Harold Jarche

Power Laws

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The real power is in making others powerful

… is attributed to Ben Zander, author of The Art of Possibility, found on Presentation Zen [an excellent resource on presentation design and worth a check before your next PowerPoint presentation]. Garr then says this about teaching:

In presenting – and certainly in teaching – we need to make certain that the audience is engaged so that they may, with our help, find for themselves what is there to be discovered, including the discovery of the possibilities that may be within them.

Finding what’s within means needing less direction from without.  And that is the crux of the issue in this emerging world of do-it-ourselves, collaborative work and user-generated social media. Once the learners are engaged, they set new conditions for the teaching relationship.

I started graduate studies over a decade after I completed my BA. By this time I knew what I wanted and was quite clear with my professors what I hoped to achieve in each course. I didn’t care what marks I got, because I had a clear learning agenda. I was still open to new ideas but I was not willing to jump through arbitrary hoops. I didn’t have this sense of direction until I was in my 30’s and had had some life experience.

It took me a while to accept the idea that I could direct my own learning. This is a powerful idea. Control your learning agenda and you have the power to create your own future, not someone else’s and definitely not the future envisaged by any power elite. What happens when this idea starts percolating down to undergraduates, high school students and even elementary school?

 

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A six-day work week – for students

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Most people have a five-day work week.  Now, I know that many people work more than the 35, 37 or even 40 hours per week mandated in their contract, and that it’s common to work through breaks and lunch to get the job done.

I would surmise though, that most of us feel that a five-day work week is about enough to be doing your employer’s work.  So why do we give our kids a six-day work week? From September unti June, students spend pretty well one day of the weekend on homework. This is work that “someone else” feels is important. I can see doing some self-directed activities, or perhaps the infrequent project on the weekend, but my observations show that most high school students have a six-day work week. This is on top of 8 to 12 hour work-days, Monday to Friday.

Come on, there’s more to life than school and we should all start raising a fuss [that’s why I’m raising this issue again]. Do we really want to have kids who know how to do nothing else other than what their teachers tell them to do?

How can they become self-directed learners when they’re too busy being directed by teachers?

Blogging for work

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Do you enjoy reading this blog? Has it ever helped you out with your work? Do you consider it a dependable source of information?

I’ve been writing this blog for over three years and while many of the benefits are personal, the number of visitors indicates that there’s something of interest for others as well. This site is advertisement-free but I still have to pay the bills, and as you probably know, I’m self-employed.

Times are a bit slow in the consulting business so I’m asking my readership for some help. If you’re so inclined, take a look at my consulting services and see if you know of anyone who could benefit from them. I have a fairly wide array of clients and projects. Pass on my name if you like. I’d also appreciate any advice on how I present my services. Maybe I’m missing something here.

What about sponsorship? Would it bother anyone if I sought a sponsor for this blog? Do you know of any company that would like to sponsor this blog? I can share my stats data if someone is interested.

I’ve had some suggestions about other ways to offer services and I’ll float them here in the next while. This blog, my business and life in general is all a work in progress. I intend to keep on learning through more and better conversations and I’ll keep on blogging for as long as I can.

Early adopters make the mistakes first

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At the Internet Time Community we’ve been having a discussion about adopting blogs and social bookmarks for organisations. These kinds of efforts need pioneers to go out and test the myriad of web 2.0 applications and figure out which ones will work in their organisation. With all of the options available, it can be a bit daunting, as Gillian asks:

do you spend a lot of time trying out things that don’t do exactly what you need them to? Or having to upgrade/change all the time to get the better fit for purpose (and hoping for high compatibility?)

My own reponse is that early adopters make the mistakes first and can then teach others, hopefully saving time and frustration. This is what I have previously described as Bridging the Chasm for my clients.  It’s pretty well impossible to explain how all of these small pieces loosely joined actually work unless you have used them yourself. We freelancers have that luxury of not being constrained by an IT department ;-)

Informl Learning Unworkshop Legacy

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We conducted several “unworkshops” on informal learning on the Web last year and learned a lot. We also met some interesting people, several of whom have continued the conversation around the use of two-way web tools for organisational learning.

Jay has now created The Unworkshop Legacy Page as an information resource and has coupled this with the Internet Time Community where the conversation can continue. Please come and join us.

I think that this open forum has the best potential to scale up, as our unworkshops worked well with web-savvy learners but could be difficult for those not used to adding and tweaking web applications on the fly. Anyone who wants just information can read the legacy page while those who are more communicative can join the community social network.

My own experience has been that face-to-face workshops, where participants have a laptop and Internet access, work best for the mainstream. A little bit of explanation, some concepts and a chance to play in a controlled environment with personal assistance, seems to be a good mix.

What is weighing down learning?

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Two years ago Albert Ip wrote how our schools are failing us. The other day I was reviewing some of my online bookmarks and re-read Albert’s post.

My own criticism of our current school model is that it too closely resembles the industrial economic model of the past and is not suited to our current societal needs. Albert’s post shows that the baggage encumbering our education system goes back much further than the industrial era. It seems that we need to critically question the entire foundation of our education systems as we prepare for an age requiring creativity at every level, in an information-rich world.

Albert refers to the work of William Spady, a somewhat controversial figure in outcomes based learning, but with an interesting take on our current system, which Spady calls an iceberg, weighed down by layers of inertia:

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The iceberg metaphor shows how much work there is to do below the surface in order to achieve systemic change. I’ve seen this with relatively small changes such as reducing homework in schools. It makes a learner-centric, process-oriented education seem even that much more inaccessible. But then, no one expected the fall of the Berlin Wall. We can change it, but first we have to understand what we’re up against and be ready with an appropriate option when the system cracks.

