Brief Stats Update: Penultimate Word Count Notes

Posted: December 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I occasionally dump the blog and run it through some Python script deliciousness to find out how many words I’ve written. This is no measure of worth or quality, more a metric of my mania. As I noted in October, I was going to hit what I thought was my year target much earlier. Well, yes, it came and it went and, sure enough, I plowed through it. At time of writing, on published posts alone, we’re holding at around 1.2 posts/day, 834 words/post and a smidgen over 340,000 words, which puts me (in word count) just after Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” (311,596) but well behind her opus “Atlas Shrugged” (561,996). In terms of Objectivism? Let’s just say that I won’t be putting any kind of animal into that particular fight at the moment.

Now, of course, I can plug in the numbers and see that this puts my final 2012 word count somewhere in the region of 362,000 words. I must admit, there is a part of me that sees that number and thinks “Well, we could make it an even 365,000 and that’s a neat 1000 words/day” but, of course, that’s dumb for several reasons:

  1. I have not checked in detail exactly how well my extraction software is grabbing the right bits of the text. There are hyperlinks and embellishments that appear to be taken care of, but we are probably only on the order of 95% accuracy here. Yes, I’ve inspected it and I haven’t noticed anything too bad, but there could be things slipping through. After all of this is over, I am going to drag it all together and analyse it properly but, let me be clear, just because I can give you a word count to 6 significant figures, doesn’t mean that it is accurate to 6 significant figures.
  2. Should I even be counting those sections of text that are quoted? I do like to put quotes in, sometimes from my own work, and this now means I’m either counting something that I didn’t write or I’m counting something that I did write twice!
  3. Should I be counting the stats posts themselves as they are, effectively, metacontent? This line item is almost above that again! This way madness lies!
  4. It was never about the numbers in the first place, it was about thinking about my job, my students, my community and learning and teaching. That goal will have been achieved whether I write one word/day from now on or ten thousand!

But, oh, the temptation to aim for that ridiculous and ultimately deceptive number. How silly but, of course, how human to look at the measurable goal rather than the inner achievement or intrinsic reward that I have gained from the thinking process, the writing, the refining of the text, the assembly of knowledge and the discussion.

Sometime after January the 1st, I will go back and set the record straight. I shall dump the blog and analyse it from here to breakfast time. I will release the data to interested (and apparently slightly odd) people if they wish. But, for now, this is not the meter that I should be watching because it is not measuring the progress that I am making, nor is it a good compass that I should follow.

I Can’t Find My Paperless Office For All The Books

Posted: December 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I tidied up my office recently and managed to clear out about a couple of boxes full of old paper. Some of these were working drafts of research papers, covered in scrawl (usually red because it shows up more), some were book chapter mark-ups, and some were things like project meeting plans that I could scribble on as people spoke. All of this went into either the secure waste bins (sekrit stuff) or the general recycling because I do try to keep the paper footprint down. However, my question to myself is two-fold:

  • Why do I still have an office full of paper when I have a desktop, (two) laptops, an iPad and an iPhone, and I happily take notes and annotate documents on them?
  • Why am I surrounded by so many books, still?

I don’t think I’ve ever bought as many books as I have bought this year. By default, if I can, I buy them as the electronic and paper form so that I can read them when I travel or when I’m in the office. There are books on graphic design, books on semiotics, books on data visualisation and analysis, and now, somewhat recursively, books on the end of books. My wife found me a book called “This is not the end of the book”, which is a printed conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac. I am looking forward to reading it but it has to wait until some of the other books are done. I have just finished Iain M. Banks latest “The Hydrogen Sonata”, am swimming through an unauthorised biography of Led Zeppelin and am still trying to finish off the Derren Brown book that I have been reading on aeroplanes for the past month or so. Sitting behind all this are “Cloud Atlas” and “1Q84”, both of which are officially waiting until I have finished my PhD application portfolio for creative writing. (Yes, dear reader, I’m nervous because they could as easily say ‘No’ as ‘Yes’ but then I will learn how to improve and, if I can’t take that, I shouldn’t be teaching. To thine own dogfood, be as a consumer.)

A book that I hope to read soon!

A book that I hope to read soon!

Why do I still write on paper? Because it feels good. I select pens that feel good to write with, or pencils soft enough to give me a good relationship to the paper. The colour of ink changes as it hits the paper and dries and I am slightly notorious for using inks that do not dry immediately. When I was a winemaker, I used black Bic fine pens, when many other people used wet ink or even fountain pens, because the pen could write on damp paper and, even when you saturated the note, the ink didn’t run. These days, I work in an office and I have the luxury of using a fountain pen to scrawl in red or blue across documents, and I can enjoy the sensation.

