Bricolage

When I talked about design of a program with one of my collaborators in the development of a system for social networking, she asked “what do you mean by program?”

Her question started me thinking about the many terms in social networking and in IT generally that have been appropriated from everyday vocabulary. 

I thought we were designing a system, which to me met a way of working. system to an IT professional means hardware. I thought we were networking - each of us contributing our knowledge and experience to the whole group and involving others we knew so that we could use their expertise, too. It seems networking is done with blue cables in IT. Of course these are not the sort of cables that used to carry text messages fifty years ago. They were named after the cables that carried the message, but soon became synonymous with the piece of paper they were printed on.

According to the Global Language Monitor there are an estimated 1 million English  words.

The monitor also says that there are:

• 450,000 words listed in the Merriam-Webster’s 3rd International edition, according to its introduction;
• fewer than 100,000 words in the French language; 
• About 50,000 ideograms in the various Chinese dialects (though countless more words);
• in the order of 7,000 human languages and dialects
• 12,143 different words of a total 787,137 words in the English version of the king James Bible,
• 8,674 different words in the Hebrew Old Testament,
• 5,624 words in the Greek New Testament;
• 24,000 differing words to be found in the complete works of Shakespeare, about 1,700 of which he invented.

Even with so many words we need to double up.

Left and right mean more than sides. Top and bottom are not just a toy and a base. Tear can be pronounced two ways, each with a different meaning.

As far I can see, the word set is the one that has the most meanings. think about it, what does it mean to you?

Place down? Collection? Harden? A series of tennis games? Prepare to run?

My favourite resource, the One Look Dictionary search found definitions in 99 dictionaries and gave 45 different meanings in their quick definitions - a feature that normally has between one and three meanings. By contrast the word system only featured in 66 dictionaries and had a mere 9 quick definitions. Reification was only found in 18 dictionaries with 2 quick definitions, while bricolage only made it into 12 dictionaries without a quick definition. 

Back to the program that I thought I was designing, no it was not the booklet that lists the cast and order of events in a theatre, it was not to be broadcast on TV, it was not even computer software. It was a set of training materials. 

On the subject of words, do you know why golf was given that name? All of the other four letter obscenities were already taken. 

Tags: glossary, terminology, vocabulary

 In his 1960 book “The Human Side of Enterprise” Douglas McGregor described Theory X managers as those who believe that “The average person dislikes work and will avoid it he/she can” while theory Y managers believe that “People usually accept and often seek responsibility”

50 years later there is no shortage of Theory X and Theory Y managers in organisations throughout the world.

I can’t help thinking that if McGregor was writing today he would notice a very different approach to the introduction of new technology for communication with the workforce which aligns with his seminal work.

A study of the use of a Virtual Synchronous Classroom in a global consulting firm was described by Thompson (2004) at the World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (ELEARN) 2004.

This response is typical of a theory X organisation.

A YouTube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4VhoWGZ2eA shows a theory Y attitude. The video is about school students, but those students are going to be in the workforce before very long and the technology they are using was purchased by their parents.

This is how I would categorise the beliefs of today’s theory X and theory Y managers

21st century Theory X managers believe

• There is not enough server space or bandwith to store all of the data that we need to provide if we used podcasts (technology)
• There are too many security concerns. we could not be certain that people outside the company were not viewing our confidential material (security)
• The material would become out of date and people would be relying on old material (currency)
• The technology is not good enough yet. (technology)
• We would have to cater to people in several countries and so would have to provide the information in multiple languages (diversity)
• The media devices would be used for non work activities. They could also be stolen. We would have to be able to clear them remotely if they fell into the wrong hands. (trust)
• Most of our people are not tech savvy enough to use the equipment. training costs would be exorbitant. and the equipment becomes superseded every year. (competence)

