Personal Blogs

'What makes people despair is that they try to find a universal meaning to the whole of life, and then end up saying it is absurd, illogical, empty of meaning.’ (Anais Nin, Journals Vol 1)

Whilst Roger’s categories may be his view of people on an historical landscape of invention they are a simplification - wherein lies our first dilemma - to open our minds to the nature & possibilities of e.learning we need to find a way to engage with its complexity.

We could each come up with our own equally valid descriptors and argue our case.

What is more, there is an in-built bias to these terms: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority & laggards. With ‘laggards,’ perhaps like ‘Luddites’ pejoratively considered to be of less worth than the ‘innovators.’

Or not?

Ideas sell. So does innovation. I know from experience. As the inventive one  - the team needed a salesperson. (an early adopter) and a business manager (very much in the late majority verging on being a laggard). A new business, that if successful may prove an innovation works, is like a pop group, made up of an assortment of band members. An innovator alone is like the nutty profession, Mr Brainstorm or from 'Back to the Future', Dr Emit Brown & his ‘flux-capacitor’ that drove his time machine. Does not the innovator sell to the early adopter? What is the point in tryin to sell to the laggard? And what role does the market play for innovations? In advertising we talked of 'preaching to the converted.' In relation to innovative products, you need to be selling to those who are already or are prone to 'buy in' to the new technology, software or service.

Roger’s is surely just one set of stepped criteria, we could as readily differentiate between:

• various levels of success & failure,
• between risk takers vs & the risk averse
• between the foolish & considered
• between experimental vs experiential
• between novelty vs tried & tested

And each or any of these could be researched, charted, put on maps and shared as annotated demographic pyramids.

As Mel Brooks put it in relation to writing:

'Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.'

All Rogers has done is to give some characters types separate terms.

Aptly, from the world of writing fiction (novels, screenplays) there are the terms ‘protagonist’ & ‘antagonist.’ I wonder if in a screenplay that incorporated characters from Roger’s terms by implication the ‘protagonist’ is the innovator, while the ‘antagonist’ is the laggard. And do you know what, it is the conflict between the two that generates innovation, the one trying to prove themselves right, the storyline in which the ‘early adopters,’ ‘early majority,’ ‘late majority’ & ‘laggards’ literally buy into the service or produc

... or not?

Where else have we been grouped & bunched?

In ‘Sloane Rangers’ Peter York defined a group form Chelsea, a dress sense and background, a typical mode of behaviour and in newspapers at the time other socio-economic groups were dwelt upon and picked up by what they wore and how they spoke.

Labels are used to bully

Would you like to be called a ‘laggard;’ over an ‘innovator.’ Coming out of advertising I am used to those in what we called ‘planning’ categorising customers in all manner of ways to suit the product, the client & the moment. 

In 2001 I took an Enneagram Test and came out as a FIVE.

“Fives are basically on some level estranged from the rest of the world, consequently, their mind is usually their best friend. They like to analyze things and make sense of them (that is their anchor), this makes them great inventors and philosophers. The immense inner world of fives can cause them to lose touch or interest in reality."

http://similarminds.com

Instead of innovators and laggards these ‘tests’ gave you a number. I am not a number, or a term. I’d like to think of myself as something more complex, wouldn't you? As Anais Nin puts it, we are each a book:

‘There is not one big, cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.‘ (Anais Nin, Journals Vol 1)

It is from this complexity, this individualisation (if you must) and tapping into it, that innovation results, and where e.learning innovation is heading. Which is why I am here.

'What's new about new media? Not much!'

So I wrote a decade ago when briefing a team of communications managers from ABB on the use of the web.

What seems innovative today, may not seem so innovative tomorrow. Indeed, is it still innovative once it has become familiar and every day? And might one way of determining when something is no longer innovative when it is adopted by the ‘laggards.' Crystal sets became the wireless that in turn became the radio. carphone, becomes mobies (cellphones), then smart phones (and iphones).

Nearly a decade ago a group of ‘innovators’ met at Sussex Net Ventures. (Tuesday 19th September 2000) At this event hosted by Wired Sussex, Hugh Griffiths of iTouch said there would be

“No killer application but a killer cocktail.”

hugh.griffiths@itouch.com

This cocktail, to result in innovation, requires a team that includes a cross-section of those ‘labelled’ by Rogers: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority & laggards.

What makes an innovator?

Why do they stand out? Because they are passionate? Persuasive? Determined? Imaginative? Entrepreneurial? Well educated? Moneyed? All of these things, or none of them.

And why are there so few of them? Henry Miller puts in well in ‘Tropic of Cancer.’

“What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs."

Who can deny the self-belief of Bill Gates? Or Tim Berners-Lee?

Innovators believe in what they are doing. Whether they are successful (and how you measure or determine success is another matter).

And extended working of a response to a thread on placing a list of concepts relating to e.learning on a grid.

Understanding how we are placing these concepts is a path of academic study in its own right.

Semantics

The fascinating thing is to be at a moment in history (again perhaps) where language, or at least certain new words and new concepts are fluid.

Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norman French ... Creole

'Definitions' offered by Wikipedia and the like cannot be 'solid' or 'set within parameters.

How stable is any word?

We know how a generation can take a word to heart and alter, even flip its meaning: wicked, gay, cool, ugly ...

My view is that we are all right in where we place the concepts (on the grid, axes exiting//new & formal//informal) ... and we could each in turn shift things around. Indeed, as I revist this exercise over the following weeks I'm sure I'll do exactly that.