Why do I still read on paper? Because it is enjoyable and I have a long relationship with the book, which began from a very early age. The book is also, nontrivially, one of the few information storage devices that can be carried on to a plane without having to be taken from one’s bag or shut down for the periods of take off and landing. I am well aware of the most dangerous points in an aircraft’s cycle and I strongly prefer to be distracted by, if not in-flight entertainment, then a good solid book. But it is also the pleasure of being able to separate the book from the devices that link me into my working world, yet without adding a new data storage management issue. Yes, I could buy a Kindle and not have to check my e-mail, but then I have to buy books from this store and I have to carry that charger or fit it next to my iPad, laptop and phone when travelling. Books, once read, can either be donated to your hosts in another place or can be tossed into the suitcase, making room for yet more books – but of course a device may carry many books. If I have no room in my bag for a book, then I don’t have to worry about the fragility of making space in my carry-on by putting it into the suitcase.

And, where necessary, the book/spider interaction causes more damage to the spider than the contents of the book. My thesis was sufficiently large to stun a small mammal, but you would not believe how hard it was to get ethical approval for that!

The short answer to both questions is that I enjoy using the physical forms although I delight in the practicality, the convenience and the principle of the electronic forms. I am a happy hybridiser who wishes only to enjoy the experience of reading and writing in a way that appeals to me. In a way, the electronic format makes it easier for me to share my physical books. I have a large library of books from when I was younger that, to my knowledge, has books that it is almost impossible to find in print or libraries any more. Yet, I am in that uncomfortable position of being a selfish steward, in that I cannot release some of these books for people to read because I hold the only copy that I know of. As I discover more books in electronic or re-print format (the works of E. Nesbit, Susan Cooper in the children’s collection of my library, for example) then I am free to use the books as they were intended, as books.

What we have now, what is emerging, certainly need not be the end of the book but it will be interesting to look back, in fifty years or so, to find out what we did. If the book has become the analogue watch of information, where it moved from status symbol for its worth, to status symbol for its value, to affectation and, now, to many of my students, an anachronism for those who don’t have good time signal on their phones. I suspect that a watch does not have the sheer enjoyability of the book or the pen on paper, but, if you will excuse me, time will tell.

Information and Education: Other Cultures, Other Views

Posted: December 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve had the good fortune to be able to start finding out about how other cultures deal with information and education. This is important for several reasons. Firstly, it helps to remind me that the perception of the dominant monoculture is both primarily a perception and an accident of history, geography and timing. Secondly, it reminds me how easy it is to slip into the monocultural assumption. Finally, it helps me to prepare my students for a world that could be very different from this one.

I’m not a true relativist, I think that some cultural practices (including but not limited to formalised child abuse and female circumcision) are indefensible because they are far too great an imposition on the individual. So let me get that cultural bias onto the table to allow you to frame what I say next. Some ideas, especially when we start dealing with the value of wisdom, and the specific roles of the knowledge keepers in the dispensation and passage of that wisdom, fascinate me but I am still not sufficiently versed to be able to discuss it with any authority or detail. I can, however, discuss ideas with my students such as secret knowledge, without being a Mason, or gendered knowledge, without being of a practising culture, because to do so allows them to realise that there is more to the world than European-derived cultural norms. We don’t have to necessarily agree with all of these other ideas, especially where gender discrimination is preventing access to essential knowledge or limiting advancement, but it is important to understand that it exists.

The role of the knowledge keeper varies with culture and it can be quite confronting for my students to encounter a situation where a single person has the knowledge and may not be available all the time. At the recent Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle that I ran, two presenters from the University of South Australia presented work on integrating Australian Indigenous Culture into ICT project work and discussed the way that it changed the projects. The person needed is in hospital for treatment? Then you’ll have to wait until they get back because they are the person that you have to talk to. A friend has told me about this before in the context of geological information in the Australian Outback. You want to know about this section of the land? Well, you can’t ask the men about it, it’s not their land. If you want to ask the women, then you’re going to have to work out who can ask it and what can be told in a way that can be viewed from people outside (and men).

Just because we want to know something from a specific culture does not give us the right to demand it and getting this across to students is, I think, one of the most important steps in establishing a mutual respect between cultures and a way of avoiding misunderstandings in the future. It’s easy to start jumping up and down in that tiresome Western manner about this kind of information management but I think we can be pretty sure that the majority of the indigenous population of Australia would have quite a lot to say about having to conform to our cultural norms, so we should think pretty carefully before we start placing our rule sets over their knowledge.

