss responded to my remark that there had been "feedback to that effect". And that was when it got weird.

I know that I am not politically astute. I know that I take everything at face value. I know that I am naieve. I know that I have neither the head nor the stomach for corporate politics. That I am not skilled in the art of detachment and the professional facade. That I take it all too personally. It has come up before, usually at my instigation. But when my line manager said those words, my instant reaction was that I was hurt. I wanted to defend myself. To deny the very thing I had just said myself. How daft. I had to remind myself that I had fed him the line - he was simply agreeing with my judgement of my limitations. As my manager, it is part of his job to know my strengths and weaknesses and to support me in both.

So I guess I'm no so grown up after all. Blast!

Playing the education system...

Note: this is a personal anecdote/reflection

My sons are both in their teens and attend the local high school. It's a huge, non-selective school, which means that there are no entry criteria, other than proximity to the school. In theory I support so many of their forward thinking approaches, but...

My elder son is now in his third year, and is doing pretty well. My younger son, in his first year there, is drowning.

My elder son is one of those internally motivated kids who goes after what he wants and sits very firmly in the driver's seat of his own life and takes nonsense from nobody. He is also one of those infuriatingly blessed people who is good at almost everything he turns his hand to (except singing - only don't tell him I said so) and knows it! He is brilliant at sport - competing for the district in many disciplines, played chess for the county team, plays the electric guitar, has a physique to die for and is set to score As pretty much across the board in his GCSEs.

My younger son suffers from anxiety and stress, lacks confidence and tends to be a reactor rather than an initiator. He gets bullied at school because of his funky clothes and long hair (well past his shoulders). He isn't keen on sport, has to work hard to get good results, and buckles under when things go awry. Since he started at this school we have had to bring in both the school authorities and the police due to bullying, and his academic performance is slipping. We find ourselves taking issue with teachers on a regular basis and the whole thing is becoming very hard work - like wading through treacle!

So we decided to look at some alternatives. Today we went on a tour of a "grammar school". There aren't any of these in our town, so this option would mean traveling out of town to a different authority. It would mean a different exam board. But kids from grammar schools tend to get into better universities - or so we have been led to believe. We were surprised to be very impressed by the school, because it is steeped in tradition (about 400 years old), but they seem to be very adaptable. However, because they have entrance requirements, the boys would have to take tests and be interviewed. Moreover, the school can choose who to test. Based on his CAT predictor scores it seems unlikely that our younger son will even be allowed to take the test. Ironically, every alternative approach we have looked at looks like a good fit for the kid who takes a proactive approach to life, and this was no exception. I say "ironically" because it is for the other kid's sake that we keep looking.

So now we have a quandary. Do we stick to our principles or do we play the system to our kids' advantage? Bearing in mind that he is likely to do well wherever he goes, do we move our older son to a school that is seen to be elitist because he can get in there, and he will attract the attention of better universities, even though it seems our younger son won't make the cut? Do we keep our older son in the current system just because his brother can't go anywhere else?

Why does it all have to be so fraught?

Don't take it so personally!

This is an instruction I have received many times during my working life. In my performance appraisals, diplomatically striving not to be critical or prescriptive, my manager says, "You tend to take things very much to heart," which is probably a different way of saying much the same thing.

As I have said in previous posts, I have trouble with boundaries. Increasingly lately, I have found it difficult to identify where my work ends and my studies begin, where this blog ends and my job begins, where my job description ends and my hobbies begin. Perhaps if I were a surgeon, it would be easy to know when I was working and when I was not. The line might be a little clearer (although I'm guessing, obviously). But I am a learning professional, a professional learner, and a wild-eyed learning zealot in my spare time. I invest myself in everything I do, so it is impossible not to "take it personally" - it is personal.

When my client implies that I am being underhanded and trying to subvert his agenda, I take that personally. I see it as an affront to my integrity. When a learner says, "look what I can do since you taught me such-and-such," I walk on a pink cloud for a week. When I learn something new, I bounce into the office and try to televangelise the eye rollers.

Perhaps it's arrogant, but I guess I have a hard time persuading myself that they are right and I am wrong, that there should be clearcut boundaries between who I am and what I do. And until I am persuaded, I guess it is unlikely that I will change - we don't take ownership of learning we don't believe in, after all. So, for the foreseeable future, at least, it seems I will continue to be told, "Don't take it so personally!"

Fragmented narrative: practising what we preach

Last night, I attended some of the FOE presentations. Sadly, my hayfever meds knocked me for six, and I missed Sugata Mitra and the first half of Chris Sessums. I was glad to pick up the balance of Chris's session, though. As ever, there was a lot of action going on in the chat room.

I have already posted on my sadly lost state during Dave Cormier's presentation. Hopefully a few of us will arrange a UK based get together to see if we can fill the gaps in our understanding there. You haven't forgotten have you, Martin?

It's the next presentation I want to focus on in this post, and I'm a bit trepidatious about this, because I just know that I am going to offend people here! Dave Snowden talked about a variety of issues, and I would be hard-pressed to give a single title to his presentation. He touched measurement and reward; the concept of tacit v explicit knowledge; innovation v orthodoxy; the disconnect between the real and the virtual; validation; scale; cognitive development. But my (possibly biased) perception was that the greatest emphasis fell on the concept of fragmented narrative - the notion of the learner constructing content from fragmented narrative (such as blogs).

The struggle for me was in the disconnect between the excellent message and the style of presentation. Dave's presentation was delivered in a largely didactic, brooks-no-argument style which seemed to be at odds with the message he was delivering. Of all the Elluminate presentations I have attended, this was the one with the least traffic going on in the chat panel during the presentation, and such questions as were raised there were answered very decisively by Dave himself, rather than generating discussion, observation and debate from the community. Many of the people attending are known to me from previous sessions of both this and the Connectivism conference, and I have never known them to be so inhibited (would cowed be too strong a word?). There didn't seem to me to be many fragments on offer.

I have no pithy observations or clever suggestions to make, but this has been nagging at me, so I felt the need to get it out in the open. To be totally candid, I feel as if I am being, well -too big for my boots to question such a respected figure, but I'm taking a deep breath and stating the case as I see it. I invite observations, refutations and responses from all perspectives... as ever, happy to be dissuaded!

Lost among the pageflakes and snowclones

Dave Cormier's session on the Future of Education Conference tonight was called Snowclones, cliches and memes. I wish there had been more time for this session, so that he could have started a bit further back, and built up to his picture more gradually. It looked really exciting, but I honestly felt just the way I do when my husband's family lapses into Swedish and gets animated. I don't have enough of the language to be able to keep up with the conversation, to appreciate the jokes.

