#rhizo14

Does  X make you stupid? (stupid or dumb or whatever)

It is like watching television, if you are stupid, television will make you more stupid. If you are not stupid watching television is a waste of time. (Maybe sometimes if you do read a good book (and throw away the television set) and you really try to become a good human, that will help)

If you read books and you are stupid, you will become more stupid. If you do choose your books with care and read carefully, you may become more human.  (Being stupid is a basic human trait, so please do forgive yourself doing stupid things)

If you talk and you talk stupid, you will stay stupid. (You could enjoy yourself talking stupid)

I noticed this weekend that I have been distracted.

As I got involved in the 'un-course' Rhizomatic Learning run by Dave Cormier over at P2PU, I have neglected my DS106 life. This stops today. I have chosen this space as my home and community on the web and my cognitive surplus will come here first and only if there is any left will it go to other hashtag classrooms. Depth of learning happens through sustained practice, breadth is all that is acquired by being a MOOC tourist. 

So, rather than going elsewhere to write, I am here reflecting on the most interesting conversation I have had on the web this week. I cannot remember how I came across him, but Alastair Creelman wrote a post that made me stop MOOC window shopping and pay attention. 

He asks in the first paragraph:

Are we all so busy sharing that we don't stop to wonder if anyone is listening?

The post moves on to wonder what is happening with all the content we are storing in servers around the world:

We're all busy filling the world's servers with information yet only a fraction of it is seen by more than a handful of people, if that. As the mountain of titles rises the chances of anyone reading your efforts diminish.

Alastair then moves on to wonder about 'dissemination' and its value:

On top of this there is all the time spent sharing these resources via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Scoopit and many, many more. Here we're not creating anything new, simply creating echoes of someone else's content.

of course there are those who think that these echoes are important in this age of abundance and there is a skill in echoing:

information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape, then it is a form of creative labor in and of itself

Alastair's post ends with a plea that we, those of us in distributed educational technology or #DEdTech as Jim Groom likes to call it,

discuss ways of encouraging digital recycling, reducing background noise and maybe choosing not to add new resources unless absolutely necessary. Just as the physical world is producing more products than can be consumed, we're producing more digital content than can be used.

I think we need to engage with this conversation for its own sake, not from a defensive frame. 

An interesting dialogue is evolving on Alastair's post and it shows that this is a sensitive issue for many - quotes that follow are from the comments on the post - I fear that it touches on the individual 'right' some of us feel we have to produce and create content at will. From an educational point of view, the argument seems to be that it is unimportant if content lies unread in the world's huge data centers,

as 'the metaphor is often more important than than the reality' that it will no be read because,

if nothing else curation may give us a sense of our place in universe. Pretty insignificant but pretty essential all the same.

We can dialogue about the 'essentialness' of human beings' place in the universe, but the educational argument here is that we use technology as a tool for self-development and that digital landfills are a price worth paying. The learning justifies the means. 

I say it again: I think we need to engage with this conversation for its own sake, not from a defensive frame. Yes, some people believe in their inalianable right create content, much in the same way as others believe that they can keep consuming regardless of the actual landfills. This does not remove the need for a conversation that tackles the negative consequences of us exercises our individual right.

Alastair starts the exploration with this suggestion:

Maybe curation can be expanded to include wise management of resources such as pruning/deleting outdated and irrelevant material. Maybe resources could have a sell-by date after which they simply vanish.

Sell by date for resources! Now, there is an idea worth spreading.

He further adds,

I love to share but when a couple of billion people share every photo, bookmark, idea, greeting, film or whatever we're saving information that should be ephemeral. Snapchat has the right idea - send a photo that disappears completely after 10 seconds. When the ephemeral becomes permanent...

My last comment before deciding to write this post was,

"All wise thoughts have been thought thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them ourselves." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Of course Goethe never said we must blog, curate and tweet them :)  The accumulation of unused resources and the phenomenon echoing other people's content without deep listening is a side of open education that deserves attention without rationalisation about people's rights to create content and/or the social/interpersonal impact of having a personal cyberinfrastructure, these are sides of the same coin not mutually exclusive issues.

