Bricolage

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.
 

There are a series of low cost downloadable licensed videos which explain the key concepts of social networking available for $US20 each from Commoncraft.com. They can be previewed on line at no charge with no registration requirements or any of the other annoying things that go with sampling on line product.

This one explains Twitter.

Others in the series explain:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Blogs in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English
• Photo Sharing in Plain English

Those used to purchasing high quality training videos will see a dramatic shift in pricing from the $1000 plus charge that we are used to, without any real loss in quality.

The delivery method - via download is also incredibly convenient.

I found out about the videos through a post to the Yahoo group TRDev, in a  contribution from Michael Greer, who hosts the site Bestfreetraining.net.

• There seems to me to be a continuum that we follow when we learn through on-line learning.

The first step is awareness. Knowing what is available. This seems to me a much bigger task on-line than in the traditional world.

The next step is “how to”. Some of these tools take longer to learn than others. Just the technical use.

Next comes when to. When to use a blog, when to use tags, when to use a wiki, when to use whatever Ning and Netvibes are.

All of these things have to precede use of the tools. And I suspect that there are some other precursors, too. Plain English writing, citation, judgement on content validity ….

The list goes on.

Kevin Jones (from the Cascadia blog, but not this time) has presented at the ASTD TechKnowledge Conference in San Antonio this week and shows the role of Social Learning as the tail of the learning process.

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In Blog Cascadia Kevin Jones reports on Tony Karrer’s conference session on social learning at ASTD’s TechKnowledge conference being held in San Antonio.

The size of the conference, for those who haven’t been top an ASTD event, can be gleaned from attendance of 250 people at one of 12 concurrent sessions. 

Yet only about 6 in the room admitted that they currently use social networking as a learning delivery technique. In response to a survey, most wanted to use these tools “alongside formal learning.” This implies to the source that social networking is not on the learning plan - it happens independently.

The barriers to implementation in the workplace appear to be:
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