O, and improving fluency

Needs analyses often seem to end with an addendum: O, and I want to improve my fluency.

Whatever the main objectives might be - report writing, doing negotiations, meetings - there always seems to be a demand for speaking better generally.

It's not so much the icing on the cake as the wish for a completely different dessert in the first place.

As the client is always right, how is it possible to satisfy their desires in this area?

If the accident will (ii)

What follows is a small example of what happened when 'the accident' did.

It began with two Tweets.

The first was by Carl Dowse recommending The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.

As so often with my PLN, the second Tweet had actually come first.

It was by Maria Popova and led me to her marvellous site describing books on the future of the internet.

This is typical of the recursive trajectory described by manoeuvring around a PLN.

It takes one Tweet to make an itch, but a second to make me want to scratch it.

If the accident will

'If the accident will'.

It sounds like a sentence designed to break CELTA trainees, but it is actually a stand-out line from a stand-out book, Slaughterhouse-5.

It's a line which, in the novel, captures the aleatory character of existence but which, for our purposes, also describes the happy juxtaposition of two or more sources from your PLN.

You happen to be reading, for example, about the experimental use of whale-song in meeting role-plays when you chance upon a blog post about white noise in learning environments.

The connection may only be tangential, but it is possible to sense a cognitive chime when this happens, a palpable re-adjusting of mental cogs.

It is a mini-Eureka!

But is it Eureka-lite?

Presentation Zen and the art of being two people

When is it right to tell a client he is wrong?

Is it:

a) when you know you are right?

b) when you think you are right and you have so little time that you can't afford to debate the niceties?

                                                        c) simply, never?

This is a relatively easy question if you are only teaching English, but if you are also training them to do something in English it becomes more complicated.

Networked intelligence

One of my favourite definitions of a service is that it is networked intelligence.

From my own experience, I know how valuable the network of blogs and Twitter feeds are that I regularly connect with.

They furnish me with ideas I wouldn't have thought of, promote a self-reflexivity that would otherwise exist only as a weak, stunted wretch, and inspire me to improve my practice in ways I had never imagined.

It is the very definition of a networked intelligence in action.

It is exciting, liberating, and stimulating, so why don't more people use it?