Presentation is Everything. ( Or Not )

By on August 19, 2011 in learning, trust

 

This weekend I was immersed in the world of presenting.. and being a Presenter. I attended a full day seminar on the different aspects of the presenting business. And that’s what it is. A business. One I don’t really grasp right now. Apparently being a presenter is actually a thing, all on its own. A single word job description on a business card or CV. Did you know that? I didn’t.

I always thought it had to end in something or be couched in some kind of content for it to make sense.

“I present on the impact of global warming on the pirate population.”

Donation box

But, no. Some people just… present.

I’m not a Presenter‘s best audience. I’m a sucker for content. I want anyone holding my attention to either know their topic, or be honest and transparent about their process. If they do both, that’s incredible. It’s also incredibly rare. In my full week at the 15th International Conference on Thinking, I only saw it a handful of times. I think that’s a little odd.

But I’m not most audiences on most days. Most people, most days want to be entertained and enlivened. Presenters are trained to make their living doing just that. Think of them as live-audience, context actors on demand. They work to weave a bit of content into the entertainment they provide and aim to leave most people happy. Are you left happy?

The other day someone asked if I liked presenting. It struck me as unusual. Like asking a builder if they like hammers. Presenting is a challenge for me, and one that I simply wouldn’t bother with if it didn’t do something. Endless hours of prep, restless sleep and dressing up are all things that are part of the package. It makes for a much longer work day than just the minutes spent talking.

But I like what presenting does. It’s a chance to offer yourself and talk through things. People get to clarify, question, disagree, relate. In that way, it’s much better than a book or even a blog. I like what it does, but if I could find another strategy, one that did the same thing with a good night’s sleep and a pair or jeans, I’d go full time.

 

 

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Digby and the Law of Distraction

By on February 26, 2011 in learning, technology, thinking

Digby tells me I can use them just like spinach, but I’m not convinced.

Digby Law 150x150

His intense, turtle necked stare striking out from the cook book’s back page suggesting that if he hadn’t made it as a New Zealand chef, he’d have welcomed a role as Dr Who, or more likely a ‘made-for-TV’ Maurice Gee adaptation. That said, his flamboyantly titled ‘A Vegetable Cookbook‘ is a gem. Digby’s classic approaches to killing and preparing your own plants have stood the test of time since 1978. More than can be said for his chin-lunging knitwear. But I digress. I’m still faced with a boxed forest of beetroot plants and Digby’s assurance that the Romans used them like spinach.

It’s a new problem, and all thanks to Ooooby.com.

A box of local veges, delivered weekly. Genius. Best thing is, instead of fussing with buying to suit a recipe, you start from the ingredients and work your way out. No high-risk coulis reductions using special utensils I can’t buy without speaking French. No. This is the sock darning, make do attitude.. delivered conveniently to your door. Not exactly war time.. but you get to put your hands on your hips and say: ‘that’ll need using’.
I do this now.
I’ll use Digby’s help to slay the crimson krakken lurking in my fridge. Its red tendrils spreading like a scene from War of the Worlds. Digby’s book has a chapter for each vege. It’s fantastic. With a focus on the one thing you need to use it keeps you focussed on what’s important.
In education, I think we can sometimes lose that focus. We have a choice of so many ingredients, procedures and presentation styles it’s sometimes easy to loose sight of the core content. We can become distracted with complex recipes of technology with its interactive devices and and online community.
There’s potential for a globally networked, collaborative, interactive task to be an edu-recipe more complex than it is nutritious.
So where’s the main ingredient?
With ICTs promising better such vibrant ways to engage students, it’s easy to lose track of what learning we wanted them engaged in. We need to keep track of that, and especially notice when it’s strangely absent from our conversations about ICTs.

We all have a gadget wish list. But maybe just once, when someone is asked what they’d buy with $2000 to spend on their class, they might reply: “A solid understanding of phonemes.”
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Managing Impulsivity – One Cattle Prod at a Time

By on January 15, 2011 in learning, possibilities, thinking

 

Inspired by John (FarmGeek) Hart ‘s session on food labeling at 2010 Kiwi Foo Camp, I decided to present the problem of poor eating habits to an eager class of year 5 and 6 thinkers. I turned the problem over to them, to solve and illustrate on A5 card.

