Fearlessness.
So you've got you new toy, or your Ubuntu install disk, and with trembling hands you recoil from the cd rom drive, or the D.I.Y. hack you are about to install.
Why?
Because you don't want to 'wreck it'. Good news, you have friends all over the place, and they are only a google search away. They will even walk you through the process step by step of getting set up, but you have to have faith and perspective.

Faith in yourself, that you won't totally muck it up - just go slow and easy and you'll be fine.

Secondly, you need perspective. The computer was, what, $30 at the Goodwill? If worst comes to worst, run a C:Config from the cmd line, and start all over again.

I had Ubuntu on my PII for nearly a year, before about two weeks of fiddling convinced me that there was NO WAY I was going to be able to run the apps for my new Palm Pilot (only $50 on Ebay!) from that operating system. So what to do? Find an old copy of W2K we had lying around the house, and go for it!

In the end, your $45 Smartphone WAS a great find, and yes you may totally crater it by entering the wrong unlocking code - but so what? Half the fun was in the getting, right? Sell if for parts, and start again. Even if you have to do it twice, you'll still save a bundle! And you'll have fun in the process.

Next time- tools for the shoestring tech-hunter.

Anti-Pride
I come from a long line of scroungers. My mom used to work at one of the original cell phone manufacturing companies, and she was always scrounging parts of them together, to come up with frankenphones that were always lying around the house. Technology scrounging was not a source of embarrassment to her, instead it was a source of pride. Sure her technology was maybe not as flashy or state of the art as yours, but it had been either free, or damn close to it.
Truly successful "tech on a shoestring" people are those that get off on this sort of "anti-pride". Sure you could go out and buy the latest and greatest - but frankly, what idiot couldn't. It doesn't take any particular skill or brains to have enough disposable income to be able to sign a 3 year contract with a cell phone provider, and get a free iPhone.
What DOES take skill, is someone who can come up with a Palm Treo for $30 on Kijiji.com, unlock it themselves, and be up and running on pay-as-you-go in under an hour.
To a true shoestring geek, half the pleasure is in the getting - namely getting it very cheap or if at all possible for free.
Next time, Patience, and why it's such a virture.

Technology on a Shoe-String
So as promised, part two of Technology on a shoe string.
First, some background, I am a self avowed gadget luddite - I believe they call us "late adopters."
It's not that I don't LOVE them, but there's this whole ... baby thing going on, and the little blighter costs a fortune, so in the end, the gadget budget is the first thing to go...and I am just too responsible to go out and purchase them, and pretend that I have always had them, and that the Mrs only just noticed them now...although it has crossed my mind.
So technology on a shoestring is my life.
I use a PII computer with about 32 megs of ram - it can BARELY run Windows 2000, although in it's heyday it had Ubuntu on it.
I also use a Nokia 3100. That's right, the phone is nearly 5 years old. As a result, I spend alot of time in the cloud, and google is my best friend, so here's some tips on how to get the most out of old, run down technology.
Three things every techno-pauper needs is:
Patience, and lots of it.
What I call "Anti-pride",
and a Fearlessness about trying new things.
Next time - Anti-Pride, and how it can save you a fortune, and help you quit keeping up with the Jetsons.

My Predictions.
SO everyone else is on the prediction bandwagon, so I thought I would skip over my proposed post on Technology on a Shoestring, and offer my predictions for 2009.

1. The economic collapse will spiral out of control, until the US economy is into the 10's of trillions of dollars in debt. Then China will call the loan, and repossess California, Texas, and for some strange reason Nebraska.

2. Bird flu will begin human-human transmission, and the ensuing pandemic will turn out to be spread especially quickly by contact with unsanitized phones. Call center employees will be especially hard hit.

3. Commodity prices will collapse, and Oil will sink below $1.69 a barrel, causing the big three to reneg on their promises, and go back to building giant gas guzzling SUV's. Subsequently the last drop of oil will be extracted from the ground in Nigeria in October, but will never reach the market due to a protracted gun battle between government and rebel forces.

4. The iPhone will be recalled en masse, after one manages to turn itself on and begin spreading a cookbook through that users email contact list entitled "To Serve Man."

5. Everyone will look back at 2009 and realize that it was only their strength, courage, and ability to come together and put aside petty differences that got them through what was otherwise a pretty miserable year.

Did I mention the Ice Age?

Technology on a Shoestring
Have been reading Richard Florida, and Tom Peters, and a bunch of other people who seem to all be saying that it's not the technology, it's what the technology allows us to do...it's a means, not an end.
So to bring up Twitter. I started a profile on Twitter about a month or two ago, didn't tweet at all. Then I started to connect with a few other training people, and tweeting once or twice a day. The suddenly, something happened, and now my followers list is adding between one and three people a day. Now admittedly, these are not deep personal connections, but they are connections.
So I guess it all comes down to what technology truly allows us to do - in the 21st century, which is to connect. More than anything else, technology allows us to connect with people more easily, more quickly, more frequently, and with more people than at any other point in human history.
But it begs the question - do we have to break the bank doing it?
I want to explore in the next couple posts "Technology on a shoestring" My process for staying remarkably connected while spending very little money on gadgets, toys or hardware, and spending as much time in the cloud as possible.
Stay Tuned.
J

Holiday Excess
So it's the holidays, and it's time to add my voice to the chorus (pun intended) of writers bemoaning holiday excess. I guess my big beef with people who decry the rampant consumerism of the holidays is that holiday overspending and overconsuming are - well, very democratic.