Perhaps if his demo site hadn't observed Murphy's Law and broken just at the wrong time, I might have had an "aha moment", but I'm feeling lost and annoyed with myself for lacking the capacity to grasp what was going on.

This blog, my PLE?

On 25 May, Stephen Downes expressed his view of blogs, Wordpress blogs in particular, as PLEs. Now this is not a Wordpress blog, and I'm not quite so clever with plug-ins, but I get his point. While this blog is by no means my complete PLE, it is an important part of it. As is my aggregator list, my protopage, my cocomment conversations, my Ning networks, the discussion forums on my university WebCT and my email inboxes among other things.

The thing is, though, that I wonder when the term "environment" got hijacked to mean an online environment. Jay Cross picks up on this to a measure in his comment on Stephen's post (BTW - as ever, the conversation going on in the comments is as much worth reading as the post itself). I consider my office, my television set, my university classes, team development days, conversations with my far cleverer colleagues (both on and offline) to be a part of my PLE.

Hey, you know what? If I stop to think about it, I guess my whole life is a PLE. Forget lifelong learning, can I coin the term "lifewide learning"?

What I will say in respect of blogs is that two years of blogging has taught me more, changed me more, stretched me more, and opened more worlds up to me than all the preceding years of professional practice put together. Long may it last!

Their generation

I've seen teasers of this on telly lately, but I came across the link to the YouTube vid via Ewan McIntosh. It had him in stitches. It had totally the opposite effect on me! Mind you, Mr Bean makes me cry, too (so lonely, so socially inept!). I know, I know!

This is a generation that survived at least one world war and the Great Depression. Those toothless, frail old men were once dashing young rakes - possibly even decorated war heroes. Those bent old dears were once nubile young women who held hearth and home together while the men were away - many of them venturing out into the workplace for the first time. They knew the hardship and deprivation of rationing. They saw cities bombed to bits. Many of them saw their families fragmented by the evacuation of children to safer locations. Some of them may even have been evacuees themselves. The whole world has changed completely since "their day" and they have had to learn to cope with that change: modes of travel, methods of communication, forms of entertainment, technologies in the workplace, banking, space travel... the list is long! Their hard-earned wisdom is often written off as being irrelevant and useless. I mentioned in a recent post how my grandfather asked on his 90th birthday, "What's the point of a lifetime of experience, if no-one wants to know?"

I found myself paraphrasing Tiny Tim as I watched these game folks really giving their all to the performance and having a whale of a time: "God bless them, every one!"

Stop Cyberbullying?

How odd! I had never personally experienced cyberbullying before. I joined the Ning Stop Cyberbullying community largely because of what happened to Kathy Sierra.

I accepted friendship requests from anyone who made them, thinking - probably naievely - that they had read something I had written somewhere and felt some kind of synergy with me. Some of the requests came from people who write like my teenagers do - all IM-and text-speak and scrambled grammar. I was fairly sure they were teenagers themselves, and wondered why they should want to befriend me, but shrugged and hit accept.

Next thing I knew, I was being bombarded with demands as to why I wasn't chattering them, and didn't I know that ignoring a person online was a kind of bullying, too? When one of them asked me if Karyn Romeis was my real name (which it is, although I only came by the second bit by marriage), because it was a really stupid one, I decided that enough was enough.

Looking through the pages of all the people who have signed up as my friends I find screeds of messages of accusation from one member to another. It seems some people seem to have signed up to the forum for the express purpose of mutual accusations of cyberbullying. Alternatively, there seems to be an equal market for mea culpa: I've been a terrible cyberbully to you all, can you ever forgive me? Puh-lease!

I know a lot of really wonderful people belong to the community, and I have enormous respect for them. However, I don't know how much of an impact a network like this can really have on what is a very serious problem. Especially when there is this kind of petty in-fighting and attention-seeking going on. So I'm giving serious consideration to opting out of it.

If you have seen evidence of the community making a difference in your sphere, or if you're seeing a different picture from the one I've described above, please let me know!

Learning from experience

A long time ago, I did something irresponsible that landed me in a whole heap of trouble. The consequences were unavoidable, and I had to decide what course of action to take. It was one of the toughest decisions I have ever had to make and I opted for a course of action I still regard as one of my bravest and most unselfish choices. The course of action I chose very nearly finished me off, but I pulled through and, many years later, pretty much everyone who knows the deal agrees that I took the right course of action.

Now someone I love dearly is in the same situation. Exactly the same decision must be made for exactly the same reasons. But this time, the voice of experience can speak.

But of course, the voice of experience is not welcome. "But, Karyn, I saw what it did to you, and there is no way I could go through that!" O-okay. So I point out what the alternatives are and explain why I rejected each of them. I explain why there is no easy solution to this situation. I point out that everyone agrees that what I did was for the best, including the person now in this position. "I know, but it's too hard!" I'm told. I explain why the alternatives are no easier. "I know - you're right, but I just can't do it!"

Does that one image of me at my lowest ebb count for more than everything I have achieved since - most of which, if I'm brutally honest, is largely as a consequence of taking the initial blow, and enduring its backlash over many years? When people who have known me all my life picture me, do they only see the defeated, broken creature I became for a while? Do they not see the steady climb out of the mire, the gradual return of joy, the moments of subsequent triumph? What a sobering thought!

Are we destined only and always to learn from our own tragedies, from our own brushes with darkness? Here I am, hearing again in my head the voice of my grandfather on his 90th birthday, saying, "What's the point of a lifetime's experience if no-one wants to know?"

Now that the rubber has hit the road and we are talking about a deeply significant life experience rather than some theoretical knowledge or skill, I find that I don't want this person I love to have a learner-driven experience. I want to give them as a gift what I gained at great personal cost.

But alas... it doesn't work like that, does it?

Remembering why I started down this road

Tonight, as part of our thinking skills lecture, we watched a segment of a video of Feuerstein teaching thinking skills to disaffected children in Israel. I watched him stimulate the kids' minds to think creatively, to solve problems using material that meant it didn't matter if they had missed out on learning the content most kids would have learned by this age. And I remembered why I became a learning professional in the first place. I wanted to empower people, to enable, to give people a leg up, to give them access to something they needed help to reach.

Okay, I'm in a bad place right now, and tomorrow I might feel very differently, but tonight, at 11:38pm, I feel as if I've lost my way. Anybody got a map? Where are those people whose lives will be better because someone like me came across their path? I've lost sight of them.

Irrelevant but impressive just the same

A fellow South African ex-pat living in the UK sent me a link to this YouTube video showing a pitched battle between a herd of buffalo, a pride of lion and a crocodile.

