Imagine how things were different a couple of hundred years ago…

You live in a community which is of a size that allows you to know most of the people in the community, at least well enough to know the faces. Some you know better, be it through your vocation or via being a consumer from the local businesses: your butcher, your dry goods store, the blacksmith, the carpenter.

You probably were born within a mile or two of where you live. Your children are within a few minutes’ walk even as adults. The relationships you build and maintain may last generations.

Outside your own town, you are more or less aware of what is going on elsewhere depending upon how determined you are to learn about the world outside. Resources are available, but they are meager and only as reliable in their reporting on the world as the folks who created the stories are.

If you knew people in other places, you could write letters to them, and such correspondence, if it involved people well-distant from you, could take weeks to complete a single communications cycle of you writing, your friend answering.

The limitation of the times is obvious: people were members of a tribe whose population was determined geographically. Any other affiliations were also likely to be ones which existed locally.

Looking at today’s communications capabilities, the huge difference is in the number of people you can reach instantly.

How that seems to play out, now that we are in the midst of the explosion of tools we have at our fingertips simply by having (or having access to) a computer or mobile device, is that we can be members of as many tribes as we choose to be. Not only that, but someone on the other side of the world might well find you and invite you into his or her tribe, a group you never knew existed!

Today, any interest under the sun is one which, by virtue of sheer volume of people connected, is likely to be a passion for other people…and they want to be connected to each other and share their passion. People want to know others who share a unique talent, or an illness, or are relatives of the same famous person from history.

People are grouping themselves today without regard to geography or political boundary, but purely based upon shared interest.

The implications are revealed only partially to this point, but even this early in the game, it is clear they are world-changing, and probably world-rearranging.

There is now an entire virtual planet which exists solely in the minds of the contributors. It is possible–no, easy!–to find new friends anywhere on the globe. This doesn’t just build new nodes on the human-connection network. It also brings a far-greater transparency to what is going on all over the planet.

The recent elections in Iran and the resulting unrest offer great and timely examples. Such brutal treatment of a populace may well have been unknown for weeks or months in days past. Today, word got out within minutes of the events taking place.

Such instantaneous delivery of information is a big problem for the iron-fisted leaders of some countries. Eventually, it will lead to their extinction. Likewise, it is a great flattener of societies. No longer is it just the special few who hold certain knowledge. Anyone with the determination and search skills can find someone willing to share what once were secrets of the guild or the priesthood or the royals.

For anyone who loves to learn, the riches of today are almost embarrassing. In my own case, I can easily spend hours at the computer just wandering the virtual hallways of the largest institution of learning there is. One minute I’ll be reading a blog written by a lady who home-schools her kids. Next, an article about a sports team I follow, then a scholarly article on how humankind can be more effective by recreating the very community structure we once had.

Sometimes, I may have a specific intent when I turn on the computer. So, the hours may well be dedicated to a single topic and the offshoots which logically follow. My job search is the obvious example.

The point, though, is that the choices are, for all intents and purposes, infinite. It raises a perfectly parallel question to the one I ask myself quite often: how would I be different if the limitations I imagine were only in my head?

We have reached that point, the place where limitations artificially imposed on people are falling away by the day. It is a time when anyone who can finagle access can change the world…and many thousands are doing so, even as billions are listening, and watching, and reading.

Two hundred years ago, a comparative handful ran the world, and they did so with little regard for the whole of humanity. Now, the tiller has a billion hands on it. This vast ship may be difficult to maneuver, but with billions working at it, it will change direction. The beauty of it is not in how well we do, but that we all have a say. It is crowdsourcing scaled to include us all.

Rick Hamrick

Rick Hamrick is a Sufi mystic masquerading as a corporate IT manager-in-waiting. He is also the OFG, a proud PV, father of four marvelously creative and powerful daughters, and second banana to his wife, author Julia Rogers Hamrick.

Image credits: Salida Regional Library, and New York Talk Exchange

We know there are different ways you visit with us these days, but today, E komo mai as we say in Hawai‘i, come inside.

Joyful Jubilant Learning has a brand new look, and we would love to know how you like it!

Dandelion Fireworks on Flickr by Aussiegall

We will continue to move in and get things completely sorted out over the weekend, but we know that we are already “click friendly” and we would love to see you too. So come visit, would you?

A special note of appreciation to Tim Milburn for our new art, and to Jesse Petersen for his WordPress wizardry, for we are really Stylin’ now!

Yes, that’s me, doing my hula dance of joy in the corner :)

Rosa Say, JJL Managing Editor

Telephone conversation overheard in the Say house: “Quiet 4th of July for us this year. We had lost Rosa to something she calls JJL the last couple of days, but she seems to be coming back now…”

My grandfather, Otto Boyken

It’s the third of July, which would have been my grandfather’s 106th birthday. It’s been over forty years since he was here to celebrate with us because he was taken by Alzheimer’s before it was even known as Alzheimer’s. Of course, since he died when I was just 10 months old, I never had a chance to get to know him, or to tell him … well, anything at all.