Minutes later we had a class set of solutions to analyze. The slide show below shows the wide range of ideas. Some put life and limb at risk, others hide vegetables in your dessert bowl. Robots, electrocution and lasers play a big role.

 

 

How could we organise these great ideas to help make good decisions on the best way forward?

By creating pairs of opposites, students created several different spectrums to organise and compare their solutions.

Cheap vs Expensive

Realistic vs Futuristic

Simple vs Complex

Cheap vs Expensive

Forced vs Free Will

Effective vs Ineffective

and

Humane vs Inhumane

all of these were student generated, and provided powerful tools to compare the qualities of each solution.

We organised each of the spectrums to a human continuum: Handing out the cards after a shuffle meant each student had someone else’s solution to interpret and justify as they spread out across the room for each continuum, reasoning and discussing as they went.

Which were the values we held most important? We decided on ‘humane’ and ‘effective’. We mapped them together on a single chart using two axis.

Our solutions to bad eating 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some clear patterns emerged. Our solutions were either very humane, or very effective. Surely you’d agree, being promptly whipped by an electric prod as you reach for a Mars bar would help to whittle away those extra pounds, but it’s not exactly humane. How could we get it perfect? What solution, imaginary or otherwise would take the top right spot in the graph?

We reviewed our ideas again using problem analysis to see just what problem we were each solving with our ideas. I’ll write about that process later.

This is the kind of work I really enjoy. Making sense of things that are messy and that don’t have easy answers.

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Bower to the People

By on April 13, 2010 in community, learning

I’d just as soon as put my hand in an open crocodile as play cards, especially on holiday, so getting me to the porch table for a ‘friendly’ game took some serious peer pressure. I’d never played 500 before and this was going be the first time in a while that I’d pushed myself to learn about something that I ..Simply. Didn’t. Like. 

How often do we ask that of our students?  
‘Last Card’ is more my game of choice (when I have no choice.. and there’s no available crocodile). There’s nothing more satisfying than watching truly competitive people fall to the fickle whims of skill-free chance. This game however, seemed to involve skill, knowledge and (as a virtual crocodile began to nibble at my index finger).. strategy. 
Without any real prior knowledge I had 500 pegged with a difficultly somewhere between Last Card and Bridge. 
Bridge has also been a mystery to me. All I remember from my Nan’s all-day gaming sessions with the ladies from church was a near-silent hypnotic hum over the table, and the guarantee of scones and jam. Scones have remained a permanent, diet-slaying Achilles’ heel for me. Cards.. not-so-much. Turns out 500 is similar to Bridge. It still involves a bit of strategy but doesn’t take as long, so it’s more suited to the younger player who may have other things to do with their day, like checking facebook. 
500 shares sailing’s frustrating trait of making up special words for things we already know. (Can we just turn the boat to the right?). You have a left bower and right bower.. which are both Jacks.. (24 anyone?) and the scoring involves ‘tricks’, ‘runs’ and other novel complexities. As more details followed I found myself gazing out across the coastal flax, idly scanning for crocs. The idea is to work with your partner to win as many ‘tricks’ as you can and reach a score of 500 first. I decided that 500 was a goal far too large to be fun, let alone likely. The chance of losing points along the way also means the game can go for a while. Thankfully I was paired with the only other person who had never played so it was probably going to be a quick one. 
Our ineptitude began as comical and then became insulting when, after 50 tricks a bag of chips and playing several left and right bowers (with celebratory song) we had cleaned up and won by a 400 point margin. We had learned just enough to play a rough game and come away equal parts victorious and bewildered. Our gracious instructor Scott on the other hand, was a broken man. Still, it was thanks to his careful guidance through a few open hands, and his generous on-the-fly play tips that we learned and scored as well as we did. 
“You’d never play a spade at this stage mate.. have you got something better?… yeah… that one.. that’ll……win it for you…. “ 
It’s our job to not just teach skills, but to give people the passion to use those skills every day. We know it’s not all the literate kids who achieve, it’s mostly those who choose to read in their own time, and they have to want to do it when we stop looking. 
If Scott had done it any other way he’d have lost us.. in so many ways. As it stands he set us up to not only understand a bit of the game play, but to want to play it again. If we didn’t have that, we simply wouldn’t ever do it again and that sprouting branch of future learning would be cut back to the trunk, never to grow again. 
Thanks Scott. I’m glad you’re a teacher. 
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Obedience School

