Organisational development - a bit like Calvinball?

Yesterday's post from Wendy Wickham (as you may see from my comment) got me to thinking.

Things change so fast at the moment, we can never be sure that anything is going to happen in exactly the same way twice running. While it may be tempting to say that this is like a game of (insert sport of choice here), the major difference is that, by and large, in sports the ground rules remain the same. And when they do change, there's a bit of a fanfare. The new rules are distributed to all clubs and associations. All refs/umpires have to bone up on them in order to be able to manage a game.

If we had to have that kind of fanfare every time things change in the environments for which we are designing learning and performance support resources, the poor trumpeter would never get a chance to draw breath!

While we're in the process of dealing with the rollout of a new system over here, HR comes out with a new requirement, based on the latest directive from the government. While we're busy making sure everybody knows how to comply with the new HR issue, the new system has to be tweaked and a new procedure introduced to deal with that tweak, so... You get the picture.

If you are a Calvin & Hobbes fan, you are no doubt familiar with Calvinball. If you are not familiar with this cartoon, it's high time you addressed this major hole in your life!

I would have said that it was impossible to list the rules of Calvinball, but someone has decided to give it a go, apparently with Bill Watterson's help and/or approval. I would like to suggest that the most important rule of the game can be found at 1.9. In fact, the whole game hinges on this one thing: the only permanent rule is that Calvinball can never be played the same way twice. It is also very important to note the caveat at the bottom of the list: This rulebook is not required, nor necessary to play Calvinball.

A bit like life, then.

There have been times when Watterson's insight has taken my breath away. Then there are other times when I take something he says in one place and apply it in another. I'd be hard pressed to say which this is.

One thing worth noting is the role of Rosalyn, Calvin's intrepid babysitter. She is the only one brave enough to take on the job more than once. She needs the money and Calvin's parents need an occasional break. The relationship between Calvin and Rosalyn is one of mutual loathing - not an approach I am recommending between learning professionals and the people we support! However, one evening, she agrees to play Calvinball with her young charge. After a moment, she figures out the lie of the land and they have a whale of a time together. She even manages to use the non-rules of the game to get Calvin to go to bed at decent hour!

Perhaps this is where we are going wrong. Instead of trying to impose control all over the place and redraft yet another set of rules whenever there's a change, perhaps we need to learn to go with the flow, making only occasional use of whatever our particular equivalent of the babysitter flag turns out to be.

After all, tomorrow it might all be different again.

Wheeeeee!

Never give up, never surrender!

Warning: not suitable reading for cynics.

What stirs your blood? What is it that makes you want to stand up and cheer?

Vicki Davis's response to my somewhat misnamed Funday Monday post, got me to thinking about a piece of footage that I once saw on TV that inspired me no end. I have tried to find a trace of it on the web, but have failed miserably - perhaps the fact that I can't remember any of the important details needed for a successful search (like names and dates) has something to do with it!

Just in case any of it rings a bell with you, it was an Olympic sprint event. Hopes were high for one particular athlete (the name Redman comes to mind, but that might be way off base), who had missed out on selection the previous time around, bpmbed out during the heats the time before that and would almost certainly be too old next time. He had worked really hard to make it, and this was to be the year he came home with the gold. He took off out of the starting blocks like a bat out of hell, only to tear something halfway down the track. So determined was he not miss out on what would no doubt be his only opportunity to cross the finish line in an Olympic final, he began hobbling his way down the track. His father scrambled onto the track to help him. At first, aware that he would be disqualified, were he to accept assistance, the athlete waved his Dad away. But he had to accept that he wasn't going to make it alone and the two of them defiantly crossed that line arm in arm - the broken athlete and his proud Dad, both weeping openly.

Of course, as you will have noted from my recent post, I'm a sucker for sporting heroism, and somewhat lacking in the cycnicism gene.

Sometimes, both parents and teachers find themselves in the position of needing to encourage or motivate a child/student who feels like giving up. I have a son who is very easily discouraged, and I have found anecdotes like these very helpful. On one occasion, he and I wept through the scene in the book Goodbye Mr Chips, where the dying Mr Chips quietly calls the register of all "his" boys in response to disprove someone's remark that Mr Chips had never had any children. Ever tried reading aloud with a lump like a cricket ball in your throat?