21st Century, Theory Y managers believe

• The stuff is out there. To maintain competitive advantage or even a place in the market we have to use it. (currency)
• Communication means using whatever our people use to communicate. (currency)
• We trust our people to deal with our customers face to face. Surely there is no more important priority. If we have got it wrong there we are in trouble already. (trust)
• The volume of information that we need to participate in the market place is so huge we have to have the server space and technology to cope. It is just a cost of doing business. (technology)
• This will help us deal with our customers, suppliers and other stakeholders as well as our employees (diversity)
• Security and privacy is a priority. We need to be using best practice. (security)

So

When McGregor published in 1960 his approach was politely acknowledged by most, and included in every supervision course ever since. Meanwhile, back at the coal-face Theory X continues to dominate. 

Some Theory Y managers operated in small cells and prospered. Others were run over as people raced to take advantage of them.

Neither theories were universally right. Which direction is more appropriate in the new millennium?  

Are you more inclined to Theory X or Theory Y? What other beliefs need to be considered?

References

McGregor, D. (1960) ”The human side of enterprise”  McGraw Hill, New York.

Thompson, T., (2004), “The Virtual Classroom @ Work: How Technology Shapes Workplace Learning”, In G. Richards (Ed.), “Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (ELEARN)2004″, pp.2166-2171, Chesapeake, VA: AACE, downloaded (purchased) from  www.editlib.org April 12, 2008.

Tags: 21st century, beliefs, management, old masters, theory X and theory Y

An article in a local newspaper reports the efforts of a high school chemistry teacher to allow students to revise their work and parents to see how their children are going.

First year chemistry students at the El Diamente High School in California are able to review their work by going to Andy Allen’s website. Parents can check their child’s progress through a password protected log in.

This is not web 2.0, though. Mr Allen has been providing the service for 12 years according to a former student. It is mainly Powerpoint and PDF. Not surprisingly the site receives visitors from far afield and its host is happy to have other students use his resources. He draws the line, however at answering their homework questions. He restricts that service to his own students. 

It strikes me as a model of how the net can be used to help school students learn.

All of the materials had to be prepared anyway, so the time requirement is minimal. Even the amount of time required for posting could be turned into class activity for computer science students.

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How I found this:I have set up a Google News search for PowerPoint. there were about ten items in today’s results, five of which looked like job ads. This one looked interesting. I don’t know what the others were about. I may have missed something interesting, but if I did not have the search I would have missed it anyway.

My aim is not to know everything, just to find out something new and interesting every day. 

Tags: , homework, school

A classmate posted to our internal Ning asking where did April go?

We have been engaged in an on-line distance learning class and she has had difficulty finding the time to do all of the things that such a class demands.

It raised for me one of the three keys to successful blogging - time, ideas and enthusiasm.

It is easy for enthusiasm to wane, but I suspect that if we start out with a genuine interest in our subject area it is often time and ideas that contribute to the loss of enthusiasm.

I intend to do a follow up post on sources for ideas, but the issue of time is one I have been looking at for a number of years.

My Time Management philosophy is based on five habits:

• Work out what matters
• Decide to decide
• Get Organised
• Share the load
• Then deal with disruptions.

1. Work out what matters.

I spent yesterday morning at my nine year old son’s soccer game and went to the park with him and two of his mates for a couple of hours in the afternoon.

This morning I went to my 14 year old daughter’s T-ball game.

Last night I watched Doc Martin on TV with my wife and the two kids. (I haven’t managed to see any of Neighbours, the Biggest Loser or Big Brother - not just this week, but ever.)

Nothing takes precedence over those.

I am working on a project for a client as my full-time (though at home) job. I spend about 50 hours a week on it.  I do have the advantage of being able to access the ning and edublogs while I am working, but that time is not counted in the fifty hours per week.

To reduce distractions I have turned off any indicators of e-mail arriving. I check my email and at the same time the ning about once an hour. When I reach an end point on my work writing tasks.

2. Decide to Decide 

If I see something that I can react to, like the classmate’s question, I make a decision on whether to respond or not. when I make the decision I act on it there and then.