By on February 11, 2010 in change, community, leadership, possibilities, society, thinking, travel
I’ve been toying with the idea that it if we want to grow children who can develop their own reasoning and follow through on social action then we should sometimes allow ourselves to be overthrown. Isn’t all the ‘empowering young learners’ talk made irrelevant when underneath it all, we consistently expect obedience even when we may not always have the best perspective or the most ethical way forward?
Where did this thinking start? My recent travel in South East Asia was a lesson in war and cultural survival. It led me to consider the responsibility of educators world wide: How do we do the work of preventing future evil?
If teachers could mover back in time and rewind the history on any given tyrannical regime, where and when would they insert themselves to make the greatest change? 
The first thought is to try and change the leaders, to be empathetic and transformative teachers to the Pol Pots and Stalins themselves, but I  doubt we could re-write the hearts of tyrannical leaders in the making. I’m not sure how early in life that tyranny starts but in my work I’ve glimpsed small shards of darkness growing from a young age. I’ve found that a lack of empathy in children is slippery business to diagnose, communicate or seek help for. I don’t think teachers have the skill or power to address it through their small window on a child’s life. 
Thinking further I considered the extent to which evil organisations are co-operative endeavors involving not just the lead roles, but casts of thousands all singing in tune. Moreover they include (require?) a vast and silent proportion of people as the audience of onlookers. The good, who do nothing.
They are the ones we can change now in our classrooms.
Those who are silent, uncertain and fearful. 
Those who take comfort in instructions and boundaries.
Those who engage unquestioningly and succeed in our systems of consequence and reward. 
The obedient. 
They arrived this morning in schools all over the world with little expectation of exerting real power in their immediate world and perhaps we thought nothing of it, because they are children. We expected them to obey and rewarded them for it. 
But are our children really empowered to overcome their fear of not belonging, of not obeying, of not ‘being good’ and their fear of us, to do what is right to challenge injustice?
We need to allow this.. to inform it.. and to encourage it. To give that social action wings we must sometimes allow ourselves to be the first casualty of truly ethical bravery. To bow to a greater good that has taken a well considered stand  against us. In doing so we may just raise a generation who are each prepared to overcome their fears and mobilise themselves to make sure we never let some histories repeat. 

I like the idea of a well reasoned, ethically driven bloodless coup… with a shared lunch to celebrate. 

( This was the original image in my head when Imagined my original blog URL )

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A Bird in the Hand

By on February 4, 2010 in community, thinking, travel

I share a story with a group of young, open minds.


I’m in Luang Prabang in Laos, at the foot of a long set of stairs that lead to a hilltop temple. An old woman is selling young birds, each cramped in their own tiny bamboo cages. it’s good luck she says to let them free at the top of the hill. No thanks. I am resolute. But I turn it to the group..
What would YOU do?
They arrange themselves in a human continuum across the room.. from an absolute ‘Yes I’d buy one’ to an absolute ‘No’. I’ll want to know why, I say. There’s magic in the why. First we hear from the two extremes.


“I don’t believe in luck, so it’s a waste of money.” Says the farthest ‘No’.
 The opposite ‘Yes’ replies. “I’d want to set the bird free if it was in a small cage.”
The debate begins.. “But you’re not really helping because she’d just get another bird and put it in a cage!!”
Without prompt.. people begin to move about.. changing position.. changing opinion.
“Why did you move.. what’s changed for you?” More magic.. more distinctions in reasoning. The clusters are deceptive. Each person has their own unique way through the problem.

Someone walks the length of the class to sit firmly in the ‘No’.. there are cheers of support from those now a little more cramped by the door.
Careful.. When we make these positions a social group, we add a new value to the equation. How could the need to belong to a group change your reasoning? Are you all there for the same reasons?

I add new detail to the story: When another tourist rejects the old lady’s bird cage she throws it carelessly on the ground, hurting the poor bird inside. ( A clever technique to encourage a purchase.. )
More debate and eventually the spread of the human continuum settles.. now the scales tilting a little more heavily to the ‘No’ than when we started.


So, now.. Imagine amplifying your opinion through time over the next two weeks.


