British people losing track of their own history

I can just imagine what Doug Belshaw thinks of this!

To be honest, I'm having a bit of a wry chuckle. It is a regular British pastime to make derogatory remarks about American intelligence and general knowledge. My own experience is that many English people are no better informed, and a recent survey would seem to bear this out.

It seems one in four British people think that Winston Churchill and Florence Nightingale were fictitious characters, while about half think Sherlock Holmes was real. I can understand a measure of ignorance around the "lady of the lamp" - after all, she was around during the Crimean War, but Churchill's lifespan and mine overlapped, so an enormous number of Britons alive today must have heard and seen the man's state funeral. And, since he (and Ms Nightingale, for that matter) loomed large in my own history curriculum in far away, darkest (okay, so it was probably lightest, so sue me!) Africa, I simply cannot fathom how he escaped the notice of so many people in his homeland.

It may well be that Churchill featured so prominently in the South African history syllabus because of the time he spent there during the second Anglo-Boer war, but that wouldn't explain the inclusion of Florence Nightingale.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the survey was that of Charles Dickens who appears to have been a fictional character featuring in his own books!

Funday Monday

Vicki Davis has declared this Funday Monday. Her post on the subject includes several YouTube clips guaranteed to raise a smile. She has challenged her readers to make a contribution to the notion of Funday Monday.

While this isn't exactly funny... and most people have probably seen it by now, it gives me such a boost, so I thought I'd include it here.

Tag. You're it!

What would you ask him?

As part of my research towards my dissertation, I am going to be interviewing the person responsible for blocking access to all forms of social from within our organisation. In the interests of evenhandedness, I need to make sure that I don't go in there with a one-eyed point of view and a list of questions that serve my own agenda.

What would you ask him?

My husband, who is a CIO himself, has started the ball rolling with the following questions:

• What was the business case for blocking access to social media?
  
• What is the impact of allowing free access to social media?
• What is the impact of blocking access to social media?

Where have I disappeared to?

Navel gazing warning.

Recently, I was given a psychometric test. Yes, yes, I know! I'm not a fan of them either. I don't like the idea of pigeonholing people. I believe we are too complex and too able to change in response to the situation in which we find ourselves to be categorised. My own view is that there are about 6 billion personality styles, learning styles or whatever.

In this instance, the test involved ranking four statements: one as being least true of me, one as being most true of me and the remaining two on a scale of 1 to 5 of accuracy. However, it was not possible to give them the same rating. Based on Jungian theories, and not a million miles from Peter Urs Bender's model.

The problem is that in some cases the thing that was least true of me, was still very true of me and, in other cases, the thing that was most true of me wasn't very true of me at all. Sometimes more than one statement was equally un/true of me.

Be all that as it may, I was given a profile statement.

Much of what it contained was true. Some of what it said could be true of just about anybody. Some of what it said was totally inaccurate. This was my impression, which was echoed by my husband, who knows me as well as anyone.

Overall, the impression was of a confident, outgoing, bubbly person to whom others are drawn. Popular in the workplace, naturally endowed with leadership skills, happily followed by others.

I could have cried. I knew this girl. This was the girl who left South Africa nearly 9 years ago to come and live in England.

But she has disappeared, to be replaced by someone who is something of a cultural misfit, causing raised eyebrows and rolled eyes wherever she goes. Opening her mouth far too often for the liking of the English populace, only to say things they find difficult to deal with. Assailed by self-doubt, and permanently somewhat bewildered, like a person with no sense of rhythm desperately trying to clap in time with everyone else, but unable to crack the code and read the signs.

I miss her.

She made a brief appearance at Learning Technologies during the week, and she tends to emerge in online spaces, where there seems to a be a community more accepting of her.

Bless him, Jay Cross looked me in the eye as we parted company at the end of the conference and said with quiet (and, yes, Jay is a rather quieter man than one might expect) certainty, "You're in the wrong place."

It was sobering to realise the extent to which living in the UK has influenced me, and not all for the better.

Hmm. Off to the drawing board, methinks!

I learned to draw a marble!

Today, my team attended an Articulate workshop, run by my colleague, Mark Berthelemy. I've done some work with Articulate before, so, while I picked up all sorts of little bits and pieces, I didn't learn anything earth shatteringly new in that respect.

Ironically, I pushed the boundaries on my knowledge of an app that I know extremely well. An app on which I ran training courses for so long during my years as an IT trainer, that I can't even remember when it started. A little thing called PowerPoint, with which I have a love/hate relationship. I love what I can achieve with PowerPoint. I hate being subjected to what some people are pleased to call PowerPoint presentations. And if I never see another bullet point again it will be too soon!

But I digress.

One thing I learned today, which was totally incidental to the issue at hand, was how to use the "drawing" feature in PowerPoint (or Word, or any of a myriad other apps for that matter) to draw a very realistic looking 3-D marble. The lesson was being used as an example of passive learning that is still engaging. It certainly proved to be so because, when Mark felt that he had made his point and wanted to continue with the Articulate workshop, I wouldn't let him! I had to see it through.

Then I came home and showed off my new skill to my husband and taught my sons how to draw marbles.

So I may well have lost my marbles, but it seems I can just draw myself a whole bag of new ones.

Okay, so I'm never going to conquer the world with this new found skill, and it isn't going to move my career forward any time soon, but I'm having fun... and tell me you're not secretly impressed by my marbles!

Learning Technologies 2008 - initial reaction

I've just returned home after spending two days at the Learning Technologies 2008 conference. I will be giving some more measured feedback over the next few days, but I thought I'd get my initial reactions off my chest right away, which means I am unlikely to be able to give all the links that should - please google any of the names I mention that may be currently unfamiliar to you - you won't regret it!

I was acting as the rapporteur on one of the training tracks - as it happens, I got to report on the track I would have chosen to attend, had I gone to the conference as a paying delegate, namely Learning Technology. As well as the keynote addresses by Jay Cross, Itiel Dror and Nigel Paine, my track consisted of presentations by: Donald Clark, Josie Fraser, Stephen Downes, Joel Greenberg, Sara Bingham & Kirstie Donnelly, Marco Tippmer, Gordon Bull, Andrew Butt, Jane Hart and Claire Line.

I also (and now I'm just showing off) got to go out for dinner with Don Taylor, Jay Cross, Clive Shepherd and Jane Hart. What a pleasure it was to spend an evening in the company of such enthusiastic, passionate, well-past-the-koolaid-point optimists! Wonderful not to be the only one who becomes animated and wild-eyed on the subject of learning and learners.

I came away from the conference with a weird feeling of someone who had taken uppers and downers at the same time: enthused and frustrated, buoyed and depressed. How exciting to discover that my thinking is in tune with that of some of the leaders of our field. How gratifying to discover that I'm not the voice in the wilderness after all. How frustrating that I don't get to put very much of it into practice. I can't remember whether it was George Siemens or me who said this during an exchange of emails, but my feelings are a bit: "okay, so we know what we should be doing, we know when we should be doing it (now), so why aren't we doing it?"

McDonalds, FlyBe and Network Rail to offer A-levels

The news reports in the UK are all a-twitter this morning with the news that the first tranch of employers has been empowered to award A-level equivalent diplomas to their staff, along the lines of the new, more vocational diplomas on offer at many schools.

For those not based in the UK, it might help to know that compulsory education in the UK ends at 16 with the GCSE (general certificate of secondary education). This certificate on its own is insufficient to gain access to a university, so those who plan to go this route will usually stay on for an optional two (or even three) years gaining three or more A-levels. While almost all high schools offer A-levels, since they are post-compulsory, they constitute further education (or FE). These A-levels are acceptable entrance criteria to a university (which constitutes higher education or HE).

Many students may go straight to work after GCSEs, while others may opt to go to college (as distinct from university) to study towards a diploma.

Of course, the public's attention has been captured by the notion of an "A-level in burger flipping". The other two organisations have hardly rated a mention. I'm fairly sure that McDonalds will look into issues other than burger flipping, but the cynicism levels are running high, right now.

Several universities have indicated that they consider the new diplomas to be lacking in academic rigour and will not accept them as valid entry criteria to the university.

I find myself torn on this subject. I can see why the universities might think that the vocational diplomas give insufficient indication of an individual's capacity/appetite for academic study. On the other hand, I gained access to my current Master's degree programme by piecing together odds and ends of formal education and producing evidence of 18 years worth of experience and informal, self-directed learning, and I have certainly not been left behind by those in my class with a more traditionally academic background. In fact, I am generally regarded as the best-read member of the class.