Let me explain.

Years ago, when we lived in Reno, the local grocery store, Safeway, was scheduled to be open on the most sacred of U.S. holidays, Thanksgiving day. It was only going to be open for 4 hours, and at that point, Christmas openings were fairly commonplace.

So I wander into Safeway on Thanksgiving, and find about 30 people in there buying things, in what is otherwise a massive American grocery store. Then the most extraordinary example of hypocrisy happened in the checkout line. The woman ahead of me had the audacity to say to the clerk, in the most sympathetic tone, "It's a shame that you have to work Thanksgiving."
"She only has to work today," I barged in, "because you are shopping. If you would refuse to shop today, then next year she could be with her family."

This was NOT a popular response, although I did get a wink from the Checkout clerk after the very huffy customer left.

But it led me to a conclusion. Americans vote in two major ways. One is with their ballot, which has seen a big resurgence in popularity in the last month or so, which I find very heartening.

The other way is with their dollar. American's like to euphemistically call it "voting with their feet" as in, which stores they walk in to, but we all know it's really voting with their dollars.

So in the end, if enough Americans vote to keep Safeway open on Thanksgiving day, then that's what they get.

Churchill once said that Democracy is the least bad of all the options for governing.

My take on democracy, is that the people get exactly what's comin' to 'em. The same I guess is true of Capitalism.

So in the end, if people want to over-leverage their homes (which a) they couldn't afford in the first place, and b) are certain to never decrease in value) and spend obscene amounts of money on plastic crap, then shouldn't they be entitled to do so.

I guess the answer is 'yes', iff (if and only if) they are willing to accept the consequences when the whole house of cards comes crumbling down.

And at the risk of coming off as a raving right wing lunatic (I voted NDP in the last election...really!), that's the one thing lacking in this whole discussion of bailouts (be it Wall Street, Bay Street or Detroit) - and that's someone willing to stand up and say "Ooops. I goofed. I'm an idiot. Sorry. I'll resign my position immediately, and you can turn the reigns over to someone who isn't a complete numbskull."

All it would take is for the CEO of AIG, or Chrysler, or Lehmen Brothers to stand up and say "Boy did I take you people to the cleaners. Sorry 'bout that. I'm going to sell my Lear Jet and donate the proceeds to homeless shelters. As a matter of fact, I feel so bad I'm going to liquidate 1/10th of my portfolio and feed DR Congo for a month. Won't happen again...Anyway, I'm going to dedicate my life to teaching High School Ping Pong, because apparently I have no idea of how to run a company."

Even if they just said the first part, I would be fine with that. I would like to say that saying the second part would be a prerequisite to ever having a job more complex than running a Burger King ever again. The sad truth, is that even if Dodds gets his way and Wagoner has to walk, he'll probably be the CEO of Frito Lay in a week.

Ok, rant over.

Dime a Dozen
So I have been trolling the various Success Blogs I read, and I have come to a startling realization - Success Coaches are a Dime a Dozen.
Now I knew there were alot of us. But I had NO idea.

I guess it all comes down to doing a little more market research.
I have also been doing a fair bit of reading about social objects and I have come to another starting resolution.

The Third Way is a social object. Or more precisely, a nascent one.

A social object, for those who don't read the link, is something that brings people together, and about which they converse.
Hugh's point is simple - people don't want to hear advertising "messages" anymore - enough of the marketing equivalent of throwing a message wrapped around a brick through people's psychological front windows.

What "mass marketing" is quickly being replaced with is conversations. Or as Hugh alludes to - maybe it has always been about conversations, and the messages were just a way of starting that.

So a social object is just a thing that gets people talking. A Starbucks cup. A Tim Horton's cup (I just LOVE Tim Hortons!) - or the Uber-Social Object - The iPod.
The hope, then, is that The Third Way is going to become a social object - a point of discussion between people who want to:
a) Get off their butts and do something about their lives, but
b) Are hampered by the negative spin that they themselves have put on otherwise unimportant events in their past.

Case in point - three times this week my subconscious has gone 'muck diving' into an incident when I was at the Student's Union - Nearly 17 years ago!

So what gives?

Well, after the third dive, when my psyche came up covered in weeds and mud, I figured that it was time to throw on a PFD.
I looked at my Perspective of the incident.
I looked at the Facts of what really happened.
Then I Discovered the kernel of truth about myself that was revealed.
After a quick inventory, I realized that I had indeed learned from that mistake and was in no danger of making it again.

And that was that. The thought hasn't resurfaced. And it of course saved me from having to perform any kind of WOOOSH foolishness.

The Big Question.
SO although this isn't technically a "edublog", it's the sphere I travel in right now, so I thought I'd respond accordingly.
The Big Question this month (as it is every December)on the Learning Circuits Blog is "What did you learn this year about learning."
Well, the harrowing truth was that - I learned that I didn't know anything.

