Last Mango Embarrassed
I'll never forget the way Joe greeted me when he came to dinner the second time:
"I noticed last time you didn't have a mango peeler, so I've brought you one."'Last time' was watching me make chilli and mango noodles. I'd struggled with the mangos. There'd been blood and cursing.
Joe's Australian and he's spent a lot of time in East Asia. Basically, he's spent a lot more time around mangos than I have. That night was the one and only time I've ever had a mango in the house. He'd been diplomatically silent while watching me struggle with the mango. But being a thoughtful type, had worked out a solution. Now I use the mango peeler on butternut squash.
And the odd thing is, I eat a lot more ginger now...
The other thing in the picture is a ginger grater which I bought in Japan. It turns ginger into ginger puree with almost no effort. Oddly, I consider the ginger grater and the mango peeler to be 'gadgets'. Unlike, say, a 'knife' or an electric kettle.
I have some friends from Argentina who are mad about electric kettles. If you ask them the best thing about living in the UK they will tell you about kettles. They give kettles as gifts. Apparently, electric kettles aren't common in Argentina - for them it's a 'gadget'. And they use them far more than I do. For me: kettle = tea. Note that preceding punctuation (it's a full stop). But they, for example, pre-boil water when they make spaghetti. They cook with kettles and were amazed that I didn't.
Tools help fight procrastination and fear
One thing I've learned is that where there's a problem, there's probably a tool for it. Now, whenever I'm abroad, I always make a point of visiting two kinds of shop; stationers and kitchenware. (Japan is especially good for this. Tokyo is worth visiting for the stationery alone - they have rows of stationery specifically for study and memorisation, for example.)
Anyhoo.
My point is this: helping people to learn is not 'central' to the stuff of life. By definition: nobody learns for learning's sake. We're all helping people learn in order to do something. Training and education are, necessarily, a peripheral activity.
I'm not saying it's not important, it's just not central. It's a spoke rather than a hub.
Get a bigger toolkit
unReal Trainers are promiscuous. There's a lot to learn from Training the Trainer programmes and Teacher Training but, trust me on this one, it's like maths and school. For most people, the last time they'll work with a differential equation is during their final exam.
Some of the places I've been finding inspiration* over the last couple of years are:
- Game Design
- Information Architecture
- Marketing
- Economics
- User Experience (UX) and Interaction Design
- Designers
- Computer programmers
- School teachers (NOT the same as trainers)
- Lecturers and 'presenters'
- Americans (they do things differently there)
Spread yourself about a bit. The internet is the biggest toolshop in the world.
*Have I missed any? I'm sure I have. I'm going to be posting a series on all the above. And I'm taking requests in the comments and on Twitter. I'll also be running some seminars and workshops in the new year for anybody interested in helping people learn.
NB I've made a couple of sweeping statements here in, I hope, a departure from past posts. I couldn't help myself - force of habit from years working with groups. Sometimes, when you're working with groups, it's good to come out with some half-baked ideas.
3 comments:
I'm very curious, I assume Americans are different (in ways I'm sure I don't want to know about) but in what way are you refering to?
This is fab, and I completely agree. Reading Seth Godin's blog flicked a switch for me, because it was all about attentionomics and motivation and it kind of opened a door into a larger world where people were much, much more clued up about these things than many people in education.
I too am curious about the Americans. I've never handled a whole group of them at once, though I can make some poorly-educated guesses based on popular culture.
Whoah. I can see now the 'Americans' thing is open to misinterpretation.
All I mean is that American teachers and trainers 'sound' different. The way they (you?) look at the world and the comments they make about training, for example, are unmistakably American - though, and here's the problem, I couldn't tell you why.
But I can make some guesses:
Accreditation. Americans seem big on it. In the UK there are huge numbers of learning professionals who are just Subject Matter Experts trying their hand at something new. I'm entirely ambivalent about accreditation. Many professional associations are little better than medieval guilds, for example. But the creation of a 'common ground' for discussion is a wonderful thing.
Polarisation. Wow, Americans feel strongly about stuff like this - this might be a result of accreditation and the creation of a sense of the 'right' way to do things. Brits feel strongly too, but the debate is largely focused on the curriculum for compulsory schooling and fees for higher education. Training is pretty much left alone, it's a private matter for companies and individuals.
eLearning. In the UK we're light years behind on the whole eLearning thing. (Like accreditation, I'm entirely ambiivalent about this). And many of the American trainers and learning professionals I read are Instructional Designers Sue, you're one of them). We have ISD people in the UK but they're not bloggers or Twitterers as much. And they're much more focused on the Moodles and the Personal Knowledge Environment. Look at the Open Learn resources from the Open University.
A good deal of the US eLearning I've seen would cause mutiny in many UK companies. If you asked a bunch of Brits to sit down to an eLearning package with a movie/presentation then multiple choice questions (which is the most common kind I've seen - I'm still waiting to see some good stuff) they would rebel. I've seen this happen.
(This is one of the reasons I made that request to you about your blog, Sue. I'm dying to see some good stuff. The eLearning I've seen is mostly call/response and I've yet to see a justification for why we need specific software environments for eLearning. A lot of eLearning packages seem a bit like normal software packages but uglier.)
Last thing. I've been careless when I said 'American'. What I actually meant was North American. Some of my fave people - like Harold Jarche, Dave Ferguson and Jay Cross - could be either American or Canadian. I know that some of them are Canadian but am not sure which ones. There are also a whole bunch of Australians who do that whole thing bridging learning and Knowledge Management that rock my world.
I should have said 'foreigners'.
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