Then again, university is not the only way forward. And perhaps it's time society did away with academic snobbery.

In my days as a student, I dated two civil engineering students (not simultaneously!). One was studying towards a degree at the university, on a full bursary from the most prestigious corporation in the country. The other was studying towards a diploma at the Technikon (read polytechnic), with his fees being paid by an employer. The university student spent four years in the classroom. The technikon student spent four years doing rotations of six months in the classroom and six months on site. It was obvious that society viewed the first as being the superior individual, and he was certainly cleverer than the technikon student in an academic sense. But would this make him a better civil engineer? Would the bridges built under his supervision be better able to stand up to the rigours of constant traffic use?

I don't know what courses McDonalds, FlyBe and Network Rail are planning to offer, but it isn't helped by the sort of snideness the announcement is attracting (see the comments on the linked article).

Since McDonalds seems to have become the purveyor of the staple diet in the UK, and since air and rail travel are frequent topics of heated conversation, perhaps it is just as well that some work-based training is being set in place for these organisations!

After all, one of the questions we often ask in this space is: what is education for? Perhaps this is finally the beginning of educational programmes with an answer to that question.

Having said that, I don't relish the idea of a future in which all learning has to have an employment-related point. How narrow our lives would become if we only ever learned skills and information that would help us at work.

We see here the opporunity for employers to have a real impact on the future of learning. Perhaps we will see further dismantling of my bugbear: the wall between corporate and academic learning! It will be interesting to see whether it proves successful.

You want to know how to teach our kids? Ask us!

In his latest newsletter, George Siemens kicks off with this paragraph:

The current issue of Forbes is focused on educating our children. Numerous experts have put forward their theories in short articles. Missing, however, are the views and opinions of teachers, parents, and students. While the commentaries of prominent people will obviously gain more attention, I think more wisdom is likely to be found in educators in the trenches. Better yet, host a "submit your view of education" session on YouTube. Then allow the network to filter the best ideas. Or host the discussion in a wiki. Don't tell us how to fix education. Involve us in fixing education.

I couldn't agree more!

Year after year, when the school exam results are published and the boys have fallen even further behind the girls... yet again, they trot out experts to tell us why this is the case and to talk about what is going to be done to address this imbalance.

Year after year, I yell at the TV - don't tell me what you think is wrong... ask me what I think is wrong! I'm the mother of sons, I know a bit about learning. Give me (and others like me) 5 minutes! Track down a sample of their better teachers - preferably the male ones - and ask them.

So, just in case you care what I think (acknowledgement - this is a generalisation):

I think it has a lot a lot to do with what I have come to call oestrogen poisoning.

The proportion of male:female teachers in early years and primary school being what it is, by the time a boy reaches high school, chances are he has not yet been taught by even one male teacher. That represents a stream of teachers who, the research seems to suggest, think in an innately different way from him. With the best will in the world, a female teacher leads by example in feminine thought and learning strategies. I suspect that this means that the assessment/examination process reflects a feminine thought process, too. Of course girls will do better at this than boys!

Is it any wonder that, by the time he gets to high school, many a boy has decided that he isn't going to crack this learning thing? It might take him years to overcome the early conditioning and find a way of working that fits.

Also, it seems to be fairly cut and dried that boys develop/mature more slowly than girls. So why are we forcing formal education of them so early? Why must a child be in a particular year group based purely on his chronological age? Why can he not tackle the school year for which he is developmentally ready?

As a woman, I am delighted to see girls coming into their own. As a human being, and the mother of sons, I am appalled to see boys becoming marginalised. Unless we are trying to head towards a Wicker Man society (heaven forfend!) please, please will someone listen to what the parents and the teachers have to say, instead of these pontificating people who haven't been associated with a school going boy in years (if ever)!

Just like riding a bicycle!

Some learning seems to stay with you - even when you haven't used it in ages. Other learning seems to vanish like the mist after even a short period of non-use.

This weekend, I played two games of squash after a 20 year absence from the court. To my surprise, I hadn't altogether lost it. I usually knew where I needed to be, even when the ravages of time meant I couldn't get there. I also always knew what I needed to do when I got there, even when I couldn't quite pull it off. One thing I had forgotten - to my astonishment - was the cardinal rule of taking ownership of the "T" straight after a service!

My first game was against (and I use the word loosely, since we were really just knocking about) my husband, who kept me running around that court like the proverbial headless chicken! My second game was against my 16-year old son, who is fit, fast and sporty. I was delighted that this time it was I who had him running himself ragged all over the court.

By the end of the second game, I had successfully rediscovered the skill of digging a ball out of the back corner (albeit clumsily) and playing off the back wall (ditto). I was still forgetting to return to the "T", though!

A while ago, we took the family to Bletchley Park, home of the famous decryptors of the Enigma machine. In one room was a range of computers, representing the history of personal computing. One of them ran WordPerfect 5.0 on a DOS operating system (I forget which version). In the days that WordPerfect enjoyed 75% of the global market share, I ran more training sessions on both of those than I care to remember! Nevertheless, when I sat down in front of that PC, I couldn't for the life of me remember the key combinations associated with even the simplest of commands.

Some years ago, we visited the small island off the west coast of Sweden from which my husband's maternal family hails. The island doesn't allow motorised traffic other than the most delightful mopeds (see photo), and most people make their way about on bicycles. My mother-in-law (who grew up on the island) after many, many years out of the saddle, mounted her bicycle and cycled about competently within moments. It is fair to say that she later had an accident - not her fault - and was banned from cycling by her daughter for fear of broken bones, since, like many others of her "type", she suffers from mild osteoporosis.

However, the irony is that it took her far longer to regain the same level of confidence in her native tongue. She had been speaking English (with a strong Swedish accent) for so many years that, even at the end of the time we spent there, she had a tendency to lapse back into English (with...you guessed it... a strong Swedish accent) when she became animated.

For me, the common factor is that both the easily remembered skills were psychomotor, while those less easily recalled were more cognitive.

I wonder if anyone else has similar experiences or observations in this connection.

Copyright infringement: two options

I recently posted about my latest addiction, namely the Facebook application Scrabulous - by far the feature of Facebook I use most heavily. As the name implies, the game is pretty much an exact replica of Scrabble that can be played online.

Hasbro is not impressed.

Like over 25,000 other people (at the time of writing) I recently joined a Facebook group called "Save Scrabulous", from which comes the following:

On January 11, 2008, the world learned that Hasbro, creators of the popular game Scrabble, has sent a cease and desist letter to Facebook and others over the popular Facebook application Scraboulous. The copyright infringement is obvious and, in retrospect, the developers of Scraboulous should have done more to create their own spin on it (rather than using the same color systems and numerical systems and having the rules to Scraboulous game link to the Scrabble Wikipedia page).

We in this group realize this, but we urge Hasbro to make the right decision. Rather than kill this application, they should work out a peaceful compromise with the developers to keep this success going. Many of the daily 500,000+ users of Scraboulous never played Scrabble before, but they were introduced to it using this friendly and convenient format. This application earns roughly $25,000 monthly in revenues from advertisements, which part of which could theoretically go to Hasbro if the parties come to a peaceful compromise.

We urge Hasbro to make the right decision. Don’t tick off the millions of Facebook Scraboulous fans that use this application.

I would like to contrast this approach with another story about copyright infringement.

People outside of the UK may not have heard of England's less famous fictional bear: Paddington. Many years ago, a lady called Shirley Clarkson (mother of the more famous Jeremy) made her son and daughter, who loved the stories of this marmalade eating bear from Peru, a Paddington bear for Christmas. Shirley was skilled at making toys and the bear was a hit. People suggested there was a market for the product. Shirley blithely went ahead and made and sold a few of the bears to some local shops - blissfully ignorant of the breach of copyright. Not two weeks later, the author of the Paddington bear books, Michael Bond, walked by a store and recognised his bear in the window... except for one small difference. This bear was wearing wellington boots. In the books, Paddington had bare (bear?) feet. This was because, when she made him, the only way Shirley could get him to stand was to give him a little pair of wellies.