This month’s theme is Communication, and while I’m not suggesting you go out to find a Ouija board, or sign up for a seance, I wanted to take a moment to think about all the important things you can–and should–say between generations. Preferably while we’re all on the same plane of existence.

How things used to be.

One of the most fascinating things that older generations can tell us is what the world used to be like. Did you watch black and white movies as a child and think that that’s how the world really WAS? Were you shocked the first time you learned that people hadn’t always had electricity? Or that the Ingalls family on Little House on the Prairie didn’t have running water? There’s a line in one of my favorite books that says (I’m paraphrasing), “If you don’t know where you’ve been, you can’t know where you’re going.” I’m not suggesting that we continually tell our children that old story about having to trudge to school, barefoot, in the snow, uphill (both ways) to impress on them how hard things used to be and how easy they have it now. But it IS important for them to get an idea of how much life has changed.

Where things are going.

Quick–can you program your digital clocks? Can your parents? Do they have a VCR continually blinking 12:00 because they don’t know how to change the time? Do you find yourself trying to explain what the Internet is and why they should care about Twitter? Or why you need to have your cellphone with you all the time? Do you get these explanations from your grandkids? Just as important as it is to know where you, your family, your history came from, it’s necessary to know where you’re going. Having a vision of what the future is going to be and sharing it with the people who tie you to the past is one of life’s true pleasures. It’s like telling the folks in the “Old Country” about the brave new world you’re heading toward–whether they come or not, they’re going to want to hear about its wonders.

The belief that the past and future are intertwined.

Just ask Albert Einstein–the past, present, and future are all connected. We may be living in the present moment, but the past and present are right there, where we can almost touch them, and nothing makes this more obvious than a multi-generational family gathering when you see how everybody on Dad’s side has the same nose, or hear the same laugh coming from opposite corners of the room. Genetics are powerful connectors, but the connections are stronger than that. The reasons that drew your grandparents to live where they live, the attraction that drew your parents together, the causes that pulled you into your line of work … there’s a huge, tangling web that ties us all together, and the only way to identify the causes is to talk about them, share the stories.

Love.

Naturally, among families, this should be the number one thing to pass along. It doesn’t matter if you fight all the time, or if you never see each other, but do make sure the people in your life know how much they mean to you. You don’t have to get all mushy about it, and you don’t even have to use the “L” word, but … make their favorite meal. Go out of your way to say hello. Drop them a card. Because time can be short.

I’ll never have the chance to ask my grandfather to tell me why he came to America, or what it was like living through the Great Depression. I can’t get embarrassing stories about my father when he was a kid, and I’ve never seen the famous “twinkle” in his eye, or heard him surrounded by roars of laughter as he lit up a party. But, somehow, knowing that he WOULD have told me all those things, that he would happily have let me balance on his knee and charm him with my granddaughterly smile, reassures me that communication is important.

Like the book said, you have to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going … and a huge part of that is making sure the stories get told. Ask your grandparents to tell you stories about when they were younger, if you’re lucky enough to have them to ask. Share the occasional anecdote with your kids. It doesn’t matter what’s new in technology, or what the latest music craze is–the things that make us family, that make us human don’t change–it’s just a lesson that needs to be learned anew every generation.

Deb Boyken

Deb Boyken spends an inordinate amount of her free time baking, knitting, spinning yarn, reading, and playing with her dog, but mostly, let’s not forget, she writes. She writes about knitting at www.knittingscholar.com, writes about writing and freelancing at www.punctualityrules.com, and writes about more or less everything else at www.chappysmom.com.

Are you getting even a tiny bit annoyed at all the hype you hear these days about “social media?”

The learner in me enjoys most of the hype (though I do chuckle over how many self-proclaimed social media experts there are now.) A reasonable dose of the more popular hype will steer me in the right direction: Think of ‘hype’ as lessons-learned evangelism and it becomes more appealing.

There definitely is Connection Appeal

Tools like Twitter [we have a JJL Twitter feed] and apps like Flickr [we have a JJL Flickr group] have proved to be both fun and useful to us here at JJL. They boost our community connections, and they can provide us with new learning opportunities we might not jump to completely on our own.

Learners aren’t necessarily early adopters, but we do tend to be quick on the uptake, and earlier versus later on the adoption time line. Give yourself a high-five, for lifelong learners are braver, and will confidently take more risks.

We also know it can be wiser to be a “right-time-for-me” adopter, and we can be more patient with our learning. We have learned to pursue balance and focus with our intention and attention. I recently revisited this on Talking Story within my Alaka‘i coaching [Alaka‘i is the Hawaiian value of leadership]: The 2 C’s of Technology and Early Adoption.

