Last month, immigration officials began hassling me because every square inch of my passport was filled up with stamps and visas. I mailed it to Washington to have extra visa pages inserted. Now I’m sweating bullets because I’m supposed to fly to London on Sunday and my passport is in transit and may not make it on time.

Public speaking, like writing, forces me to sharpen my thinking, and that, in turn, improves my coaching and workshop sessions with corporate clients. In London, I’ll be talking about how to evaluate informal social learning and learning infrastructure, things that are tougher to get your arms around than individual courses. In my keynote address in Faro, I plan to discuss post-industrial learning and new approaches to instructional design. The next week in Madrid, my workshop will focus on informal learning: what it is, how to take advantage of it, and who’s been doing a good job thus far.

People invariably ask for slides and recordings, so from now on I will be posting follow-up information on my primary website, jaycross.com

If you’re in London, Faro, Seville, or Madrid, ping me if you’d like to get together.

Evaluating formal and informal learning
London. June 9, 2009

IADIS International Conference e-Learning 2009
International Association for Development of the Information Society
Faro, Portugal. June 17, 2009

Informal Learning en la Práctica: Cómo diseñar su Proyecto de Aprendizaje Informal
Madrid. June 23, 2009

On the flight from Berkeley to London, the phones enabled me to retreat into my private cocoon, removed from the din of the jet engines. The headphones don’t knock out 100% of the cacophony, but they can cut the volume down to a very dull roar.

The Bose units come with an adapter that lets you plug into the soundtrack emanating from your armrest. I was quite satisfied with the sound as I watched Nixon/Frost and The Days of Harvey Milk on the way home. When I tired of movies, I’d pull the plug and retreat into my private isolation booth. Sometimes I’d listen to songs from my iPhone; other times I’d just nod off.

I’m listening to Leonard Cohen on the Bose phones as I write this post. The neighbor could get out his chainsaw and it wouldn’t register on my consciousness. I spend an increasing amount of time taking part in online events. You will, too, if you don’t already: it’s an inevitable outcome of living green and connecting to the larger world. Guess what? No more cheapo ear-buds for me: I’ll be wearing the Bose phones.

Some of you are undoubtedly thinking it’s absurd to lay down $350 for a headset. That’s the wrong way to look at it. An experience is only as good as the weakest link in the chain that gets it to you. I’ll spend sixty hours on planes in the next couple of months, and I’m happy to pay an incremental $5/hour for comfort. Actually hearing the movie without having to fiddle with free but dorky airline headsets is a bonus, as is the greater fidelity when listening to music and events on the web. Before long, my average cost will drop below $1/hour.

I got the Bose® QuietComfort® 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® Headphones. They go for $314 on Amazon.

Maybeck build this one for his kids.

The lovely fireproof chimney in the house Maybeck built for his mom.

Breathtaking views abound. That’s the Golden Gate on the horizon.

Comfortable living in the Berkeley hills.

The broken roof pediment is a Maybeck hallmark.

A recital hall attached to a house. Note the concrete “woodwork” on the balcony to the right. Fear of flames once again.

Smelt on the left, anchovies to the right. You get about this many for a dollar at Ranch 99 Market. I pigged out, downing nearly two dollars’ worth.

The recipe I was following called for seasoned breadcrumbs. Since I’ve sworn off white bread until I drop another ten pounds, I had to improvise. I pitched a few Triscuits and two fancy crackers into the blender. Bingo! Savory breadcrumbs. I shook the crumbs and the thawed fish in a plastic bag (so I could see what was going on)

Then I dropped them into a 1/4″ layer of olive oil in a heavy skillet. I let them sizzle for two and a half minutes.

I poured myself a fino and squirted a few drops of fresh lemon juice on the fish. I popped one in my mouth. And another. And another. Soon my taste memory transported me back to a balcony overlooking the Med in Marbella circa 1972. It was mid-afternoon. I was hungry. I ordered a fritura malagueña. It tasted just like this. ¡Qué estupendo!

Reflection makes life worth living.

Uta at the World Ice Art Championships

Photographing the electric plug for the car

Audit your brain

More

Raw material from a nearby pond

Mind-blowing results

Slideshow

On Thursday, March 12, the Learning Irregulars and I will facilitate a BarCamp on unmeetings and whatever issues seem important to us at the time. Come to experience a meeting where participants create their own agenda.

On Tuesday, March 24, join the Learning Irregulars and me to explore the future of organizational learning. It’s peer-to-peer, real-time, bottom-up, and largely free of curriculum and classrooms.

Both meetings will take place at the NextNow Collaboratory in Berkeley. Timing is 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm. The sessions are free, but space is limited, so you must register in advance to attend.