Wherein lies the purpose of the task - we come to our own understanding through engagement with the subject matter ... and those who have been 'here' for a few months are more may be ahead (or at least in a different place). similarly a word can be hijaked. Off the top of my head think of 'Beatles' & 'Oasis.' Thinking longer, how the word 'traffic,' has for example gone from the inane movement of people, goods & vehicles ... to the illegal, & criminal kidnap, expert, trading, rape & prostitution of young woman.

The caveat is that without considerable common ground on what the concepts mean, communication and then action become difficult. To use a hackneyed phrase, 'we all need to be singing from the same hymn sheet.'

Were this a live project with money, clients, schedule & problems to solve, coming to a working agreement would be crucial.

Here's another thought. How are we each saying these words? How we say them adds an important additional layer. Not just any accents, but our state of mind, whether we speak with confidence or we are hesitatnt ... and then during the course of a conversation how we alter how we use the term.

There is good reason for meeting face-to-face. How we say a word is just the start, of course. Our body language adds yet more. Saying 'Just-in-time learning' I might act out a factory worked sifting through widgets on a conveyor belt. Is this your idea of 'just-in-time' - intellectually it is managed somewhat differently and there are different degrees of 'Jit.' There are elements that form part of a predicted learning progression ... and other ;unique' grabs on nuggets of learning that are more literally 'just-in-time.'

Circumstances and necessity have taken me back to a pad of paper & a pencil.

Years now of typing in, typing up, scanning in and saving 'stuff' digitally finds me returning to the safe, solid & 'real' storing, sharing & manipulation of 'stuff.'

Lack of space in the house had me taking of the kitchen/dining table with the laptop. My 'office' took over the place & I got fed-up of needing to work at 5.00am so that it could be cleared away.

Then the Laptop screen bust.

It's an iBook. It's pushing seven years old (which in laptop years, as in doggie years, probably makes it due for retirement). It is no longer a laptop & it is no longer on the dining room table ... or on my lap out and about. Instead it is on a desk the width of a large shelf at the end of the bed.

No longer being a student, or a child with his own bedroom (this doesn't last long guys, if you are in this position) & therefore sharing a bed (& bedroom) - it has its pleasures & comforts. No longer being a student ... & sharing a bedroom means that access therefore to this cornucopiea of semi-retired, quasi-disabled techno-stuff may only occur when hers truly is up. I'm a lark, she's an owl. Access is denied 'til mid morning.

Unless I tip myself into the 'study,' a broom-cupboard that takes a desk and a narrow set of shelves, one person, one office-chair - her office chair.

Pencil & Paper

I don't even have a fountain pen that functions. Ink on paper would be my preference if I must put pen to paper. I like a good pen, but I will lose them. But I no longer have teh luxury of replacing them when lost.

Poverty has its lessons. (If I dare even call it that).

So I am using a pencil on paper. The pencil needs to be sharpened every few lines, so I clutch a sharpener in one hand, the pencil in the other. I flick through pages of a tatty book and make notes. These pages & this book, given my inclination to box & store said 'stuff' could be around in fifty years time.

I have double 8 film shot by my late father in the 1960s - on film, on a digital Beta master, on VHS & DVD. It exists.

I have diaries, from the 'Five Year Diary' bought for me in 1976 & the others - hardback A4 lined for the most part - for the following 16 years. All boxed & safe.

I 'postcard' photos of my late grandfather - one is dated 1905, others 1918. I have pics of other relatives across the century.

And our wedding

And our infant children

But find me the CD of photos taken on holiday in Cornwall 6 years ago. It is buried in a stack of labelled Photo-CDs.

Find me a photo I took of Lewes Castle in the snow only a month ago ... it is lost amongst hundreds of versions of this and other photographs that have been loaded onto this PC over the last couple of weeks from four different phones & any of three digital cameras. Each of appears to have a different way of doing this, uses a different software programme too.

Digital Stalemate?

Please don't tell me I should have sytems, methods & to do this or that to resolve the clutter. A computer each to start with.

No.

The digitisation of everything will be our undoing - it will result in a block, a jam, a mental breakdown.

In a reflexive mood, you see.

Preparing for an exam in a month's time I find I am falling back on old methods - methods that worked for me before. The notes on a piece of paper. The re-hashing of these notes. Then attempts to recall the information or to answer questions from a mock paper. All of this I do offline, on paper as described above.

Just as watching TV, we are told, can be like a person smoking canabis - semi-comatose, I do wonder if despite this interactivity, that screens, removed by one step from 'reality' are therefore less conducive to forming deeper mylenation in the mind and so the information is less likely to be retained.

In any case, the input here is on a QWERTY keyboard, whilst the 'exam' will be black Biro to paper. Something else gets lost in translation.

There is no easy way to make the information stick - not, at least in my case, without visualisation & engagement, without a battle in which the pathways in my brian take on some significance.

"The problem for schools at the moment is that many teachers do not have the levels of digital literacy held by many of their students. This is magnified by the fact that the 'decision makers' in schools - i.e. the senior management team are less likely to have the skills needed due to their ... 'experience' so see less value in elearning and ict.

They have the power to effect change and innovate but are less likely to use it.

Trying voice recognition software and expected to use it fifteen years ago I fail to see its everyday application. (Inform me otherwise, please).

A generation typing in TXT may in time stick with an keyboard that goes ABC/DEF while touch screens and icons are still an expensive novelty, limited yet again by those who create the software in a language that they can use and favour with English often the mother tongue and culturally the was screens are read, the images and colours used, of Western origin.

And within this, take one tiny Empirical-like imposition that took many years to address – all Microsoft dictionaries favoured American English.