Uncle Lewis O’Brien, Elder of the Kaurna people, noted once that it was common to welcome newcomers to your land, to show them around so that they could see how good the land was and how much care was being taken of it, but it was always done in the understanding that, one day, the visitor would go home. As he noted, wryly, perhaps his people should have been clearer on that last bit with the original white settlers. But we were here now.

Cultural issues are important to the people in that culture and working out how we can marry these requirements allows us to demonstrate our maturity as people and our level of comfort with our own beliefs. If, one day, somebody shows me something so amazing and truthful that I start believing in a new belief system or an entirely new way of living, then I hope that I would be able to cope with it and make sense of it. In New Zealand, Maori medical researchers are working through the cultural taboo of handling the dead in order to meet the educational requirements of working with tissue samples. If we can work with closing shops on Saturday or Sunday for Synagogue or Church (as we did for centuries), then we can have some thinking about incorporating the living beliefs of other cultures without dying of shock or making racist statements about ‘backwards cultures’. You go and thrive in the middle of Australia for a while and tell me how much knowledge it required to avoid dying of thirst on the third day.

I’m always worried when we start rejecting other cultures because monocultures are not strong, they’re weak. By definition, they are static and immutable – the rock, not the water. They’re prone to a single attack vector and, if they fail, they fail on the massive scale. I’m not talking just about our unnatural dependency on one banana or one wheat, I’m talking about real disasters that have occurred because of a lack of resistance to animal-borne diseases. The current thinking is that both North America and Australia were far more heavily populated than the original European explorers thought, but that earlier contact had introduced devastating levels of disease that almost wiped out the populations – making the subsequent colonisation and seizure of land easier. These were accidental resistance monocultures, caused by geographical isolation. Now we are connected and we have no excuse for this.

What my students have to understand is that the world of three hundred years ago was not the world of two hundred or one hundred years ago. Empires rise and fall. Cultures come and go. Today’s leader is tomorrow’s footnote. Learning how to work with other cultures and how to reduce the dependency on a single strand may be what changes the way that our history unfolds. I’m not naive enough to believe that we’re at the end of history (the end of conflict) but I think that we’re sufficiently well connected and well informed that we can tell our students that not everything different is wrong and scary, and that not everything familiar is right and just.

I wonder what they’ll be saying about us, in 2112?

The Invisible Fragility of our World of Knowledge

Posted: December 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

If I were to mention that I was currently researching Rongorongo, as background for a story in which the protagonists communicated in a range of reverse boustrophedonic texts, there are three likely outcomes.

  1. You would roll your eyes and close the browser, or,
  2. You would think “Aha, that’s what I was talking about last night at the Friends of Rapanui Quiz Night. How apt!”, or,
  3. You would go and look up Rongorongo and boustrophedon in Wikipedia.

What I am fairly sure that most of you will not do, is to go and look up the information in a book, go to a library or even ask another human. (Some of you will have used physical means such as books or libraries because you are being deliberate physical users. I am after the usage patterns that your adopt unconsciously, or as a matter of actual habit, then those that are employed because of a deliberate endeavour to use another source.) There is no doubt that we live in an amazing world of immediately available information and that it has changed the way that we use, store and retrieve information but this immediacy has come at a cost: we tend not to use or consult physical media as much. As a result, there is less of the physical to hand, most of the time. I have noticed a major change in the way that I use information and, while I tend to read and annotate material on printed paper (using a fountain paper, no less, so I am not judging anyone for their affectations), I search and edit in the digital form. Why? Each form has its own efficiencies.

A physical artefact that we can no longer read.

A physical artefact that we can no longer read.

The absence of the physical artefact is often not noticeable unless we are cut off from the Internet or from our stored versions of the material. Last week, my laptop decided that it would no longer boot and I realised, with mounting horror, that my only copies of certain works in progress were sitting on this ‘dead’ machine. Why weren’t they backed up? Because I was not connected to the Internet for a few hours and I had left my actual backup device at home, to reduce the risk of losing both laptop and backup in the same localised catastrophe.

