Wildlife Photo Blog

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I’ve been volunteering at The Atlantic Wildlife Institute as Director of Education for the past five years. This year we managed to get a few Summer students to help us out and Mark has set up the AWI Blog, which is highlighting photos of the orphaned babies as well as some of the injured animals that have started to pour in to the Institute. For example, New Brunswick allows a Spring bear hunt so we usually receive a few orphaned cubs.

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AWI uses these animals in much the same way that scientists conduct water and air sampling. We want to understand the causes of displacement. This knowledge informs our research work, in partnership with several universities & colleges, and lets us create appropriate learning programs. AWI is a registered national charity, so you can make tax-deductible donations, too :-)

Update: Our new blog is atlanticwildlife.org

RSS Feed Stealing?

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Scott Leslie is concerned that someone has taken his entire feed and used it in a way that contravenes his Creative Commons license, which happens to be the same one I use for this site.

A quick aside – if you don’t understand CC licensing, you should review the license explanations before you start using other people’s work on the Web, and if you are a teacher, you should ensure that students understand copyright and copyleft.

In my comment to Scott, I noted that there is another organisation, The Human Capital Institute, that uses many RSS feeds (including mine) but makes you register for their “service” before you can read a complete post. Some might think that this too would contravene the copyright license that I use. Here are two other CC-licensed sites I noticed from the same website:

e-learnspace

InternetTime Blog

I also noted that many blogs do not have clear copyright statements, like The Learning Circuits Blog, which means that they are fully copyrighted, so that taking an entire feed would likely infringe copyright. If you have a blog or website and want to share, then you should use something as simple and easy as a Creative Commons license. However, it obviously doesn’t mean that everyone will play by the rules.

Update: Following my notification of copyright infringement to the Human Capital Institute, they promptly deleted my feed from their resource list.

Process improvement is bad for innovation

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I’ve had this feeling for a while and now there is evidence that process improvement, like Six Sigma, stifles innovation. Oligopoly Watch feels that, “The management moves that cheer stockholders and financial analysts, when taken too far, can lead to the long-term decline of the company in question.” Their article today reports that Six Sigma process improvement has resulted in less innovation at 3M, a company renowned for its innovative products, like the Post-It Note:

But, according to the article, 3M is hurting this year. Its operations are far more efficient, but this is company that has thrived on having a variety of new and sometimes breakthrough products coming to market. No longer. Financial results are down, and the general sense is that 3M is doing everything more efficiency except innovation. Six Sigma is great for speeding up the assembly lines or minimizing errors, but fails at producing new ideas.

About ten years ago I became immersed in Human Performance Technology (HPT), another process improvement method, but not as lucrative as Six Sigma or Lean Manufacturing. The tools and perspectives were beneficial but that is all that they are – tools. Process improvement is a tool set, not an overarching or unifying concept for an organisation.  Process improvement is a means and not an end in itself, and this seems to be the trap that 3M fell into.

I left the HPT fold about a year ago when I realized that being a Certified Performance Technologist was not an achievable end, but a costly merry-go-round that just kept spinning.  I have learned a lot from HPT, but you cannot look at things one way, to the exclusion of all others. The fundamental problem with all of these process improvement methodologies is that you get myopic. It seems that 3M is learning this lesson as well.

The all too real effects of artificial structures

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Stephen Downes says that teams are a fiction that purport to represent everyone when in fact they reflect only a select subset of opinions [such as the team leader?].

Liong Huai Yu, highlights this quote in his review of Dave Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous – “The world is too diverse for any single classification system to work for everyone in every culture at every time.”

Classification systems, like teams, are artificial structures. Liong goes on to compare Weinberger’s premises with education:

To bring the discussion further from what is discussed in the book, what are the artificial structures and organisational methods have we put in our schools? Artificial subject segregation, timetabling and even teacher-specialisation. As we move forward facing new challenges, fighting regional and global competitions, we may have to re-examine the structures we have in place, as most of the time, these structures were created for a world that was last century. Also, are they benefiting the users (both students and teachers) the way it set out to be.

Any change initiative or attempt at systems improvement has little chance of success if you don’t take the time and effort to really examine the underlying structures. All of our management models and organisational structures are artificial structures and we have the collective intelligence to change them. Usually what is standing in the way are the vested interests of those with power and the all too powerful ingrained culture that we take for granted.

Remembering that it’s all artificial may be a good first step in seeing with new eyes.

How we measure shows what we value

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Stephen Downes calls it, “a completely useless and misleading piece of non-information” while the Globe & Mail earnestly reports that, “Once formal schooling ends, learning rates drop“. They are both talking about the Canadian Council on Learning’s Composite Learning Index.

Given the CCL’s support of homework without any data to back it up, or pushing formal post-secondary education in spite of what Canadians value, I don’t expect many innovative ideas here. What I see are reports that reinforce the existing industrial education system, with all its trappings. Instead, let me recommend some other sources of information and points of view:

Don’t correlate post-secondary education directly with economic success, either as an individual or as a society.

Educational attainment may not be a useful measurement, according to Richard Florida:

One, the educational attainment measure leaves out people who have been incredibly important to the economy, but who for one reason or another did not go to or finish college. Names that come quickly to mind are Bill Gates. Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, among countless others. My measure of creative occupations counts them all.

Two, the educational attainment measure is quite broad and thus does not allow for nations or regions to identify, quantify or build strategy around specific types of human capital or talent. We all recognize for example that Nashville is the center for country music talent, Hollywood for film, Silicon Valley for technology. And it is clear that nations and regions are coming more and more to specialize in particular kinds of economic activity, so my occupation based measure allows us to get at that.

There are systemic and biological reasons why boys are dropping out of school.

Though the CCL states that “Early adulthood is an ideal period for participation in formal education“, many parents and even educators feel that you don’t have to go to college.

Useless industrial artifacts

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I came across two articles about public education yesterday, one is four years old, the other quite recent.

Here’s a snippet from a long article Why Nerds are Unpopular (2003):

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens’ main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I’ve read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

The main problem is the system, which creates prison-like conditions, and in the case of this article shows why “nerds” may be so successful in life but are unsuccessful at the school game, and this is what happens:

In almost any group of people you’ll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it’s generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that’s exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one’s rank depends mostly on one’s ability to increase one’s rank. It’s like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another’s opponents.

From Mark Federman is this 2007 case of a high-performing student caught in the feudal power of the classroom:

To me, this is another sad case of a burnt-out, small-minded teacher conveying the well-rehearsed lesson that school is the place in which a love of learning and the value of curiosity, discovery and insightful, abstract thought are to be trampled beyond recognition. These are substituted instead by a discipline that enforces compliance, conformity, and intellectual docility, rewarding the mediocre to create a compliant, easily distracted citizenry for the benefit of the elites.

So why is a workplace performance specialist so interested in public school? One reason, of course, is that I have two children in the system, for now. The more important reason is that almost all workers have come through the public school system. If graduates, especially the high performing ones, are already bitter and jaded, how do you think they’ll react to a training program that mirrors what they had in school?

Courses not related to something that they will need to use tomorrow morning on the job show that management has no real interest in employee performance. They’re just going through the motions.

Performance evaluations not based on observable and measurable criteria will be viewed the same way as school report cards; a popularity or a compliance contest.

Perhaps the best way to change the school system is to set the example by divesting our workplaces of all of the useless artifacts of the industrial age. For instance, how would a Results-Oriented Work Environment (ROWE) translate into our education system?

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 ;-)