Matthew Sweet was once a member of The Thorns. I declared their album my favorite of 2003. No one else paid attention to that fine album. We saw them in concert in support of that album when they opened for John Mayer. We had seen John Mayer before he was huge and that was a brilliant concert. The one with The Thorns was more of the machine that is John Mayer making teen girls scream. Still musically nice, but come on…teen girls screaming is not a good time.
Anyway. The Thorns were super-awesome-fantastic and I was the one screaming. People stared. They were fools for not paying more attention to the opening act. It was like the time Shawn Mullins (also a Thorn) opened for the Indigo Girls at the Carpenter Center. It was amazing to watch and hear the crowd start paying attention to how great he sounded.
I’m not embarrassed to say that I liked the Bangles. I grew up in the 80s which explains a lot of things. I’m especially not embarrassed to say how much I like the idea of Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoff hooking up to cover songs. I’m a freak for covers. Really. Perhaps I’m over-sharing on what’s supposed to be a look at my lifelong learning adventure. But, it’s Friday and you’ve just learned something about me.
It may not surprise you to hear that I’m quite interested in the idea of what generations bring to the workplace. I’m a Gen Xer. When I got out of college we were in the middle of a recession, but I had a job and my friends worked too so I never understood the idea that we were a bunch of slackers. When I worked two jobs that was a particularly hard idea to swallow.
I think Gen Xers get overlooked often because we’re a small demographic. Much smaller than the Boomers who have dominated so much of our world, especially culturally where I grew up. I chuckle now that oldies stations play Dephece Mode instead of Jethro Tull…because seriously how many more times must I hear Aqualung in my lifetime? There was a radio station in my home town that alternated between that song and Stairway to Heaven with some Eagles thrown in to round out the hour. Not kidding. College radio saved my life.
As I’ve participated in the workforce, I’ve been managed and supervised (although lately there’s been a lack of supervision–but that’s another posting) by Boomers. The Gen Xers I know are moving slowly into higher levels of management but there seems to be a “frowning upon” Gen Xers as a whole because we see the world differently (see the link below). Perhaps it’s always been like this–the older generation mistrusts the younger and the younger just rolls its eyes (actually, that’s probably just me).
Seeing the world differently is not necessarily a bad thing and that’s why I’m looking forward to reading Tammy Erickson‘s upcoming book What’s Next, Gen X?: Keeping Up, Moving Ahead, and Getting the Career You Want.
Having just participated in a cultural sensitivity training session that went badly, I was pleased to read this bullet point–which dovetails nicely with what the other Gen Xer in the session and I were trying to get across. We’re self-aware and different:
Your awareness of global issues was shaped in your youth, and you are richly multicultural. You bring a more unconscious acceptance of diversity than any preceding generation. Your formative years followed the civil rights advances of the 1960s. High divorce rates during your youth meant you are the first generation to grow up with women in independent authority roles. You welcome the contributions of diverse individuals.
I think this book will be on my Christmas wishlist.
It’s often written that the millennials are the first generation to grow up only knowing computers and other technology and that the rest of us have been trying to play catch-up.
I think that’s crap.
With all the talk about the Apollo 11 anniversary, I was reminded of a story my mother told me when I was little. She said I pulled myself up and took one step, only to fall down, about the same time that Neil Armstrong put his foot on the surface of the moon. My baby book supports that I first walked on July 26th. I was 15 months old. What can I say, it was faster to crawl.
So, I am the generation that grew up with amazing hopes and dreams of the future. I really thought by now that I would have been to the moon and back. I’m still not giving up on doing that before I leave this mortal coil.
My first experience with computers was on a field trip to the Math and Science Center and we used punch cards to tell the behemoth what to do. I played PONG at a friend’s house and was thrilled. Even my family had an Atari. I kicked some major Asteroid butt in my time. The Centipede game at the drug store had my fingerprints all over it. We adopted BASIC and made stick figures run across black and white TV screens. We were the first to use Apple Lisas. And, who can forget those ugly watches that did practically everything for you to the point you’d be asked to turn it off because the beeping interrupted class?
I didn’t have a personal computer until I was an adult but I learned how to use one in college. I spent a lot of time in a computer lab in the basement of the dining hall towards the end of my undergraduate career. The sound of dot-matrix printers will always remind me of that lab.
