I've written a lot about Katrina over the past 10 years, and thought about just letting the 10th anniversary slip quietly by. But then I realized that wasn't going to happen. It can't happen because there are still so many lessons to learn. Before I get into my and my mom's stories I wanted to take a moment to remember the nearly 1,000 people in Louisiana that lost their lives during Katrina.
Each fleur de lis represents 10 lives. More than half (51%) of the victims were black; about 42% were white; and the remaining were of other ethnicities. (Source: Katrina Deaths) Disasters like Katrina, the perfect storm of natural and man-made catastrophes don't discriminate. They affect us all and take all of us to get through them.
What people don't probably realize is that most of them were elderly, among the most vulnerable, and often the most isolated and forgotten.
Luckily my mom did not become one of those statistics, but she did spend a week at the Superdome, an experience that changed her forever. I wrote extensively about it at the 5 year mark in a series of pieces you can find here, here, and here. I don't think my story of Katrina is any better, worse, more important or relevant than anyone else's. Everyone in or connected to NOLA has a Katrina story.
If you want to see more pieces I've written about Katrina over the years, many are available here. As I scrolled through I reflected on how many little things remind me or set me off about Katrina. Sometimes it is the small things like a warm meal (something I couldn't have for weeks after we returned to NOLA) that make all the difference, and while I am normally accused of being possibly too perky, sometimes the anger bubbles up. I've talked about how a rose signaled I'd found a new home for my mom or how small bits of normalcy are big symbols.
Mom just got up and asked me what I was doing. When I said I was writing about Katrina she asked me what else I could possibly be saying about that. What else indeed.
A couple of years ago I started trying to get people to realize that training, as we knew it, had to change. There was no way, in workplaces where the technologies were changing at ever-increasing speeds and employees needed to perform work that could not be condensed to a job aid, that trainers could train people to do what they needed to do anymore. Everyone was frustrated. The employees were overwhelmed. The trainers were overwhelmed. No one was getting their development needs met. In fact, sometimes people didn't even know what those needs were.
While looking for ways to help our trainers and staff I came across some comments by Google's VP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock. He said the most important skill for today's workers was the ability to learn quickly. I was fortunate to have had a mother who was a schoolteacher and an insatiable curiosity that had led to a lifelong love of learning. I had been exploring DIY learning for years ... it seemed natural to me. But there's the rub. I came to see that many people don't know how to learn on their own. They don't know where to start or how to proceed.
That was when I started talking to people about personal learning environments and how they could start to build a support system to help them move into a new age of learning. Last year I spoke at the USDLA National Conference and told people that If You PLEs (please) You'll Thank Me Later. Among the key points were to help people start to see the whys and hows of getting started developing their PLEs.
In the coming days I will be participating in a MOOC that is trying to create a Self-Blended Learning Movement. The course description says:
Be part of the Self-Blended Learning Movement, an approach to teaching and learning that takes the best of blended learning, combines it with the best of self-directed learning, and creates a pathway to optimal authentic learning. Explore how savvy students are designing amazingly creative ways to find success in the traditional classroom through self-blending.
One of the first videos suggested as a great example of self-blended learning is Scott Young's Can you get an MIT education for $2,000? Spoiler alert: yes ... and no. His talk in no way diminishes the value of attended an institution of higher learning, but it also points out that there is a lot of learning that can and must be done outside of those hallowed halls. I too would highly recommend watching this talk.
Scott Young beautifully shows his thought process and the methodical approach he took. And that is a key point for all of us. Part of learning how to learn on our own is coming up with a deliberate and focused approach to learning. While he undertook his MIT education project as an experiment, I had to do a similar thing when I found that I did not have the funds to complete graduate school. And frankly, I was not entirely happy with the whole school experience. Sadly I found it had many of the limitations that I experienced in the workplace. I was a bit disillusioned I suppose. One of the things I didn't like in both environments was how captive my learning was. At work, my artifacts of learning were held hostage in the firm's LMS. At school, pretty much the same thing. I couldn't even interact with people taking the same course I was in another time slot. For someone who had spent years exploring the wonderful connections to be had over the Internet, I felt very restricted. So I went back to charting my own course.
The video also immediately reminded me of three books that I have read that are directly on-point with the idea of DIY learning. I'll post more about each in the coming days, but the list is Kio Stark's Don't Go Back to School in which she interviews dozens of people who took non-traditional learning paths; Blake Boles' The Art of Self-Directed Learning in which he too helps chart the uncharted approaches to learning; and Josh Kaufman's The First 20 Hours in which we get a front-row seat to his approach to learning any skill quickly.
This morning I was reading Andrzej Marczewski's post entitled The Hype is Over – Gamification is Here to Stay. After relegating gamification to the trough of disillusionment last year, Gartner has taken it entirely off the recently released 2015 Hype Cycle graph.
I had been saying that I thought being in the trough way a good thing. I took it to mean that we had enough experience with different gamification efforts to start to make really good choices about what was good and bad about it. The failures may disillusion some, but for others (like me) it meant a open field of opportunities. We could learn from past gamification efforts and deconstruct what was working, just as gamification has drawn from games.
I don't think everyone should look to gamify everything but I think having knowledge of the tools can help inform lots of innovative solutions. I focus on the learning space, and, I have heard a lot of the same arguments about gamification that people have made about e-learning in the past. It was a fad. It wasn't good for certain topics. And it has suffered some of the same maladies. Guilt by association. One bad experience has made people shy away from trying it again. Thinking that it was simple. Thinking that it was a quick fix. Sigh.
When I advocate for gamification, I don't focus on using it because it makes things more fun, I focus largely on two key things that games and gamification, when done well, do really well -- make progress visible and shorten the feedback loop. As much as some people kick and scream about how pointless (pun intended) game elements like points, badges, and leaderboards are, they are valuable if you use them in ways that are meaningful to the learners.
So I'm glad the hype is over. Maybe now we can get down to some serious gamification.
Yep, another one. Why? Because I am still trying to find my niche. So many whys, so little time. But slowly I inch forward, finding new ideas, communities, and pathways. Each time I have reached out into another corner of the social media world, I have encountered grand new adventures, so let's see where this one leads.
Right now the three areas I am exploring most are self-directed learning, creativity, and gamification, so many of my posts will be about these. But it is also nearing the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, so, while I have mixed feelings about what to say, I'm sure I'll be saying something about that. And many other seemingly random things. Although it is the random bits that combine and remix and sprout into new and wonderful ideas, so the random perhaps is not so random at all. As Steve Jobs said: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
