Last weekend as an employee

This is very weird
There is no more need to sleep in
Every day is same.  

Perks of my job

Perhaps I have mentioned this before… maybe numerous times, but one of the perks of my job is being able to travel and stay in nice hotels. Something that was unthought of when I was a child. I vaguely remember staying at a motel maybe once or twice on the way to visit friends. Yet, maybe it is only my imagination. 

The years of working as a trainer allowed me to travel and to stay in mom and pop B&Bs or something along the lines of trucker motels. These places have their charms because there is always something about the decor and amenities which are shared no matter where the place is located. The morning rooms are always filled with people from all sorts of walks of life. I love sitting there over a long breakfast and make up stories of their lives.

With my current company, for the first time, I have been able to stay in luxury hotels. Or at least what I call luxury. Places where the staff is usually separated into the managers who have been working at the hotel for possibly decades and the new young eager employees who are using this stint as a springboard. No matter the size of the hotel or where it is situated, this younger set of employees are often coming from every corner of the world.

Generally, I find it far more interesting to observe the employees and how they do their jobs and how they work together than I do looking at hotel guests. For as is the case for most service jobs, they often forget there are other people in the room and behave naturally. At the moment there are two women working the reception desk for Sunday morning check out. They probably started hours ago. There are no guests checking out at the moment, so one of the women is do a funny calisthenics routine to get her energy back, while the other looks on laughing. A guest arrives and, pink-cheeked, she reverts back to her role. Good for her!

Zero Inbox

Years ago, I watched this video of Merlin Martin explaining his method of Zero Inbox. I was intrigued with the idea of making instant, quick, possibly radical, decisions daily about how to handle the constant flow of information arriving in my inbox. So, for a while, I followed his methods (more or less).

Then like most practices stemming from good intentions, I digressed and even regressed into bad behaviour. Things went from bad to worse, when I tried embracing a new idea, "only touch once". This idea states you should only handle a piece of information once. Read, think, respond, act. No previewing. No hesitation.

If you get an email or phone message on your voice mail and you know that you are not in the position to act upon the information given, don't open it. Do so when you can complete the task. If you only partially read an email and have to go back later to look at it, you are wasting time that first glance (previewing).

"Touch on once" does make sense on many levels. Yet, it also means that I amassed nearly 100 unread emails in the last six months.

Today was my day allocated to reading my nearly 100 "unread mails" and zeroing my inbox. Mission Accomplished!

Starting up a freelance business

It has been nearly a year now since I started up my freelance business. I am working as a project manager, trainer, and technical editor. I do quite a bit of the former and later tasks, but the bulk of my work is, for the moment, working as a trainer.

This year has certainly been a roller coaster ride between breathless optimism and existential worries of looming failure. I thought I would write down my Top Five Lessons about being self-employed during economical times like these:

1. Even at my age, I am capable of regularly and frequently working 12-hour days.
2. Even after all my business experience, it is necessary sometimes to start with the modest contracts and build from there.
3. Even if the media says otherwise, social media does not rule; word-of-mouth, person-to-person, face-to-face, straight-from-the-heart, are all top strategies for building a loyal customer network.
4. Even if the economy is in crisis, people want to do their jobs well and are willing to pay if I can help them do that.
5. Even though everyone is far too busy, it is surprising, and touching, people's willingness to find time to help me move forward.

To those of you who helped me learn these lessons, I am so very grateful for your enduring patience. Thank you so much.

Grey winter days

Why is it we spend so much time talking about the weather? Well, I am not going to talk about the 100 words for grey winter gloom.

Just wanted to give a brief update on how my world of freelance is going. Busy. Busy as a bee busy. Sort of getting the feeling of this now and even though there is no deluge of paying contracts on my desk yet, there are some very promising ones. That's it.

All else is fine.

New branch in the road

As most of you know, I've been trying to find a new work contract or job position since January. It has not been an easy task and, to be perfectly honest, I've failed miserably. In the nearly 40 years that I've worked, starting as a 15-year-old working weekends in a sailing shop, up until now, I've never really had a problem finding qualified work. There were even times that I had a choice of jobs.Mostly,  each job came with new and interesting responsibilities.

Still, there have also been times when economic restrictions has made it necessary to look for the same job, but with another company. What I call changing desks, or geography, but not jobs. Times when company hiring philosophies were so conservative that HR officers were taking no risks when filling free positions and thus, giving no one the opportunity to come into the positions with enthusiasm, naivity, and a willingness to try out new ideas.

These last months have been particularly discouraging because those job opportunities that I have applied to, where I covered the job profile 150%, have come and gone without even being invited to an interview. This is the first time that this has happened to me in my life. It is hard not to take this personally. Well meant platitudes from friends and family do not sooth the hurt of feeling unwanted and unnecessary. It is surprising how much of my indenity is based on my ability to work and receive a salary.