Did you buy the bird? Then imagine a steady increase to the old lady’s bird sales over the next two weeks till eventually she’s selling scores every day.
Didn’t buy? Then imagine the sales dwindling to nothing in the same time frame.


When you amplify your short term, small scale decision does the result still balance with your original reasoning? Compare the future outcomes.
The discussion continues.. but an observation has come from the one who doesn’t believe in luck. They’ve drifted in from the extreme ‘No’ and now sit closer to the middle. “ If her sales stop, then we know that birds will die because she doesn’t take care of them.. because if no-one buys them she’ll let them die…… but then she won’t buy any more birds so no more birds will be hurt.”
Brilliant. So: If you chose to stop her sales or not, how do you balance the certainty of the dead birds with the unknowable suffering of many birds in the future?

But surely, that’s enough temple splitting for a day. Time to run about in the sun.

Because it’s all about balance.

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At the Crossroads

By on January 14, 2010 in change, context, society, travel

Hoi An, Vietnam- New Years Eve

Walking to the festivities by the river through the Old District of tailors and restaurants we noticed a throng of people at an unlikely spot and decided to investigate. What we found were several hundred young locals standing, sitting and squatting, packed shoulder to shoulder at each corner of an intersection. Another hundred teens stood astride scooters almost blocking the road, reluctantly giving way to let the odd car squeeze by. We were still unsure what all the fuss was about when suddenly a scooter appeared from a gap, blazed through the intersection and disappeared on the other side prompting a roar of applause from the crowd. This was South East Asia’s Mod Squad, and we had arrived at ‘The Drags’.

We eagerly anticipated some kind of Vietnamese intersection X-Games, but it wasn’t to be. The scooter wrangling hijynx, like the front wheel of many an attempted wheelie, never quite got off the ground. Yet when a wheel DID lift off.. the crowd response was raucous. Pretty soon we began lowering our expectations and started to join in on the cheering. At one point there was even a police scare when the streets emptied in seconds flat. No police ever arrived but the brief panic added to the atmosphere of risk and excitement. This was just like a scene from ‘The Fast and The Furious’ but with a much smaller carbon footprint.

In all fairness it’s hard to wheelie a machine designed strictly for the day to day chores of work and transport. Perhaps it’s just as hard to lift such a frivolous idea up from the gravity of a culture that takes such pride in their capacity for useful work.

Though the skill level suggested this was a new thing it clearly had a keen following. This was a full-swing celebration of an idea, played out in a spirit of rebellion. Exploring the possibilities of their day to day tools and overcoming a historical focus on personal utility in the same fell swoop.

I say good on them. I hope they get it off the ground.

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Forgiveness and the Digital Footprint

By on September 24, 2009 in change, community, context, policy, society, technology, trust

I remember a story… from where I’m not sure. A little girl, claiming to be a channel for God was questioned by an man to prove her claim. He asked:
“For what did I ask forgiveness yesterday?” She replied “I have forgotten”.
It was swiftly decided that she was either the real deal, or a twisted genius.

Forgetting was the ultimate forgiveness.

We may never be able to forget again. When our lives are not only recorded online but lived online how will we ever forgive or be forgiven in the same way when the infinite memory of The Cloud renders our every move in an unforgettable, indelible ink?

We’ve become so adaptable to rapid movement that there’s a little part of us that isn’t concerned with the future because we quietly think we ARE the future. It’s just not so. The tools we use today were once an unforeseeable magic, but we forget that there’s magic still to come.

Our cultures were once recorded in song, but now we’re writing our own as we go. As we hum and sing our lives through stanzas of joy, sorrow, success and failure, our own song is being heard and recorded in perpetuity by the perfect listener to later be performed on request at any time, to anyone, for any reason.

In time this will change our expectations of one another. It’s only a matter of generations before our CEOs and leaders have all been immersed in media for a lifetime and the children whose online presence appalls their grandparents, become grandparents themselves. That’s the horizon of a broad social forgiveness of shared honesty… but we’re not there yet.

We are custodians of a transition generation. The first to record their song from the beginning. If we didn’t manage that with great care, should we be forgiven?

………………………………………………..

See below for an early experiment in live media broadcasting. Testament to the dangers of 24/7 social transparency.

