Note to self - RSS feeds are a healthy mental breakfast

I learned quite a few things yesterday. My RSS feeds have been piling up in Google reader and I haven't quite had the strength to deal with them. But I gave myself 10 minutes or so to tackle a few of them and found energy in doing them.

I particularly enjoyed Tim Harford's piece in the FT on the collapse of macroeconomics. When I was living in Russia in the 1990's there was a marvellous quote that I am afraid I cannot attribute that, "History was closed for refurbishment". I think the same is true of economics at the moment. Tim's piece immediately took me on a tour of Wikipedia to look up "non linear stochastic general equilibrium" which in turn lead me to the "Lucas critique" which essentially states that you cant use theories drawn from historical data to make policy recommendations to government. It's no use looking at how the game has been played in the past to suggest how changing the rules might affect it as the players will adjust depending on the interpretation of the new rules.

That seems likes a very elegant way to put a large number of civil servants and academics out of a job.

Anyway my point is that this 10 minutes lead me to some interesting things which enthused me. I was subsequently more energised for an interesting meeting I had with some guys from Google which in turn lead to a number of interesting ideas.

All from 10 minutes spent on RSS feeds in the morning.

Treasure Hunt Learning

Prompted by George's response to my post last week, it occurred to me that I have never blogged about how we can and should be shaping the learners of the future.

Whilst the philosophical shift in many governments' attitudes to education which moved in the 1990s towards a more interventionist and "evidence based" approach was needed (in the UK at least the average quality of teaching had declined), I am hoping that Ed Balls's recent scrapping of SATs for 14 year olds is recognition that the pendulum has swung too far towards a culture of measurement.

As business has known for years and governments should have learned by now, people respond to the figures that they know that management are looking at. If Doctors can earn more for giving flu jabs to asthma sufferers, they will; if teachers are rewarded for delivering students with 5 A-C grade GCSEs including English and Maths, that is what they will do.

The trouble is that so much time is taken preparing students for the tests that young people are no longer taught to learn. By spoonfeeding our children we risk making them mentally obese.

But it is not as simple as returning to a false memory of the halcyon days of education where all learning was a joyful treasure hunt without end. Whilst is is true that, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" it is equally true that there are "Lies, damned lies and statistics" and you will get the answer to the question you ask, not the question that you think you have asked.

"In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad." Friedrich Nietzsche

Whilst I agree with Nietzsche that too many cooks often spoil the broth, I don't share his miserablist sentiment entirely. I still believe that it is still possible to retain the joyful spirit of discovery in learning present in a treasure hunt but at the same time have accountability through assessment that is both light in touch but also useful and relevant.

I Tweet Therefore I Am

Apologies to Descartes for the title of this post but I was chastised by a colleague for not Tweeting the other day despite having set up an account last June. My trouble with Twitter is that I have been unable to see the benefit of it. It strikes me as narcissistic (an interesting post on the Guido Fawkes political blog on the subject made reference to a Times article, which underlined my feelings). I explained this to my critic and suggested that he might be better off doing his job than having a pop at me for my lack of tweets. His response was that Tweeting is very narcissistic (implying that there might be little wrong with narcissism) but a lot of companies, celebrities and politicians found it a marvellous tool.

But Narcissus starved to death while looking at his own reflection...

Can Twitter be a tool which enhances productivity as opposed to a distraction which destroys it? I'm not sure.

By restricting tweets to 140 characters or less, Twitter encourages brevity, and probably clarity. It also appears to generate fast and constructive discussions in communities that form around certain threads. So I feel that it should be a great learning tool I just can't see it yet.

There can only be one way to find out and that is to try it. So we have set up a Reed Learning Twitter Account and I have set up a personal one. From the Reed Learning one we will try to produce learning tweets on how to improve aspects of your life at work. From my own account I will try and distill some of the things that we are thinking about.

No more learners

Jay Cross posted an interesting video blog the other day about changing the way we look at learning. He used the analogy of a preacher guiding a congregation, given them direction but talking down to them from a pulpit as representative of the old forms of learning. He then introduced the story of Hans Mondermann a Dutch Traffic Management expert who removed road signs to improve road safety as an indication of the new.

Mondermann's idea on traffic management is simple. To make roads safer, you must first make them more dangerous. Road users have become lazy and overdependent on signs and signals to tell them what to do. By removing most of the road signs and markings you make the road users uncertain. Result, they pay more attention to their surroundings, other road users and pedestrians.

As usual, I agree with Jay on the need to reduce our dependency on overly directed spoon feeding in education and training in favour of teaching people to think and learn for themselves. But I don't think it is as easy as just removing the signs or preachers.

I risk upsetting a lot of people here but Jay introduced the religious analogy. The reason the directed form of learning persists is the same reason that organised religion continues to flourish. Many people like to be told what to do and in some cases how to think. It provides security and certainty.

Removing the road signs only works if people have already developed the expertise to evaluate what is presented to them (be it whilst driving their car, whilst doing their job or living their lives). Hence the reasons that Mondermann's ideas have only been implemented in a few areas of the more civilized countries in Europe .

I have written before about George Siemens's insightful comment earlier in the year about information now being, "validated at the point of consumption, not creation". The trouble is I don't think it is yet. We are still too credulous and if we simply remove the prophets and the road signs, nature abhoring a vacuum as she does, they will simply be replace by other agents who will tell us what to do.


However it may be simply that Jay is in sunny Berkeley, California and I am in rain and wind lashed London so my outlook is not so bright. Perhaps I should just watch Sugata Mitra's life affirming video of how slum children in India taught themselves to use a computer without any outside help and not be so negative.

