My new Epson VT100 scanner stopped working this evening for no apparent reason. I reloaded the scanner software. Didn’t work. I went to Google and found lots of people having trouble with their Epson scanners. Epson doesn’t come out looking very good on this one.
For a while, Epson had maintained the problem was with Windows, but the sheer number of complaints pointed the finger back at Epson. They stonewalled. Or gave friendly advice like: reinstall your operating system and see if that takes care of it. The net offered lots of homebrew solutions. Delete this .bmp file; remove these lines from the Registry; check your cables; replace the glass on the scanner (!) Someone suggested downloading the latest driver. Okay, even though I bought this thing this month, it seemed worth a try.
I downloaded and installed the new driver. I got the normal installation message to shut down the system for the changes to take effect. I shut down the PC. But I couldn’t log back on. The fingerprint reader wouldn’t read my fingerprints. The alternative password entry-box wouldn’t accept more than four characters of my eight-character password. This happened half a dozen times. I stopped the boot-up to tweak the BIOS. Whew. The system started up. Of course, now I’m afraid to turn it off.
Two-and-a-half hours down the drain. And I had some work to do this evening.
What have I learned from this? I no longer trust Epson. That goes for their computers, printers, scanners, cameras, my recommendations to corporate purchasers, and automobiles, should they ever go into that business. Every company that makes progress experiences a few hiccups along the way. But to continue pumping out faulty software after hundreds, if not thousands, of customer complaints is unpardonable.
As you might imagine, I’m a bit frazzled. I was determined to smile and keep my cool while catching up on a few feeds before calling it a night. Whoa. I find I’m becoming a lightening rod for everyone seeking a foil for their gripes about informal learning or related cultural issues. This little brou-ha-ha began with a post I wrote about visualizing learning as an audio mixer. A mixer has sliders, not on-off switches.
In my post, I wrote, “The formal-versus-informal debate shouldn’t be happening at all. Extremists on both sides miss the point that this is not either/or. It’s shades of gray. Few human issues are binary, or, as I kid people, ‘bi-polar.’ The world doesn’t work like this.”
Stephen hopped in with a lengthy critique saying, among other things, “If there is anything to the theory of informal learning, then the values it expresses are more than just preferences on a sliding scale.” I’m not a philosopher, but this seems like telling the Ferrari dealer I’d like a red one, only to be told there’s more to a Ferrari than its color. No joke. If a Ferrari were merely wheels, speed, color, and so on, a Toyota would suffice.
Saying Ferraris come in a choice of colors (I saw a green one a couple of days ago) does not denigrate the mystique, aura, beauty, and utter Ferrari-ness of the car. But I digress. I’ve suggested to Stephen that we converse on the subject, record it, put it on the web, and see if it advances understanding.
When people disagree, I want to understand where they’re coming from. I’m on a quest to make organizations more effective and workers more fulfilled and happy in their lives. Since hearing David Cooperrider in New York last month, I’ve tried to adopt his stance that you get a lot further building on strengths than sorting through problems. I’ll address my critics when Epson and others stop making it hard to get through the day. I’m busy at the moment. Customers come first, academic argument later.
Let’s think of ways to air these issues in public. They are important. At Training 2007? At the Guild’s Annual Gathering? In an online gathering? I’m always up for honest dialog. What we’re addressing, such things as knowledge work, learning as co-creation, more self-service, taking advantage of network effects, learning with both sides of the brain, and giving people the freedom to do what’s right is a gut-wrenching change from the status quo. Some see a job threat; others, a career opportunity.
I encourage those joining the debate to do their homework — by looking further than one blog post to support their take on things. Let’s go beyond knee-jerk reactions.
Finally, please leave ad hominem character assassination out of this. I’ve been trying to make the world a better place to live for thirty years. Question my findings if you like, but don’t tell me I’m insincere. I don’t buy assertions that I am a snake-oil salesman, trying to obscure the truth, dishonest, or hyping things I don’t believe in, all of which I’ve read on the web this week.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for this transparency Jay. I met a friend last Sunday at our “third place” for a Starbucks. A month ago I was telling him about your book and he became an instant fan of yours. He’s producing a documentary about empowering approaches to elementary classroom education. There are oodles of connections between your “Informal Learning” and what he is advocating and showing how others can join in. This week I explained what I had learned about Stephen’s approach that stirred up so much controversy in the Manitoba conference, and then on your “All or Nothing” posting. As we usually do, we attempted to apply “Appreciative Inquiry” to Stephen’s stance. My friend made sense of Stephen’s rant as a theoretical purist, like A.S. Neil (Summerhill) or Rudolf Steiner (Waldorf Schools). I saw similarities to John Taylor Gatto (we saw him in person years ago) who questions all classroom instruction (factory schooling) more pragmatically, less idealistically or theoretically. I then proposed that Stephen’s rant needed to be seen politically. We’ve been exploring advocates of “democratizing” and “restoring the rights of citizens”. Stephen’s list (decentralized, distributed, disintermediated, disaggregated, dis-integrated, democratic, dynamic, desegregated) makes more sense as questions of the learners’ rights, self control, freedom to be spontaneous – than as “opposition to informal learning”, character assassination or making you a lightening rod for controversy. Where you are coming from, the difference you’re making and the wisdom of your approach is easily understood, related to and valued by me and my filmmaker friend. Stephen’s rant is “none of the above” and takes major “thinking out loud” to incorporate usefully. Hopefully that gives you a sense of where I’m coming from.
Tom
Jay, I want to thank you for the work you’ve done and the contributions you’ve made to my own learning (as have Stephen and many many others). I really like the idea of putting this conversation into a public setting in a relatively formal way. I’m wondering if we might not be able to organize an online conference to do so.
I for one would enjoy the discourse and would be delighted to help organize such an event.
Breezing through HBR’s Breakthrough Ideals for 2007, I came upon this apt piece from David Weinberger:
The Folly of Accountabalism
Accountability has gone horribly wrong. It has become “accountabalism,” the practice of eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to magically ward off evil.
The emphasis on accountability was an understandable response to some god-awful bookkeeping-based scandals. But the notion would never have evolved from a buzzword into the focus of voluminous legislation if we hadn’t also been lured by the myth of precision: Because accountability suggests that there is a right and a wrong answer to every question, it flourishes where we can measure results exactly. It spread to schools—where it is eating our young—as a result of our recent irrational exuberance about testing, which forces education to become something that can be measured precisely.
When such disincentives as the threat of having to wear an orange jumpsuit for eight to ten years didn’t stop the Enron nightmare and other bad things from happening, accountabalism whispered two seductive lies to us: Systems go wrong because of individuals; and the right set of controls will enable us to prevent individuals from creating disasters. Accountabalism is a type of superstitious thinking that allows us to live in a state of denial about just how little control we individuals have over our environment.