It's all in the name

Further reflection on my post earlier this month on learning and risk suggests that by using the word, "risk" I might be missing the point. This reflection was prompted by Peter's comment on my post and some interesting conversations with other learning professionals. The best of these yielded this gem of a quote attributed to a brigadier in the British army,

"Often the wrong idea executed with extreme violence turns out to be the right idea"

The trouble with the term "risk" is that it means too many different things to too many people. Moreover, it is perhaps against the zeitgeist of the credit crunch to exhort people to take more risks so that they can learn more. That was, of course, not what I was trying to say but I can see how it might be understood this way.

I proffer "attitude to uncertainty" as an alternative. Less pithy, I know, but perhaps a tighter definition.

Is our attitude to uncertainty the thing which best defines our ability to learn? You can have fun with the word uncertainty. The future is uncertain but when you come to think of it so is the past. We only think we know things.

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so. " Artemus Ward [found on Peter Edstrom's blog for which thanks]

Wild Friday Thought

I have just finished reading The World in Six Songs by Daniel Levitin, which was a birthday present from a friend that I highly recommend.

[note to self: is the fact that all of my birthday presents were either books or malt whiskey something I should be concerned by or proud of?]

In it Levitin examines the evolution of music alongside the evolution of human consciousness. This sounds terribly dry but is in fact compelling and fun in his hands he marries it to a dissection of the music of The Beatles, Paul Simon, Neil Young to Arcade Fire, Sting and Johnny Cash.

In any case towards the end of the book he talks about systems displaying evidence of consciousness. An individual ant in an any colony is no more aware of the actions of the whole than an individual neuron in the brain is aware of taste or thought or dreams.

This made me think about Michael Wesch's YouTube film "The Machine is Us" from a year of so back. Millions of people sorting, sifting the web, creating and collaborating...

I am sure I am very late to have this thought. We are the ants or the neurons. And it has only just occurred to me that the next big step is when the web attains consciousness!

Monday musings on risk

I have been thinking for a while about risk. My summarised view on learning is that without risk very little learning happens. So rather than focus on the learning content we should focus on the attitude to risk. Encourage people to challenge themselves and others a bit more, step outside of their comfort zones more often and reflect and they will learn more.

Thus I am disappointed to read Lucy Kellaway's piece this morning on managerial bone-headedness as it suggests that the window of humility is closing.

The idea that the recent "unprecedented" shock to our global economy might precipitate a reflection on the whole model seems to have been naive. Maybe like macro and micro economics or classical Newtonian and quantum physics, my little theory of learning doesn't apply across all realities.

A small girl stops peddling and falls off her bike or a little boy shakes a Coke bottle violently and covers the kitchen in stickiness. It is reasonable for them to reflect, adapt and maybe learn. But we drive the entire world's financial system into the buffers and one year on pretty much nothing has changed.

I'll be the first to accept that the reasons for "the perfect financial storm" are far from clear. There are a multitude of variables which will keep economists in decent arguments for years. But to file it under, "Too difficult to understand. Carry on as before" seems a little like a cop out.

Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) is also good today on choice. Which makes me think a bit more about the above. Does too much choice mean the same as no choice in terms of a reduction in quality? You could think in terms of market and planned economies both being routes to failure.

But this also applies to learning. If you have no choice you won't reflect and learn. If you have too much choice you can't reflect and learn. New model of politcal and economic thought anyone??

Interesting to note that today my thoughts are entirely provoked by the FT...

Making it happen

I have been reflecting on how to make individuals take responsibility for their own learning. A number of conversations with people over the last few weeks have hammered home the difficulties of getting an informal learning programme off the ground.

e.g. our firewall shuts off access to anything of value, our risk department would never let us delegate responsibility that far down the line, imagine if someone said something really stupid on twitter...

Within the informal learning blogosphere the response seems to be, "Quit moaning and just accept that the change has already happened. Traditional learning and development is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet"

And yet I don't hear of many major employers who have jumped the early adopter chasm yet (I would love examples to prove me wrong)

Which prompts two thoughts:

1. Start really really small. Teach two or three small groups how to use RSS feeds and social bookmarking and maybe just maybe blogging about their experiences
2. Start huge. Approach major employers and say, "You currently spend £50 million or £590 per head on training each year. Appoint us to run your L&D function and we'll save you 20% in the first year and improve the quality. We'll make ourselves redundant in two years leaving you with the capability to teach yourselves.

Hmmm.

Data swimming

George Siemens wrote an interesting post yesterday on the narrowing gap between virtual reality and reality. Starting from the changing behaviour of conference audiences who no longer sit patiently and listen but tweet, blog, tag, chat and fact check, George explains his desire to have an "overlaying data layer on the physical world... such as walking through a historical district and being able to see buildings on your mobile device as they looked 100 years ago"

He concludes that the integration of the physical self and the online self is the greatest challenge facing technologists, arguing that total convergence is the likely outcome.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that a Terminator like Head Up Display which offers us the constant seamless ability to access data on our multiple realities would be very cool. Moreover, I am sure that they will be available, if indeed there are not already some working prototypes. But I wonder whether it would necessarily be a good thing...

