Adventures in home working

I am on holiday this week and all 4 kids are doing activities (film and video, drama and sports club) so Debbie and I are able to spend from about 10:00 – 16:00 on our own just relaxing in and around our home town – St Anne’s on Sea.  At home I like nothing more than a mix of long walks along the coast (east to Lytham and West to Blackpool), simple Cafe food, cycling, meditation and reading and the last few weeks the weather has been superb, with glorious sun with a warm breeze.  When the kids get home it’s time for swimming and beach games – perfect. 

4 days into this relaxing routine and it’s also noticeable that my arthritis pain is fading fast,  a few years ago and after a weeks holiday it would be gone completely, now it never goes completely but relaxation and many hours of exercise definitely still has a very beneficial effect.

Kathy has yet another amazing post on her Creating Passionate Users site about the fact that animals love exercise, and she questions why we don’t.  Well whilst I think its a great article with wonderful pictures of her horses if she came around to my house and saw my four girls bouncing on the trampoline she would see a lot of parallels with her horses.  Some of us love exercise too, and its not just the kids round here who love the trampoline, the beach, the sand dunes, the tennis courts, the swimming pool and their bikes!

Last week I read the book “A whole new mind” by Daniel H. Pink.  I found it very interesting, especially – as a parent of 4 girls – I am increasingly concerned about their futures.  Daniel describes in this book the skills that are going to be needed to succeed in the future.  The following mindmap is a summary of the book.  A more details version of the map is also attached, as a PDF and a native MindManager file.

One of the nice features of the book is that at the end of each section it includes exercises that you can use to develop these skills, I started a mindmap of these two which is shown below and again a more details version of the map is also attached, as a PDF and a native MindManager file.

File Attachment: Skills.pdf (279 KB)

File Attachment: Skills.mmap (57 KB)

File Attachment: A whole new mind.mmap (55 KB)

File Attachment: A whole new mind.pdf (86 KB)

My youngest daughters (twins) have been studying smoking,  Tessa has just finished her anti-smoking poster, which I wanted to share with you:

Don’t smoke because people out there have died.

Just because of cigarettes and people suffered from lots of illnesses.

So you will get illnesses.

Children can get Asthma if smoke is around them.

So after you have read this bit of information

Please stop.

Please.

I am still on a journey of discovery to try and “find what I love doing”,  I am fairly content in my work, find it interesting and challenging, but I don’t feel I make a difference, at home I spend most of the time with my family – which is great – but very internal focused.  I would like both work and home life to change over time to be more community centred and to feel that I am giving something back to the world and that I live in a more natural and sustainable way.  My relatively poor health is currently the excuse I hide behind that stops me taking the risk associated with change.

I do however continue to be on the lookout for advise in this area and I recently cam across these two articles, one by Steve Jobs – You’ve got to find what you love and the other my Dave Pollard ‘Business’ Advice for Young Adults (and Their Parents & Teachers).  Check them out if you ever think about your work or worry about how you are preparing your kids to help them make good choices about their future work choices.

As I work from home I tend to make sure I do my share of the housework.  My normal daily jobs include:

• tidying the bedrooms
• making the beds
• washing, drying and putting away the clothes

Well Debbie and I have been finding our respective daily tasks a bit of a grind, so on Friday we decided that we would swap jobs every weekend.  So this weekend I have been:

• making all of the meals
• setting the table
• clearing the table, washing up, drying and putting away the pots

it’s been a great success, I have loved not having to do my jobs, and really enjoyed my new weekend jobs.  By Sunday I had change the routine and made it a lot more organised and peaceful and had written up (stephie laminated for me) a crib sheet that tells me all of the kids favorite meals, vegetables, fruit, drinks etc, as with 4 kids  I am always forgetting  Hopefully a weeks break from them will mean I enjoy these tasks every weekend, as they say “a change is as good as a rest”.

My daughter has recently inherited by old Tablet PC, a TC1000.  She has an auto-immune disorder and secondary Raynaud’s and these conditions mean that she suffers from cold hands, is very stiff and not that strong.  As a result she often struggles to carry her bag around and with writing.  About a year ago I wrote an article explaining why I thought a Tablet would help here and a few weeks ago I demonstrated my Tablet to the school teachers and her assessors.  As a result they have agreed that they will try and get her a grant for a Tablet ready for high school which is great news.  In addition they will get her a book scanner.  Although scanned books are not perfect, nor many eBooks, as I mention here, they are often better than paper.