In blogging about design during Headless 13, I talked about the consequences of us encouraging our students to produce more and more content in the name of creativity. Some took my comments then as a personal attack on their right to produce it rather than social commentary.

I clarified: "My current reflections are about the unintended global and long term consequences of our virtual habits, your reflections highlight the individual argument about how we benefit from what we own, produce and create. Just as I see the negative consequences of individualistic pursuits in landfills in our physical world, I also fear for our open web as we keep producing, throwing stuff away and engaging with content from a cumulative but non-reflective perspective."

As we worship at the altar of 'make art, damn it!' may we also take time to consider the consequences in the physical of non-reflective consumption. And if you need a reminder of these, please make yourself a cup of tea and take time to watch this heart breaking animation. It was watching this little heart breaking treasure this morning that led to this post.

Enforcing Independence In Careers Development (part 1). #rhizo14

This is my second post for the #rhizo14 course. At the moment I feel I’m mainly just finding the time to write my own stuff and not really engage in anyone else’s but at least I’m doing something which I also fail to in these sort of courses (I’m not very…

And here is the link to watch it at the Zeega site.

Not that I have time for more stuff, but I love to learn.

When I was in Glasgow, doing a Master’s in the late 90s, a flatmate of mine was quite brazen about lying on his CV. He made up qualifications and experience. Even wrote his own references. For him it was about getting where he wanted to be as quickly as possible. He was a clever guy, and a consummate bullshitter, who backed his ability to get away with it. He also spent the first 6 months trying to run a nightclub promotion business from our flat and barely did any academic work. By the time we left, he had got onto another course at a prestigious architecture school in London. He also helped me a great deal with my CV…

Forward 3 years. My year in Glasgow appears on my CV as:

1997-1998  MSc Information and Library Studies University of Strathclyde - Won John Smith Prize for dissertation

I actually won the John Smith Prize for a dissertation related to publishing (I suspect I was the only entrant), but decided to drop the last  bit. It’s not an outright lie, but it gives a different impression to the reader. Hopefully a better impression.

A CV is purely a vehicle. It is a construct whose single aim is to gain you advantage over somebody else in order to achieve a goal. Curriculum Vitae translates as ‘course of life’, but no employer expects, or wants, to see the course of your life transcribed. They expect (want!) to see how well you can sell the skills/experience you have (or tell them you have). They expect (want?) to see a degree of over-egging your skills/experience. Like my example above, it doesn’t have to involve wholesale invention. Who doesn’t say they have excellent IT skills? The application process does not have rules, but it does have conventions. In other words, there is collusion all round between employers and jobseekers.

A CV is also a fictional construct. Memory is unreliable. As soon as you write it down, you have written only your interpretation of what happened. What you remember is not the actual event but how that event fits into your own view of the world and your experience of it. Facts are slippery, and hard to prove either way. Memory is also selective. You leave stuff out. Stuff that doesn’t fit your picture of how you fit in the world, or that makes you look bad. This is psychological self-defence, but when you are writing your CV it is simply good practice.

In the careers world you are never far away from a blog post or news article warning you about the consequences of lying on your CV. There are high profile cases of people who have been sacked from positions of responsibility because they have lied about their education or experience. In one case it helped convict somebody of murder.

But don't let that put you off! Accept that your CV is a fiction, that employers expect a level of exaggeration when they look at your CV. It's a liberating feeling. Maybe, accepting that your CV is a fiction, the use of narrative, storytelling techniques is the next logical step? Find out who will be your boss. Research them online. Create a character that will appeal to them directly. Make them believe in that character. If you succeed, there is a good possibility you might get the job even if you fall short in real life.

My wife was looking to get a job in university administration, in which she had no tangible experience. She lied about her IT skills (while getting emergency Excel training from a friend). In the interview, she had to make a database. She tried to do this using Excel and failed miserably. She got the job. Turned out her new boss was more impressed that she had a First Class degree, when none of the existing admin staff had H.E. qualifications.

Getting a job is not a straightforward, linear process despite how it appears. The best qualified person on paper doesn't always get the job, whether they have lied or not. Sometimes the lie can be discovered and you still get the job. But cheating does pay. Everybody does it. From small exaggerations to brazen lies. It's part of the process. There are consequences for some, but for most people it will just result in a new job.