You can't control how fast (or how slow) some things happen. We were getting close to home when she asked me, "Daddy, what's Jessonade?"
You can just tell when you enter an empty house. We don't need to resort to anything like a Sixth Sense to explain this. The seven that we know about are plenty good enough. The air is still, we don't hear any of the signs associated with occupation. It's pretty similar with kids; you just know when they're asking something important.
So, I could feel that 'jessonade', whatever it was, was important.
One of the things you learn with kids is that, sometimes, it's important not to laugh when they do something funny or to show too much interest in their questions. Laughter and greater than usual interest are scary.
"Jessonade, jessonade, what's that? I don't think I've heard of that," I said. "Is it like lemonade?"
This was a very weak joke. The way she said it, the word had the stress on the first syllable, JESS-onade.
"No, like in Rwanda," she said.
Explaining genocide to an 8-year old from Hackney is much harder than you'd imagine. She went to a school with more than thirty mother tongues and lacked a sense of how people could be so different you'd want to exterminate them.
"They said that women were raped."
You'll notice that this sentence doesn't contain a question mark. But I refer you to the previous remark on Sixth Senses and empty houses.
So, that's how my daughter got her first taste of sex education. You can't explain rape without sex. So we talked about sex and rape as we sat on the kerb a few steps away from the front door.
Haphazard learning
I learned about sex in a slightly more haphazard manner.
Fighting with my sister, I uttered the immortal words, "Get off me, you . . . pimp!" Mum was on me like a lynch mob.
A burning curiosity, coupled with an ostentatious sense of injustice, forced me to turn to a less reliable source of information when my mother decided my protestations of innocence ("It's just a word! What does it mean? It means something, doesn't it? Tell me, I just liked the sound!") were a ruse. Which was Gary, our 15-year-old occasional babysitter and confirmed child-hater. Gary soon discovered that the word, 'prostitute' wasn't moving things forward as much as he'd hoped. And, well, you can imagine the rest of the conversation.
So, my daughter gets her first sex education from me. And I make sure that, by the time we're finished, it's more about love than rape. And I get mine from Gary, the misopedist babysitter. And he makes sure I know enough synonyms for prostitute and sex to impress my friends in the playground.
Just-in-time learning not just-in-case. . .
This is Just-In-Time learning. You might've seen the positive example in the news recently when an American in Haiti used his iPhone to teach him first aid and stay conscious while trapped under rubble.
It's important stuff. Read Chris Atherton's (@finiteattention) latest blog post, The search for context in education and journalism (wicked problems, Wikipedia, and the rise of the info-ferret) on students suffering from something which sounds like learned helplessness:
It’s not about having access to the information; all my students have Internet access at least some of the time. Too many (N > 0) of my students are just not in the habit of looking for information when they get stuck, like someone forgot to tell them that the Internet is good for more than just email and Facebook.How did they get this way? I would suggest that they didn't. We did. We taught them that learning is timetabled and planned. We taught them that learning happens in order.
How did we do this? Good question, I'll be covering that in a future post. (Yes, yes, I know there's no 'us' any more but I still need to get paid for my work - so, for the time being I am 'we' and they are 'them'. Ha ha ha hee hee hee wo ho ho.)
The obligatory bit where I'm slightly cross
Students don't ask because they're waiting to be told. Workers refuse tasks until they're 'trained up'. It's one thing to struggle to provide just-in-time learning opportunities due to resource constraints. But many of our learners in school and at work are actively prevented from pursuing things that interest them at a time that suits them.
How do I know this? I've done it. I've trained other people to do it. (Not sure about this? Teach an observed class and deviate from your lesson plan and see what happens.) And I've had it done to me. I once waited a month to advertise posts I needed to fill, like, yesterday because the next recruitment and selection training (compulsory, natch) was scheduled for once a quarter. The last organisational induction I attended was delivered by people who'd worked in the organisation for less time than me. And it was all okay because there was 'no way round it'.
We need a JIT strategy (where's that sarcasm mark when I need it)
It's tempting to see blog posts like this as idealistic or impractical. Yes, we know that the curricula teach the map not the territory - and that there's good reasons for this. But the thing about just-in-time learning, though, is this:
You can't stop it.If you're involved in managing an organisation (or lecture in a university), you're choice isn't between just-in-time learning or meticulously scheduled timetable of theoretically sound learning interventions.
Nope, the choice is me or Gary.
Notes on Just-In-Time (JIT)
The reason for writing this post was that most of the people I work with have got no idea what JIT means. And I think it's less likely to confuse/enrage/turn them off than 'informal learning' or learning through social media or unworkshops or whatever else people like me blather on about on Twitter. (By the way, you should follow me on Twitter. Do you know why so many blogs have the 'You should follow me. . .' thing? And what does this mean for the future of teacher and trainer training? All will be revealed.)
The philosophy of JIT is simple. Inventory is waste.
It's interesting to compare this idea with the idea of knowledge stocks and knowledge flows. Harold Jarche has written about this Knowledge Management concept for learning:
The web for learning - from stock to flow
Learning is conversation
Connect, aggregate, filter then train
Most school and training is about building up your inventory.
The phrase Just-In-Time is from the world of things like Lean and Taichi Ohno of Toyota. Which is interesting, but this blog's not the right place to go into it. (Although I kind of did a bit last August with a post on the Five Why technique.)
More posts on Just-in-Time Learning:
- Jeff Utecht at The Thinking Stick talks about something I think most trainers and eLearning designers are familiar with, when you're only a half-step ahead of the people you're teaching.
- Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror talks about the only way to deal with learning when you're faced with something as fast-moving as talking to computers.
- Incident Blog on a man who helped his wife deliver a baby by consulting his Blackberry.
- Continuous Learning Lessons from Leaf Blowing - I just like this post a lot (thanks @usablelearning)
If any of you have written a JIT post (or a near-JIT post like the leaf blowing one), let me know and I'll add it to the list.
I had a play around with some ideas on types of learning and where JIT might fit into a Learning & Development strategy/plan over at Hypergogue. The thoughts and diagrams are based on Jane Hart's ideas at C4LPT.
As always, I'm curious to know what other people think.
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