Harold Jarche

Freelancing

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Thinking about working for yourself? I made the move four years ago and don’t regret it, though working for yourself isn’t easy, it’s just a lot more free. Not as in free beer, but more like free to choose.

If you’re thinking about working on your own, my first recommendation is Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation. Though it’s US-focused, it gives several perspectives on the ups and downs of free-agentry.

There are many blogs that you can start reading in order to check out life as an independent. If you are working in an office and want to get out of the rat race, check out Escape from Cubicle Nation. You may also want to consider Become a Consutant, if that’s where your inclinations lie. Finally, there’s a new blog from down under, Freelance Switch, that posted this comprehensive article on 101 Essential Freelancing Resources.

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PKM Notes

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Yesterday I gave a 90 minute online session to the Calgary eLearning Network, using Elluminate (a free “room” was provided by the company). This web presentation platform is quite robust and simple to learn if you’ve some experience with synchronous web tools. It’s based on a presentation model though, which means that it’s best for a lecture format, with one person doing most of the talking. It’s more difficult to get a conversation going, with only one person holding the microphone at any given time. The audio was good and I liked the polling function to get some quick feedback.

Here are links to what we discussed, in order of appearance:

Informal Learning Website and Jay’s book on Informal Learning

Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog on Web 2.0 (I used some of his excellent diagrams)

Hugh McLeod’s Gaping Void cartoons and commentary (may not be workplace safe)

Accenture Report on managers finding information on intranets

Dave Pollard on PKM

Will Richardson on Reading & Writing Online

Stock & Flow on the InternetTime Wiki

Leigh Blackall’s Networked Learning photo set

On the right navigation bar of this site are my External Links, including My Feed Aggregator and My Bookmarks. There are also several posts on PKM on this blog.

* You can test out Elluminate with their free vRoom offer.

Web-Learning Skills

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With my upcoming online presentation on personal knowledge management (PKM) to the Calgary eLearning Network tomorrow, I’m going through some collected files on the subject. I’ve also noticed that “personal learning” was a topic for a panel discussion at the recent eLearning Guild conference. Tony O’Driscoll has remarked that:

This is also one of the coolest things about Web 2.0 that we talked about on the panel. First and foremost Steven made the point that your approach as an educator should not be “OK let me figure out what blogs, wikis, social tagging, You Tube, Second Life and Moodle mean for my learning strategy or my learners.” Instead Steven suggests you start in the most obvious place -Where might that be? you ask – Why YOU and your own learning of course – Steven [Stephen Downes] says.

Learning has always been a personal thing, even when it happens in formal training. It’s also social, in that our learning is affected by our social context, whether it be in conversation or observation. What’s relatively new is that the Web lets us do some of our personal and social learning in a much easier way. We can connect, reflect, dispute and research with the click of the mouse.

My experience in helping trainers and educators with learning on the Web reinforces Stephen Downe’s advice to start with YOU. Those who are using the Web for their own learning have an easier transition in using it in training & education.

I guess it would be similar to asking someone to be a trainer in the pre-Web era. Could they be a good trainer if they lacked presentation, speaking, writing, or organisation skills? Today, you need web-learning skills.

For further digging, here are some articles I’ve tagged with PKM. Here are a bunch more tagged PKM on del.icio.us.

To train or not to train

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I’ve been in the training business for most of my life, in one role or another. Training, when it’s needed and done well, can be a most effective intervention.

Training is really effective when you can clearly measure the end performance. My own experience of good training was with helicopter pilots. As the training specialist I was able to observe instructor pilots and watch the junior pilots develop their skills in the aircraft or on the flight simulator. The program was proficiency-based, meaning that once a skill was mastered, the pilot could move on, without repeating the same thing. Avoiding unnecessary training meant significant cost savings as well.

I was reminded of the down side of training in Michele Martin’s post on 5 Reasons You Don’t Need Training, where she shows that inappropriate uses of training include:

  • To make up for poorly designed work processes
  • As a replacement for corrective action
  • To satisfy a “Requirement” for professional development
  • When performance expectations have not been properly developed
  • When you don’t have management understanding and buy-in

I’ve experienced all of these, from inside the organisation and as an outside consultant. I’ve also learned to stay away from “training” projects that really aren’t about training. I’ve discussed this before in, Whither ISD, ADDIE & HPT, but it bears repeating because training is costly, in both resources and in time (trainers & trainees).