It could have turned very nasty. Instead, Michael Bond sought out the Clarksons and came to an agreement. They are friends to this day. He also went off and wrote a story in which Paddington came to be the proud owner of a pair of wellington boots.

As a consequence of this agreement, Shirley Clarkson's business grew from a one-woman cottage industry to become an international business. It is fair to say that the business later collapsed, but then Shirley happily admits that the she hasn't an ounce of business sense, and it seems she was duped by an unscrupulous business manager.

I think the story between Hasbro and the developers of Scrabulous could have been a much happier one. After all, I think it likely that Scrabulous has made Scrabble players out of people who might never otherwise have considered engaging in the game, in much the same way as JK Rowling made readers out of kids with the attention span of a gnat and zero interest in books.

Postscript: If you'd like to know more about Shirley's story, her book Bearly Believable My Part in the Paddington Bear Story is due for release in June. Please note that I have no connection with the book and stand to gain nothing from this - it just seemed the polite thing to do.

Stats, metrics and html. Oh fooey!

I've never really been driven by the numbers on my blog - just as well really, because they are rather paltry!

However, I did think I might use them to provide some quantitative material for my dissertation, which is why I installed a couple of metrics tools. From the outset, they gave me widely different readings, which Tony Karrer might have explained in the conversation in the comments on his recent post.

Then, in his comments on one of my recent posts, Doug Belshaw indicated that he had had trouble seeing my blog - that it bombed out while loading. Patrick Dunn and Mark Berthelemy have previously told me the same thing, so I decided the time had come to something about it, in the interests of what amounts to customer service, I guess.

I went into my template (always a dangerous undertaking considering my prodigious ignorance) and pruned the Java script, including one of the metrics tools, opting to lose the one that Mark indicated had a tendency to slow things down.

Cobbling together advice from different people (and probably adding apples to oranges in the process), I also moved the script for the remaing metrics tool into the "head" section of the template. Since then, my metrics have flatlined. Just 5 minutes ago, I tried moving the script into the "body" section and there's already been one hit on the site. Hopefully this means that I have now resolved the problem.

I tell you what, when it comes to html-ish, I am dangerous! The next thing I want to try and do is to create my own custom template using images and graphics that I have generated. But that is for another day! If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them... provided of course, that I understand them!

In the meantime, I hope you approve of the slightly amended, somewhat more streamlined appearance of my blog.

Animals or litter?

This link to a Youtube video of Theo Jansen's presentation to TED talks from the latest IDG connect newsletter. There is no denying that these are very clever beasties - well designed and even pleasing to the eye, and there are sure to be many ways in which they can prove useful.

Their creator envisages herds of them living on the beaches. Am I the only one who thinks that this will constitute a very sophisticated form of litter, with all that plastic? And will the elements not see to it that they become a great deal less pleasing to the eye over time?

A bit of fun: CD covers

Although this is supposed to be a meme and I haven't been tagged, I thought it was a bit of fun, so I had a go. Nod to Grandad over at Head Rambles.

If you're a teacher, I thought it might be quite fun to set as an extension exercise in the classroom for those kids who finish their work early.

So this is the deal:
Go here. The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
Go here. The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
Go here. The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

And this is my result:

Patonga is a place in New South Wales, it seems. The tail-end of the quote came from Oprah Winfrey, and the magnificent photo is one of an equally wonderful series taken by nevertorun, who might not be terribly impressed at having his/her photo thus purloined.

Watch what you say... and how you say it!

This is not really a contradiction of my earlier post about words.

In my job, we design a lot of bespoke elearning materials on behalf of clients, both internal and external. My team is content neutral, which means we are not subject matter experts on the content of the resources - that is usually the role of the client-side SME. Of course, as we work with the material, it becomes familiar to us, which makes QA a bit tricky. We have to try to ensure that the material makes sense to someone who is new to it. For this reason, we don't expose our QA person to the content until we are about ready to release the alpha version to the client. However, this has its downside, too, in that the QA person does not approach the material from the perspective of someone working in the field being addressed, so it isn't always easy to assess the appropriateness of assumptions made about basic levels of knowledge and competency.

This got me to thinking about a lot of things.

When you're delivering material in a classroom, you can assess how your learners are responding to what you say, and rephrase/rework if necessary. In distance learning - both on and off-line, you don't have that option, so you need to express yourself clearly first time around.

This affects your choice of words. In a recent post, I used the word "reactionary" which has two, apparently contradictory meanings. When I used it, I knew what I meant, so it didn't occur to me that it might be confusing to my readers. It was, so I updated the post.

I recently wanted to cite one of Stephen Downes's papers in an assignment for my post grad course, but in included a word that was unfamiliar to me. Knowing that Stephen's vocabulary is far broader than my own, I looked it up. No joy. I thought perhaps it was a Canadianism and searched for it that way. Nope. Eventually, sure that I was going to make a fool of myself, I emailed him and asked apologetically what "irredibly" meant. His reply was an enormous relief to me: it was a typo. He had meant to say "irreducibly". Of course, because he knew what he meant, every time he proofread the piece, he saw the word he knew was supposed to be there. Been there, done that!

It also affects the idiom we use. In my last company, we had a new system developed for us by an organisation which outsourced its development function to India. Part of the deal was that the user manual would also be written by the supplier. As the person who would take the lead on the rollout of the training, it fell to me to approve this publication. As soon as the first tranch of materials arrived, I knew that it wasn't going to work. Quite apart from the fact that the manual was being written using PowerPoint of all things, the idiom would just not work for an English audience. When speaking English, Indians often default to the present continuous tense - something which is widely lampooned in caricatures. The entire manual was written in this manner (where I would say "to access the invoice...", they would have "for accessing the invoice..."). I wrote the manual myself.

The flip side is that we increasingly find that resources are intended for distributed, multinational audiences. This precludes the use of idiom and collquiallisms unfamiliar to the non-native speaker, or even to a native speaker with a different dialect.

We need to be careful of labels, too. As an extreme example, let me pick on a topical issue: the American presidential elections. There are two primary parties involved: the Republicans and the Democrats. If you live in the US, you may know more about the policies of these parties than I do, but a person new to American politics, would be forgiven for assuming that the Republican party was in favour of a republic, while (only?) the Democratic party was in favour of democracy (one might draw similar conclusions from the names of the main parties in British politics, by the way). Years and years of rebranding have seen to it that the label often no longer necessarily fits what is in the tin, and we need to be careful of assuming that the user knows this.

There is also the issue of voice. I have always favoured the idea of supplying a personality to an organisation's online learning resources - one which matches the organisation's ethos. The personality of the trainer in the face to face situation can be a huge asset. I don't see why the elearning can't have a personality, too. Just as one addresses issues such as look and feel, and carefully selects appropriate images and graphics, tone can be created by the phrasing of the material. In cases where user-generated content is encouraged, there can be a wonderful mix of styles and voices, echoing the reality of the people in the organisation. But where the resource is unidirectional, why should it be necessary to adopt a formal writing style? Why preclude the use of exclamation marks? To do so, to me, would be to dictate that the elearning materials remain dry, dusty and impersonal.

Which brings me, finally, to content. Why is it that, when it comes to divvying up the material into different delivery media, all the dry, dusty stuff is deigned suitable for online delivery, while all the interesting, fun, engaging things are kept for the classroom? Is it any wonder that so many organisations out there equate elearning with boring? How many of us have wearied of text screen after text screen, back and next buttons, and fatuous multiple choice or drag-and-drop quizzes? With all the resources available to us, surely we can let loose with a few really exciting online projects, using discovery based learning, user-created content, social media, simulations, multimedia...?

Not that I'm proposing we do away with the face to face sessions altogether - far from it! But I think we could put them to even better use if we made optimum use of the online aspects of our toolkit.

Phone? What phone? Oh, you mean

You would think that, with the proliferation of gadgets around, it would be ever easier to buy gifts for teenagers. But, reaching December with little inspiration as to what to give my sons for Christmas, I had - over the space of several days - the following conversation with them.

"Would you like a watch?"
"What for? I have my phone!"
"Would you like a new alarm clock?"
"What for? I have my phone!"
"Would you like a digital camera?"
"What for? I have my phone!"
"Would you like an mp3 player?"
"What for? I have my phone!"
"Would you like a video camera?"
"What for? I have my phone!"
The list goes on...

And this is without an iPhone (look, much as I fancy the thing, I can't bring myself to spend what will amount to £900 for it!)