After much contemplation, I've decided to become self-employed (training and project management). The German employment agency offers a substantial training program and financial package towards acheiving this goal. So, it could be that this blog will have various posts about this new branch on my journey. I'm feeling a bit uncomfortable about doing this, having always wanted to keep a clear distinction between my "real" self and this blog. Yet, honestly, I do know most of you guys who read my posts, so I am not so sure why I am reticent.

What are your feelings about this topic? Do you have inner guidelines in your blogs? Does it interest you at all to know what other bloggers do for a living? Should I keep to the old format?

Renewed Hope

As you guys know, I've been seeking a new job position for the last months*. After many ups and downs, I had lost my spirit.  That is, until a friend and I sat down and worked through a list of possibilities: narrowing and prioritizing the possibilities into Plan A, B, C, and D. My spirits picked up knowing that there were concrete tasks I could do towards finding a job.

And as it so often is in life, I was working through this list late last week, when all of a sudden I tripped across a job description that exactly fit my credentials and hopes for a Plan A job. It took me two reads before I could believe that even though the times are tough, there are still jobs out there that I reallyreally would like to do.

I've just received word that the organisation has been inundated with applications and so they ask for my patience. This might mean that I won't even be invited for an interview. But, you know, this will not be the end of the world. Now that I have found the job description with my name stamped on it, I just have to find another organisation with the same sort of viewpoint. My hope has been renewed.

Ray of Hope

I had a job interview just before Easter. The position is as a teacher in a industry and trade school. I've been invited back for a second interview next Monday. Please keep your fingers crossed.

Onto The Next Round

Last Friday, we received the good news that our preliminary project proposal was accepted as one of the finalist in a research funding competition. After walking around with my head in the clouds the whole weekend, I sat down today and started working on the more detailed proposal we have to submit in a few days time. There are strict requirements about how long the text can be, so every word is weighed and every idea is examined closely before putting them down. My brain is mush.

Next Step

work contract runs out in a few months time/ trying to figure out the next step/ options do seem less feasible than they did even a few years ago/ friends deliver predictions or platitudes such as "you've always managed before" on my doorsteps/ or, some give up dire predictions about the finality of life on the job market/ nothing really is reassuring/ yet, I remain, for the most part, optimistic/ silly isn't it?

My dear friend just doesn’t get it…

Recently, a good friend of mine wrote that she is “amazed by all the stuff you do outside work”. This reaction, to be honest, sort of miffed me, since I consider all that I do, except for writing blogs and creating collages, work. Then I thought about her comment for a while and came up with this:

all the stuff I do outside work – monetary compensation – filling out lots and lots of forms – dealing with the Difficult Colleague – having to attend numerous weekly meetings that are often just a whole waste a lot of time – the really fruitful discussions I have with my Favourite Colleagues – the wonderful technology to be found in my office = Work

So, if you consider that “all the stuff I do outside work” is shared with some amazing people at different corners of the world and the work can be done just as well without the wonderful technology that is found in my office, it is not only Work, but work with perks because those negative aspects of my job fall by the wayside. Except for the fact that I am not being paid to do the work, it is a cushy job.

War on Work

Mike Rowe gives an interesting talk about his experiences hosting the “Dirty Jobs” television show. I’ve never seen the show, but much of what Mr. Rowe talks about towards the end of this presentation strikes me as being contextually relevant to the present crisis.



He believes that the American society has declared a civil war on work. He mentions four players in this process: Hollywood’s contribution with laughable portrayals of workers, Madison Avenue's messages “life would be better if you could work less”, Washington’s deals and policies that negatively affect the working class, and, what he calls, Silicon Valley’s tendency to design “innovation without imitation”.

Mr. Rowe talks a “marginalization of lots and lots of jobs” and he feels the only way to battle the war of work, to counteract it, is to pursue vigorously a PR campaign about work (manual and skilled labour). The type of work he calls grandfather stuff.

This made me reminded me of a situation I encountered a year ago, when I supervised a grade 9 student’s two-week work internship. The student was to create a podcast about work. The content of his podcast was a series of interviews he made with people in his family and neighbourhood, all about their professions and trades. Amongst others, he interviewed his father an electrician, neighbour a hairdresser, aunt a kindergarten assistant, and grandfather a plumber.

He asked each of the interviewees whether any role model had inspired them to choose their professions. All the people he interviewed, except his grandfather, answered this question with no. No one helped them choose their profession; no one showed them the way. The grandfather though, he had the fellows working on and installing the water mains for the city with their blowtorches, toolkits, and bawdy sense of humour, that made him think, “That is what I want to do”.

What about you? Did you have a role model in choosing your profession?

Good News

Our generous sponsor has agreed to extend funding of our university research project for another year. Halleluiah!

