It's all Geek to me

Before we get back to Clean Language, I’d just like to gripe about computing.

I spend a lot of my life computing, writing material for students, building webpages, blogging, reading research articles, trying to keep up with advances and the like. The trouble is that I seem to spend nearly as much time trying to fix the sillinesses that constantly occur as I spend in productive work. I know that Windows is worse than Linux, but I spent quite a lot of time trying to fathom why Linux did strange things too.

The good thing about Linux is that it is cost free and you know that someone will come up with a fix sometime. The trouble with Windows is that even though you have paid through the nose for it and for the programs that you run on it; it still isn’t right.

Isn’t it about time that the computer world did get something right? I suppose they have with WiFi which works like a charm most of the time, but so many things just hang, fall over, do unexpected things or are just so impenetrably hard to understand that you may was well have done it by hand in the first place.

I get less trouble from my handheld than I do from my desktop and although the PDA’s running Windows it seems to have many fewer difficulties doing what it’s supposed to than the desktop running XP. I don’t have any confidence that Vista or whatever it’s called will be any better, and I’m worried that it won’t be backwards compatible with my software. I say this with a heavy heart because I’m fundamentally a Gates’ fan. I don’t mind clever people making money in relatively legal ways. I just wish everything worked as it says on the can. I’d be in awful trouble if what I ‘sell’ didn’t come up to the expectations of my customers. Is there a workable remedy? Best wishes, Derek

Getting to the Information

One of the things that I find most fascinating about people and learning is how our societies tend to make us unwilling to be open about many of our deeper feelings and ideas. Often those who help us to learn can do so much more for us if they are more aware of where we’re coming from in a psychological sense.

It might be, for example, that I have spent many years of my early life in a very competitive setting and generally ‘failed’ because I was competing at things that neither interested me nor at which I was naturally adept. Of course, living a life like this would tend to influence how I thought of competition and the competitive spirit later on in years. If as a learner those who taught me did not understand this, they might assume that competitive quizzes and tests would encourage greater effort from me, when it almost certainly wouldn’t.

One of the reasons that people don’t open up seems to be that when we talk to others in what we might call the counselling role, they are all too obviously ‘there’ in the conversation. What someone with a problem needs is to be able to talk to themselves through the medium or with the help of someone else, but without that other person intruding into the conversation.

A psychologist called David Grove developed a technique to reduce the way in which counsellors tend to subtly steer interviews by rewarding things that fit with their model of the world. This technique goes by the name Clean Language because it is clean of the influence of the questioner.

Using this technique we can often encourage people to be very open with themselves and to develop models and metaphors for situations in which they are involved that open new understandings. The use of clean language in a learning setting is a very useful way to get through to better learning styles for individuals who are having a hard time.

I’ll give some more detail of Clean Language in future posts, but if you have experience of it from any angle, do tell us about it.

Hello!

This is the introductory post to this blog, so I suppose it ought to talk about what the blog's about. I'm 62 years old and have enjoyed most of the learning I've done most of my life. In fact, the truth is that it's only when it's been fun that I've really learnt anything easily. So with that in mind, I though it would be a good idea to have a blog that talked about learning and how to do it successfully, that gave people ideas about how to enjoy learning and turned dire subjects into amusing subjects and maybe even gave tips about particular difficulties that members were experiencing.

So this is it! I'd love to hear from you, whether you just want to talk about learning, whether you have a problem you would like usn to help with, whether you have some sound advice you'd like to pass on. So have a go, you might enjoy it and even learn something. Best wishes, Derek