Unmeeting at NextNow with the Learning Irregulars

Rethinking Learning with NextNow

Today I read Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto. Formerly an award-winning school teacher, Gatto now spews more vitriol at schooling than anyone else I have ever encountered. If you are unfamiliar with his work, you must visit his site. Years ago, Heidi Fisk turned me on to Gatto; I began reading his The Underground History of American Education on the web and simply couldn’t stop until I got to the last page; it’s on my short list of seminal documents.

A few gems from Weapons of Mass Instruction:

Quoting H.L. Mencken on the aim of American education: “The aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

Schools intend “to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.”

Quoting Ellwood Cubberly: “Our schools are… factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned… And that is the business of the school, to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”

School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored.

I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs project, contract giver, and protector of the social order to allow itself to be “re-formed.”

School is a religion.

Schooling is organized by command and control from without; education is self-organized from within; school disconnects its clientele from other primary sources of learning. It must do that to achieve administrative efficiency; education sets out to provide a set of bountiful connections which are random, willful, promiscuous, even disharmonious with one another — understanding that the learning of resourcefulness, self sufficiency, and invention will inevitably involve surprising blends of things, things impossible to predict or anticipate in advance.

Sad to say, Weapons of Mass Instruction, like the title itself, is stronger on flashy, firebrand rhetoric than inner logic. Gatto refers to important shifts in the direction of Horace Mann without telling the reader who Mann was. Gatto’s stories sometimes ramble off to nowhere. To savor the best of Gatto, read Dumbing Us Down or The Underground History of American Education.

I love intellectual counterpoint, so it was delightful to read John Taylor Gatto on a train to and from a temple devoted to pioneering railroads, the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. Railroads fueled the need for the by-products of the schools that Weapons of Mass Instruction rails against.

As this plaque points out,

“By 1800, the United States had a progressive political systems and an idealistic vision for the future. But the country was small, rural, agrarian, and culturally backward. Transportation was slow and America produced few manufactured goods. The Ancient Romans enjoyed a higher standard of living and comfort than did most Americans.”

Enter trains.

“A hundred years later the United States was a large and powerful nation. It was highly urban, thoroughly industrialized, culturally sophisticated, and enjoyed some of the higher living standards anywhere. At no time in human history has a country transformed itself so quickly or on such a scale.”

Small wonder we revere the things that got us here.

It takes a lot of conformity to run a railroad. You don’t want workers re-interpreting the rules for the sake of innovation. Assembly-line schooling spit out ideal workers for the time, workers who respect authority and do what they’re told. Those workers kept the railroads and factories humming efficiently.

The perennial problem is that the times have changed but the way we do things have not. We need knowledge workers who can think for themselves but maintain schools that are structured to produce drones for the long-gone railroads and factories.

Related posts:

Against School

Schooling

Informal Schooling

The nominal reason for this trip, the tenth annual Learning Technologies conference, was great fun, particularly because I shared the closing keynote address with two pals, Donald Clark and Charles Jennings. We didn’t rehearse; we didn’t need to: we’ve been following one another for years. The day before the event, George Siemens and I toured the Imperial War Museum, chattering about learning and society (and the horrors of war) for hours. I talked myself hoarse conversing with friends old and new.

From London, I took a cheap flight to Bilbao and then a bus along the northern coast of Spain to the beautiful country village of Santillana del Mar. I wandered up and down the cobblestone streets, contemplating my next book, and took in the recreation of the nearby Altamira cave paintings. (I will get back to the book topic in another post.)

I left Spain by way of Bilbao, enjoying both the Guggenheim and the narrow streets of the medieval city. Next up: Rome.

Over the course of two days, my friend Robin Good took me on an incredible tour of ancient Rome, wandering the narrow passages he frequented as a boy between delightful houses and beautiful churches. Art and history and great architecture everywhere we turned.

Traversing Rome on the back of a motorbike puts the taste of adrenaline in your mouth, but that was the only way we could see everything on the second day’s agenda: the Roman Forum, the Coliseum, the Palatine Hill, the Circus Maximus, and the Aventine Hill for starters.

If you know Robin’s site on Professional Online Publishing or saw his presentation on learning at LeWeb this year, you can imagine our topics of conversation. Robin and I read the same books: Ivan Illich, John Taylor Gatto, and dozens of other learning revolutionaries. We spent hours talking about social media, the wrong-headedness of schooling, the boredom of traditional learning, and the importance of informality.

Here’s an impromtu interview that took place in Robin’s office near the Vatican. Robin’s reach is incredible. More than half a million people visit his sites every month. Over 13,000 have already watched our interview!