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Rush-in Fudge – Official Dessert of the National Standards

By on September 8, 2009 in assessment, attestation, change, national standards, politics

Auckland principal Paul heffernan did a brilliant job of humorously threatening to fudge test results when national standards come in. It was a nice way to bring attention to the genuine concern about professionals feeling pressured to compromise their integrity for the sake of their jobs.
The media, taking exception to the idea of people compromising integrity for the sake of their jobs were quick to take him on his word and run it as a headline.

It’s hard to know when some people are being serious and perhaps Paul Heffernan is one of those people, but a stroll through his school’s website will give you some clues. It could be that in the photo of Mr Heff, his choice to be toting a water pistol and wearing an elephant hat and monster slippers only serves to perfectly balanced the cool steely interior of a relentlessly serious man with everything to hide.

No. Fair to say that as Paul wrote that response to Luke’s post his tongue was so firmly wedged in the side of his cheek he was on a lean. Thing is, good satire reflects reality and the truth is this is a very real problem. In my time teaching I’ve heard of all kinds of test-fudge ethics running rife in bold daylight.
Let’s move that bell curve over a little… it’ll look like we’re doing better.
Let’s test non-fiction at the start of the year because its harder, then fiction at the end.. it’ll look like they’ve improved more.
Let’s report ‘where teachers think children are’…not their tested scores.

All this in the low-stakes assessment model we’ve enjoyed so far.

WE KNOW THIS HAPPENS..
We know how easy it’s done..
We know how easily it’s justified..
We know how easily the clear black lines become shades of grey..

Thank goodness for people like Paul who are telling this story NOW… before we and the children we teach have to live it. The inevitable effect of impulsively applying poorly considered nation standards is a drab, predictable 20 year cycle that stands to teach us nothing we don’t already know. It’s just salt in the wound that the people who spearhead the move won’t be around to take responsibility for it when we see how many ways educators are pressured to compromised their best for the sake of looking their best.

If all this leaves you needing a pick-me-up.. watch the clip below.
( This one’s for you Mr Heff. )

*Update. 11/09/09 . I’ve since met Mr Heff and was promptly shot in the chest with the water pistol he keeps holstered behind his desk. We got him set up with a blog because we think he’s got a lot to say and an audience waiting to hear from him. Watch this space for the link. *

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The Journey

By on August 24, 2009 in assessment, change, community, society, trust

Multi-tasking isn’t a personal strong point, so with my head down at the map I was oblivious to the oncoming cars till they were kind enough to honk. Funny how car horns use the same voice to say ‘The light’s green now.. off you go’.. as they do for ‘Sweet mercy he’s going to kill us all!’
Australasians are much more possessive of their road space than other cultures and there’s nothing like having a green light and three columns of traffic on your side to give you the feeling you own the intersection. The cars about to broadside us had JUST that feeling. Rightly so.

Given that all we had was a red light and a car with the imposing street presence of a foil wrapped kebab, we conceded the point and even reversed slightly to let the columns pass. Polite I thought.
This was the journey. Sudden lanes changes, inverted maps, cheating intersectional death and helpful statements like “I think it was that street… back there…”. All that was added to a cocktail of personality traits and shaken together in a 4 wheeled thimble. It could have all gone Pete Tong but it didn’t. Friendships intact, we only ended up late to a lunch that the other party had completely forgotten. When the goal evaporates, it’s nice to know you didn’t lose any mates on the way.
It surprises me how fleeting goals can be, yet how much of our time, resources and focus they absorb at the expense of appreciating the journey.
Alan Watts knew this. All the web 2.0 stat-happy videos can get in line. If you watch only one video to change practice, make it this one.

Greg Whitby’s post got me thinking about using different assessment methods to get a full picture of how students and community experience the journey through school. I’ve changed my thinking on it since I added my first comment. I don’t think we can sterilize all we hear through our own ideas so it fits our thinking.
If we are engaging with our students and community as collaborators in this dance then surely we can’t set all the boundaries on how we assess our efforts. Instead we can let in the wonderfully confusing collection of subjective experience that makes us human. Even if people have wildly different views of the journey we could learn from that. Not all expectations of educators are reasonable, yet we’re often so much on the defensive we generate little opportunity for our community to develop a more informed perspective.
Perhaps first we just need to listen.

How were your school days?

At the time, did anyone stop to ask?

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