I have just one question:

Why are we still calling it a phone?

Reflecting on BETT and Teachmeet08

On Friday afternoon, I headed over to BETT, mainly because I was going to attend Teachmeet08 and thought I might have a quick nose around BETT first. Mistake!

I had heard that BETT is huge, but that is the understatement of the century.

On the advice of my colleague, Mark Berthelemy, I tried to plan my route ahead of time. I used the online planner and promptly found myself looking at a list of unbelievable length.

Take 2. I took out everything except "adult and community learning" and CPD. The list was still longer than my arm. Mark's advice was to go to Future Schools. What a good idea, I thought, since I have been known to occupy my soapbox on the subject from time to time!

He and I had a networking meeting scheduled for 4pm, so we went our separate ways on arrival, agreeing to meet up later - venue to be established via the joys of text messaging. I should have stuck with the man! After a short while of frenzied attempts to get my bearings and find the stand I wanted, I decided to head for the wifi hotspot and chill with a coffee. Wouldn't you know it? My stupid laptop decided that the wifi was all just a rumour! I could see other people all around me, busily interacting with their online resources while I just got an error page. So I just chilled instead.

Anything you want to know about BETT, you'd best ask someone, anyone else - my visit was a washout.

However...

TeachMeet08 turned out to be a different matter entirely. Various people had put themselves forward to do 7 minute micro or 2 minute nano presentations. The order was set at random by a digital one-armed-bandit-type application. Oiled by copious quantities of free booze, both audience and presenters became increasingly rambunctious as the evening progressed.

The deal was that no-one was supposed to get up and sell their product. It was all supposed to be a testimonial: practitioners sharing their experiences with each other. Some people bent the rules, it has to be said, but it was wonderful to see the passion and enthusiasm among the people collected there - most of whom appeared to be secondary school teachers. It would have been nice to hear from a few in the primary school sector, too.

Highlights for me: Drew Buddie's wikifly effect about a collaborative writing exercise and Dave Stacey's 10 commandments for evangelising edtech.

The best thing about the evening, though, was getting to meet members of my online community in the flesh (people with whom I interact via Twitter, Facebook and blogs) - adding a third dimension to the profile photos I carry around in my head: Doug Belshaw, Dave Stacey, Andy Roberts (whom I've met before), Paul Harrington (who's much taller online), Drew Buddie (whom I've seen before, but only from the audience) and Ewan McIntosh (who gave the lie to the "online friends are not real friends" thing by hugging me the moment he identified me), Terry Freedman... Apologies if I've forgotten anyone. I can't even blame it on the free booze, since the strongest thing I drank all night was diet Coke!

I also met a few new faces, including Jose Picardo, who I mistook for David Delgado!

I will add pictures to this post once I've found my data cable so that I can upload them.

Thanks for nothing (rant warning)

I've been mulling over the reaction of some of my teacher acquaintances to the idea of using tech tools - particularly social media - as an integral part of their practice. Of course, if you're a teacher reading this, you probably already doing that. The people who react in the way I'm speaking of aren't reading this. In fact, many of them are still unsure what a blog is.

That's fine.

I'm not criticising ignorance. A person cannot control what they don't know if they don't know that they don't know it (if you follow me!). What bothers me more is stubbornness. The "Don't bother me with all that stuff" approach that says "this method of teaching was good enough when I was at school, and it's been good enough for hundreds of years." It's like sticking your fingers in your ears and going "lalalala".

What I'm thinking about is the extent to which the way we are taught at school informs our views on learning for the rest of our lives. It's one thing if you leave school and become a learning geek like yours truly, whose entire life revolves around lifelong, lifewide learning. For someone who becomes a nurse/chef/engineer/whatever, to whom CPD learning is going to form an important part of the job, but one that they have to find the time to squeeze in, while getting on with their real job, their ideas on learning are probably held on some unconscious level, and will, on dissection, very likely look rather like their schooldays.

So, to all those teachers who are refusing to engage with ICT in teaching and learning, who maintain that the read/write web has nothing to do with them, who are not actually reading this blog... gee thanks!

Thanks for the guy who controls the budget and requisitions the learning solutions but wants the learning to look "like this" or "just so", with lots of back and next buttons and endless content dumps. Thanks for all those workers who suffer from total inertia when it comes to taking the wheel on their own learning journey. Thanks for all those people who feel that their professional development is someone else's responsibility.

I know I'm overstating the case - it's deliberate. I'm not having a pop at teachers per se. I know that they often get a pretty raw deal, and are often expected to shoulder responsibilities that should be handled at home. But I do feel that too many of us who have responsibility towards children and teenagers are in danger of abdicating our roles and neglecting our duty of care.

When we were expecting our first child, someone told us, "Parenting is hard work... if you do it properly, and the better you do it, the harder it is." Sometimes it's easier just to do a thing yourself than to keep on at your kids to do it, or to deal with the mess that results from their doing it. But what good is that to the child? So sometimes we have to put ourselves out. Sometimes we have to move out of our comfort zones. Sometimes we have to deal with mess. There's no margin for "can't be bothered" when it comes to equipping our kids for the future.

Okay - I'll get off my soapbox now!

Big screen thinking

Donald Clark's post about big screen TVs jumped out at me this morning, because I've been thinking and talking about big screens lately. Not in relation to my work, but for home.

We're in the process of buying a new house - much bigger (but ironically, not much more expensive), with a family room. This is something we have long wanted to have.

When we have guests over, especially when the guests have kids, the adults always wind up sitting at the dining table and chatting, while the kids watch a DVD or play games on the TV in the lounge. This has been the status quo for many years.

In our current house, this is a problem, because the whole downstairs area is one big, split-level, open plan living space: kitchen, lounge and dining area. It looks very elegant, but it's not very practical.

The kids turn the volume up on the TV so that they can hear it over our conversation. We speak louder. The kids turn the TV up. We ask them to turn it down. They ask us to "turn it down".

In the new house (if we actually get it - buying property in the UK is fraught with obstacles), the TV will go into the large loft room, which will serve as the family room. In due course, we will buy another TV for the lounge.

But I have always been bothered by the blankness of an inactive TV screen. This is probably due to my grandmother, who compared a TV to a dead fish's eye. Since TV only arrived in South Africa in the mid 70's, and they resisted getting one for some time after that, my grandparents were fairly advanced in years by the time a rather large TV set took up residence in their lounge. And it was hardly ever switched on, since they preferred the genteel art of conversation after dinner. Finding the "dead" look of the inactive screen too disturbing, my gran used to cover the set with a cloth when it was not in use.

As TVs have taken an ever more dominant place in the home, with furniture usually being arranged around the focal point of the TV set, I began to feel that the TV should "earn its keep" when not in use.

When the TV screen became flat and wall-mountable, I began to wish that it could double as a picture, especially as the screens became larger. Our current TV is only a 32", but I have long wished that, when no-one was watching TV (or playing Xbox 360 games), we could have a rolling slideshow of family portraits or beautiful scenic photographs. I know that I could achieve this by connected the TV up to my laptop. But the trouble is, I am usually using my laptop - especially at the times when the TV is off, and it strikes me as overkill.

It seems I might soon get my wish, as I see the market generating a few technologies that seem to be leading in that direction:

• Animated advertisements - there have always been a series of A4-ish sized advertisments beside the escalators serving the London Underground. Recently, these have been replaced with LCD (I think) screens showing animated advertisments, sequenced to keep pace with movement of the escalator, so that the "story" flips from screen to screen as you travel up or down. They have also recently introduced enormous curved screens that take up wall space within the tube tunnel itself, visible to passengers waiting on the platform.
• Digital photo frames. There is now a selection of these frames available from many stores. You just bung in your memory card and you're away. As with mp3 players, the capacity varies enormously, and as with digital cameras, there is a range of resolutions available. Both of these factors influence price. Being the sort of person who keeps family photos on my desk (and has a rolling slideshow of family photos as the screensaver on my laptop), I quite fancied one of these, but they are rather small. I think the biggest I've seen was 8".

So now I'm just waiting for someone to develop whatever it is that drives the photo frame in a little matchbox sized thing that you connect to your TV... once you've programmed it from your computer, of course! Perhaps, by the time I come to buy my 46" screen to mount on the lounge wall, this technology will automatically be included.

Mind you - it wouldn't be very green, would it?

Do you remember Tetris?