In preparation she is taking her Tablet into school 3 days a week to get used to the logistics and the envious kids and how to deal with them.  Since she got the Tablet I noticed that she has started using the computer at home a lot more as well.  I often find her sitting in bed browsing the web, writing her journal etc.

In this context I was interested to see this report on a trial of Tablets for kids of Jen’s age group, some interesting quotes are:

Carnegie Mellon University is conducting an experiment at The Ellis School and one of CMU’s own classes in which traditional textbooks are replaced with a Tablet personal computer. The HP Compaq 1100 Tablet PCs weigh 4 pounds and have been adapted so students can highlight key passages on the screen and write on the e-text with a digital pen. Students also can send their homework on the Tablet PCs and get material from their teachers.

They mention an important caution, which is especially an issue for A4 content, not so big an issue with text books:

“Nationally, students have not warmed up to e-texts at first because they saw little advantage in them,” said Diana Oblinger, vice president of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit group in Boulder, Colo., interested in technology in higher education. She said the print on the screen used to be harder to read than regular texts, and the software lacked features to encourage people to use it.

That is beginning to change as new software lets students do more things than they could do with a textbook.

Others have Jen’s problem too:

Before this experiment, Chao said her 6-year-old brother Bobby could not even lift her bookbag, which often contained four textbooks and three binders. The bookbag of her classmate Heather Acuff, 14, of McCandless, was so heavy that she used to roll it around on wheels.

It has changed the way teachers work:

Nine eighth-graders at Ellis have replaced their hardback geometry and earth science texts with Tablet PCs. The geometry class uses software developed by Shadyside-based TextCENTRIC that allows students to highlight passages and trade material with their teacher.

Math teacher Russ Schopper presents a problem on a computerized blackboard. The same image appears on the students’ 8-by-10-by-1-inch computers. A split screen lets the students solve the problem on one side and refer to the textbook on the other.

Kids have the same problems we do with PC’s:

Ellis students complain of long startup times for the PC and the danger of computer crashes, but the benefits, they say, outweigh the disadvantages.

I have thought for a long time that going paperless was a good strategy. Now I know why, Microsoft has posted 3 great videos that demonstrate the dangers of office stationary.  They really are worth watching, preferably with the family as they are very funny.  Another tip,  make sure you watch them through a few times watching the background characters as well for best effect!