Then there are stories like this one:



Or any of these stories (which are admittedly very US-centric). YouTube can be a very useful tool for getting a message across in 3 minutes that would take you half an hour to explain.

Do you know of someone who could do with a little inspiring today?

National pride: the good, the bad and the ugly

I hate it when people treat me like dirt because I'm foreign. I have lost count of the number of times I have been told, "*&^% off back to wherever it is you came from!" often by "service" staff when I have challenged them on a point which, from my position as customer, I feel entitled to do... within reason. I hate the bandying of epithets and the denigrating attachment of stereotypical prejudice.

But I have just this minute sat through the anthems at the start of the Scotland v Wales game in the Six Nations rugby tournament, and the tears are ready to spill over. The camera zoomed in on one man who was punching the air at about waist height, singing his heart out (okay - he was Welsh, and they're a nation known for their love of and skill for singing). And during Scotland's anthem, Nathan Hines - all hairy 6'7" of him, was weeping openly. I love that. I'm always a wreck during anthems - the passion and pride get me just here... and as for the opening ceremonies of the olympics, wel don't even get me started!

So is national pride good or bad... or just plain ugly?

I reckon there is a line between national pride and nationalism. Sporting competitions tend towards the latter, but it's the former that gets my goat!

What I love about this community is the way we can express our national pride without getting nationalistic about it. Anyone who reads this blog regularly, will know that, even after a 9 year absence, my heart is still in South Africa - much as it has turned into a place I know I will never feel able to return to. In spite of the fact that he now speaks his mother tongue with less skill than he does English (and with a strong South African accent), my husband's national pride is for Sweden. We are never in any doubt that Dave Snowden is Welsh to his core - his posts make it abundantly clear, while Stephen Downes is a proud Canadian. - I mean, just check out that flag on his home page! I use those two as particularly strong examples, but there are others whose national pride comes through loud and clear.

And why not, I say? It's part of who we are.

Assessing special needs: isn't there a better way?

This is the threatened follow up to yesterday's post, but this one is more directly related to learning, you will be pleased to discover.

Once again, this is not hypothetical.

Once upon a time, there was a baby girl who, at the age of 10 months, was still not able to sit up on her own. Her parents were referred to specialists in Cape Town, where she was assessed for cerebral palsy. The tests came back negative, and it was decided that she was simply atonic (which certainly seems to be the case - today she is somewhat clumsy and inelegant, but not attention-grabbingly so). While she was undergoing tests, she developed an ear infection - something to which she was prone. Later evaluations would indicate that it was likely that the medication she was given for this infection caused her to go deaf, since (a) it was contra-indicated for a child with grommets and (b) she had responded normally to sound stimuli before that time.

The audiologist duly assigned to her case was adamant that she should not be taught sign language. He argued that her poor co-ordination was inadequate to the task and, furthermore, that this avenue would restrict her communication to only those who knew sign language. Since there was no school which taught the approach known as "total communication" in her home town, the child was packed off to boarding school at a specialist school for the deaf 1100kms/700 miles away at the age of 4. This experience was traumatic for the entire family, and she did not progress at all well. After all, what child can learn effectively if she is miserable? Her communication skills did not improve a great deal, so instead of being cut off from hearing people, she was cut off from everyone.

At the age of 7, she was given a cochlear implant. The school felt that this move put her outside of the closely defined demographic they chose to address. She was duly sent back home. Sadly, having spent her formative years in a silent world, she decided that sound was a dreadful thing, and very quickly learnt to turn off the receiver. This meant that the reality of her situation was no different than before, but her eligibility for specialist schools had changed because of the mere presence of the implant - none of the schools were qualified to deal with a situation such as hers, and she was shunted from pillar to post.