It has no direct relevance to learning and teaching, but it's awesome just the same. If you like things to happen quickly, you might be frustrated to start with, but stick with it, it's worth the wait. And if you possibly can, get someone who knows Afrikaans to watch it with you to translate the background dialogue - it describes things not always visible on camera, adding to the context and the suspense.

Appearances and how much they (don't) count

I have just returned from a ladies' retreat. Of course, all sorts of things went on that were important to me, but not many of them have relevance to this blog. One incident that happened early in the weekend, however, serves as an analogy that does belong here.

One of the organisers of the weekend invited anyone who was interested to join her for a short run early on the Saturday morning. I decided to take her up on her offer. Now I haven't run for a long time, due to what appears to have become a permanent problem with my left knee, but I still have all the kit. So, when I appeared at the ridiculous hour of 7:30am on Saturday morning, I was dressed for the occasion. There were only going to be three of us on the run, and the other two were a little intimidated by my apparel. They were wearing an assortment of clothes from Tesco (read Fred Myers or Walmart). I on the other hand, was dressed from head to toe - including (ahem) foundation garments - in proper running gear. Running shorts, running top, running shoes with custom-made insoles. It all added up to a rather expensive and convincing looking ensemble.

But you know what?

I couldn't keep up with them. I am unfit for a start (see my goal meme post) and, to make matters worse, I developed asthma almost straight away (which I normally only do in around June/July) and my knee gave me a lot of gyp. Bless them, the other two kept stopping and waiting for me to catch up.

My point is that it's not about the kit. It's not about looking the part. It's not about impressing people with flashy custom features. It's about delivering the goods. I may have looked the part, my flashy exterior only served to raise expectations which made my below par performance even more noticeable.

When we develop learning resources, we need to bear this in mind. Don't get me wrong, I like aesthetics as much as (possibly more than) the next person - I like my resources to look good, to make a good first impression on the user. But let's face it, for all its good looks, if the resource runs slowly, wheezes and limps along, the user is not likely to want to use it again.

Gutted! No learning innovations conference for Karyn

Rats and double rats! I have learned today that my request to attend the Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning conference in Santa Clara in September has been turned down. Phooey.

Bless the man, my husband thinks I should go anyway, and is determined to do everything in his power to find a way to fund it. I am pretty close to absolutely certain we can't afford it, but his willingness brings a lump to my throat.

The cost of the conference at the early bird rate works out to around £450, which isn't really a great deal of money - less than the cost of many local conferences, in fact. The problem comes in when you start adding things like airfares - the cheapest I have found has been £377 return; hotels - the cheapest being around £32/day and less than a mile from the conference venue; and meals - £?? Plus taxis and shuttles to and from airports and hotels and stuff. Since the really cheap airfare only applies if I stay in the US for a week (a week within spitting distance of San Fransisco, my second favourite city in the world - what a trial!), I would have to pay for a week of hotels and meals. Let's call it £300. I have no idea how much the taxis and shuttles would be, but let's make up a figure based on complete ignorance of £50. Where are we now? £1177. Or roughly $2320. That's a lot of money for an individual person to stump up.

What I do think, though, is that the good folks at Brandon Hall have missed a trick. I'm totally with their view that it helps to get together in person from time to time and online conferences aren't the answer to everything. The thing is though, that online conferences aren't the only alternative. With the technology that is available to them, surely they could have run parallel conferences in major centres around the world (London, Tokyo, Sydney, Cape Town...) via simulcast? That way presenters, vendors and delegates from outside of the USA would be able to participate from a more local venue. I'm fairly sure that for a bunch of wild-eyed learning zealots such as we are the time difference would have been a minor matter. What surprises me most about the fact that this approach has not been adopted is the fact that the conference page displays this little box.

Philosophy for children - what a pity we need it!

Last night, our thinking skills lecture slot was guest run by a woman from SAPERE. She introduced us to the concept of Philosophy for Children (P4C), starting as young as the age of 4.

There was some debate about the name, apparently, since philosophy has developed a bad rep in some quarters. But they decided to stick with it. The kids aren't studying philosophy or becoming disciples of this or that philosopher. They are learning to philosophise: philos = love + sophos = wisdom. So...

The use some stimulus like a photo, a piece of music, a movie clip, a story book. Then they ask the children to come up with questions based on the stimulus. The children then vote on a single question to discuss during the session. We had a go at it ourselves and chose the question "Why don't we value non-conformity?" based on a children's picture book about a little boy who was a nonconformist. It was an interesting and valuable exercise, with many people saying they didn't know what they thought until they starting hearing other people's views and found themselves agreeing or disagreeing.

The initiative has not been universally welcomed, but where it has been introduced at schools, it has apparently had enormous success. It has been introduced to children of various ages, and even to adults, when the parents/grandparents of the children have developed an interest. In some schools it has become a timetabled session. In others, the requirement is for the principles to be introduced into other subjects in the curriculum. Through last night's session, I began to recognise the ways in which at least my elder son is receiving teaching of this nature ("In the play Blood Brothers, how does class affect the relationship between the two boys?")

Children who have been exposed to this approach have apparently almost universally shown improvement across the board.

This is all wonderful and very exciting, but it makes me want to say, "Well duh!" What makes me sad is that it is necessary for schools even to be doing this. I mean, what are families for? Where are all the lively dinner discussions? The rainy weekend debates? The discussions over board games? What ever happened to conversation, for goodness sake?

It has always been my view that parents are the primary educators, and I have stuck by that view in the face of some pretty stiff opposition from schools along the way, and part of the parental responsibility must surely include teaching children to think, to consider.

Twitter: I don't get it

I have seen several mentions of Twitter in blogposts, but kind of assumed it was something along the lines of Explode, which I have already joined and occasionally use (although more often than the stats on my blog-widget would indicate!) so I didn't pay it much attention. Then Vicki Davis prodded me to join, and since I have a great deal of respect for her, I thought I'd look into it.

I duly joined, and entered 5 updates. But I can't see what else a person is supposed to do there. I seem to have acquired a friend - possibly the person who is behind Twitter (I can't connect to it today to check, but his name seemed familiar). I can't see for the life of me how to connect with people I know who already part of the network. I can see how to invite new people to join, but that doesn't help. I have spent some time watching the barrage of random snippets of information that get broadcast. I have looked at the map to see where everyone is. All very interesting, but so far, I haven't actually found out how to have a conversation with anyone or enter into a meaningful exchange.

I was feeling somewhat inadequate, until I saw this from Stephen Downes today. Now I feel a bit better, but I still can't help wondering whether I'm missing the whole point somehow.