This link thanks to the latest IDG Connect newsletter. I used to play Tetris for hours on end, but haven't seen it for years. This video clip, with its vocalised sound effects, using people as pixels brought back memories. I have to say that I was a slightly better player than the one whose "game" we're watching!

Copping out of LCB's big question for January

This month's big question, fittingly enough, is

What are your predictions for learning in 2008?

I'm kind of skittish about making predictions in a field where I am not really one of the leaders. Especially after seeing Stephen Downes's grades for eLearn Magazine's predictions from last year. Like I'm going to set myself up for that!

I thought I might stick my tongue firmly in my cheek, get really specific and predict that Jay Cross and Stephen would disagree on something. That Stephen would make a categorical statement and Dave Snowden would make an equally categorical but totally contradictory statement. But those are no-brainers!

So instead, I'd like to own up to the fact that I have no idea. I have a few hopes, but whether they will come to pass or not remains to be seen. I would like to see the Great Divide between corporate and academic learning eroded. I would like to see more elements of technology and learner empowerment introduced into corporate learning programmes and the traditional bums-on-seats courses becoming more blended.

What I will say, though, is that I've bought my ticket, and I've taken my seat. Let's see where this ride goes.

All abo-oard!

An autistic woman tells it like is...

This is a truly remarkable piece from an autistic woman called A M Baggs. I guess the fact that I consider it to be remarkable says more about me than it does about her, and I probably owe her an apology. To a greater or lesser extent, we are all expected to conform to societal constructs and corrected or even ostracised when we can't or won't. But few of us have had the capacity to communicate this as effectively as Ms Baggs manages to do.

Note: I would never have been able to share this video with my colleagues in my last job - they would have made ribald fun of this woman. I'm hoping none of them ever read this blog - such reactions would not be welcomed here.

Gratitude list...

Harold Jarche sets a good example by exhorting us all to draw up a new year's gratitude list. While I have made a few resolutions, which I prefer to think of as personal goals for the year, I would like to flatter Harold by imitation. Apologies (or not!) to all the eye rollers ;-)

I am grateful that I am twenty years in to a marriage to a wonderful man who still adores me and thinks me beautiful.

I am grateful for my two lovely teenage boys. I was very fortunate to be able to take time out when they were little so that I could raise them myself. I don't regret the financial or career sacrifice. I am grateful that we were in a position to make that choice. Very few people are that privileged nowadays.

I am grateful that we live in a safe enough society that my children are able to take for granted a level of freedom that their cousins can't even imagine.

I am grateful that I have a job which stretches me and affords me the opportunity to engage with this community.

I am grateful to this community for all that I have learned over tha past two and a half years.

That'll do for now.

Fototrix - too cool!

Via Tony Karrer. This is a neat tool you can use to personalise your photos, or to generate images you can use in a learning resource. Here's one I created using a picture taken at the Christmas dinner table.


You are perfectly welcome to suggest a less cheesy caption!

Just in case you thought I was exaggerating: Internet connections in South Africa

I have mentioned on several occasions the lack of access many people have to this space. Living as you almost certainly do in a broadband world, you probably don't even realise the extent to which you have become dependent on services that other people don't even know they lack. And it's not only the third world, either - I can't remember which of the Daves it is (Warlick or Snowden) who often bemoans the cost of Internet access in New Zealand. So, if I may:

This morning our post included the annual University of Cape Town alumni news magazine (UCT News 2007). In an article by one Chris McEvoy, called "Wireless technology makes Internet affordable" the opening paragraph runs as follows:

It's a well known fact that Internet access in South Africa is among the most expensive in the world. In fact, it is said that the average American teenager has access to more bandwidth than a medium-sized business in South Africa.

Sadly, the article neglects to mention who it is who says this, but it seems that someone has decided to do something about it.

An award-winning young startup called Skyrove, the brainchild of a computer engineer called Henk Kleynhans, has come up with an approach which allows providers to "install their own wifi hotspots to share the Internet with others" and then charge users per megabyte rather than the usual approach of being charged for time spent online.

In a country with unspeakably high unemployment rates, entrepeneurship is the most important source of job creation, and this company's approach appears to foster that in spades - according to the article: "anyone with IT experience can become a provider, set up as many hotspots as they want and earn ongoing income from it" using a router supplied by Skyrove which the provider connects to the ISP of their choice. Users then connect wirelessly to the Internet via the router using credits purchased online.

So there is hope! Who knows, perhaps my family will soon be able to see the pictures I send and Animoto videos I post for their benefit.

It's only words...

In the past few months, I've developed an addiction for Scrabulous, which is an online version of Scrabble played via Facebook. I have been a fan of word games of various sorts since my mother taught me Scrabble shortly after her divorce as a way to fill the newly empty evenings.

One thing that took me by surprise was the passionate battle raging on Facebook between those who feel that profanities should be disallowed and those who resist such a move. I guess, having grown up playing word games, I have been able to distinguish between the concept of words per se and that of words for communication.

If a word is in the agreed dictionary for a game of Scrabble, it is allowed on the board during the game. This includes words I would only use under extreme duress and words I would never use at all. My culture, my faith, my (for want of a better term) station in life, my backgound, my upbringing, my age and even my gender have an influence over the words I will use to express myself, but I cannot deny that they are real words.

Time and fashion render some words profane that used to be an integral part of the language. In certain dialects, words will be considered rude that in other dialects don't even warrant a raised eyebrow. Some groups apply euphemistic nicknames to genetalia, while others simply opt for their proper names. Americans freshen up in the bathroom (which often doesn't contain a bath at all), while in the UK we go to the loo for a wee. The American term for one's rear is the same as the nickname given to female genitalia in the UK, while the term used for one's rear in the UK means a tramp or hobo in the US. Xhosa speakers in South Africa, when speaking English tend to use the term f***-all freely in all situations, blissfully unaware that it offends native English speakers. When these cultures bump up against each other, we have a choice: we either take offence or we recognise that words are weighted differently. Where do we draw the profanity line?

We also have the ability to adapt our language to our circumstance. I don't often refer to behaviourist pedagogies at home with my children. Many people I know who turn the air blue at work, utter nothing stronger than "flipping" around their children.

As a student of English, I have studied texts containing some very explicit language. This doesn't mean I consider it appropriate for every day use. I encouraged my children to read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, even though I wouldn't tolerate for a moment their use of some of the language it contains.

If I were writing a play or a narrative, I might put words into the mouths of one of my characters that I wouldn't dream of using myself, simply because the character isn't me, and doesn't speak like me (I had this argument with one of my sons' teachers years ago, when she objected to the use of the word "yuck!" in the dialogue of a piece of creative writing).

And if I'm playing Scrabble/Scrabulous and trying to win, I'd be hard pressed to turn down the opportunity to play the f-word on a triple word score. After all, that would net me a minimum of 39 points... and it's in the dictionary.

Indulge a proud mother as I brag....

Yesterday my sons (aged 16 and 14) got an Xbox 360. "So what?" I hear you say. I'm glad you asked!

They had had a PS2 for some time, but decided between them that they wanted the Xbox instead (I raised my voice for a Wii, but got shouted down... sigh). Between them, they planned what they could sell (the PS2 and all the associated games for a start), how much that would net and how they would raise the balance. They shopped around for the best price they could get for the various items they wanted to sell and negotiated deals. They lived frugally so that they could contribute as much as possible from their allowance. They scrimped and saved the earnings from their paper rounds. My younger son even went without topping up the airtime for his phone, and has spent at least a month on an "incoming calls only" basis. They decided that they could make this their Christmas gift to each other, and added the money saved that way to the pot as well.

For several years (at least five), my elder son has been plying his trade as the family masseur (he has a natural skill that he has been honing over the years). The income from this enterprise has also been diverted to the Xbox fund over the past few months.

One particularly clever thing they did (in my - ahem - unbiased view) was to check the deals on the console at each of the shops in the centre, and to offset those against what each of those shops would give them for the pre-owned games that they hadn't already sold to friends. This was because the stores would give them vouchers for their games, rather than cash, so they would pretty much be tied in to performing both transactions at the same store.

Never once did they argue about it, in spite of the fact that they discussed it often and earnestly, at great length, over a period of several weeks. The fact that they were contributing unequal amounts was never an issue (since my elder son has a bigger paper round than my younger son, he earns more). Never once did they ask us for money. They didn't even ask us for advice, although they proudly kept us up to date with their progress and the mounting total in the tupperware container.