The majority of the on-line information repositories are remarkable in their ease of use and sheer utility – as long as you can connect to them .We, however, have an illusion of availability and cohesion that is deceptive and it is the comfortable analogue of the printed page that lulls us into this. Wikipedia, for example, presents a single page full of text, just like a book does. It is only when you look at the History and the Discussion that it dawns on you that each character on the page could have been contributed by a difference source. While the printed page is the final statement of a set of arguments between the authors, the editors and their mutual perceptions of reality, it is static once printed. In Wikipedia, its strength and its weakness is that the argument never ends. Anything on a publicly editable page is inherently fragile and ephemeral. What is there today may not be there tomorrow and there is no guarantee that what appears sound now will be anything other than horrible and deliberately broken in a second.

The fragility doesn’t stop there, however, because we don’t actually have any part of Wikipedia inside our offices, unless you happen to be Jimmy Wales. (Hi!) Wikipedia.org, the domain name of Wikipedia, is registered in California, but the server I was connected to (for the queries I put above) was in Washington State, and there were some 17 active network devices involved in routing traffic from me (in Adelaide) to the server (in Washington) and then getting the information back. This doesn’t count the active electronic devices that I can’t see in this path and, believe me, there will be a lot of them. Now we build a lot of redundancy into the global network that we call the Internet (the network of networks of networks) but a major catastrophe on the West Coast will quickly force so much traffic onto those backup links that information flow will stop and, for some good technical reasons, it will then start to fall over.

So the underlying physical pathways that actually shunt the network information from point to point could fall over. At that point, if I had a book on the linguistics of Easter Island, I could read it by torchlight even if I had no local power. A severe power failure here or in enough places along the way, or at Wikipedia’s data centres? Suddenly, my ability to find out anything is blocked.

But let’s look at the information itself. People have been editing the Rongorongo page for over 10 years. The first version (that we can see, Wikipedia can invisibly delete revisions) is recorded for the 25th of November, 2002. Happy double digits, Rongorongo page! Since then there have been roughly 3000 edits. Are all of them the same quality? Hmm. Here are some comments:

14 April 2006, “reinstate link to disambiguate Rongorongo, wife of Turi, NZ”

18 May 2006, “If I want to be blocked, why do I improve these pages? REMEMBER LIUVIGILD! TRY BLOCKING ME!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA” (sic)

18 May 2006, “Excuse my insolence. This is not vandalism, as it is all true. Why do you insist on reverting it? Please send a PERSONAL message of explanation. Sincerely, 64.107.172.130”

28 April 2007, “Inhabitants of Easter Island have many names for it.”

7 April 2011, “A picture of a banana leaf is not helpful here. I looked on this banana leaf for scribblings. I know what one looks like, and if someone doesn’t, they can read about it at banana.”

12 November, 2012, “What’s wrong, Kwamikagami? It is what it is, isn’t it? Just a straight up comparison of rongorongo and Indus Valley glyphs, nothing more. I’d love to know which ones are ‘not true”‘according to you”

There are periods when this page is changing every few minutes and sometimes the data is the same for days or even months. But most people don’t know this because they never think to look in the history or talk sections. Right now, it appears that someone is disputing the authority of Kwamikagami, a person who has carried out a lot of edits on this page. This is important because if you say to someone “Hey, look at this page” then 3000 edits over 10 years says that the chances of the page changing in a day is something like 80%. The burstiness would have an impact on this but the general idea is that the simple page on a dead text(?) is more likely to change on a daily basis than not.

Does this make Wikipedia any better or any worse than the printed page? I think it makes it different because we have to treat it as an evolving discussion that we have walked in on, because of its inherent fragility and ephemeral nature.

We live in amazing times, where I can use a small hand-held device to access almost everything that our species has created. And yet, when I go to look at how robust this knowledge source is and how vulnerable we are to losing our connection to that knowledge, I am reminded that we are going to have to work out how to do this properly. If we give up the fixed physical forms (books, CDs, DVDs), then so be it, but we must make sure that we deal with this fragility before we become too seduced by the immediacy.  We have to think about this for our students too. How do we provide them with artefacts that they can consult down the line, when they need to look something up? Books have no licensing agreements, never expire and do not have to be abandoned when a digital format changes. Yet, they have none of the advantages.

I mention this because I am really looking forward to seeing how people address and solve this challenge – how can we have the best of the immediate and convenient, while having the enduring presence and guarantee of future access? Rongorongo itself is a physical artefact for which we have lost the knowledge of reading, or if it is even a text at all. It’s a reminder that we have faced this problem before and we have not solved it sufficiently well. Perhaps this time.