There is a song that opens with the line "There must be more than this..." That line very aptly describes my feelings as I sat staring uncomprehendingly at the screen as the world map swung back and forth and snippets of information flashed before my eyes. The very fact that there is so much traffic must mean that people are getting something out of the whole thing. I just don't get it!

Anyone care to enlighten me?

Tagged with the goal meme

I have been tagged with the goal meme by Lynn. The idea is to list your goals and then to tag five other people. So here goes:

I am currently studying part time towards an MA in Education. I aim to finish that by October 2009. I am actually currently on track to finish a year early in October next year, but I don't want to put myself under undue pressure. The dissertation bit is a big ask! Apart from the MA, there is so much other learning I want to do. I want to make the most of learning opportunities that come my way, and to make opportunities to learn where they might not necessarily exist.

I hope to see more people become involved in this ongoing conversation that is Web 2.0, particularly the edublogosphere. I aim to do my best to make known the opportunities for disproportionate professional development. It bothers me that so few learning professionals have been bitten by the learning bug themselves. I don't understand how a learning professional can not be passionate about their own learning.

I want to make some changes to my job role, somehow regaining contact with learners. After 17 years of face-to-face contact with learners, two years without them has been too long. The thing is, I have had ample opportunity to go back to life as a full-time delivery consultant, but that's not what I want, either. I like the world of blended learning. Hmm. How to find a way to combine the two.

Since I started studying, I have allowed my exercise regime to slip and I have gained weight and lost condition. I keep promising to fix both those things. It's really simple: eat less, exercise more. The trick is finding the will!

I aim to go back to South Africa for a holiday next year with my husband and sons. I hope to spend a week on the east coast with my parents, and then to undertake the long trip down to Cape Town where some members of my husband's family live. In spite of all my talk about how I no longer belong in South Africa, I am worried that I will find it hard to leave Cape Town. I moved there 20 years ago this year, and it very quickly claimed my heart - it still has it, even 8 years after leaving, and there is just something about that mountain. I am one of many Capetonians who refer to it as "my mountain", but my devotion to that landmark runs so deep that even my friends call it "Karyn's mountain".

Okay - I think five is enough. So who shall I tag next? Apologies if any of those listed below have already been tagged earlier in the meme!

Artichoke

Mark Oehlert

Michael Gorey

Dave Cormier

Harold Jarche

Future of Education conference

You may not be a teacher - I’m not either. You may not work in the field of formal education - I don’t either. But for one reason or another, we’re all interested in education. Because we’re learners ourselves, or because we have children going through their education. Or because once, long ago, we had a teacher who scarred us for life, or empowered us beyond what we would have thought possible.

The Future of Education is an online confereence being organised by George Siemens on behalf of the University of Manitoba. The presenters are drawn from a wide range of sectors and countries, and the delegates (if the last of George’s conferences was anything to go by) will be an even more eclectic lot. The Elluminate platform absolutely rocks! The presenters are able to make use of a whiteboard for slides, and their presentation is delivered real time over the audio channel. Delegates have access to a chat facility during the presentation, any may pose questions or make observations this way, or by “raising a hand” to request the microphone. Conversations continue after the presentation via the conference Moodle. Considering the logistics involved, a remarkable sense of community is established.

Be there. No, really - be there!

The gatekeepers of truth

This is one that has been knocking about in my head for a few weeks now. I have touched on the matter in conversation with a few people, so you might have heard my musings on this subject before. My thoughts are still not really defined, but I need to unload them because they are taking up too much space in my head, and something in the graphic of this post from Mark Berthelemy has set the bees buzzing again.

In the not-quite-two-years that I've been reading, commenting on and writing blog posts, I have learnt more than in the preceding 17 years as a learning professional. Many of my ideas ideas have changed completely - not only in respect of my own job and immediate working environment, but on wider issues as well, both professional and personal. The list in my aggregator has changed often and continues to change. The posts that appear in these blogs, the comments on my own posts, the responses to my comments on other blogs, the conversation that is generated... all these things inform me, mould me and move me forward in my learning journey.

However, I have noticed that some people somehow seem to have become gatekeepers. The holders of "yes". They take issue with what other people have to say, but seem either to reject or ignore when people take issue with their views. They appear to have moved past the "that's a good point, I hadn't considered that angle" stage. I'm not going to mention names - that would be rude - but as you read this, I wonder if you aren't thinking of one or two people in your own blogroll/aggregator list who fit the description.

So who are they learning from? Are they still learning? How did they get into that position? Did they choose it themselves? Did they come to believe their own press? Or did we (their readers) make it happen?

We promote a we-are-all-learners-together approach to the classroom, encouraging teachers to move from sage-on-the-stage to guide-on-the-side. Some of our blogging teachers enthuse about how they constantly learn from their students, which is very exciting evidence that it works. But I'm a bit worried that we might be in danger of not practising what we preach in our online community. From where I'm sitting, we certainly seem to have developed a few sages on the stage. Am I wrong? Does their learning happen in an "advanced class" I have yet to discover? Like an Escher etching, am I fooled by the perspective of the view from where I'm sitting? Can I move to a different place where the view changes?

Just wondering...

Ken Robinson on whether schools stifle creativity

I saw this some time ago, but someone recently drew it to my attention again and thought it was worth a mention here - it certainly still has relevance!

This month's big question: PowerPoint

Ah, so this month's big question touches on one of my hot topics: PowerPoint. I have very strong feelings on the subject of PowerPoint, but my current circumstances have sapped me of the energy needed to do this question any real justice. So please pardon me while I cop out and point to "one I made earlier."

Apologies for the apathy.

Musings about bullying and victimisation

There has been much talk lately about cyberbullying. And with good reason. I suspect that the feelings people have when they are bullied are the same, regardless of whether the bullying is conducted in the physical or the virtual, by snail mail or text message. What follows is a description of my own current experience.

Over this past weekend, the whole family was indoors when a large clod dirt suddenly hit the window ledge and shattered. We raced outside to investigate, only to have to duck as several more followed. My husband called out for the perpetrators to stop. We stood on chairs to see whether we could identify the assailants, who began to throw rocks at us. One narrowly missed my elder son's head. By this time, I had picked up the phone and dialled the police. My son called out to the perpetrators that this was the case. Another barrage of rocks answered.

The policewoman on the phone asked me who was doing this and why. She kept insisting that we must be able to describe the people, but of course, we were too busy ducking rocks to get a proper look, and between volleys, they were too careful not to be seen. We were able to see which house the rocks were coming from, were unable to identify the address, since the house is in a street that backs onto ours. This, too frustrated the policewoman who felt we should be able to provide this information.