Yesterday, they finally reached the magic number. They went straight from school to the centre under their own steam. From there, they went home and set up the console. When I arrived home, they were hard at play (Halo 3, in case you're interested). Neither of them had done their chores, but I was so proud of them I left them to play. They had earned their reward and then some!

Every time I think about it, I think of yet another learning outcome from the whole exercise.

Tell me I don't have reason to be proud of my enterprising young men!

An apPEAling story

To counterbalance Friday silliness with a little gravitas...

I came across this today, courtesy of Drew Buddie. It focuses on breast cancer, which is an issue particularly close to my heart, since all three of my Dad's sisters had breast cancer... only one survived.

I had not encountered Susan Reynolds before, but it's a fascinating story in which frozen peas (of all things) loom large.

The strapline? We will not apPEAse cancer.

Edit: Doh! It would help if I included the link. Fixed now.

More Friday silliness - a little ahead of schedule

Apparently this comes from the Washington Post, which runs an annual neologism competition, in which contestants suggest alternative meanings for existing words. At the risk of being labelled a coward, I shall err on the side of caution and cull the more risque ones from the list, but this post nevertheless carries a political incorrectness warning.

• Coffee (n) The person upon whom one coughs
• Flabbergasted (adj) Appalled at how much weight you have gained
• Abdicate (v) To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach
• Esplanade (v) To attempt an explanation while drunk
• Negligent (adj) Describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown
• Lymph (v) To walk with a lisp
• Gargoyle (n) Olive favoured mouthwash
• Flatulence (n) The emergency vehicle that picks you up after you have been run over by a steamroller
• Balderdash (n) A rapidly receding hairline
• Rectitude (adj) The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists
• Pokemon (n) A Rastafarian proctologist
• Oyster (n) A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms
• Frisbeetarianism (n) The belief that, when you die, your spirit flies up onto the the roof and gets stuck there

I have to say that my favourite is "esplanade". As a person who never, under any circumstances, gets drunk (long story), I have been subjected to many earnest "esplanations" in my time that - tragically for "splaner" - I am able to remember the next day! If I'm ever down on my luck, I might start to charge for my silence!

A close second has got to be a tie between negligent (Cherie Blair, anyone?) and flatulence.

I invite you to come up with a few of your own - perhaps it will relieve the stress of the frantic pre-Christmas rush to "get it all done in time".

A little something I learned... that might save a life

I recently mentioned that my elder son had had something of a close shave with the heater in his room. I have subsequently learned something about the situation that will certainly change the way I manage heaters in the future and may serve to alert someone else out there.

First off, I discovered (after returning the heater to the store and declaring it faulty) that the problem was with the extension cable rather than the heater.

What you need to know about this cable is that it was one of those very long ones rolled around a reel - usually used outdoors. In fact, ours used to be used for our lawnmower. Since we no longer have a lawnmower (or a lawn, for that matter), we had begun to utilise it elsewhere, expecting that it would be particularly robust, having been intended for outdoor use.

Because the space in which it was being used required nowhere near the full 10 metre length most of the cable was wrapped around the reel, which was stowed away under a chest of drawers and this is apparently where the problem lay.

I have discovered from my stepfather that heaters draw a lot of current and should always be connected to uncoiled, untwisted cables. If not, you could wind up with the situation we had, in that the coiled cable becomes a heat coil, much like a rheostat, which then begins to melt the insulation and can cause a fire.

By the time I discovered the situation, the insulation had melted through, generating a great deal of toxic smoke, and the wires had begun to make contact. Fortunately, this shorted out the whole system, and I discovered it in time to prevent the situation from getting any worse.

If you're using any electric heaters in your home, office or classroom, please do a quick safety check, courtesy of my stepdad.

Quick tribute: My stepdad is one of those wonderful, salt of the earth, unschooled, blue collar people who has become a source of all sorts of wonderful, practical knowledge over the course of a lifetime. It was he who taught me how to service my first car so that I didn't get ripped off by unscrupulous mechanics who (research showed) thought female=ignorant and therefore charged more for their services. It used to cause much hilarity in our street, and it is one of my "claims to fame" that I was even the cause of an accident as a man was so stunned at the sight of working on her car on the front lawn that he drove into a tree. I never did develop the upper body strength to loosen the sump nut for oil changes, though!

There goes the neighbourhood

Jacob Zuma has just won the race for leadership of the ANC in South Africa. To be honest, it was a bit of a devil-and-the-deep-blue-sea choice, but I think this victory represents a bit of a death blow for the country's future prospects. You can see his party political profile, or you can read up on some of the issues that have dogged him.

Oh dear. This is one of those situations where my greatest wish is to be proved wrong!

Formative assessment... BEFORE it's too late!

I was going to call this post RIP old friend. The reason will become clear in due course.

Imagine that you are a child in school. You think you are doing very well thank you at your favourite subject - for the sake of argument, let's say physics. No-one ever mentions that your performance is below par. And then comes the exam. You fail miserably and the teacher who is giving you your feedback tells you that there has been a general consensus among the staff that there have been cracks in your work for some time. They did ask the physics teacher to address the issue with you, but he never got that far. How do you feel?

Imagine that you are an employee in a workplace. You think you are doing your job very well thank you. No-one every mentions that your performance is below par. And then comes your appraisal. You are advised that there has been concern among management for some time that there have been cracks in your performance. They did ask your line manager to address the issue with you, but he never got that far. How do you feel?

Have you ever been in the situation where you have found out by chance that someone you cared for deeply died some time ago, but no-one thought to tell you. How do you feel?

Last night I was compelled to come to terms with the loss of a very dear friend. No-one died, though.

As I have said in many spaces, I have always been able to sing, and sing well. I have independent witness to this fact. I have been recorded, I have sung on television, I have performed live. For the past several years I have done little more than use my singing in service of my local church as a member and occasional leader of the worship team.

Last night I discovered, quite by chance, that there has been consensus among the leaders for some time that I have not only lost my ability to hold a tune, I have also lost the ability to tell when I am off key - something which is happening more and more often, apprently. They asked the team leader to address the issue with me, but he never got that far. How do I feel?

The word gutted comes to mind. I have lost something extremely precious to me - something I have always simply relied upon to be there (I cannot begin to describe the utter joy that singing has brought me throughout my life. As my mother always said: if Karyn's breathing, she's singing). Worse, no-one saw fit to tell me. I cringe to think of the torture that I have been inflicting on people week after week as I stepped confidently up to the microphone and spewed forth discord.

One way or another, we are all formative assessors. If you are aware of something in someone's life that needs addressing, whether it be professional, personal or educational, please, PLEASE discuss it with them. Today. Don't wait for someone else to do it. And especially, don't wait until the revelation is going to be utterly gutwrenching and humiliating. The longer you leave it, the worse it will be.

And especially avoid dumping the bad news in their lap on their birthday!

Zoom, you chase the day away

(With apologies to Fat Larry)

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else out there has experience of ZoomInfo. I stumbled across it while trying to track down an old colleague. The service claims to help one "be found on the web". Since the information it contained about me was scanty and outdated, I thought I'd sign up (it's free) and get it updated. Not that I feel I need help being found online!

I completed all the required details and then reached the sticking point: verification. The last screen asked me to select my preferred method of verfication from the list in order to prevent identity fraud. The "list" displayed one single possibility: my credit card details... together with assurances that they would not be abused. My response? Yeah right!

I have been the victim of credit card fraud/identity theft before, and I'm a little skittish about handing out my details - especially in a situation where no money is supposed to change hands.

I emailed them asking for an alternative method of verification. The reply, from a member of their technical support team, advised me that this was the only method of verification available:

To ensure that people are who they say they are, we must verify their identity, and an online credit card transaction is the safest and most effective method for us to minimize the possibility of mischief.

Once again they assured me that my details would not be used for any nefarious purposes (my words, not theirs) and (and this is the kicker) boasted that there was "no charge for this service".

My reply started as follows:

I don't intend to be difficult, but I don't see how you think that your insistence that you have no plans to misuse my credit card details should reassure me. After all, if you were planning to misuse my credit card details, you would hardly be likely to say so.

Am I being unreasonable?

