Why It’s Important to Keep the Well Full

I spend a lot of my time teaching other people things. I might be teaching my clients how to envision their perfect web or video project, or teaching them about what options and technologies are available to them.  I might be teaching (more coaching) staff on projects. This Fall, I’ll be teaching college students the basics of digital audio and video production.

Whatever I am teaching, in whatever capacity, it’s a lot of output. I’m spewing forth a ton of information each day, week, and month. I’m not complaining. I love to teach. I get a real kick out of showing someone something new, of helping them to see things in a different way. It’s a real high for me.

But the absolute key to being a good teacher is being a good learner. To love teaching, you must love learning. To be able to have the kind of output that teaching requires, you must keep inputting new information all the time.

I find that my input/output goes in cycles. I will have cycles when it’s all about output…I’m teaching classes, teaching clients, teaching staff, all at the same time. But then I have times, like right now, when I’m in the learner’s seat. I’m online, learning about new technology. I’m attending things like Podcamp Montreal. I’m attending train the trainer sessions at the College. I’m working on my inner self. This input is critical. I NEED to learn. It is something I crave. If I spend too long on the output, I get tired. It’s almost as if my well of knowledge empties out. I need to fill it back up again before I can continue.

I guess that is true about everything in life…you need to empty out once in a while, so you can fill back up – whether it’s knowledge, work/family balance, or technical work/creative work.

How do you keep your well full?

Photo by szlea, from Flickr.

Real World Skills for the College Student

I’m very excited about a new opportunity I’ll be embarking on this Fall. I am going back to teaching part time at our local community college. I taught web design at the same college about 9 years ago, for the Continuing Education and Corporate Training programs, so some of this will be very familiar to me.

The major difference this time is I’m teaching for a diploma program. In fact, it’s the latest evolution of the same diploma program I graduated from in 1998 – Interactive Multimedia Developer. It was a 7 month program when I took it, now it’s 2 years. The fact that it’s a full time diploma program means that my audience is going to be fresh-out-of-highschool NetGenners. This is quite a dramatic change from the semi-computer literate adults I’m used to teaching. The young people that are going to be in my classes have been using computers since they were old enough to talk. It’s been embedded in their culture for their entire lives.

This has me thinking about how the Net Generation is going to fare once they are out in the real world. After all, college is not just about learning some new skills, it’s about figuring out how to apply those skills in a way that will enable your success once you are out in the workforce.

I’m teaching Video and Audio production (as it relates to New Media). I’m going to teach them how to operate a camera, set up 3-point lighting, do a paper edit, edit their stuff in Premiere, and export to various media. Given that most of the students will have plenty of computer and technology experience, I don’t forsee the vast majority of them having too much trouble catching on. But in order for them to be truly successful, there’s got to be more than just “push this button to make this happen”.

The real world is not just about knowing what buttons to push. The real world is hard. College is supposed to prepare you, as much as possible, for the real world. So, in addition to the button pushing, I think these are some things that should also be taught in college:

Communication
I’m not talking about IM, Facebook or SMS texting. I’m talking about how to write a business email or a resume that gets noticed. How to pitch someone on an idea. How to cold call. How to conduct yourself on the telephone. In the real world, these kinds of communications are a daily occurrence. You’ve got to get it right from the outset, because as the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

Networking
Whether you’re a CEO or an entry-level cubicle dweller, being comfortable with networking is a critical real-world skill. Whether you’re the new junior in the company or just want to meet and socialize with like-minded people, knowing how to introduce yourself, strike up conversations and even interact through social networks will have a tremendous positive impact on your personal growth and ability to learn. It will also open up a whole lot more opportunities.

Continuous Learning
Hands up. How many of you graduated from university or college and thought “Now I know everything! Are you ready for me, world?” How shocking it was to realize that after all that hard work and money spent, you really didn’t know much at all. The real learning begins the moment you walk out of the school corridors and into the working world. And it never stops. Students need to learn how to LEARN. After being spoon-fed knowledge throughout their high school careers, college needs to teach them how to think for themselves – to discover, explore and be curious all the time. They need to know that graduation is the START of learning, not the end.

Be Passionate
I’ve talked about passion before. It is perhaps the most important thing that we need to be teaching our young people. I’m crazy passionate about video. I’m crazy passionate about the Internet and new media. I’m extremely enthusiastic when I talk about both. And I want my students to share my enthusiasm and passion. If they go through this course with me and don’t feel as strongly passionate about these things as I do by the end of the semester, then they will need to seriously consider if this is the right path for them. They need to be excited and amazed every day by this stuff. Developing that passion will be a cornerstone to their future success.

Now it’s your turn. Do you think students are getting enough of this kind of preparation in college? Do you think it’s necessary? Or not? I would love to hear what you think.

What They Don’t Teach You In School

I came across this statistic in a post by Steve Olson and it outright shocked me:

• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
  (original source Jerrold Jenkins http://www.bookpublishing.com).

58% NEVER read another book??? I can’t even imagine going a DAY without reading. If you look around our house, our bookcases, end tables, bedside tables are overflowing with books. Who are these people that NEVER read another book after high school? And why aren’t they reading? Reading is an essential skill for understanding the world around us. I can’t comprehend what someone’s view of the world would be if they never read a book.