When we bought this house almost two years ago. Many who knew us read into the purchase the decision to set down roots in the UK. Perhaps they were right, but since we moved into the house, I have had cause to call the police several times - something we have not had to do before.

Some of those times, I have already posted about. In addition, there have been other incidents of stone throwing; there has been the theft of bicycles; eggs being thrown at our house; my car being "keyed;" my younger son being threatened and harassed on his paper round. The only time the police have actually come here was after the happy slapping incident (see link above). This is because the others have been petty crimes and no-one has been hurt.

What I can say, though, is that many of these minor crimes add up. They wear a person down. While I recognise that many of the incidents are random, there has been a veritable campaign of egg- and stone-throwing. After this last incident, I informed my husband, "I don't want to live here anymore." He asked whether I was referring to the house or the country, and to be honest, I don't know the answer to that one. I feel victimised, singled out. I know in my head that the police have bigger fish to fry, but I feel abandoned and unsupported. And if I were to run away from the problem, where could I go where I could be sure that it wouldn't be just the same... or worse?

I imagine that all victims of bullying feel this same sense of helplessness and puzzlement. Why me? Why us? What have I/we ever done to them?

Note: we were subsequently able to identify one of the people as a boy from my sons' school who, together with his father, plays cricket with my husband and elder son for the local village team. And of course, I am agonising over what we have done to him to warrant this kind of treatment - there has certainly been no sign of acrimony during the long Sunday afternoon cricket matches.

The value of "I don't know"

I've been thinking a lot lately about what constitutes effective teaching. Often I come back to the view that teaching is more about who you are than what you do. So yesterday I expressed the view that passion, zeal, etc. were more valuable to a teacher than having all the answers.

Today I'd like to speak out in defence of the phrase "I don't know". Some years ago, I met up with the woman who had taught me English and history during my final two years of high school. She confessed to me that her spelling was very poor, which was the reason for her stock in trade response when anyone in the class asked how to spell a word: she would point in the direction of the dictionary on the front table. The idea then was that the student had to find the word in the dictionary and then write it on the board. The truth was that she often didn't know how to spell the word and hoped to improve her own spelling through this sneaky tactic. The occasion was an old girls' reunion and there were several teachers in the room. This anecdote generated a round of similar stories, to much hilarity. The point being that revealing ignorance to your students was a bad move.

Looking back now, I wonder about this. Why is it so risky to admit ignorance? Why must a teacher seem infallible? Surely that sets artificial standards for the learners to aspire to? It jsut smacks too much of gamesmanship to my mind (non-sequitur: isn't it weird that "gamesmanship" and "sportsmanship" are often mutually exclusive concepts?)

I was recently in a meeting where the client asked a question. The question was answered by the provider - totally inaccurately. I was appalled. He obviously had no idea, but dared not risk exposing this fact to the client. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why he didn't simply turn the question over to someone on his team who knew the real answer. Similarly, if a teacher can't admit to a student that s/her doesn't know the answer, surely this opens the door to minsinformation?

If you don't know, but pretend you do, then you remain ignorant and your learner enters the world of thinking he knows when he doesn't.

I haven't always got it right, but when my learners asked me a question to which I didn't know the answer, the tactic I adopted was honesty: "I don't know, let's ask Google." "I don't know, does anyone else know?" "I don't know, why don't you try it and see?" "I don't know, let's check Help." "I don't know, but I will find out and email the answer to you. Would anyone else like to have that information?"

Even before I learned about clever things like peda- and andragogy, collaborative learning, constructivism, and all stuff, it seemed to me to be a logical approach to set the scene as being a journey we were all on together, and in which we could all learn from each other. I don't believe in lying to my kids, and I don't believe in lying to my learners. If you don't know, and say so, you create the potential for an outcome where you do know and where your learners know, too.

I can't see the downside.

Looking at learning: the importance of caring

A paper I wrote for my Masters' course took me back to my early days as a classroom-based IT trainer, running courses in things like DOS 3.3, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and the like.

My first taste of the world of IT training took place very soon after the first course I attended myself. This was way back in pre-history (well, 1989) and the trainer who ran my DOS course was atrocious. She obviously knew her stuff - there was no doubt about that, and by blindly copying her every action, we produced some very nice little interactive menus by means of which we could launch various apps on our PCs (using a function called edlin - for those who are interested).

But, in order to be able to use the operating system, one needed to know a fair amount about syntax. DOS had this infuriating little error message: Invalid command or filename - that popped up if your syntax (or your spelling or typing, for that matter) was less than exact. And screaming "But why?" at the computer elicited nothing helpful. I know. I tried. Smashing the keyboard repeatedly with both fists was equally fruitless. Rather than editing the autoxec.bat file, creating beautiful menus and writing little batch files so that we could automate the process of launching our software, what we needed to know was how to find files, how to create directories (read "folders"), how to delete files, copy files, how to format floppy disks, how to back up... that kind of stuff.

For some reason, I understood what the trainer was saying to us, and I spent the best part of the day explaining it to the rest of the class. One member of the class must have reported this on their happy sheet, because the very next day, I received the call to run the next DOS course. And so, somewhat serendipitously began what would become my career in learning and development. I would frantically work through the course manual to prepare for a course in an application I had never/hardly used before. I was quite often only one step ahead of my learners. Scary. But we muddled through, and they learnt how to use the help feature, the course material and the hard copy user manuals.

The sudden upswing in requirement for IT training meant that almost anyone with a certain level of proficiency could get drafted - I was a prime example. But quite often trainers were dire, and computer courses (as they tended to be known) were right up there with a trip to the dentist - necessary but painful. Why? Because having an understanding of the technicalities was no guarantee of an understanding of the learning process, or even of an interest in the learners' achievements post-training.

To my delight, it turned out that I was diferent. I was actually good at this. Occasionally, the sounds of my "class" laughing uproariously generated complaints from some of the other trainers, but by and large, the verdict was that learning about computers could be fun. After all, how many trainers do you know who explain absolute referencing in spreadsheets by
getting their learners to do a little dance?

Don't get me wrong, I might be blowing my own trumpet here, but I'm not claiming that I was unique - just in the minority. What made the difference was that I (and others like me) cared... a whole lot. We had empathy with the learner's position, and tried to approach things from where s/he was at.

Empathy. Passion. Enthusiasm. Zeal. These were the qualities we started with, and we learned the software skills along the way. Starting from the other end of the equation, in other words, starting with the software skills, was often a less successful tactic.