Busy as a Beaver

The days have been speeding by. I’ve been busy as a beaver on various projects. Some of the projects are for my work. I’ve helped some teachers and students begin the following projects:

• Stop-motion animation project for an art class (topic metamorphosis)
• Helping the students plan and organise an urban orientation race (using mobile phones and various digital devices and Google maps during the race)
• Creating a Ning community for students to work in groups, studying and presenting various material focusing on life in post-centennial America
• Creating a wiki for students to collaboratively write down study material for examination purposes

On top of this, I’ve become involved in two more global communities. This is on top of the three I’m already involved in. Admittedly, I’m going to have to reduce these activities sometime in the future. For now, it is all rather interesting.

If any of you are interested in finding out specifics of any of the above-mentioned projects, just drop me an email.

Creating a Dialog

This slide show is a part of a presentation I gave to a group of teachers and professional women last winter in preparation for activities related to our national Girl's Day program. The program is organised on various fronts, but it is the work between the schools and the business community that is most crucial to getting the program up and running.

Girl\'s Day 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mentoring education)

A teacher approached me a few months before Girl's Day 2008 was to run, with a dilemma. Apparently, the girls from her school (grade 7-8) had not left a very good impression with the professional women they had visited the year before. The women stated that the girls came to their companies appeared overall to be disinterested and distant. They wondered whether the only reason the girls agreed to come to their workplaces was to get a day off school. The girls had not asked any questions or expressed any interest in what they had heard during the professional women's presentations. When asked, many of the girls admitted that they found the presentations boring and they didn't know what questions to ask in the Q&A sessions, so they didn't say anything.

The teacher came to me to ask how the project could be made more interesting using digital media. And, as happens so often, the solution did not lie in introducing all sorts of new media into the activities, but by changing the learning format to one which would encouraged collaborative learning.

The previous Girl's Day activities were so structured that the girls were sent off to various companies without previous knowledge of the companies or the professional women. The professional women introduced themselves, gave a presentation of their company and their particular job positions, carried through a Q&A session and then sent the girls on home.

This year's Girl's Day was structured so:

• Professional women introduced themselves and their professional field in short biographies and sent them to the school two weeks before the event.
• The girls divided up into small groups and chose which professional women they would visit and sent the women emails with their names and questions they wished to ask them during Girl's Day.
• The professional women had time to think of how they would respond to the questions and also created a list of their own questions that they could ask the girls when they came to visit.
• The different groups went to the different companies and interviewed the professional women they were allocated.
• The girls returned to school and each group made up a presentation that was a story about the professional women they visited and the profession these women worked in.
• Each group presented their presentation to the other girls, teachers and the professional women at an evening event.

Even though the girls did use media (cell phones, digital cameras, mp3 players (recorders), cc photo material from the Internet, and Open Office presentation program), and the use of media did motivate them to be more alert, this only played a peripheral role. It was the fact that everyone prepared themselves for the day and the fact that professional women created a dialog with the girls and not lectures that made the exchange so successful.

Preaching to the Choir

Have you ever been invited to give a course or a presentation to a group of reluctant or resistant converts? It takes a certain type of person to survive such an experience. For the first twenty years or so of my professional career, I usually only preached to the choir when giving presentations or submitting project proposals. In the last years, since I started working in schools, I’m standing amongst the reluctant and resistant.

Originally, I was involved, one-way or another, in training technicians to maintain or repair complex medical equipment. The technicians wanted to do their job well, for not infrequently, lives depended on them. I wanted them to do their job well too, for exactly the same reason. Even the shareholder-pleasing corporate executives running the company were interested in us doing our jobs well. Then I went over to working in university research.

The projects I worked and work on are highly innovative. Or, innovative in the sense that the ideas we are trying to promote (i.e., creative and constructive use of digital media in schools (K-12 grades)), are not commonly practiced in the schools in our region. Even though many studies, in the last then years, state the importance of media literacy in our children’s development, the school system here ignores their responsibility to lead and guide their students in this learning process. The last three weeks have been particularly discouraging for me because nearly every meeting I have attended with teachers has been like swimming through toffee.

I am discourage not only because the teachers are so reluctant or resistant when it comes to introducing media in there classroom learning scenarios (e.g. grade 9 math teacher reluctant for her students to use Excel tables to record data), but also because I cannot convince them to change their Old World practices.

It does not help to point to the conclusive results of the studies, or to indulge in passionate rants. Before the teachers actually take the leap and use media in their classrooms with all the joys and sorrow this brings, no amount of talking will change things for the present generation of students.

Just in the last weeks I have heard the following statements,

“My students know if they want to reach me, they have to come and find me, for I don’t look at my email inbox for weeks on end.”

(from a dear friend and dedicated college English literature teacher)

“I have to study for exams, I don’t have time to waste on the Internet. Maybe in three or four years time, I’ll look and see what is offered there that I can’t find in books.”