Systems Thinking (CI 2012 MasterClass on the Change Lab)

Posted: December 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I can’t quite believe how much mileage I’m getting out of the first masterclass but it’s taking me almost as long to go through my notes as it did to write them! I should be back into a semi-normal posting cycle fairly soon – thanks for any patience that you have chosen to extend. 🙂

Can we see all of a system if we’re only in contact with one part? The Change Lab facilitators used the old parable of the six blind man and the elephant to remind us that we can be completely correct about our perception but, due to limitations in our horizon, we fail to appreciate the whole. Another example that was brought up was the role of the police in the protection of abused women and children. If a police officer can look at a situation and think either “Well, I don’t think thats my problem” or “I don’t know what to do”, it’s easy to see how the protective role of the police officer becomes focused on the acute and the extraordinary, rather than the chronic and the systemic.

(That theme, a change in thinking and support from acute to chronic, showed up periodically throughout the conference and my notes.)

In the area of study, the police were retrained to identify what they had to do if they attended and thought that there might be a problem. The police had to get involved, their duties now included the assurance of safety for the at-risk family members and, if they couldn’t get involved themselves, their duty was to find someone else who could fix it and make the connection. We do have protective systems and mechanisms for abused people in domestic situations but there was often a disconnect between domestic violence events that police attended (acute and extraordinary events) and the connecting of people into the existing service network.

Of course, this was very familiar to me because we have the same possibility of disconnection in the tertiary sector. It’s easy to say “go and see the Faculty Office” but it’s that bit harder to ring up the Faculty Office, find the right person, brief them on what a student has already discussed with you and then hand the student over. However, that second set of events is what should happen if you want to minimise the risk of disconnection.

It’s possible to do a remarkable job in some parts of your work and do a terrible job in others, because you don’t realise that you are supposed to be responsible for other areas. It has taken me years to work out how many more things that are required of me as an educator. Yes, scholarship and the practise of learning and teaching are the core but how do we do that with real, breathing students? Here are my current thoughts, based on the police example:

  1. Getting Involved: If a student comes to me with a problem, then if I can fix it, I should try and fix it. My job does not begin when I walk into the lecture theatre and finish when I leave the room – I do have a real and meaningful commitment to my students while they are in my course. Yes, this is more work. Yes, this takes more time. Yes, I don’t know what to do sometimes and that’s scary. However, I do hope that my students know that I’m trying and, even when I’m moving slowly, I’m still involved.
  2. The Assurance of Safety: Students have a right to feel safe and to be safe when they’re studying. That means a learning space free from discrimination, bullying and fear, working in an atmosphere of mutual respect. If they feel unsafe, then they should feel safe to come to me to talk about it. This also means that students have a right to feel safe in the pursuit of their studies: no indifferent construction of assignment where 60% of students fail and it’s dismissed as ‘dumb students’.
  3. If You Can’t Fix It, Find Someone Who Can: Once you’ve done a PhD, one of the key things you work out is how much you don’t know. My Uni, like most Unis, is a giant and complex administrative structure. I don’t have the answer to all of the questions but I do have a spreadsheet of duties for people in my school and a phone book. However, saying “Go to X” is never going to be as good as trying to help someone by connecting them to another person and handing them over. If I can answer a question, I should try to. If I can’t, I should try and find the right person and then connect the student. The final part of this is that I should follow up where I can to see what happened and learn so I know the answer for next time.

The final point is, to me, fascinating because it has made me aware of how hard it can be to find the answer, even when you’re inside the system as a staff member! I always tell my students that if they need something done and aren’t making headway, get me involved because I have the big, scary signature block on my e-mail. Now, mostly our culture is very good and you don’t have to be a Professor or Associate Dean to get progress made… but it is funny how much more attention you sometimes get. I’m very happy to use my (really very insignificant) mild corner of borrowed status if it will help someone to start on the pathway to fixing a problem but I’m also very happy to report that it’s rare that I have to use it, except for the occasional person outside of the University.

It’s important to note that I don’t always succeed in doing all of this. I’m always involved and I’m always working to guarantee safety, but the work involved in a connected handover is sometimes so large that I don’t actually have enough time or resources to close the connection. This, to me, illustrates a good place to focus my efforts on improving the entry points to our systems so that we all end up at the right destination with the minimum number of false starts and dead ends.

Like I said, we’re normally pretty good but I think that we can be better – and thinking about our system as a system makes me aware of how many things I need to do as well as educate, when I’m calling myself an educator.

An Evening of Event: No More Fistbumping with Thoughtless Young Men

Posted: December 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sorry about the late post. I didn’t get back to my room until 2am this morning and I was a little too tired to blog – it has been a week! I’m staying with wonderful friends between conferences (as one does, dahhhlings) and we went out to dinner and drinks near where they lived. When we were in the bar, sitting around and catching up, we got into conversation with a younger couple and spent the next while chatting to them.