First up, the Elastic Band next the Paper Cut and finally the Bad Pen

Visit the web site for more information

1. I was born in Lincoln in England in 1963
2. I have one brother 2 1/2 years younger than me
3. My Grandma claimed to be a medium, she was certainly very wise, and she told very convincing stories
4. My Mum’s Grandad was Major of Lincoln
5. I grew up with tremendous freedom roaming the countryside, building sites, abandoned airfields and gravel pits and reading
6. My parents were amazing, I don’t ever remember being put under pressure, or ever feeling that I needed to work to gain their love and approval
7. I grew up in a house with a huge garden and 50 tree orchard, the source of endless play
8. I was a slow starter at school, I was 13 before I actually started to move up the sets, and never really found my feet academically until I was doing my first degree
9. I suffered badly from acne as a boy and still suffer a bit now at 41,  but I learned not to let that sort of thing bother me, and learned to be happy with myself
10. I suffered very badly from Migraine and Hay-fever as a child and remember spending lots of days debilitated by one or the other
11. When I was about 4 I woke up one morning in the spring and a wasp was crawling up my bed, I could not get out of bed and still don’t remember what happened.  I have a phobia of wasps to this day
12. When I was about 14 I had to read Shakespeare out load,  I had an asthma attack from the nerves and could not read at all fluently, people laughed.  I still have a fear of public speaking, although 10 weeks of speakers club helped a little
13. I always remember working, my childhood jobs were gardening, apple picking and selling, washing up, preparing fruit and veg for bulk freezing, running errands for old folks, pumping water from the well, window cleaning round, school librarian, school lab boy, school odd-job repair man.  I was never short of money!
14. From a fairly young age I had an allowance for, and bought, my own clothes and food
15. I love home backed bread and other simple foods
16. I used to help my dad repair cars and we also refurbished an old army ambulance to make a camper, it was great fun and I wanted to be a mechanic
17. I had two childhood pets a tortoise called Micky who turned out to be a girl (she laid eggs) and a cat called Scamp who had to be put down due to injuries from a car or dog (I never found out which). 
18. I had my finger sliced open at school by a closing door,  I was accompanied to the hospital by a careers teacher who said he thought I could do better than be a mechanic, from that day I decided to be an engineer and have never tinkered with cars since
19. On one of our holidays in the camper the big ends went in Kendall.  Dad and me tried to fix it but we only got 20 miles before it failed again.  We got home by train and Mum bought a copy of Here’s Health at the station and her life started to change.  Ours changed as well but to a lesser extent.
20. On another holiday shortly after, Dad broke his ankle rock hopping, this was the beginning of a string of bad luck with his health that partly drove Mum and Dad slowly apart, (drinking and smoking didn’t help either)
21. I was shy at school and still am, especially in social situations.  Years later a Vice President at work said “did I realise I probably had mild Asbergers Syndrome”.  I looked it up, realised it was true and have never felt bad about being shy since
22. I have always been very positive
23. I have never been religious,  for three main reasons.  First I can not accept something so profound based on so little evidence,  I can not accept the concept of a vengeful god as described in the bible and I can not accept the concept of a god that would want to be worshipped.
24. I have always been content with myself and never felt the need for a God to make me whole
25. My Dad spent most of his spare time working in the garage, or more truthfully tinkering.  My Mum was always busy in the house and garden.  I promised myself I would spend all of my spare time with my wife and kids
26. I had plenty of friends at school, but few that I really wanted to spend time with outside of school
27. I got 8 O Levels (4 A and 4 B) and took 9. 
28. I decided that I was never going to get a good mark in German so I decided to sacrifice it, and that it would be better to get ungraded because that did not appear on the certificate
29. At A Level we were taught the wrong Maths syllabus so I got an E, I didn’t have the patience for Tech Drawing so I got a D and I got an A in Engineering and a B in Physics. I got an apology from the school for teaching me the wrong maths, but lost my place at Loughborough.  So I went to Trent Polytechnic
30. I never regretted for a moment going to Trent, it was a great course and I met my wife
31. My wife’s name is Debbie, we were on the same course at Trent – Mechanical Engineering – I really got to know her when she got glandular fever, she had to go into hospital for a week or so and I popped in to see her,  I decided on the way home that we would be married.  I had to win her away from her boy friend so it took a few months before we started to go out, we were married shortly after graduating
32. My Dad had a bad accident on his motor bike, the front of his leg was ripped off by a car that hit him.  I am pretty sure it was not his fault – although we don’t talk about it.  He was on hospital for a long time, had grafts etc.  The leg never properly healed.  Dad was never very keen on exercise after this.
33. I started to mentor people seriously during my time at Trent and have continued ever since
34. My first real job was working for Debbie’s Dad on work experience one summer
35. Then I worked for a GEC company called English Electric Valves, who decided to sponsor me.  Debbie was already sponsored by British Aerospace
36. Debbie and I lived together during the 3rd and 4th years at Trent,  it was a great time.  We were both sponsored so we had plenty of money
37. My Mum, after a life at home, decided she would lease a market stall and sell whole foods.  It changed her life, but my Dad didn’t change and they grew apart and separated shortly after I graduated
38. I graduated second in my year with a First,  Debbie also got a first and came 4th.  We were both pretty pleased
39. I got offered all of the jobs I applied for, but decided to be near Debbie so took a job at the same British Aerospace site – Brough near Hull.
40. After a very boring year working in Airframe Systems,  I applied for an internal PHD in IT, this fell through but the IT department offered me a job and I never looked back
41. We had two kittens Salt and Pepper, both black and white and brother and sister
42. I was sponsored to do a part-time MBA in Engineering Business Management at Warwick University.  I did pretty well.
43. Debbie and I had our first child – Stephie
44. We also took on two more kittens, one I found at work after her mother had been poisoned.  She was a wild cat we called lucky.  The other was a friend she made at the Cat Protection League – Joshy.
45. Three of our cats died in car accidents, lucky is still with us, and still pretty wild unless she wants feeding
46. I worked mainly in IT systems to support manufacturing engineering doing development and systems integration
47. I learned to programme in Modula 2, Fortran, Pascal, Visual Basic, DCL, Perl, Python, VB Script
48. I was a very early adopter of Windows NT 3.1
49. I moved to do IT systems in support of engineering design
50. I moved to do IT infrastructure architecture
51. We had our second daughter – Jenny
52. I decided there was no future in Brough so we moved directly across country to Warton
53. The happiest I have ever been was in a small flat in Lytham St Annes, we put most of our stuff in store and lived a simple uncluttered life by the sea.
54. I have lived in 14 different homes so far
55. I have only ever had one job that existed before I took it, my first.  I have had 10 jobs since and every one I have either invented or has been invented for me
56. I moved to do IT solution design for major programmes
57. I have Adult Onset Stills disease, It took 4 more years to get it diagnosed. 
58. I have Twins Tessa and Anna
59. That’s 4 girls if you don’t count the cat
60. Debbie, decided to re-join a church, just around the corner, after years away.  It has made a great difference to her life, and continues to be very rewarding from both a spiritual and community perspective
61. I once wasted a lot of money buying a posh car, and then deciding a year later to buy a practical one.  The practical car kept cutting out on me and failing to start again for an hour or so, after a year they gave me a new one.  I don’t bother about cars these days
62. My life has been changed by Stills Disease,  it means I have to work from home and only on specific types of work but it has changed my life for the better in many ways
63. I live with daily pain
64. I like gadgets, especially IT gadgets
65. I like to make my own rules, that comply with the principles that underly the applicable rule book.  I don’t feel compelled to follow “stupid rules”
66. I rarely give in,  I have spent too much time debugging thorny problems, that always have a solution in the end
67. I know that most problems are probably my problems, I have spent too much time debugging my own code!
68. I don’t like it when things don’t work properly
69. I dislike conflict and competition that is not friendly
70. I have strongly held opinions
71. I like to work in small teams
72. I like to mentor/develop people
73. I read a lot, all sorts of books, even more variety since I decided to join a reading group at the Library
74. I like to go to the cinema and theatre
75. I love to walk and do so most days
76. I love to swim and do so several times a week
77. I love to cycle and do so once or twice a week, but wish I could do it more often
78. After 12 years Debbie and me finally found a reliable baby sitter and now manage to go out once a week
79. I like to build things
80. I am a perfectionist at work and a “good enough” bodger at home
81. My favorite book is The Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
82. I am pretty emotional, for example I often cry – a little –  when watching a good film
83. I love open spaces, particularly the beach
84. I am very lucky to live by the sea
85. I like to eat out,  I have my breakfast at a beach side Cafe most days, and the kids come too weekends and holidays
86. I do all of the washing at home
87. I like things to be neat and tidy.  I find it difficult to relax in a mess
88. I do not like large groups
89. I don’t drink or smoke.  I never liked the taste and did not feel peer pressure very strongly
90. I am very picky with my food,  I like what I like, and thats simple fare.  That said I enjoy my food very much
91. I don’t like hot drinks
92. I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle
93. I love a sunny day
94. I have sun sensitive skin as a result of a reaction of the medication Roacutane, so I have to wear sun screen most days
95. My favorite place is Filey in North Yorkshire, a sleepy fishing village
96. Although I am not a Christian I admire the teachings of Christ
97. I meditate most days
98. I have been very poor and am not afraid of it
99. I value my time
100. I am happy with my life