Half formed ideas...

Yesterday I admitted to being pathetic and not blogging because I didn't have anything I felt worth saying.

Today is a new day and I thought I would relish the fact that I am not a politcian. One of the things that frustrates me most about politics is that it tends towards the mean. Unless you can keep the idea hidden or secret, anything that you want to do has to survive the polarising glare of the red top media. As a result many politicians develop the ability to avoid saying anything in case it is held against them.

The reason I celebrate not being a politician is that I am happy to admit that I am wrong. And coming up with half formed ideas and having them knocked down by people who know better is a brilliant way of learning (and this form of informal rapid prototyping should be at the heart of new approaches to learning design). It is better to take lots of small risks than to take a few very big ones.

Last week I had a fascinating conversation in the pub about our current economic gloom. It started off with the obvious and general, "Dear me, isn't it dreadful... Government doesn't seem to have a clue... Bloody bankers..." your everyday superficial and shallow comments.

Until someone said,

"OK, it's alright criticising Gordon Brown for putting our children's future in hock but what would you do?! Would you have let Northern Rock go down? Or HBOS?"

This was followed by a pause in which everyone actually thought about it (good start!). Then we ventured ideas, everyone contributed and things were batted about. And I learned a couple of new things.

My thesis was I would reinvent FDR for the 21st century and spend on major public works that were in the long term benefit of the country, major rail network, renewable energy sources to make the country energy independent, etc. Until it was pointed out to me that most renewable energy sources still cost too much: wave power doesn't work yet (see great article in the Economist), nobody in the country wants wind turbines in their gardens (an example of my favourite new acronym BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) and solar power takes 15 years to break even.

This being a conversation in a pub I immediately and shamelessly shifted my investment plan to nuclear power. I'm not one of those who thinks the way to save our planet is a return to pre-industrial society although it was interesting to hear James Lovelock (father of the Gaia hypothesis and exponent of using nuclear power) on the radio yesterday saying that it was all OK, the earth would survive and so would humans provided that about 6 billion of us die...

Interestingly, for the £12.5 the goverment gave away in the VAT reduction before Christmas, one could have built about 8 nuclear power stations.

So what would you do if you were Gordon Brown?

Why blog?

I have not been blogging much recently for a number of reasons but perhaps the biggest reason is that I have not felt like I have anything interesting to say. On reflection this runs against my whole rationale for this experiment as I laid out in my first post, that blogging for me is a way of ensuring reflective practice, which is at the the heart of learning.

So not blogging because I didn't have any completely formed ideas is a bit of a cop out. The point being that this is precisely where I should put my half formed ideas in the hope that by writing them down I may develop them and that people who agree or disagree may comment and thus add to the process. (for more reasons to blog please see Tony Karrer's excellent collection)

Many of the things I have learned in the last 9 months have come from this. Having the courage to put thoughts up in public and risk being laughed at (which doesn't hurt anywhere near as much as you might think) means you come across new ideas or developments faster than you would imagine.

I may have written about this before but finding people who change the way you think on certain subjects is one of the joys of life. Many years ago when I was still at university I went on holiday to America to stay with one of my new friends. Because American universities start earlier than British ones I was able to spend a couple of weeks in Washington DC experiencing life as an American student. My friend lived in a very poor neighbourhood in the north of the city which had a large number of homeless people congregating near the metro exit.

As a middle-class left-wing (ish) student I felt very guilty about just being there on holiday spending money on my credit card whilst these people begged for food. One day I bumped into a friend from home who was just returning from a year in Nicaragua with a Quaker peace mission. He came back with me to the apartment in Mount Pleasant and as we walked from the underground I told him about my guilt and how I always gave some of the change in my pocket to the homeless.

"All apart from this one up here", I said to him as we approached a particularly bedraggled old man, "He just sticks his hand out and grunts aggressively" I explained.

"Oh, so you're not giving him money because he isn't begging correctly?!" said Allan without missing a step.

Eurgh!

It hadn't occurred to me to even consider the effect that having to beg for food might have upon a man's dignity. And in less than 3 yards my opinion on something had been completely changed. I turned round and gave the man all the money I had in my pocket - which admittedly wasn't much.

I still cherish this moment 20 years later. There have been moments like it since but this is the easiest one to tell in a blog.

So I guess the message is this; not putting yourself in a position where people can challenge or disagree with you is only doing a disservice to yourself. As I have said before, what's the worst that can happen?

Making the change easier...

As an unabashed convert to the virtual world of informal and social learning, I have to keep reminding myself that we are still very much in the early adoption stage. The vast majority of people are unaware or uninterested in what networked change can do for them.

I spent about 20 minutes this morning recording some screen casts on Jing for a client (a marvellous tool for rapid deployment of information which is really easy to use) and thought I would share them here to help others get involved.

They deal with how to set up and start using a delicious account and how to set up and start using iGoogle and Google reader, which are all pretty near the top of Jane's list of e-learning tools. I have interspersed them with some short clips from Common Craft explaining each of the applications. All fairly basic stuff but for those of you lurking in the background it might show you just how easy it is.

[Note to any of my staff erading this: these links will be meaningless in thin client as you dont have sound so try them at home]

Social bookmarking in plain English (Common Craft)
Setting up a delicious account
Tagging web pages in delicious
Networking and sharing in delicious
RSS in plain English (Common Craft)
Personalising iGoogle with RSS feeds

If this prompts you to get involved, why dont you look me up on Delicious and add me to you network?