It seems to me that if the school system was doing its job, nearly everyone would be passionate about reading. What are we teaching our kids, if not to love learning? And what better way to learn than to read? Yet over half of the population couldn’t be bothered to pick up a book. Is it possible that our school systems are not doing their job? I want to share with you my experience with public education in the hopes of shedding some light.

My Dad was in the Canadian Armed Forces and we moved around a lot when I was a kid. Over 13 years, I went to 3 different elementary schools and 2 high schools, in 2 provinces and 1 territory. In Canada, education is governed provincially/territorially, so every time I switched to a different school in a different province, I was forced to fit in to the curriculum and level of a new school system very quickly. It was detrimental to my ability to keep up. In six months, I went from being an “A” student in British Columbia to being a “C-” student in Ontario. The reason I wasn’t able to learn French in school was because 10th grade French in B.C. is equal to 3rd grade French in Ontario. When I asked if I could take French, the school administrators simply told me I was out of luck.

In the end, I was able to work really hard and overcome. I graduated high school with a B+/A- average, and to be honest the benefits of the life I had growing up, being able to live in so many different places and meet so many people, far outweighed the struggles I had with my education.

My point is, that the education system is not set up to be conducive to learning. As counter-intuitive as that may sound, it’s absolutely the truth as I see it. Here is a list of 10 things that I was never taught in school that I think should be on any curriculum. If you were taught any of these things at your school – that’s great! I’d love to hear about schools that are doing it right. Here’s the list:

1. How to start and run a successful business.
2. How to cope with disappointment.
3. How to love books and reading.
4. How to think for oneself and draw one’s own conclusions about things.
5. How to communicate with a spouse/partner.
6. How to manage finances and invest wisely.
7. How to speak in public.
8. How to write a business proposal.
9. How to apply for a mortgage.
10. How make wise choices when buying a car or house.

These are things that I only learned after I graduated from high school (and college). Why did I have to figure all this stuff out once I was out on my own? Doesn’t it make sense that arming our young people with this kind of information from the jump would help them to make better decisions in the long run?

What do you think – are our school systems doing their job?

Curiosity Killed the Confusion

I’ve recently come into contact with a lot of people who don’t know a whole lot about the whole social media thing. When I try to explain the stuff to them, I either get a yah, but….or just a blank stare. It’s true, there is SO much going on in this space right now that it’s hard to even know where to start or who to listen to.

A year ago, much like many other people, I barely knew what a podcast was let alone an RSS feed. I didn’t see much point in having my own blog. I would read the odd blog here and there, but I really couldn’t distinguish between what was worthwhile and what was a waste of bandwidth. I too, was confused.

The shocking part was I’d been working as a web designer since 1998. I was there when all this World Wide Web business started! I’m an oldtimer! I was an “industry professional”! How did all of this social media stuff pass me by? How come nobody told ME about it? I realized very quickly that if I didn’t get out there and learn about it I’d be left behind.

So I went to Podcamp Toronto.

For me, that was where this new world opened up. I learned about WordPress, Twitter, Talkshoe, Skype, RSS and a ton of other stuff, and realized the future of the Web. I met some great new friends who answered all my silly questions (and they still do, thanks guys!), and what I didn’t have answers for I figured out on my own. I farted around with it. I set up blogs and broke them. I mean, I really screwed them up bad, man. I made RSS feeds that didn’t work and played with them till they did. I clicked on every link I saw. Read every blog post I could, till my eyes went blurry. And I figured it out.

We have some new interns working at our office. Great bunch of guys, fresh out of college. Unfortunately the educational system always seems to be about 1 year behind the real world in what they teach, particularly when it comes to technology. The reason is that curriculum is set too far in advance. By the time they are teaching the classes, the technology has already changed. This happened back in ’98 when I graduated from my college Multimedia programme. We were focused mainly on CD-ROM development. We had only ONE DAY of HTML coding, using Notepad and Netscape version 4.7 because our school computers had not been upgraded to the new version 5.0 yet. We had a couple of in-class demos from some company we’d never heard of called Macromedia, showing us these new tools called Flash and Dreamweaver, but we really didn’t see any practical use for them at the time.

Within weeks of graduating, I was hired by one of my instructors to – believe it or not – TEACH web site design! So me, with my demo versions of Dreamweaver and Flash and my “Teach Yourself HTML in 7 Days” book, set to work to learn everything I possibly could about this stuff. 3 weeks later, I successfully taught a class of 20 students how to make their own web sites and put them online. I succeeded, not because I had any special training in it, but because I was curious about how it worked. And I sat there at my computer, and frigged around with it for days, till I got it right. Thank God I had no social life back then.

I sat down with “The Interns” today and had a serious talk with them about social media, something they (remarkably) haven’t really touched on in school. Told them everything I know about it. Got them excited about it. Gave them a bunch of links and said “Just go in there, play around with this stuff, listen to these guys, they know what they are talking about, and have fun with it. Explore it. Get curious about it. This is going to be your career.”

There is no magic tool that is going to make you an expert about the Web or about social media. All you need is a computer, a web connection and a browser…and extreme curiosity. Oh, and lots of coffee.

Oh, and by the way? If you want to figure out what all this social media stuff is about, click on some of the links you see in this post. That’s a GREAT start.