I think the point here is that we shouldn’t limit one group of people based on the time they grew up. I’m stunned at some of the millennials I know of through their parents. They can’t boil an egg so they text mom. SRSLY? That’s what Google is for–don’t call mom. Use the technology you have. That can be said of all of us. Think about those early adopters of the automobile. Or, those people who first had indoor plumbing (sad but true fact: there were people in my county who still made the dash across the yard while I was in public school). Those were new technologies. People welcomed them and now we can’t imagine not having them around.
We’re all capable of learning new things. We can all adapt and adopt new ways of doing.
I mentioned that I’m working on a fast track course that needs to get out the door by the end of next month. Considering our “year” didn’t start until the beginning of this month, it’s a crazy time line.
I believe in highly-focusing my attention and banging out work. So, that’s what I’ve done for the last three weeks. I researched, located resources and I wrote. And, I wrote for elearning. Which is an entirely different beast from classroom training. The biggest difference is there is no narrator in our courses. There’s no one to smooth out the rough edges.
All of this would be a no-brainer except I had to work with someone else on this project. Someone that is supposed to have more experience in the content, but I’m the lead because I
a) asserted myself as such
and
b) have written many elearning courses.
When we initially met to go over who was going to write what, it was all vague and sketchy but the time line was sharply in focus.
I explained the need to write as if there is no voice telling trainees what they need to know. The content must come to the screen fully formed just like Athena popping out of Zeus’s head. She was ready to go with weapons in hand and elearning content must be sufficiently together so that learners are prepared and ready to go with the content.
Time passed and I ended up writing 90% of the course and am now using my project management skills to get the content expert on staff to answer my emails and finish her content in a way that can be delivered online. Our supervisor has been mum for a variety of reasons but needs to step up and provide some leadership because I need her to do it and the course needs her to do it. Without this leadership, I feel like I’m shouting into the void and we’ll slide on the deadline. That’s unacceptable for me and for the high-profile nature of this course.
This leads me to wonder:
Was I not clear enough about needs and deadlines?
Was I not clear enough about writing style? I provided links to several elearning courses our organization has produced so that the content expert could review them to get a sense of style. I know she hasn’t reviewed any of them based on conversations we’ve had about style and possible interactions. Should I have pressed her to examine those courses?
OR, is all of this really my problem and not how someone else is behaving?
Were my expectations too high and time too short for me to be of more help on the basics? Should I have found a way to make more time to be helpful? Did I make assumptions I shouldn’t have?
I’ve just started reading Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block. I hope to be able to get my thoughts together and post something here about the book. So far it’s great–in that practical and deep way he has of writing.
Until I can get those thoughts together, please enjoy Zoe Keating’sTetrishead. She plays the cello, as you can see, and then loops it through her Mac. She makes layered, beautiful music.
This will resource will reside over in the sidebar but I wanted to share it with others and you may not care about what’s in this site’s sidebar.
I attended a webinar presented by the Academy of HRD last week and the site was mentioned. It’s a listing of management models and includes information on the model, a diagram (it seems on most) and a little blurb about why you should care about the model.
The Hawthorne study from the late 20′s and early 30′s is referenced. On what should have been copious notes I made during a cultural competency training last week, I have one word written down and that word was Hawthorne. I realized the answer I gave while answering the final question of what I got out of the training was exactly a Hawthorne response. I’m a smart-ass. Fatal trainee flaw.
Truth be told, the training was something that politically we had to endure and we’re already quite culturally competent in the courses we produce. Honestly, how could you exist in this world (meaning curriculum development for social services) and not already be culturally competent? It’s a big foundation piece. It didn’t help the trainer that she’s not an expert and she didn’t recognize the expertise in the room. Fatal trainer flaw.
Last week we also had training on instructional strategies and that was a lot more enjoyable and contained good nuggets of information. I hope the trainers in the room now appreciate the level of difficulty that exists when developing training materials. I think it helps the developers that every one of them has been a trainer. We know what it’s like to stand in front of a group of people and present material. That knowledge definitely informs my choices when I create activities. It would be an interesting experiment to have a few trainers create content. Would it change the way they think about our courses?
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