I have always maintained that skills can be learned - especially technical ones. But good teachers care about their learners. They are interested in seeing their learners take the baton and run with it. They care about their subject. They believe that the things they are teaching the learners are going to benefit them in some way. They become spontaneously animated when discussing matters related to their subject.

Recently, during a break in one of our sessions at university, one of my classmates (a music teacher) asked another of my classmates (a biology teacher) whether there was any truth to the rumour that margarine was so unhealthy that he might as well stick with oh-so-fattening butter. Her eyes lit up, she waved her arms, she drew pictures, she explained the molecular structure of margarine and what makes it unhealthy. He asked questions. He pointed at the pictures she had drawn. He made observations. I have no idea whether either of them bothered with tea that evening - they were in a little world of their own, and they were having FUN!

The many facets of me

I've been given cause to think a lot lately about the tension between the various aspects of our beings. For example, in no particular order, I am a:

• woman
• wife
• mother
• worshipper
• practising Christian
• singer
• learning professional
  
• voter
• teacher
• student
• step-sister
• stepdaughter
• social media user
• member of online communities
• learning designer
• learner
• leader
• human
• homeowner
• half-sister
• friend
• follower
• female relative of various other sorts
• expatriot
• employee
• colleague
  
• driver/road user
  
• daughter
• citizen
• blogger
• birth-mother-but-not-mom
• swimmer
• customer
  

I'm sure I've left several out, but you get the idea.

I don't think of these roles as being things I pick up and put down. I am always a daughter, even when I am concentrating on driving my car in rush hour traffic, and not thinking about my mother. I don't stop being a woman when I go to cast my vote. The fact that I am a Christian will influence the way I think about everything else. The fact that I am a wife will influence the way I conduct myself in a social setting.

And yet. And yet.

I am a chameleon. And I'm not talking about the outward matter of grooming - that's a given. I'm talking about more fundamental matters. When I speak on the phone to another South African, everyone in the room knows it - apparently my accent changes noticably. But it's not just that. My vocabulary changes in each situation. When I am counselling one of the members of the church group I lead, I use terminology that would not be acceptable when resolving a situation with a colleague. My confidence level fluctuates wildly. In respect of some of these roles, I am self-assured, in others, cripplingly insecure. My sense of self-worth is inconsistent. In some areas of my life, I know that I am valued - cherished, even; in others, I know that I am not - I may even be despised.

If one of my clients were to be a fly on the wall in my office, would his view of me change for the better or the worse? If my friends were to overhear my next performance appraisal with my manager, would they recognise the Karyn they know? If I had a party which was attended by people from work and people from church, would I be conflicted as to how to behave?

There are times when my leadership role is in tension with my family commitments; when my role as a student conflicts with my role as a mother; when my role as friend puts pressure on the wife in me. Some of the more recently added roles are in tension with some of the longer standing ones, and I'm struggling to assemble the pieces of the tangram into a shape that I can live with, without hypocrisy.

Is this just a symptom of our times? Do we all spread ourselves too thin, and should I just learn to "deal"?

Home? What's that?

Wendy Wickham’s recent poignant video tribute to the Virginia Tech tragedy includes a line that is the latest is many things that have got me thinking about what the word “home” means. Another was a comment on one of my recent series of holiday-related posts.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I live in England as a foreigner. I was born in South Africa and I lived there for over three and a half decades before concern for my children’s safety and future prospects prompted us to move here. I don’t mean to imply that those who have not left are less concerned for their children, but there are many factors that influenced our decision.

One of the first thing people want to do when they hear me speak – often even in the most fleeting encounters, like at the supermarket checkout – is to identify my accent. “Where are you from?” they ask. And they don’t want to know where I live. They want to know where I’m from. Of course, it’s great that they’re interested. What they don’t realise is how the question says “you’re different, you don’t fit the model” and when you hear that question almost every day, the subliminal message is reinforced.

Quite often people follow up the question with others. Do you like it here? What made you come here? More than once I have been asked, “What made you decide to come back?” Back? What on earth does that mean? The first time I ever travelled outside of South Africa was when I emigrated. One of my great-grandfathers was from England, and one great-grandmother from Scotland. All my other greats (and everyone subsequent to them) were born in South Africa. But for the people who asked this question, there was the inconscious assumption that England remained “home” in the ex-colonies.

Recently, a woman insisted that I wasn’t foreign. I was puzzled. In every way, I am foreign. I was born abroad. I have a foreign passport. I speak with a foreign accent. I speak a few foreign languages – one of them with native fluency. I live by different mores. I have a different history. I support a different national team. I asked her why she thought that. She didn’t have a reason, but she was repeated that she couldn’t think of me as being foreign. It dawned on me that she was trying to pay me a compliment, and I was floored as to why anyone would think I would be flattered by this assertion… or insulted by its reverse.

After 8 years, England is still not home. So where is home? South Africa?

I have not been to South Africa since a visit in December 02/January 03, and by then, both it and I had changed. So yes, South Africa is home, but South Africa circa 1999 for Karyn circa the same time period. Neither of which exist any longer. In Wendy’s video, someone says that Blacksberg is where they feel safe – the place they go back to when they need to feel secure. This is often the way people describe home. In the light of that description, there are many countries no-one would ever call home, including the people indigenous to the area for countless generations. South Africa is arguably among them.

I think home is where you feel you belong. Whether you feel safe there or not. It’s the place where you don’t have to keep explaining yourself to people. In these terms I no longer have a home. I don’t belong here, and I no longer belong there.

My husband’s family emigrated to South Africa from Sweden when he was a child. He has lived much of his life in this state of not belonging. All the time we were in South Africa, he said he belonged in Sweden. When we visit there, he feels closer to belonging than he does anywhere else, probably because he has family there, but even there he is an anomaly. His Swedish is not 100% fluent and he speaks it with a South African accent. His life experience has been different. He has played different sports (Who ever heard of a Swedish cricketer? Yet he opened the batting for a first division side in Cape Town).

So how will it be for my children? They have a Swedish father, a South African mother and they’re growing up in England. Their accents are almost English. Their passports are Swedish. Their diet is largely South African – especially in the summer. I have asked them where they feel they belong. My younger son wants to stay in England, but feels he doesn’t belong here. My elder son wants to return to Africa for at least a year, but doesn’t think he belongs there. He doesn’t want to stay here, but doesn’t know where he does want to go. They both regard themselves as Swedish, although they have never lived there and neither of them speaks more than a few words of the language.

We own a house. We pay tax. We vote in elections. But in one sense we are homeless. Sojourners. We don’t really belong anywhere.