Now, let me restate that. We were actively engaged in conversation by another couple and they doggedly kept us in conversation for a while.

Does that change the context? Rather than just talking to people in a bar, when you’re ensconced in the comfy seats, does that seem different?

After some discussion, my friend and I are pretty much convinced that the couple were probably more along the con axis than the friendly axis. Their over-attentiveness, some of the actions, and, more importantly, the rapid transition from complete attentiveness to “exeunt and farewell”, which took about 2 seconds. Why did they say goodbye? I suspect because they worked out that no money was forthcoming. Having come from three solid days of “Create! Innovate! Change the world!”, I’m in a very interesting place, mentally. So when the guy started talking about how he’d always wanted to be a Royal Marine Commando, as part of a patter, we then spent the next two hours talking about why he wasn’t doing it, how he could prepare to go back and so on. If you’ve wanted to be a commando since you were 16, then sitting in a bar in Australia at 24 is a very funny way to be pursuing it, isn’t it?

Hang on, maybe that’s why they left so quickly! 🙂

Anyway, to the meat of the story, while I was up at the bar, a group of guys walked over to where our group was sitting and basically tried to chat both the women up. I walked back from the bar with the drinks and sat down. They noticed me and one of them said “Oh, sorry for talking to your women.” and held out his hand to fist bump.

What? It’s 2012 and you’re talking about “my women”? Now, lest you think this is just a figure of speech, it was completely clear to me that he was backing off because he was recognising my territorial claim.

I held my hand down and, in a relaxed way, met his gaze and said “They’re not my women. They’re their women.” Very reasonably and no aggression. His reaction was amazing – the embarrassment on his face was immediate. I wasn’t trying to embarrass him, seriously, but at the same time I wasn’t going to buy into some exchange of property rubbish. He and his friends disappeared very shortly thereafter (well, immediately and very apologetically) and, I hope, might think twice before saying something that silly again. Perhaps it was a figure of speech but the way that he and his friends were acting… it was the same old nonsense dressed up with good haircuts and nice clothes, but the same old nonsense that starts cheerily and then starts to go nasty quickly if things don’t go as the initiator wants.

I was reflecting on this when I woke up this morning and I’m happy that I did the right thing, in the right way. However, it’s that constant reminder of how much… rubbish people have to put up with and how far we still have to go in order to get a basic sense of equality going.

I worry about a society where we are happy to tell women not to dress in a certain way, rather than having the much clearer message of “respect other people and leave them alone when they want to be left alone.” Where the moment a women gets attacked, there is always the followup questioning regarding what she was doing in a certain place at that time. There’s a lot of judging going on of the victims, rather than the very simple recognition that it is the actions of the perpetrators that should be judged. Can you walk around without crapping yourself? You have enough physical self-control to not attack someone else.

Basically, if someone wants to walk down the street naked, in the middle of the night, then until our society is safe enough to do that (ignoring your feelings on public nudity for a moment) we still have to educate. We still have to say “This person is not mine, they’re theirs.” We have to teach people that perceiving something as an invitation is a perception, not an actual invitation. We still have to look at someone and say “Really? Is that what you think is reasonable?” And, maybe, slowly, people learn and in 30-40 years time we can go and deal with some of the giant problems that we’re having difficulty with because we’re making up artificial divisions between people and undermining trust by acting stupidly and without basic consideration.

I read recently about an assault charge where a man put his genitals on the face of a young man who had passed out in a fast food restaurant, a photo was taken and ended up on the Internet. People stood around and watched as this happened. A young man is defenceless, obviously after not making the best decisions, and a crowd allow someone to humiliate him and assault him in that way.

No. This is wrong. Someone who has passed out because they drank too much has been silly, because they’ll feel bad tomorrow and they’re risking medical issues, but the vulnerable are not legitimate targets for the cruel and the thoughtless. You don’t get to be judge and jury on this one, no matter how stupid you think someone has been. You don’t get to punish someone for silliness that isn’t a crime, no matter how amusing you find it. The weak and the vulnerable need the support of the strong and privileged – not their exploitation.

I’ve come out of the last three days with an enormous amount of energy and I’m ready for a big challenge – the first stage in this is never letting something like this (helping other people or protecting other people) slip by again. If it means asking people if they’re ok, and risking getting involved, then I’ll have to swallow my trepidation and just do it. If it means getting dirty, or maybe having someone throw up on me, I can wash my clothes and have a shower. If it means running late for something that isn’t life threateningly urgent because I’ve stopped to help someone, then I will be late. I haven’t always been very good at this and I’ve always had really good reasons… or at least that’s what I thought.