That action may consist of writing the reply, as happened in this case, or making a note on my tasks list in Outlook.

A decision not to act means not doing either of the above.

3. Get Organised.

When the lecturer posted details of an article to be read as part of the course we are doing, I ran the article through an OCR program so that it was in Word format. I use the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer. It is automatically installed as a printer if you have Office on your machine. I did that immediately and added the article to my Outlook tasks.

When I decided it was uni time (priority number 3 for me) I started to read it in Word and pasted some extracts into a new Word document. When I struck “reification” I looked it up in an on-line dictionary and pasted that there too.

That one word led to a blog post, a response to someone else’s blog post and a paragraph in my assignment. All three differ, but contain the same basic thought.

When we received advice of the location of our wiki, I logged in, posted the assignment question, extracted the three or four key statements and set up a page for each.

I ran through the Ning and cut and pasted the discussion that led to the formation of our group. It probably looks like a lot of work, but as far as the wiki is concerned, it took about 20 minutes of my daily allocation of 1 hour to uni.

The one hour a day incidentally is made up of a calculation of the amount of time I would spend in a  face to face class plus travel to and from, doubled as I would still need to read and write, then rounded down.

I am about to paste this response into a database, which I go to when I want to write an article (I write about five a year for various publications) or give a speech (Toastmasters membership is my number 4 priority) or use it in a training session.

So this response will probably get at least three outings with minimal editing. This is the second, with only minor changes from the original response on the ning.

4. Share the load

The next habit in my time management philosophy is share the load - I have picked up ideas from class-mates Prue, Lorraine, Debra, Nicole and Michelle for blog posts and quoted Mal and Concetta in an assignment.  

They found interesting articles or made interesting blog posts and I built off them.

5. Then deal with disruptions

If you can get into the first four habits the number of disruptions will be much less. What to do about a disruption is a decision, based on “Does It Matter?” How can I use my organised activities and tools to deal with it?  Who else is involved? What are they doing about it? No point in two of us doing the same thing!

I still run out of time to do things that I might find attractive, but none that really matter!

Tags: study, Time Management

One of the delights of higher education is the marvellous words that one finds in scholarly texts.

Joel Barker discovered Paradigm in a 1984 article by Harlan Hahn about Law Enforcement for Disabled Americans and made a movie about the word - not the topic. This was almost twenty years ago and it has now made its way into everyday language. Generally misused, but nevertheless ever-present.

I found Bricolage in a readable, but nevertheless scholarly, article and have adopted it to describe everything I do. While my son guessed it was a green vegetable, my wife suspected it was highly calorific. She suggested that it may be a progression from Irish coffee, which contains only four of the five essential food groups - alcohol, sugar, cholesterol, caffeine and chocolate. That’s what happens when you work with whatever materials are at your disposal.

But the word of the week must be reification. It is an Anglicization of the German term Verdinglichung, which is almost onomatopoeic. I found it in an article by Etienne Wenger, but it is not defined there. As is my wont, I went to the Onelook on line dictionary and discovered two options:

representing a human being as a physical thing deprived of personal qualities or individuality (freedictionary.org).

OR

To regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence. (Random House)

The two may seem opposites.  ”Removal of the spirit” - turning humans into objects or materialization - “giving an abstract concept a concrete form”.

But this can be the effect of so many policies and procedures. The humans are required to comply with the written word. The rules are unchallengeable. The humans become robotic and treated as though incapable of thought. The rules, however become living things. The policy is about to descend from its ivory tower and Verdinglichung you into submission.

Like reification, policies have whatever meaning the upholders wish to ascribe.

I am not against written policies. it is just that I believe that any CEO should be able to express them when asked to do so in a social setting. It would be even better if the front-line workforce jumped out of bed in the morning committed to implementing them as a way of making the customer’s experience more pleasant.

But that would require reification.
 

Tags: , policies, social learning