Most of the time we just get on with the business of living, but there are times when the sense of dispossession hits hard and deep. Seeing communities pull together the way folks have in Blacksberg makes me realise that, at some level we all want to belong. The way they have risen up and defiantly shouted to the skies that they are hokies-and-proud-of-it is reminiscent of the sense of national identity after 9/11 when, for a while, people stopped being Irish American, Latino, African American, Native American, Polish, whatever, and became American.

Afterthought: I noticed several apparently foreign names in the list of the Blacksberg deceased and I wonder whether in life they also felt “apart” as I do. In death, they are an integral part of the community, and mourned as such. I wonder whether this only applies to those brutally cut off in their prime.

10 reasons it's good to be home

You know what it's like - you go away on holiday, you eat too much, you sleep 10 hours a day, you do very little of anything that smacks of work... and then you have to go home. So, on Sunday night, with the post holiday blues, I decided to draw up a list of 10 reasons I was glad to be home. A bit of a "count your blessings" exercise if you like. It probably has no relevance to learning, but what the heck, here goes...

1. My bed.
I LOVE my bed. We have a fat, down-filled duvet (dooner to Aussies, I don't know what it's called in North America) that I use all year round. On holiday, we had sheets and blankets that kept falling off. Also, we had twin beds on holiday. At home we share a standard double. Much cosier.

2. Driving
In Spain, they drive on the right hand side of the road, in the UK it's the left. I have never driven on the right. Nor has my husband, but he was daring enough to have a go, so we hired a car. Our first trip was to our hotel, 70 or so kms from the airport, which we had to undertake in the dark, since we landed around midnight. All the unconscious means my husband uses to judge his position turned out not to work so well on the other side of the road, and I spent the entire journey in stark terror, as we ventured far too close (by my estimation anyway) to the edge of the road. I was NOT a good passenger, and I opted there and then out of trying my hand at driving. Coward. I know. The morning after we arrived home, I slid behind the wheel of my car and tootled up to the shop to get milk. I appreciated again the first sense of liberation one gets on becoming a driver. Which brings me to

3. My car
I don't have a fancy car. I drive a silver 2006 model Peugeot 307 HDi. It is my second one of these. I traded in the previous model when it went out of warranty. When I got that first one, it was a 3 month old ex-demo model and the newest car I had ever owned. Oh, sure, my husband has had newer, fancier cars, which have been a dream to drive. But this was mine. I have always had a thing about cars - I spent my very early years side by side with my Dad under cars, acting as his toolhand, and my stepdad later taught me to service and maintain my own car so that I wouldn't get ripped off by unscrupulous mechanics, so I was often to be found with grease up to my elbows, face first under the hood of my car, tinkering contentedly (I wouldn't know where to start on the modern models, however!). I tend to drool over cars in a way usually associated with the male of the species. From they day I got that first Peugeot, I stopped drooling. Sure, I would still like to own a 1979 MGB in British racing green or pillar box red, or an Audi of almost any description (just not the TT - you can keep that), or a nice Mustang or Buick (both of these are in short supply in the UK), but I'm content.

4. My cats
I have two moggies. Molly and Daisy. While we were away, our neighbours fed them and kept an eye on them. They came to no harm at all - they are cats, after all, and very self-sufficient. When we got home, they were somewhat startled - it was 2am after all - but they quickly recovered their equilibrium and told us at great length about the adventures they had had during our absence. Of course, they tried to persuade us that they were starving and hadn't been fed in two weeks, so needed double portions immediately, but the evidence was against them. They grudgingly conceded defeat and lavished affection on my husband. Note: they are my cats, and John is a dog person. No matter - they both adore him and allow me to feed them and change their litter and clean up after them and brush them and and and

5. Being understood in shops... and understanding the replies
In spite of having a foreign accent, I never have trouble making myself understood when shopping in the UK. In Spain, I was often unable to explain what I was looking for, and even when I was (for example: "donde esta la leche" - even if it isn't correct grammar was close enough so that the shop assistant knew I was looking for the milk), the rapid fire answer left me looking blank. I have similar experience when we go to Sweden to visit my in-laws. My Swedish is now good enough so that I can frame questions and make simple statements, but I'm bamboozled when these elicit a response from the natives!

6. Finding the products I need
The whole time we were in Mallorca, we never once saw any fresh meat for sale. We could buy processed meats of various descriptions, and the restaurants were obviously able to source the stuff from somewhere, but the supermarkets didn't stock it, and we didn't see a single butcher. We also got confused about where to shop for other things. Pharmacies only stock medical type items. If you want nail varnish, cosmetics or aftershave, you need to go to a perfumery. Neither of us smokes, but we noticed that supermarkets don't stock cigarettes - these must be bought from a tobacconist.

7. Business hours
We needed to find a pharmacy on one occasion. We knew of 3 in the town, but none of them appeared to be open for two (week)days in a row, even though their business hours, posted outside, were shown as 10-2 and 4-6. On the third day, they were all open, even outside of those hours. Many shops close for two or more hours over lunch time, but then they stay open until 8 at night. Nothing much is open before 10am. I'm sure if we were to live there, this would become normal, but we're accustomed to the hours in the UK, so we kept getting the timing wrong.

8. Church
We attend a very lively, pentecostal, charismatic church in the UK. We didn't see any churches at all in Cala Millor. We know they exist, since we saw evidence that people had attended a service. Chances are, of course, that any church would have been Catholic, so the service would have been even more alien to us than even the language difference would indicate, and we would have been unable to participate. Of course, we observed Easter together as a family (no Easter eggs - those aren't available in Spain), but we missed the wild and woolly bunch with whom we normally spend our Sunday mornings.

9. Familiar etiquette
I have no desire to imply that Spanish or German (the nationality of most of the other holiday makers) people are rude, but the protocols are different. Several times, we would hold a door open for someone, and they would march straight past us without even acknowledging the act, let alone thanking us for it. We felt very slighted. No doubt we frequently offended people in our turn by not observing some or other protocol of which we were unaware. Perhaps we offended by holding the door open, thereby implying that they were incapable of doing this for themselves!

10. Dog poo
No, I haven't returned to a mound of the stuff. Quite the contrary. In the UK, dogs must be on leashes at all times if they are outside of their homes, and their owners must clean up after them or face a fine. Many people ignore this rule, but most are pretty good. I have never seen a dog wandering about on its own in the UK. We saw several in Mallorca. Even when the owners were with their dogs, though, and even when the dogs were on leashes, there was no attempt to clean up their - ahem - leavings.

And one thing I will miss...