This is my first mini review of a talk from IT conversations, it is an interview by Moira Gunn with Dr. Henry Jenkins and explains how he thinks video games will revolutionise education. Dr. Jenkins is the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-editor of Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Media in Transition).   The talk is truly fascinating, and pretty scary when you think about the dramatic affects it will have on the capability and outlook that the kids of the future.  Surprisingly this talk and others point out that the gamer generation will have different attitudes to work and will need to be managed differently, this talk by John Beck, a Senior Research Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center of the Digital Future, is on that topic.

I particularly liked the description of the teacher, as more of a coach and leader, and the emphasis on experience as a tool for learning.  In the games that bring history to life it is interesting how it will be possible to provide a real insight into what life was actually like for those experiencing key events from different perspectives, it will no longer to a sequential textbook description.  He also talks about a science game where students try and master magnetic fields by learning to navigate through them, the teacher then explains the theory and the kids can try again this time with an evolved understanding of the underlying theory.  He mentions that in the classroom of the future kids will use textbooks as “cheat sheets” that help them play the game better.  This is much more true to life in the real world which is of course all about doing things and researching to do things better.

The best part of the talk was where Henry talked about about the process of producing a game.  The producer asks the teacher “why are we teaching this – what is its purpose” ie what is the relevance of the knowledge learned to some real activity.  You would hope that the teachers had a good answer but invariably I suspect the answer is “it’s important”.  As someone who likes to learn by experience and apply what I have learned the whole talk was music to my ears.

That said I am not a gamer! why? because I am worried that I will get drawn into it and never get any work done or spend time with my family etc,  I have an addictive personality and games certainly sound addictive!

If you want more, then try reading this interview on Education and Violence, these books,  and this wide ranging interview.