It was in selecting a school for her to attend at this stage that her parents found themselves dealing with the inadequacies of tests designed to assess a child's mental capacity and potential. None of the assessments available could be applied. Because of her poor reading age, it was decided that she was very probably dyslexic (I have since learnt that deaf people often have poor reading skills). It was further decided that she had learning difficulties of indeterminate nature. Helpful. She was placed in a specialist school for children lacking in the intellectual capacity to cope with the rigours of the standard curriculum.

Having now left school, she is not qualified to do anything very much and runs the risk of losing her (pitiful) disablity grant, should she ever land a job. Of course, it's too late to change things, but I have often wondered what might have been done.

One thing I noticed, when watching her at play with other deaf children (disclosure: this girl is my niece) is that deaf kids are rough... I mean really physical. For those who work with them routinely, this is par for the course, but imagine a teacher trying to deal with this level of roughness in a mainstream school, where hearing children are not likely to put up with being pushed and pulled, hugged and thumped. Also, when a small deaf child wants something, she takes it. She is not intuned to the idea of manners or asking for something - nor do the wails of dismay from the "victim" alert her to the fact that she has caused any unhappiness. I can't see any mainstream teacher being able to handle this, while trying to teach the curriculum to all 30 children in the class.

Will we ever know what her true potential is? She never acquired the literacy skills to complete a written assessment of her mental capacity, and she doesn't possess the communication skills to complete the verbal tests that are sometimes used as an alternative. How might she have been tested to see if she is, in fact, as intellectually handicapped as has been assumed?

I was very glad when the misery of boarding school was brought to an end, even though this threw her future education into a limbo from which it never recovered. During the time she was a boarder, she used to come to my home for a weekend every month, where it became apparent that the little things that parents do for their small children as a matter of course (I'll spare you the details) were simply going undone, and she spent the entire weekend sitting listlessly on the couch with tears rolling down her face - unable to tell me why she was so unhappy. Sadly, I think that she assumed she was being taken home whenever I came to collect her, which might have had something to do with it.

I apologise for the heartrending sadness of this story, but I wonder if you can suggest what might have been done differently.

A moral dilemma about special needs

Here's a situation for you to think about. I will probably post again about related matters, but let's stick to this issue today.

It's not hypothetical.

There is a young woman of 20. She is profoundly deaf with little knowledge of sign language. Her mental capacity is largely unknown (this will be the subject of the other post I threatened above). She has a boyfriend of roughly the same age. He has learning difficulties. Neither of them will ever be able to live independent lives as a consequence of their own limitations combined with the provisions of the country in which they live.

They want to have a baby. Her older sister recently became a single mother, and that got this young lady's broody hormones going. Her family has tried to point out that she is not in a position to raise a child, but she and her boyfriend don't have the ability to follow this line of reasoning. In the UK, they would probably be given all sorts of welfare support, but this is not a provision available to them. She argues that her sister is single and unemployed, so what's the difference?

Up to now, her mother has taken care of the contraception issue. Now that her daughter is starting to become adamant about having a baby, the dilemma arises: feeling fairly certain that her daughter does not have the ability to raise a child, and that the boyfriend is even less capable, does the mother infringe on her daughter's human rights and have her sterilised? What about the human rights of the hypothetical child, for whom no provision will be made by the state?

The reason I mentioned the woman's age at the beginning of this post is that, within very few months, she will be 21 and legally an adult, at which point the whole issue of her mother's power to impose her will becomes a thorny matter.

I was discussing this issue with a colleague whose girlfriend, a human rights lawyer, is writing a paper about the compulsory sterilisation of disabled people in Kenya. The case study for the paper involves a mentally competent, blind woman who was given a hysterectomy with neither her permission nor her knowledge after the birth of her fourth child. She only discovered that the surgery had taken place at all when she developed complications.

Where is the line between these two cases? Who makes the choices, and who gives that person the right to make those choices?

How do you define "average"?

Several times in recent weeks, I have been taken to task over the fact that the "About me" section of this blog describes me as "just your average middle-aged woman". I have been advised that this is not an accurate reflection and that I should change or delete it. Oddly, this admonition has come from both professional and personal contacts.

Hmm...