It appears that the nanny state does not exist in Spain. At least not in the same measure as it does in England. It seems people have a measure of freedom that has been lost here. Of course, this has its downs as well as its ups. Some of the issues I've covered above are the result of that freedom. And there are other negative points, too - smoking is still permitted in many restaurants in Mallorca and, where there are signs that say that it is forbidden, the people smoke anyway. I saw a woman backhand her child across his face in a store, and no-one turned a hair. In the UK, she would have been in serious trouble.

However, the State has not seen fit to dictate to people about every last aspect of their lives, and they get on with the business of living, raising their children, ruining their health, running their businesses and walking their dogs in the way they see fit. In the restaurants, the proprietors were prepared to let us make the choice as to whether our children may drink wine or sangria, rather than citing a rule about ages. There don't seem to be rules that govern every little thing (or perhaps there are and people just ignore them, like the prohibido fumar - smoking prohibited - signs) which means that people have to take ownership themselves, and be grown-ups.

Games and simulations - keep them consistent!

Over the course of our recent holiday, my sons spent a large amount of time playing PSP games. This is not unusual in itself. What is unusual is that I was in earshot much of the time and got to experience their frustrations by proxy.

I have recently been thinking about the use of games and simulations in learning - trying to figure out what place they might hold, etc. - so I was alert to their observations. I'm still not sure how to reconcile learner-driven just-in-time learning with the serendipitous, learning-by-immerson world of simulations, but regardless of how these things fit together, it has become abundantly clear to me that simulations must observe some rules:

• If the player is leading a race by 10 seconds, and the second-placed, system-controlled competitor is not catching up according to the images on screen, then the player must win. He cannot be pipped at the post by a competitor that was clearly eating his dust.
• When the player is in second place, the leading car must not straddle the centre line when cornering - it must take the inside lane as would be the case in real life.
  
• If getting back onto your motorbike after a spill takes 2 seconds when you are in third place, it must not take 5 seconds when you are in first.
• Clipping your wing mirror must not cause your car to roll 5 times and end up on its roof off the track. Especially not if it only does this if you are in the lead.

To summarise:
1. They must be more or less realistic within their own set of paradigms (perhaps believable would be a better word)
2. They must be consistent
3. They must not cheat!

I would have given up faced with the frustrations they experienced, and elder son's temper was tried to extremes at times, but he is a stubborn and determined child, and he persevered.

Meanwhile, I muttered into my pen-and-paper sudoku...

A painful lesson

Of course, as learning professionals, we know that we are always learning, and usually thinking about learning. And going away on holiday doesn't mean that we switch off our brains.

My own recent trip to Spain was no exception. I had a very painful opporunity to remember some key things about the learning process. It had to do with clarity of message.

We had a very relaxing holiday, marred somewhat by the fact that we had pretty miserable weather. The first couple of days were sunny-to-partly-cloudy but not hot. Thereafter, it clouded over and rained on and off until the last day, when the sun shone (of course). Feeling the need to acquire at least some measure of a tan, I decided to pay my first-ever visit to a solarium.

I popped in during the morning, and found a very pleasant German lady in attendance. Her English was excellent and she assured me that a single session would give me a hint of colour. I am very careful about my tanning, taking it gradually and building up my exposure. She assured me that a single session would do me no harm, and would lay the foundation I was seeking. Since I had one of my sons with me at the time, I decided to return later in the day alone. Confident that there would be no communication problems, I left my phrase book at home when I returned.

Big mistake.

There had been a change of shift and the lady now on duty was Spanish without a word of English or German to her credit. Uh-oh. In my best (non-existent) Spanish, I asked her for "instrucciones". Using very simple Spanish and sign language, she told me to pop my tokens into the slot machine, whereafter I would have "dos minutos" to strip off and lie down on the sunbed, which I would then pull closed over me, and that was all there was to it.

This was a breeze, I thought. Even I couldn't botch this. It all went very smoothly. When I emerged from the bed, I could see the signs that there would be colour in due course (I have a strange skin that doesn't tan immediately - it acquires a bluey-grey tinge, which over the course of the next 4 hours, goes brown or, if I've overdone it, pinky brown). Emerging from the booth, I found two German ladies trying to make themselves understood. They enlisted my help to try to get the attendant to understand that they each wanted 20 minutes at the highest setting. The alarm bells started. I hadn't known anything about settings. They were both well tanned ladies. The lady that used my booth before me was Spanish and well tanned. No doubt, she had opted for the "highest setting" as well, which I had not changed. So I had just had just subjected my winter-white skin to its first dose of sun to the tune of 20 minutes - which was in fact two sessions - at the highest setting.

Within an hour, the discomfort had started. By that night, I was lobster red (no exaggeration) in places and very pink in others. I could barely move, and I radiated heat. I had only once been more sunburnt and that was when I fell asleep in the sun after an all night party in my misspent youth many, many years ago. I was very glad that I had opted to wear my two-piece during the session, rather than opting for the all-over approach. Several days later, the lobster red bits are now brownish pink and only slightly tender to the touch.

So what has all this got to do with learning?

Well: it's important to ensure that instructions are clearly understood. Just as important - instructions must cover everything that will have an impact on the outcome. You can't afford to assume what your users already know/don't know, unless you have a process by which to check this at the outset. In my case, the result was a couple of days of severe discomfort. It could have been worse.

Lesson learned. If/when I ever visit a solarium again, I will make sure that I understand the recommendations for my skin type very clearly beforehand!

Service with a snarl

I am holiday with my family at the moment. We decided to push the boat out and do the tourist thing. So we are staying in some beautiful apartments right on the beach on the east coast of Majorca (or Mallorca, of you prefer - it´s the same thing).

When I told a colleague where we had booked, he said that this was the part of the island favoured by Germans. He wasn´t wrong. The service staff at the hotels and shops all have German as their second language. We were warned that we would receive bad service if we were thought to be English - apparently English holiday makers have a bad reputation abroad. This proved true, too. After one night of incredible rudeness, and an accusation of shoplifting, we decided to set people straight. When asked if we are English, we now say, "No, but we can speak the language." This then gives rise to a major curiosity about our heritage, and how did a Swedish man and a South African woman (a) meet and marry and (b) wind up living in England? We have been treated wonderfully well and declared a "very nice family" by several people. We have been given free gifts and all sorts of perks.

Isn´t it weird? We are the same people who were thought to be so deplorable on that first night. We haven´t changed, but the attitudes of the people we meet couldn´t be more different - simply because we are not English. It would be interesting to do a survey on how people´s attitudes are formed and to what extent they are justified. When I think of the English people I know, it seems totally off.

For now, I´m enjoying the sun and the sea, oh and the food and the cocktails...