Friday silliness

Okay - it's Friday. I went in for a minor "procedure" this morning, which I have decided means that they inflict enormous pain on you without the benefit of aneasthetic. So I in no mood to be sensible. Hence the following. Apologies to all you less "sad" people and/or more deprived mortals for whom Star Trek and/or Monty Python are unknown quantities.

As for myself, every word spoken and every visual image used is comfortably familiar. Trust me - it adds to the humour!

More perspective

Last night, I participated in a phone interview with Kristina Schneider for her Master's dissertation on blogging. Before the interview, she sent me her list of questions to help me focus my thinking.

During the course of the interview, I mentioned my ongoing concern for the fact that some people's voices are excluded from this space. I fear we are sometimes in danger of being somewhat self-congratulatory when we gather together in our electronic spaces and tackle the challenges that commonly face us. I wonder if we aren't just a little "holy huddle-ish" - choosing to ignore the challenges facing those who don't have the means to join us in this space (the video clip I included in yesterday's post reminds us how few people actually have internet access). I have niggling doubts at the wisdom of pushing the leading edge further and further forward while leaving the trailing edge ever further behind - especially since most of those with whom I come into contact are vocally opposed to the same model in relation to material wealth. Why then, does it make sense to adopt this model in terms of knowledge wealth? Are we/am I being hypocritical? Speaking in gravely sympathetic tones about those who endure deprivation, only to take every opportunity use the tools at our/my disposal to widen the gap between them and us/me?

Last night, I very nearly lost my elder son as the fan heater in his room burnt out and filled his room with noxious smoke. It just "so happened" that I opened his door to look in on him and discovered this situation. Since my husband is abroad, I had to battle alone to wake him and get him out of the room and then go back into the room to unplug everything and ensure that there was no further danger of the house burning down around my ears. Even that short period of exposure brought on an asthma attack for me, and I had no idea how long he had been breathing in that toxic smoke.

I took him outdoors to breathe the clean, cold air and, as he sat there, looking in sleepy confusion at me as I wrapped a second duvet around him, it dawned on me what had just very nearly happened and what might have been. It was as if his life flashed before my eyes, and I began to shake almost uncontrollably.

Talk about a dose of perspective! It could all have burnt for all I cared. My boys were safe. Of course, spending several hours in the A&E department (with both my boys, just in case) of the local hospital gave me plenty of time to stocktake, analyse and assimilate.

Anyone who knows me well will tell you what a learning geek I am. How rampantly and passionately I pursue learning and knowledge. How I grind my teeth in frustration when I lack the capacity to understand some new concept. But it takes something like this to remind us, as trite as it may sound that, in the final analysis, it's about people.

I told Kristina last night how I recently discovered that I have developed a bit of a reputation for being one who vociferously champions the cause of the learner in every project with which I am involved. When I finally got to my desk today, it was to find that last night's erm... little shake-up has served to renew my commitment to this perspective. So, to all those who find themselves working with me on one or the other project... you have been warned ;-)

Kristina asked me if my tendency to leap onto my ever-handy soapbox about the plight of the so-called third worlders was an extension of this attitude and I was forced to admit that it was not. I have been a learner. I am still a learner. I have empathy with the learner's perspective. I have lived in the third world. I have lived side-by-side with deprivation, but I have never been deprived... not in any real sense. My experience has for the most part been purely vicarious. In that context, I was one of the privileged few who had access to very sophisticated services (which I have since come to appreciate were superior to those on offer in much of the first world). So the best I can hope to do is to shine a spotlight of awareness onto the situation when the opportunity arises. To be the one who says "ahem" from time to time. I acknowledge in advance that I am likely to continue to do this - so my apologies (or maybe not) to those for whom this stance has worn a little thin.

I have a lot to be grateful for today!

A little perspective

Occasionally, I raise my ineffectual voice in this space for the third world.

Having spent the first 36 years of my life in Africa, I am deeply conscious of the plight of those who don't even have a frame of reference to understand let alone the means to participate in the conversations we have about learning.

Today someone posted this on my Facebook page. you may have seen it before, but at this particularly materialist, acquisitive time of the year, it is perhaps a timely reminder.

Beyond ROI

This is a subject I have touched on during the discussions around the recent Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations (CLTI2007) conference.

My mail at the office today included the December issue of inside learning technologies, which I gather is not yet available on line (have you signed up for the LT2008 exhibition and/or conference, yet?). The lead article by Donald H Taylor addresses the issue of the value of learning and ROI.

My gut feel on the subject of ROI is that it is just too difficult to quantify. There are just too many other variables that may impact the situation - the learner may read a book in his leisure time that profoundly influences his behaviour, or he might attend a life enrichment seminar , or hear a powerful sermon at church. He might meet a new love interest, or become a parent. All these things happen outside the workplace, but have the potential to impact profoundly on his workplace performance.

And the move towards performance support will do nothing to firm up those blurred lines, as we see learning becoming more and more seamlessly integrated with the day job.

To use an expression I have probably already turned into a cliche: how do you know where to position your ROI chisel so that you can hit it with the budget hammer?

Donald's article draws this rather wonderful comparison:

Does the IT manager ever feel obliged to justify their department through a ROI analysis of the value of each PC and the time spent maintaining it? Of course not.

The message from IT is simple: "If you want to run the business, you have to invest in IT. No IT, no infrastructure, no business. Of course, we can discuss costs and other details, but the role of the department is non-negotiable."

As I keep saying: you either believe in the value of L&D for your staff or you don't. End of. Either way, you'll find a way to make the numbers support your argument.

Edublog awards

The winners of the 2007 "eddies" have been announced. I would have liked to attend the online ceremony in Second Life, but it clashed with what little family time I have these days, so I had to wait to get the news.

I enjoy the fact that the nominations alert me to some blogs I had not previously encountered. I also enjoy the fact that at least one of the blogs I vote for usually comes through. This year one of my nominees won a category, too.

Not everyone likes the idea of adding an element of competition to the whole social media scene, and I respect that. There has got to space in the blogosphere for all shapes, sizes and persuasions. At the time of the conversation, I stated that I had no problem with it.

What I can safely say now that the whole thing is behind us is that I realised that I was speaking as one not in the running.

It's a really odd thing that I love competition... if I can win by my own efforts: sports, board games, quizzes. But I hate being at the mercy of other people's votes. Always have. I take it all far too personally. When I was 11, I was nominated for the position of house captain at my primary school, but I stood down, because the vote was by a show of hands and I couldn't face the possibility of no hands being raised for me.

Later, in my first year at college, I was asked to participate in the annual beauty contest. Quite apart from my instinctive objection to the whole concept of beauty pageants, I was afraid of being humiliated, so I refused.

Talk about your average insecurity!

You would think I had outgrown that by now. But I went through the same agonies when I was nominated for school governor (that time I was persuaded to stand and I was elected). I imagine that I would be the same if my blog were nominated. I am also fairly sure that I wouldn't feel free to write this post, if I were nominated but didn't garner any votes.

By what do we measure the success of a blog?

My dissertation (which I mention often, but have yet to start writing) focuses on how my use of social media has transformed my professional practice. When I read back over some of my early posts, just a little over two years ago, I am amazed at the extent to which many of my views have changed. To me, this is the measure of the impact of my entrance into the blogosphere. However, this is very subjective and qualitative. It would be nice to include an element of quantitative evidence, but I'm at a loss as to how to do that. Having identified my life as my PLE, I have made my learning journey so personal, so subjective that it can't realistically be measured by anyone other than me, and I'm not sure my own measure is an entirely reliable one!

Wow!

I can't even imagine what went into acquiring this level of skill so young, but this has just made my Friday.

Thanks to Chris Sloan via Dean Shareski on Twitter. Some comments on Chris's post express doubt at the genuine-ness of this clip. It looks real enough to my inexpert eyes, and that'll do for me today. If you happen to know that it was faked, don't tell me about it, okay - it's not important enough to warrant bursting my little bubble!

Unexpected thumbs up

Today was "curriculum progress" day at our sons' school. My younger son and I attended meetings with four of his teachers to discuss his progress against expectations so far this academic year. These days are usually pretty fraught as one dashes from room to room, sometimes in different buildings, in order to make each appointment on time. If you have more than one child, it's even worse.

I got off fairly lightly today. When my sons brought the forms home, my older son said he didn't want to meet with any of his teachers. He said that he was in his final year of compulsory education, already in the countdown to exams. He knew what needed to be done to achieve his grades and he didn't think that a meeting with me and his teachers would have any impact on that.