(from a college occupational therapy student nearing graduation and who, like her other classmates was very resistant to use a computer as a learning tool)

“What is the pedagogical advantage of using media? It only causes confusion and trouble in the classroom.”

(from a high school math teacher)

“The teachers don’t want us to use digital media. They don’t even want to use it themselves. Why do you bother trying to convince them otherwise? You’ll only fall on your face if you keep trying to present them (the teachers) with new ideas.”

(from my 18 year old son)

I really question the soundness of my ambition to become a teacher in my next career. How can one person make any difference when the learning instructional forms are so rigidly planted in the past century? With this frame of mind, I listen to Geetha Narayanan keynote talk at ED-Media 08. She talks about the necessity for remodelling our educational system,

“It is my current position that contemporary forms of schooling do not sit comfortably with the potential of new media. Nor do they resonate with the needs of youth today. All of who need to live, and live well, and not just struggle to survive in today’s complex world.”

I sit in my living room and I am transported over to her inner city programs in India. I am a choir member listening and rejoicing to the sound of her preaching voice as she talks about her children and teachers and the wonder of learning. Maybe I will become a teacher, maybe not, but it is inspiring to know there are people out there not only with a vision of reform, but with the energy and influence to implement it.

Need Some Help Here

I’ve just been offered a contract to give some occupational therapy students a ten-week technical English course. The goal of the course is to optimise their reading comprehension. Rather than try to teach them to speak better English, they must try to use their school English to their best advantage.

When the students become occupational therapists they will occasionally have to treat non-German patients, read English literature, or communicate with other professionals in their field outside of Germany. The course focuses on these three learning scenarios. Up until now, the person giving the course relied strongly on photocopied texts and question sheets for encouraging and testing reading comprehension. This has not been successful. The students remain unmotivated, sullen, and unwilling to participate in class. The teacher was not able to get the students to do the weekly homework, let alone work collaboratively with the other students or communicate with the outside world.

I would like to get the students to use the Internet to explore and communicate with outside sources. I want to see if the students could learn more about the world of occupational therapy outside of Germany than me.

My question to all of you is,

Could you refer me to any blogs, wikis, or websites dealing with occupational therapy in particular, or health and health care as a whole?

I’ve been told that overall the occupational therapists work a lot with children or aging patients. So, if you know any blogs or websites concerning these target groups, please send along the links.

I’d very much appreciate some starting points. Thanks.

First Day Back At Work

Just about to return to work, my old office, my old job. Feeling very happy about this. There will be only me and one other colleague in the institute today, which will give us plenty of time to catch up on all that has happened the last three months.

I'm going to start bookmarking all the hundreds of sites I've collected over the last while. Been vacillating between del.icio.us and magnolia. Can anyone help me decide?

Language

A few weeks ago my daughter and I travelled down to visit friends in southern Germany. A train official in Hamburg was announcing the departures and arrivals of the trains every few minutes over the intercom system. At one point I turn to my daughter and ask her what other language the official is speaking besides German. In my ears, it sounded like Dutch, but I couldn’t figure out why the woman would be speaking Dutch.

My daughter looked over at me and rolled her eyes, “It’s English, mom.” How could the language be English if I didn’t understand a word of it? My daughter patiently explained that it was the type of English she is taught every day in school.

A friend of a friend’s daughter, who speaks perfect English at home with her British parents, apparently speaks German-school-English when she is in the classroom. “Tvinkel, tvinkel, leetil star…” her daughter sings at home, rehearsing for the Christmas concert. The girl’s mother runs out of the room suppressing a scream and laughter; she doesn’t know which.

Most, nearly all, English teachers in the schools are German. Some of them studied decades ago and have not immersed themselves in an English-speaking culture since. Some teachers, especially grade school teachers, teach English without being able to speak anything but the most rudimentary English. The school board introduced English into the grade schools without insuring proper instruction for the teachers.

The German train company and the grade schools should be commended for making an attempt to introduce English into their services. I shouldn’t laugh, but it is hard not to, when what comes out is undecipherable.

Yet, the train officials and grade school teachers should be commended; for they’ve been given a task they have no qualification for. Can you imagine being asked to read out a text in a foreign language, whose pronunciation you do not know? Daunting. Do the officials and teachers accepting this task do so because they have very little inhibitions, or do they overestimate their knowledge of the language, or do they just hope that practice will make perfect?

It’s Christmas!

Christmas came early this year. I just came back from the university with a new two-year research project contract under my arm! The project will concern schools (grade 1-13) use (or lack thereof) of digital technology. I couldn’t be happier.

The company who funded the last project has kindly agreed to finance a new project. Something they usually do not do, for there are many people standing in the lines needing funding for social, cultural, educational projects.