CogTools - Students Use Social Media to Strike Back After Feeling Like They Got Stabbed In The Eye With a Soldering Iron

This last week, I was able to witness a beautiful thing.  My daughter had been cast as the lead (Alice) in her high school’s production of Alice in Wonderland.  Last weekend, two months of practices and rehearsals would culminate in to six performances.  Opening night was Thursday and it went fantastically.  Friday during school they were due to perform in front of 600 3^rd-5^th graders when the school made a curious decision; they cancelled the performance, put the director of the show on “Administrative Leave” and called all future performances as cancelled until they made adjustments.

The entire production with existing sets had been checked by district officials and the construction was overseen by an OSHA certified official. The school principle made the decision to suspend the teacher and the show (although initially she implied it was a district decision) due to her interpretation of the safety inspection.  She deemed the set was unsafe in its current state.  My daughter had a lengthy scene where she was suspended 20ft. in the air (in a harness, supervised by the H.S. Adventure Ed. Teacher and over crash-mats) and there were supposedly missing rails for some of the set pieces and a hydraulic lift could not be used.

After hours of late set configuration changes, the students were OK’d to perform the remaining Friday night and Saturday shows… but without their General – the director who led them in the first place.

IMMEDIATELY, starting Friday morning students went to the only place they could to fight back… they took to social media and went viral against the school’s decision.  In support of their play and their director (a drama teacher with 20 years of experience, who the year prior took the school’s theater program to win state and to perform at ThesCon), they started Facebook pages and Twittered like enraged society members vying for change.  At the same time, parents and alumni also sent numerous emails to the principal and school board in support of the teacher.  A former student even created and distributed ‘Team Neil’ buttons for parents and students to wear.

The students, with support from locals and many across the nation had succeeded in trending on Twitter and Instagram.  #TeamNeil had over 44,000 tweets.  Students conspired online to wear school spirit t-shirts (for the following Mondays pep rally,) yet they would duct tape over their mascot name and write “NEIL” in its place.  Clay Shirky would be proud, as this was a great example of technology giving students the arms available for fighting back and addressing a poor decision and a disrespectful slight on the schools theater program. 

Not too surprisingly, due to social media pressure on the school, the following Monday the school reversed their decision and brought the teacher back.  On an entertaining note, when the deposed drama teacher returned the students celebrated with #theBeardIsBack.

The Other AR - New Researcher Observations

The last couple weeks have been really, really busy for me at work.  Two trips out of town sandwiched a week of instructing at home, I have put in nearly 227.3 hours of work in two 14 day periods.  The point of my mentioning all of this is to underscore the constant go-go-go of my recent schedule and also note that I have had a lot of recent experience to analyze the training that is the subject of my Action Research project.  

It has been hard at times to allow adequate time to research for my AR project, and after many attempts of searching for pertinent articles I have finally been able to find examples that provide a wealth of information as well as unplanned potential directions to aide in my AR.  

Particular items that I have noted recently:

·         I had forgotten how tiring personalized training can be when training small groups on new information (specifically, information that trainees have not been exposed to in the past)

·         I need to give more attention to removing our assumptions of the knowledge level of those we are instructing

·         There is a need to provide a “Big Picture” outlook for personnel undergoing training

·         We are missing examples to help learners develop ways to use their analytical ability

The first bullet above is personal, and is noted to call out the need to involve students more in the process; less time of the instructors teaching, more time of the students learning and collaborating among themselves.  

The last three bullets will likely be where I spend a lot of time formulating my AR work.  The second bullet, removing instructor assumptions may be addressed by a short foundational course to lay the groundwork for the rest of the training.  This may require re-tooling the rest of the training courses to incorporate different learning strategies to aide in skill development coupled with the material.  The big picture need may be able to be addressed with new learning objectives and skills exercises while verbally engaging trainees to think about steps of the process and how they relate to overall objectives.  The last bullet is where I really feel like we are failing at training right now (albeit we get very positive notes on our current training), we can do better to help unlock the true potential of those we are training.

CogTools - This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Stuff

129.4 hours of work in a 14 day period (not bad, considering all we got done!!).  Throughout this week and the last, I have had a bit of time to reflect on just how much time it takes to learn the simplest things, (and retain them for later use,) when your brain is inundated with new or different information.  

Day to day tasks when working with software are usually considered routine or mundane, but when one has to trouble-shoot issues the brain gets involved in a deep problem-solving of software or extraneous network issues.  De-bugging software anomalies presents a very interesting dilemma (CHALLENGE) for those tasked with it. For those who are not skilled with the aptitude afforded to those with software engineering, computer science or similar backgrounds, de-bugging and trouble-shooting system issues is an arduous task.  With potential issues that become known when working on closed networks, through a multitude of domains, hosting disparate software packages, with varying levels of privileges… levels of socket layers, firewalls, installed software package accessibility to execute commands across domains, etc… issues may seem to be endless to track down the root-cause of.

Even the simple act of “remoting-in” to another machine across a different network can present potential issues.

Isolation, may be the key.  Not isolation in the sense that the trouble-shooter is isolated, but isolating the components that are NOT the cause (or potential cause,) of an issue may become the most helpful in trouble-shooting system issues.

It seems obvious enough, but if one can isolate what is NOT the source of a perceived problem, then it is easier to employ process-of-elimination to identify anomaly sources.  One may have to look at ALL of the most minor details to get at the root of a problem.  In many ways this is a test of active learning coupled with the patience required of trial and error.  For many technology trainers and SA’s it would be hard for them to list and quantify all the ways of going about how to solve a system problem they are responsible for.  

 In most cases it seems, SA’s will employ memories of past issues and their resolutions to formulate a plan for attacking current issues.  In this way, one can mark-off and identify any system issues caused by the usual suspects.  Specifically, this refers to past issues that have not been properly worked through (and thus, the resolutions to them haven’t been completely solidified,) and removing them as possible causes of the current state of breakage.

I would identify much of what was mentioned above as fact-finding or fishing trips.  Depending on the complexity of what is being worked on, the first stages can probably be completed by a single person, while later success will usually involve multiple people working together to detail the holes in previous information.

It is easy for one to take for granted their software working cleanly with other kinds of packaged software, but when this is coupled with disparate versions, timing requirements, privileges, licenses, OS’s, etc. one can have a plethora of potential sources to isolate as the culprit of any number of system issues.