I learned early in my career as a training development officer that training should be the last option, after all other performance improvement measures have been proven inadequate. It’s a good rule of thumb.

Three Conflicting Pillars – Synthesized

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I took some time to re-read Kieran Egan’s book The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. I’ve referred to his premises in Education’s Three Conflicting Pillars. These three premises are:

  • education as socialization
  • education as a quest for truth (Plato)
  • education as the realization of individual potential (Rousseau)

The same topic was later revisited with a good discussion between Brian Alger, Rory McGreal, and Terry Wassall, and myself.

Later, I then went back to Egan’s website and came across a shorter article that summarizes the main premises of the book, Why Education is So Difficult and Contentious:

“… educational thinking draws on only three fundamental ideas – that of socializing the young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and facilitating the development of students’ potential. All educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face.”

Egan’s suggestions for a curriculum based on process, not content, has made sense for me ever since I read The Educated Mind and some of his other writings in 1997. The book includes a Planning Framework that still makes more sense to me than any other curriculum framework that I have seen to date. You have to read the book to understand how to implement it, though.

After ten years, Egan’s ideas remain fresh and workable for the Internet Age and I strongly recommend this book.

Making A Difference

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Do all of the small environmental actions of individuals make any significant difference to climate change? According to an article in In These Times, not really:

One barrier standing in the way of meaningful action is fuzzy-headed thinking on the part of those truly concerned about global warming. So worried are these activists, that their solution to the climate change problem is to marshal legions of Americans to change light bulbs, buy a Prius, or do any other number of helpful, but, in the big picture, not too significant feel-good actions.

Some of my work over the past decade has been in performance improvement, and I’ve tried to focus on the real causes of organisational problems, and not just the symptoms. Having everyone “do their part” may not be enough to reverse global warming and a more concentrated effort to address the root causes may be needed . The article goes on to make this comparison with the civil rights movement:

Take the Civil Rights movement. Yes, personal reflection and individual change had its place, but can you imagine Martin Luther King telling people to “ask” their school boards to integrate the public schools, or “encourage” corporations not to discriminate, or “tell” their elected leaders to “push” legislatures in the South to do away with Jim Crow laws?

One answer may be to act green in our decisions that can actually make a difference. For instance:

  • When voting, choose the most environmentally responsible candidate or party.
  • Don’t settle for half-measures from any elected official and let them know it.
  • Refuse to be sold short-term economic benefits in place of environmental sustainability.
  • Lobby to get rid of the worst offenders amongst our elected officials.

AIMS Fails Learning 101

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The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) has just released its report about our public education system. On the local news, the Director of AIMS urged the New Brunswick Government to bring back standardized testing. The Minister, Kelly Lamrock, is supposed to reply this afternoon. We’ll see what stuff our politicians are made of.

So what does it matter that our local high school received a C+? About as much as the fact that I got a D in Grade 9 French class. I now speak French fluently. I also got an A in Grade 12 Algebra and my math is abysmal, even after two years of university level math. Face it; in the long run, there is no correlation between success in life and the grades you got.

Creating a lovely matrix filled with absolute numbers may look pretty and may get you some press time but it fails to inform us about the state of our education system. The time to measure is several years after graduation, when all of the short-term test results are irrelevant and what you really learned is what you have left.

Our neighbour to the South has been pushing standardized testing through its “No Child Left Behind” legislation, and look at the results, according to Monty Neil:

Key problems with the law include over-emphasizing standardized testing, narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation; over-identifying schools in need of improvement; using sanctions that do not help improve schools; inappropriately excluding or retaining in grade low-scoring children to boost test results; and inadequate funding. The law not only punishes schools, it damages educational quality, particularly for those the law purports to help – low income children, children of color, those with learning disabilities, and those who are just learning English.

Is this the direction that AIMS wants to take our system?

Standardized tests tell us little about learning, and report cards for schools only create “talk points” for partisan debate about education. Standardized tests, for students or for schools, are all about control. Yeats said that education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. Fire is much harder to control.

Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth and The Case Against Standardized Testing, has this to say about grades:

Second, I’d been looking for an alternative to grades because research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself. The ultimate goal of authentic assessment must be the elimination of grades.

In another article, Kohn refers to a Journal of Educational Psychology study that examined just how actively students were engaged in learning while taking standarized tests:

To be sure, there are plenty of students who think deeply and score well on tests—and plenty of students who do neither. But, as a rule, it appears that standardized-test results are positively correlated with a shallow approach to learning.

Therefore, I will not grade the AIMS report, but rather examine it from a performance-based pass/fail perspective:

  • Does the report help policy makers to improve learning in the educational system? Fail
  • Does the report inform the general public about the core issues in public education? Fail
  • Does the report raise the public profile of AIMS? Pass

Phone oligopolies ask to deregulate

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I came across this PR piece from Bell-Aliant on TechEast today:

Aliant announced today that it has applied to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for forbearance from regulation of local residential telephone service in nine competitive exchanges in the Halifax area. [snip] With forbearance, customers in these areas will experience the full benefits of competition, with greater value through increased choice and flexible offers that can be delivered in a more timely manner.

A little more digging and I connected to an article on CBC:

The Conservative government’s move last week came against resistance from the CRTC, whose rules were intended to handicap the big telephone companies until they lost 25 per cent or more of phone users to competitors.

[Industry Minister] Bernier expects that the decision to liberate the big players will result in rapid price reductions, but consumer advocates fear the established operators will use their new freedom to squelch emerging competitors.

I don’t feel that competition is real when you only have a few companies in the market. For example, there is little competition for wireless data in Canada, as shown in this graph by Tom Purves:

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I’d like to re-iterate a post I wrote last year, which discussed the April 2006 edition of The Atlantic. It included five past articles on the subject of Markets & Morals. Here are two pertinent quotes, from the 19th and 20th Centuries respectively.

Henry Demarist Lloyd wrote in March 1881, “When monopolies succeed, the people fail”  and that “The nation is the engine of the people”, in his piece denouncing the practices of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. There is little doubt today about the world wide power and influence of monopolies and oligopolies.

In 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith warned of the dangers of blindly having faith in our industrial/corporatist systems:

The greater danger is in the subordination of belief to the needs of the modern industrial system – These are that technology is always good; that economic growth is always good; that firms must always expand; that consumption of goods is the principal source of happiness; that idleness is wicked; and that nothing should interfere with the priority we accord to technology, growth, and increased consumption.

Just as each generation must work to preserve its democracy, so we have to constantly keep corporate interests at bay, for no matter how much NewSpeak they put forth about the “full benefits of competition”, the truth is that we, the citizenry, are being hornswoggled.

Blogs that get you thinking

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I’ve been tagged with the thinking blogger meme, which asks you ” … to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all – blogs that really get you thinking!”. This came via the screaming pages, and I must say thanks for the recommendation.

In what I believe is the spirit of this meme, I’m not going to tag any of my standard and essential blogs, like Jay, Jon, Rob, or Stephen (he’s already been tagged anyway).

Here are five highly-recommended blogs that make me think:

  • Nine Shift has strongly influenced my perspective on the changes that we are witnessing as a society and an economy. It’s also changed my understanding about why change happens. I would recommend the book and the blog for anyone in North America interested in community development.
  • Donald Clark’s Plan B is filled with thoughtful and sometimes contrarian opinions about the learning field. He has taken on Bloom’s taxonomy, instructional design, education and Freud.
  • The Eide Neurolearning Blog, written by two doctors, is a wealth of information about how the brain works. The scientific studies reported here should be required reading for all educators.
  • I have saved and tagged more articles from Anecdote than any other blog. This Australian multi-writer blog is filled with practical information about the power of narrative for organisations and learning.
  • The name tells all, with think:lab by Christian Long. I don’t know how Christian can write so much and so well (perhaps they have 26 hour days in Texas) but he covers all aspects of learning environments, from the physical to the ephemeral.

Take these five blogs, plus the other 145 that I read, and there’s plenty to think about.

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Here are the rules, should you wish to continue this meme [I always wonder if propogating these memes is a good thing or not, but I figured in this case it may introduce readers to something new or different, so that can’t be bad]:

  1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
  2. Link to the original post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
  3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).