Since I am unavoidably middle-aged, I would imagine that it's the bit about being average that galls. What I should point out, though is that the sentence continues "...in the early 21st century."

As I see it, the reality of the age we live in has an impact on what it means to be "average". The average woman of my age today is...

• often a wife/partner
• usually a mother
• normally holding down a job or building a career
• maybe studying (anything from flower arranging, to advanced thermodynamics)
• possibly dieting
• probably trying to adhere to an exercise programme of some sort
• increasingly maintaining a presence in cyberspace
  
• very likely pursuing a few hobbies and
  
• almost certainly trying to keep in touch with friends and family all over the world.

All of these things are true of me.

Furthermore, my weight is about average, ditto my house and my car. My appearance is unremarkable (you know: neither drop dead gorgeous nor...erm... "unfortunate"). I'm taller than the UK average but not remarkably so. I'm fairly intelligent (I hope) but not in the prodigious leagues inhabited by the Downeses of this world. I am endowed with about the average number of talents and abilities, none of them stellar.

In fact, the most notable thing about me is probably the amount of noise I generate. People challenged to come up with a single word to describe me are far more likely to emulate my school teachers and opt for "talkative" or "loud" than anything else. I've been told I'm like a walking ear protection gear zone. And let's face it, that's not really something to brag about.

In fact, like almost the entire population, I only become unique when you get to know me - put me in a crowd, and I blend right in.

Like I said.

Average.

The value of a life

Today my husband was late for work. There were no trains running from our station in to London this morning, so he was advised to try again later. How inconvenient!

Today, my sons were driven to school. The fact that Dad had not been able to catch his train meant that he grabbed the opportunity to spend a few precious minutes with our boys by collecting them from home and driving them the short distance to the campus. Just as well, really - they were running horribly late. How fortuitous!

Today a person decided life was no longer worth living. Statistics tell us it was likely to have been a young man aged 18-24. He threw himself in front of a train. Which was why my husband was inconvenienced and my sons were lucky. Suddenly those things seem very small.

Someone lost his life today. Someone gave up hope. Someone hit bottom and saw no way out.

I think it was Nigel Paine in his closing keynote at Learning Technologies who touched on this very thing. How he was on a train that was brought to a halt, because someone had committed suicide in this manner. How no-one in the carriage said a thing when the announcement was made over the PA. How one man looked at his watch and tutted in annoyance - presumably because he was now going to be late for an appointment. After all, why can't these people be more considerate - don't they realise how busy we are?

Is this what we have come to? "A young man ended his life in misery and despair" "Tsk! That means I'll be late for my meeting!"

School of everything

I'd like to give a plug to the School of Everything. I met Mary Harrington a while ago at a Creative Coffee Club klatsch in London. I identify with her passion and wild-eyed enthusiasm.

If you have something to teach or something to learn, swing by. Apparently someone is about to run a lesson in how to draw monsters! Of course, if you prefer something a little more cerebral, those matters are covered, too!

Shrove Tuesday

Today is the day known as Shrove Tuesday in the church calendar. Lent begins tomorrow, which is known as Ash Wednesday. Traditionally, Lent was a period of self-imposed deprivation. Mirrors would be covered over and the pursuit of pleasure of any sort was avoided for the forty days leading up to Good Friday - the day of the crucifixion. These days, people (if they observe Lent at all) tend to choose to give up one thing, one "guilty pleasure" such as chocolate or TV.

In order to prepare one's home for this period, people would consume every sweet and pleasurable thing in the house on the Tuesday before the start of Lent. In England, this has come to mean making mountains of pancakes and spreading/filling them with all the nice goodies remaining in the house. I guess one can see a reflection of the Jewish tradition of ridding the house of all leaven in the build up to Pesach (Passover).

Even in homes where no other religious observance is kept, many families all over the country will be eating pancakes tonight. Since we're not great traditionalists, we usually forget about it until it's too late, only, now that I've thought of it, I think the Romeis family is likely to have pancakes tonight.

But shh! Don't tell my boys - it will be a pleasant surprise after all the serious-diet-imposed tedium of the past few weeks.

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!