Business Plans in 2009

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Three years ago, Seth Godin wrote about what the future might hold in 2009 and I wondered how this would change anyone’s business plan. We’re more than half way there, so are these assumptions coming true?

There is no doubt that hard drive space is getting cheaper, and Gmail’s 2.8 GB of free space is a good indication. It sure is getting harder to sell storage space.

Wi-fi connections are not everywhere but many of us wish they were. Some cities are more advanced than others, but my recent travels to the US and larger Canadian cities found it to be expensive, whereas I can get free wi-fi down the street in our small town.

Yes, it seems that everyone has a digital camera or at least one on their cell phone.

Connection speeds have improved (mine have doubled) but it will be a great leap to be 10 to 100 times faster.

I’m not sure about Wal*Mart’s sales but at least the company is going to opt for compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

Compulsory retirement ages seem to be a thing of the past and I think that they will be gone in a few years,. When I was in the military, the compulsory retirement age was 55 and in 2004 it was raised to 60. There is little doubt that this trend will continue.

As for the assumption that our current professions will be gone or totally different, I believe that change will be uneven. In my own area of experience, I think that Instructional Design as a field will all but disappear.

So what does this mean for business plans?

  1. Don’t try to build another #$%* portal, because people have lots of places to put their stuff and they are getting information from a whole bunch of sources. Think small pieces, loosely joined.
  2. Anywhere can be a hotspot so adding wi-fi just might get some interesting people to gather around you and that’s what’s really important.
  3. All of those digital pictures are looking for a place to be shared. They might even improve your organisation’s learning about itself and its environment.
  4. Remember those folks that you thought would leave with all their knowledge? Well, they’re not leaving, or they’re probably interested in a new relationship, so get them while you can.
  5. Job? What’s a job?

Bridging Troubled Waters

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It’s Friday, and if you have some time you may want to watch the keynote speech by Jennifer James, at the BCEd Online Conference. It’s a streamed presentation and is over an hour long but I found it fascinating. James is a cultural anthropologist and discusses how technology and people have been interacting for thousands of years and links this to the role of educational technologists.

Near the end of her presentation, James talks about the stages of human adaptation to major new technologies, such as the Internet.

First the technology concentrates energy and changes our definition of intelligence. For instance, emotional intelligence is becoming more important in an environment of limitless data and information.

Second, the economic system adapts to the technology. This results in population and demographic shifts.

Third, the demographics adapt to the economics.  James – “If you have an international market; you have an international labour pool; you have an international gene pool. And wait and see who your kids and grandkids bring home for dinner.”

… and then there is a long time lag … (this is where we are in relation to the Internet economy/society)

Finally, the culture changes when the old mythologies break.

Take some time, put your feet up and have a listen. Please comment, if you have the urge.

A second age of reason

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Rob Paterson calls Al Gore’s latest book, The Assault on Reason, a manifesto for public media. In reading this excerpt from Time, I was fascinated by the interwoven threads of issues that I’ve been discussing on this forum. First of all is the need for public discourse, not just improving our existing educational systems:

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

There is also the issue of Net Neutrality, which Gore shows as critical to the future of The Republic:

We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

The extract reminds me of John McKnight’s thoughts on de Tocqueville’s 19th Century visit to America, and how my own work to create a Commons is part of an effort to re-create spaces for rational public discourse:

The book, Democracy in America, is, I think, the most useful book I know to help understand who we are. And he says, if I can summarize him in a rather gross form, that he came here and he found a society whose definitions and solutions were not created by nobility, by professionals, by experts or managers, but by what he identified as little groups of people, self-appointed, common men and women who came together and took three powers: the power to decide there was a problem, the power to decide how to solve the problem – that is, the expert’s power – and then the power to solve the problem. These little groups of people weren’t elected and they weren’t appointed and they were everyplace, and they were, he said, the heart of the new society – they were the American community as distinct from the European community. And he named these little groups “associations”. Association is the collective for citizens, an association of citizens. And so we think of our community as being the social space in which citizens in association do the work of problem-solving, celebration, consolation, and creation – that community, that space, in contrast to the space of the system with the box at the top and lots of little boxes at the bottom. And I think it is still the case that the hope for our time is in those associations.

Perhaps these local spaces, linked through online communities, will be the seeds of a second age of reason. One can hope.

And then, 24 hours later, Rob follows up with this post, identifying variants of a new model for our age:

In Software, it is called Open Source. In banking it is called Microcredit. In business it is called eBay, or Google, or Southwest or Starbucks. In gaming it is called Second Life or World of Warcraft. In academia it may soon be called Wikipedia. In politics it was the Dean Campaign. On the web it is called Blogging or Web 2.0 or Social Software. In office design it is called the Commons.

Five Goals – One More Meme

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At Karyn’s request, I’ll add my two cents to the 5 goal meme. Here are five goals, some realistic and some quite far off:

  1. To watch our boys become adults and be able to follow their passions.
  2. To take an extended family visit to a foreign country, preferably in conjunction with a work project so that it can last a while and we can afford it.
  3. To complete our Commons project.
  4. To build our own greenhouse.
  5. To write a book some day.

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Photo of “Goal” Italia ’90 by Smeerch