Last night reminded me that it doesn’t have to be violent or unpleasant, but it does require you to keep your eye on things and not get sucked into the implicit privilege of the colour of my skin, my educational background or my gender. No more fist bumps for stupidity and, with any luck, no more convenient business to allow me to turn a blind eye.

More on the Change Lab: Creative Innovations 2012 Day 1 (still)

Posted: November 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

(Yeah, I’m slowly adding content. I just came from a dinner that pretty much defies description so you’ll have to just give me love for actually taking the time to write this at midnight instead of going to bed. 🙂 )

I spoke before about the Change Lab but here are the key steps.

1. An innovative approach that is systemic, participative and creative
2. Collective effort to address a vital, complex challenge in a given systems
3 A committed alliance of political, economic and cultural leaders in the system
4 A rhythmic process of acting and reflecting
5 A structure container for building capacities for co-initiating co-sensing co-presencing co-creating and co-evolving
6 A safe space for practising how to exercise both power and love

Whoah – what? Power and love? This is a form of framing to show how two very different camps think about the work.

POWER: One camp says that the only thing that matters is individual interests, ambitions and capacity to act.
LOVE:  Other camp focused on what’s good for the whole, the best solution, that’s the only thing that matters

Here’s the quote from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior:

“Power without love is reckless and abusive. Love without power is sentimental and anaemic.”

So we must attend to both the power and the love as part of the whole.

Ok, this kind of things is easy to say but the guy who was saying this was Dr Adam Kahane – he’s gone to places to look at difficult situations and if he thinks this works then I’m willing to listen. Adam was in Bogota with politicians and militia in one room, including people who had made death threats against each other, and had guerrillas calling in on the phone to be part of the scenario generation.

“Do I have to agree to a ceasefire to take part in the scenario?” (Random guerrilla)

(The answer was no – no preconditions to the scenario because you just wanted people in the same place)

What we have to face is that some problems are so big that it will take more than our friends and family to solve them. We may have to work with strangers – or our enemies.

Think about that.

You’ve been fighting someone for so long that you don’t really remember all the details – but you know that you hate each other and that you have both done bad things to each other recently. Suddenly, something comes up and it’s huge. It’s a wicked problem, one that is complex and hard to deal with or even understand. You can’t solve it alone. Your enemy can’t solve it alone.

Can you solve the initial problem of getting these two people into the room just to even talk about things? Then, having done that, can you work out how to work together on the thing that threatens you both and, somehow, act in concert to deal with it?

What if it’s so big that it’s bigger than both of you? Now, not only do you have to work together on something, you have to find someone else who will work with your semi-dysfunctional mutual hatred society. Maybe the only person who can help you is the person that you both hate second to each other? Point 2 of the approach talks about a collective effort and 3 demands that the leader, the people with agency who can change things, are the people who should be at the table.

Does it have to be Kings, warlords or CEOs? It depends on how entrenched they are in the status quo. If all the CEO is going to say it “Hey, we’re great”, then send someone who is nearly as powerful but actually has their eyes open.

I spoke to Adam tonight at the dinner and our exchange went like this:

Nick: “Thanks for a great talk, Adam. Listening to you talk about Bogota gave me hope. I don’t have to deal with warlords and guerrillas, I just have to get some academics around a table.”

Adam: “You’re welcome, but I was trying to change academics for years and I just gave up. Remember Kissinger’s quote about academics? (Kissinger, who was apparently quoting Sayre on Issawi)”

Issawi (from the grave): “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”

Sayre (from the grave): “That is why academic politics are so bitter.”

Now I realise that Adam was being facetious, he’s a highly amusing man, but it is slightly scary to hear this from a man who was willing to tell people to stop complaining about sitting next to someone who had tried to kill them five times, because he was trying to stop the sixth attempt.

I like the Power and Love framing – I think I’m far too prone to that sentimental ‘love’ approach,without giving enough attention to the requirement of people to be people! I think I’ll have to buy Adam’s book tomorrow!

First day of Creative Innovations 2012

Posted: November 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It has been a hectic day. Up early to go to the gym and then, from 9am on, it’s been solid meeting, thinking, talking, networking and writing furiously. Regrettably, it appears that almost all of my notes may have just disappeared due to an application crash but, to be honest, I learned a great deal from writing it all down! (I’m still trying to recover all the notes!) (Whew – after a nervous hour that included a complete failure to boot, we appear to be going again. Sleep? Who needs sleep?)