Moreover would it be put to good use? More (data) does not necessarily mean better it just means more.

I'm tying myself in mental knots here because by nature I am a liberal - throw open the doors see what happens type, treat 'em like grown ups. As appear to be many in the informal learning community and associated networks. But at the same time it remains true that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it think... Many people, I would even go so far as to say, the majority, want to be told what to do.

When I wax lyrical about the opportunities for learning in this brave new world even some of my own staff say, "Yeah, it's OK for you to say that. You're educated, curious, enthusiastic... I can't see the relevance."

Now I am really heading into dangerous territory.

Might it be the case that people without the skills to sift, sort, weigh and assess the wealth of available information will marginalised; left at the side of the pool afraid to jump in. Those with confidence to jump in, who lack these metaphorical data swimming skills or who don't learn them fast will drown. Think of how many people cross the road or drive while texting. This figure will rise exponentially with the increase of available distractions. "Surfing related death" will become a whole new category in our national statistics

Previously knowledge was power because most people couldn't be trusted to deal with the information. Where data is ubiquitous, does "data swimming" become power because most people simply can't handle the information.

Old fogey status confirmed...

Today, I am forty... (pause for gnashing of teeth). A delightful vignette in the office this morning confirms just how out of touch I am. In a brief office conversation about YouTube, I mentioned the current Internet meme of mash-ups involving Kanye West.

I had read in the traditional print media about West interrupting the recent MTV event and then noticed references to it becoming a meme (like Star Wars Kid, Rick Astley and many others before) in some of my RSS feeds this morning.

Unfortunately, I pronounced his name as Kayne as is "Cane" not Kanye as in "Cahn-yay". This was enough to send one of my young colleagues into red faced paroxysms of delight at just how out of touch I am.

The thing is, I have never knowingly heard Mr. West's name spoken out loud. I have simply read it. My mind decided not to recognise the reversal of the "Y" and the "N" in his name in favour of a more plausible (in my head at least) mispelling of Abel's brother's name.

I could complain at this stage that life would be a whole lot easier if people learned to spell and stopped making up words. But it has been ever thus and it is one of the functions of language to separate the wheat from the chaffe, the "in" from the "out" and the young from the old. Many pronunciations of English names and places (Featherstonehaugh: pronounced Fanshaw; Cholmondeley: pronounced Chumly except where it is pronounced Cholmondeley; Loughborough pronounced Luffbra) are deliberate traps for the unwary to highlight the fact that you are either foreign, uneducated or worse "middle class"; depending on your prejudice.

Anyway Kanye's name did its job. It identified me as one of the uninitiated.

This made me think about my learning. Much of my receptive processes are written. I read more than I watch or listen. But when trying out new ideas I will discuss them or write about them as in this blog. This practice, to become useful, must feel safe and indeed the creation of a safe learning environment is one of the cornerstones of a good teacher's art.

Fortunately, I have developed a fairly thick skin in my four decades on this earth and I am happy to be laughed at occasionally. I will not forget Mr West's name in a hurry nor yet will the shame of my mistake prevent me from talking or wrtiting about things that I don't entirely understand.

But it does offer me an insight into why this might be difficult for other people. For people who are still sensitive to the opinions of others the internet and the world of informal learning might resemble less a quasi-infinite candy sore of ideas and opportunity and more a place of almost infinite opportunities for self-embarassment

The information foxtrot

On Saturday I managed to lose my blackberry. In the past this would have been cause for something akin to panic. OMG there goes my life.!! Not just the address book which I have built up over the years but also the photographs of my daughter I took whilst we were on holiday.

This time no such thing. Most of my contacts are in linkedin or Facebook, my photographs are mostly uploaded to Picasa, my emails are all still waiting for me at work and the phone itself is being replaced by the insurance I didn't know I had (nice to know you can insure yourself against stupidity...)

All of this is lovely and so far so web 2.0...

But the thing that struck me most was the joy of being inaccessible and the things I didn't do whilst deprived of my technological worry bead substitute.

Over the weekend and this morning I didn't read any news I wasn't interested in on the BBC website whilst I was ostensibly doing something else; I didn't absent mindedly check for emails or texts at least 30 times in the day; I didn't play WordMole or FreeRice whilst waiting for something else; I didn't zone out in the middle of a conversation to check a fact on Google; I didn't visit Facebook; I didn't send any text messages when I could have talked to someone.

What did I do?

I took my daughter out on her bicycle and then to the cinema. I watched the last night of the proms on TV when my daughter was in bed. I read a book. I talked to family and friends. I painted with my daughter (her grandmother has bought her oil paints so help me!). I cooked dinner for a neighbour. I thought about stuff.

Then I came to work this morning (reading a book on the way) and checked my RSS feeds and then my emails and the world hadn't ended. I didn't have the courage to leave my phone behind when I went on holiday and yet when it was removed from me I loved it.

I think there is something in this alternation of pace of information (a bit like the slow food movement). Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow (for those of you who wondered about the title)