Which according to Socrates, apparently makes me quite wise (didn't he once say that his only wisdom was the knowledge of his own ignorance?).

The bottom line is, I went into this year a firm believer in Learning Styles - and specifically that Visual/Spatial learners are smarter, and more creative. Sorry Linda, dead wrong. In fact, as a former devotee of Dr. Silverman, it was quite painful to sit through a session on speech pathology where the Speech Path in question trotted out slide after slide of "popular myths about speech that have now been totally dispelled" and Dr. Silverman's quotes were on every one of them.

So that's been hard.

Secondly, I learned that we, and especially I, really know next to nothing about how the brain works. I read John Medina's Brain Rules, I watched Dr Jill Bolte Taylor's moving Ted Talk, and I read every blog, online forum, and wiki I could lay my hands on about neuroscience and learning. Hell, I even participated in the incredibly awkward Learning Town (I had quite enough of social isolation in High School - Thankyouverymuch!), and their forum on neuroscience and learning.

The only conclusion I came to after all that is that nobody has a clue what's going on with our brains. And what little you can claim to know authoratatively, someone else has the MRI's to prove you wrong!

Next, I used to think I was a pretty good instructional designer. I unfortunately also though that putting only 6 lines of text on a power point slide, and having only 6 words to the slides, was the pinnacle of user friendly instructional design. After a year of subjecting myself to weekly humiliation (dear God, I used to do THAT too!) I now realize I know nothing.

Further more, after my daily trundle over to Karyn Romeis's blog today, I realized I know even less than I thought I did. Apparently The ability to puke the contents of your brain all over your class, is not desirable. Who knew?

So in the end, all this may seem a bit depressing. After all, I know so little. But as per my "pre-new-year's resolution" I'm looking on the positive side. Clearly I have much to learn. And I am, after all, in the learning business!

Forgetting
The last couple of nights I have been finishing Brain Rules by John Medina. What is it about the whole ADD/Gifted/Visual Spatial continuum that makes it so difficult for me to finish a book - even one I find fascinating.

I got to the chapter on Memory, and read that in some cases it can take 10 YEARS for a memory to properly consolidate. And during that time, it can be subject to almost constant revision.

In the place where I work, where I teach people how to sell - we have a phenomenon called the 6 modules. When I first started, nobody wanted anything fancy, they just wanted the same 6 topics (each broken into bite sized chunks) repeated again and again.

I thought at the time, that the powers that be were insane - surely they get it by now.

But today, I was walking around the sales floor, and out of maybe 50 conversations I overheard, one, count 'em ONE was doing what she was supposed to. All of the others were making virtually no effort - or to give them the benefit of the doubt - were TOTALLY STUMPED by what to do when they heard the initial "no" from their customer (HINT - Don't argue with them, and for the love of God don't just hang up - start asking intelligent questions about their situation, and then try and offer them a benefit based on your answers).

The problem is - and the thing that had me nearly pulling my hair out - is that I or their managers have covered this topic with them at least 10 times a piece. In many cases 10 times in the last three months.

So where is the learning breaking down?

Here's where I come into what I call the drudgery factor.

Now, we know that a highly visual/spatial person (although I have turned my back on the hemispheric theory, I still think Visual vs. Auditory preferences are valid) can actually forget a skill or some information by repeating it too many times.

Here's what happens. A highly visual person needs to understand the big picture. The parts have to come later - but it's the solid understanding of the whole that guides their perception. My theory (and Dr. Silverman can question this if she wants to) is that when a highly VS/L person focuses on a task too intently, they start to break it down too minutely into it's component parts, and in doing so they lose sight of the 'whole'. That causes their execution of the skill or understanding of the concept to suffer.

So the drudgery factor (still with me?) means that if a person repeats a fairly monotonous task over and over - and is only rewarded with a positive result once out of every 100 attempts - can that cause them to forget the skill that gets them even that meager result?

More importantly - if the person is PUNISHED for using the technique (in this case with a hang up) once every 15-25 attempts, and only rewarded for using it once every 75-100 attempts - can we pretty much guarantee that they are not going to remember it?

In other words - at the risk of getting all behaviouralist on you - can the lack of consistent reward for performing a fairly boring task -combined with a perceived punishment - cause you to forget how to do that task that you were able to execute so well in the safe cocoon of a training class?

In other words - in the call centre world, should we be rewarding correct application of the technique AT LEAST as often as we reward the positive results?

Just a thought.

GOI

The three most powerful letters in the English Language:

Get
Over
It

I’m adding two more:
LAGOI

Learn
And
Get
Over
It


Learn from what went wrong, and move on.
Self abuse is…well…selfish.

Beating yourself up all the time about things that have happened in the past is a supreme act of selfishness.


It deprives those around you of the joy of getting to know the real you.
It deprives your family of the success you could be bringing them.
It deprives your friends of taking any pleasure in your company.

Past failures are like a scab. And like every 12 year old boy finds out:
If you pick it, it will bleed.


Just stop.


Stop poking at it and it will heal.