I wrote as much on the form and returned it to the school, adding that I supported him in his recognition that it was his learning journey and that it was now up to him to "do the work (or not)". His teacher was apparently so impressed with this attitude that she read it to the class, declaring me a "legend" (don't be too impressed, the word is freely used these days!).

In respect of my younger son, however, there are still some mountains to climb and some battles to fight (such as two teachers blemishing the record of this over-diligent lad by writing in his report that his homework is "causing concern" when none has been set... and I know this, because the planner is online), hence the four meetings. On our rounds, we encountered several of my older son's friends, who asked where he was. When I explained that we had decided that he was now shouldering the responsibility himself, one child declared, "Wow! My Mom forces me to come to these things." I wasn't sure whether he meant it as praise or criticism.

Time will tell whether it was the right decision or not, but I was pleasantly surprised to have earned the teacher's support for it.

What's with all the extras?

With our elder son coming up to his GCSEs, we're turning our attention to 6th form options. Of course, he could stay at his current school, but he is underachieving fairly spectacularly there. Since the university he plans to attend is one of the most selective in the country, he is probably going to need a change of plan to attract their attention.

Last night we attended the open evening of a specialist science school in a nearby town. Unlike his current school, which is a comprehensive (no entry criteria), this school has a selection policy and kids have to qualify to get in. There are only 40 places available to those who wish to transfer in from other schools.

Judging by the attendance last night, competition is going to be fierce!

According to the information we were given last night, this school is one of the "top 50 schools in the country".

Today, I've been thinking about what that means. Are their students the happiest? The best educated? The most well-balanced? The best equipped to deal with life-after-school? I suspect it is based purely on their results and, since I question the validity of the assessment process, this places a question mark over the relevance of this achievement.

Sadly, though, the system is what it is and it is within the constraints of this system that my son is going to have to prove his worth to the university of his choice if he is to have the chance to follow a career in forensics (this is the legacy of CSI and its ilk - every second child now wants to study forensics, whereas 10 years ago, hardly anyone had ever heard of it).

He is too young to see how tough the adjustment to this school will be, should he be accepted. At his current school (unusually for the UK), there is no official uniform. At this school, the sixth form boys must wear suits to school every day. Last night, he was blissfully unaware of the fact that he stuck out like a sore thumb. There were many other kids in civvies, but none of the others was wearing his trousers below his butt, with his underwear on display. Nor did they wear T-shirts that informed the reader that the only reason the wearer had not yet made a pass at them was because "You ugly!"

At his current school, the teachers are known by their first names. At this school, it's Mr this and Dr that (I doubt there is a single PhD on the staff of his current school, but I saw at least one last night and am trying to decide whether this is a sign of anything in particular). At his current school, the stated ethos is one of equality for all (I have my doubts as the successful implementation of this approach, as I have mentioned before on this blog). At this school, the teachers are without question exalted beings. They expect the students to stand aside for them. My son complained to me that one of the teachers had shoulder-barged him. In fact, what had happened was a conflict of expectations: the teacher had expected my son to step aside to let him through, while my son was making his way from point A to point B via the shortest route.

None of the other kids left their parents in their wake and interviewed the teachers for themselves.

Standing back and watching this whole interplay, I realised that my son was not making a good impression. That he was coming across as brash and yobbish. In a one-to-one interview (which will form part of the selection process), he will fare very well, but he has clearly been influenced by the culture of his current school, and it hasn't all been to his benefit!

Listening to the feedback from teachers and students, it certainly seems that they promote a culture of independent learning and diligence. All the students emphasised the need for "further reading" and "reading around the topic". In amongst all the other bumpf, this was what I wanted to know about. It is this that my son does not do. He sails along on the bare minumum of effort. We were chatting to the mother of a boy who transferred to this school from my son's current school. He and my son have similar interests and similar strengths and weaknesses. She assured me that my son would become motivated to work very hard in the new environment. She told me about daytrips to Switzerland for significant events. About opportunities to assist in scientific research. About trips to universities to attend lectures.

So why is it that schools that impose such seemingly irrelevant and outdated constraints such as formalwear, formal forms of address, etc. produce such good results? And why is it that schools with a more liberal approach have such a high incidence of crime and poor performance? Where is the link and why does it exist at all? Surely these factors shouldn't have an impact on learning, and yet in the UK education system, it seems they do. Or is this a case of the Forer effect?

As we drove away, I asked him if he wanted to apply for a place. Unhesitatingly, he said he did. When I hinted at the difficulty he would have in adjusting to the restrictive environment, he said he thought it would be exactly what he needed. I felt as if a huge wave had just loomed up, and I was paddling my surfboard like mad. I realise we are either, by dint of enormous effort, going to ride this one to the shore, or we are going to get unceremoniously dumped and churned (if you've every surfed you know exactly what I'm talking about!). I don't feel as if I have enough left in me to put in the effort to ride that wave, but I also don't relish the thought of the buffeting that is the alternative.

... and we will have to go through this all over again in two years' time with our other son. Oy vey!

What did you learn about learning in 2007?

This is the big question over at LCB this month. Originally, I had thought I'd give it a miss, since I couldn't name one specific thing that I had learnt about learning - it's all been fairly intangible.

Then I realised that, in fact, that's the whole point. That encapsulates what I keep trying to say about learning, so I thought I'd give it a go - but I doubt that it will be very coherent.

I can't pick out one thing that I have learned and put hard edges on it. Does this mean that I have learned nothing of significance? Far from it!

I have been engaged in an ongoing conversation with hordes of people. Some of them have become, well... friends, I guess. Those relationships were already in place - they just moved forward this year. These interactions have contributed to my own personal development.

I have bumped up against people with opposing views to my own. Debating with them has firmed up some of the boundaries of my knowledge set, while moving others. I have even had the unenviable experience of being vilified in the discussion forum of an online publication.

I have encountered opposition at work, and had to defend my position. I have drawn pictures, waved my hands about and foamed at the mouth. I have champed at the bit. I have used every moment of downtime (and, for a while there, there was a lot of it) to learning about this business. I have given thought to my professional future. I have thought about where the learning industry is going and where I want to be.

I have attended lectures at university. I have researched assignments. I have spoken to people I might never otherwise have encountered. I have read material I almost certainly would not otherwise have read. All these things have added to the sum of my knowledge, and impacted on pre-existing knowledge.

I have attended conferences. I have sat through sessions which have set me a light and others where I wanted to stand up and shout, "What a load of claptrap!" (and still others which bored me silly). Both of the extremes stretched me (while the boring ones afforded me time to reflect, I guess).

I have tried innumerable times to explain to people what it is that I do. I'm getting better at it, but it still needs work. In explaining, I find that I think about learning and what I understand it to be.

Some of these situations have taken place online, some face to face. Some in a group, and some one-to-one. Sometimes the situation has been a specific learning event, other times the learning has been so embedded into a situation as to be indistinguishable from it.

I have been a learning professional of one sort or another for close to two decades now, and one thing that has become increasingly clear over this past year is that I don't deserve the title. I'm not sure anyone does. The more I learn, the more I realise what a learning amateur I am. Perhaps that is my "one thing," although even that realisation didn't spring into existence fully formed during the space between 1 January 2007 and now.

Note to Samaritans: the rules are changing

Last night, the police (finally) came around to get a statement from my son regarding Tuesday's incident. At the end of the interview, the policeman advised my son to refrain from offering or giving help to people in the street - "no good deed goes unpunished."

Ugh. When I think how hard we have worked to teach our children to be neighbourly!

When I was in my teens, my mother encountered a man staggering down the high street of the city with a knife protruding from his back, bleeding copiously. He was pleading for help from passersby, but people were giving him a wide berth. My mother drove him to the hospital.

Shortly after we were married, my husband and I were awakened by loud banging on the door of our flat. At the door stood a bleeding man who said he had been stabbed. My husband drove him to the hospital.

If my children take to heart the advice they are now being given, such people will just bleed to death. What worries me most is the thought: what if it isn't one of my children who encounters such a person? What if the person is one of my children?

When I contrast the willingness of my online communities to help one another academically, emotionally, spiritually, informationally, with this sad state of affairs in respect of physical or material help within our physical communities... well, it breaks my heart.