This morning started with the Change Lab: solving complex social problems through design thinking. The key to all of this is, instead of getting caught in Challenge/Response cycle, you take a step back, get the useful (active) parties involved and get all of the problems out onto the table. I’ve given a very, very high level description but I’m going to need some time to go through my notes to distill it properly!

However, we were looking at problems in terms of whether they were dynamic (cause and effect a long way apart and interdependent), social (no one has the same lens on the problem) and/or generative (products of an uncertain and unknown future). We were asked to think about the problems in our institutions and how we’d classify them. I thought about two:

  1. Gender imbalance in the Engineering and ICT disciplines, which I assessed as dynamic (a dearth of female students years ago has not helped the numbers today) and social (in the amount of argument about this, due to personal perspectives and agendas).
  2. Increasing student workload to self-support. Most of today’s students are working to pay bills while they’re at Uni. I regard this as dynamic (changing social structures over the last few decades as well as reduced government funding), social (because the view of how people ‘should’ go to Uni is highly subjective) and generative (as we have no idea what this will do in the future and how we will really tackle it.)

I found it an interesting way to think about the problems in their overall scope. Other people’s problems included the health sector and their shift from acute care to chronic care as the population ages, and what was happening for students who don’t even make it to Cert IV in a workplace where further education has become expected. We then got a question that, to be honest, is one of the core themes of this conference:

What is the single greatest challenge you’re facing in trying to make progress in this problem(s)?

Well, that’s a good question. Speed of adaptation is a big one here – just because we were taught a certain way doesn’t make it right by any stretch of the imagination. Getting everyone who can solve either of my problems to even meet in the same room can be tricky, let alone agreeing to anything. We may end up spending all of our planning and organising time just putting a meeting together!

The Change Lab approach is designed to be systemic, participative and creative – so you need to be able to address the whole system and talk to all of the key players, while being able to step outside of the current constraints. (Hey, no-one said it would be easy!) The big problem with a big problem is that you can get stuck. You do the same thing because it’s what you do, even when you know it’s not working. Are we there yet? I don’t think so, but as someone else said today  (and I paraphrase) “The time to innovate is not when it’s inevitable, it’s when it looks like it’s not yet time.” We have some bad situations (gender balance being one of them) but we’re not yet completely stuck in it and there’s a lot of action for change.

Ok, must get some sleep but will blog again shortly.

Rapid Fire Quote: Creative Innovations 2012

Posted: November 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Attended a great panel over supper on “Now to Next: How will Science and Technology help solve our wicked problems” moderated by Robyn Williams, with Baroness Susan Greenfield, Michael T Jones, Professor Nadia Rosenthal, Dr Iain McGilchrist and Jason Drew. Tons of great stuff from a very talented panel but my favourite quote of the night was from Iain McGilchrist:

“We are in a race between education and catastrophe.”

(Edit: Alan has noted that this is normally attributed to H. G. Wells. Thanks, Alan!)

Can you think of a better description of what we do or a more important reason to get up in the morning? The burning deck analogy, where crisis forces us to act, may not always apply – after all, as Baroness Greenfield noted, Quantum theory wasn’t developed because of a looming crisis, Barry Marshall’s work on ulcers wasn’t because of war and global warming had nothing to do with the work on Nerve Growth Factor. So thinking of scientists as firefighters is not a good way to think. But thinking of educators as essential and of education as the way to avert disaster – now that’s a much more useful approach.

Creative Innovations 2012

Posted: November 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

So much to blog about from the conventicle but, surprise!, I’m not at home, I’m in a hotel preparing to attend the first day the Creative Innovations 2012 conference. I have a ‘wild card’ entry (sponsored ticket) courtesy  of the Vice President of Services and Resources of my University and I’m really looking forward to it.

This is not a free lunch. (Readers of fine literature will know that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.) I need to look at the activities of the next three days through a lens that could bring five concrete proposals back to the University. I must be honest – I had been expecting something like this because it’s too good an opportunity to go to waste. Take a group of people from the Uni and throw them into a giant melting pot of entrepreneurs and creative thinkers… well, you’d hope to get at least five ideas!

Our Uni is a big place, with many complex systems, so I’ll definitely have my thinking cap on for the next few days!

This entry is short because I suspect I’ll be live blogging quite extensively tomorrow.

And I have my conventicle notes to write up as well.

…

Expect a lot from me over the next few days!

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