I give you that link for future reference, and you need not click away to read that now… I will quickly tell you that one of those C’s is competency, and the other is communication, and this is the money quote:

“From what I see, technology is getting us to talk to each other more, not less, and it’s encouraging us to welcome more people into the conversation.”

Our July Focus: Communicating as Learners

If you’ve read Joyful Jubilant Learning for any amount of time at all, or even if you’ve just arrived and only skimmed over our sidebars or archives, you will know that we don’t get into much how-to here: We offer no curriculum listings, and don’t even have content categories: Our categories are features [like Rapid Fire Learning] or are author indexes, because we collaborate with each other in the learning process, and to support each other as learner.

In other words, of those two C’s, we largely leave the Competency to you.

Where we love intersecting with your learning, and seek to support you as we invite you to get involved with our Ho‘ohana community, is most emphatically with that second C of Communication.

And we seek to be timely and relevant to you.

Which brings us to the month of July and our theme. The way we sense current trends is that social media hype (and its current ilk) has tremendously accelerated learning attention on the way we can most effectively communicate with each other. As we saw just this past week when headlines stated, “Michael Jackson tragedy crashes the internet!” our defaults may have radically changed too.

Communication is a HUGE subject

There are so many ways we communicate! This was a quick list of inclusions we’d collected in an informal talk-story within our JJL Hui one day:

Photo Credit: Junior by notmpres on Flickr

• Letters, cards and hand-written notes
• Picking up the phone / Skype
• Twitter / microblogging
• Tumblr / lifestreaming
• E-mail
• Smart phones / Texting
• IM-ing and Chat
• Comment box conversations
• Visual communication / sharing photographs
• Using voice / understanding the difference it makes
• Video
• Expressing ideas by being a Guest Author
• Changing lives by writing a book/ and by speaking about it
• Creating niche and global community by blogging
• Creating team / project management
• Communication with employees / colleagues at work
• Keeping in touch when you work on your own
• Communicating to build / maintain community
• Speech presentation / different speaking habits
• Connecting with customers / prospects / those making a complaint
• Listening to understand / listening to respond better
• Listening for voices / listening for other sounds
• Body language
• Talking story (my personal favorite… had to get it in here!)
• Telling stories / signature story (David likes it too.)

We are quite sure that you can instantly add to our list with more, and if you have an immediate thought, do jot it down in the comments!

There is much we can explore this month, and I have a feeling that July is going to sprout some wings and simply fly by! Will we possibly have enough days on the calendar for the sharing we can do?

You’re a Communicator and a Learner

And no megaphones are needed here :-)

Consider reserving a posting date on our editorial calendar this month: Lead a joyful conversation here with your thoughts, and let’s communicate. Contact me via our Community Mailbox and I will help you get started.

Rosa Say, JJL Managing Editor

Has our mid-year check given you more butterflies?

Has it given you more stress, or anxiety about your goals?

Or has it helped to know that you aren’t alone, and the best laid plans do go awry… we can simply make a new agreement with ourselves and move on, move better.

Or maybe you’ve been one who has read different conversations here, and thought to yourself, “This is so cool, I think I’ve gotten a lot more done than I first thought!” (And by the way, if you haven’t tried it yet, that is precisely the magic of Rapid Fire Learning.)

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re probably up in arms, deep in the throes of the Battle of the Learner and Over-Achiever. At ease! (Please?) Pull up a chair, and let’s take a break.

In the Learner’s Camp

We talk about learning with a lot of warm and fuzzies here at Joyful Jubilant Learning, yet truth is, ‘Ike loa [the Hawaiian, MWA value of lifelong learning] if you have it, tends to be about relentless learning which just doesn’t let us off the hook at times —times we should honestly just chill.

If it makes you feel any better, we who value ‘Ike loa just can’t help ourselves. Believe me, I know, for I have a severe case of this affliction.

“You love to learn. The subject matter that interests you most will be determined by your other themes and experiences, but whatever the subject, you will always be drawn to the process of learning. The process, more than the content or the result, is especially exciting for you. You are energized by the steady and deliberate journey from ignorance to competence. The thrill of the first few facts, the early efforts to recite or practice what you have learned, the growing confidence of a skill mastered – this is the process that excites you.”

—Gallup with me: An Appreciation for Learning

In the Achiever’s Camp

Achievers can’t help themselves either. It’s a Kūlia i ka nu‘u kind of thing [the Hawaiian, MWA value of achievement and excellence.]

“Achiever describes a constant need for achievement. You feel as if every day starts at zero. By the end of the day you must achieve something tangible in order to feel good about yourself. And by ‘every day’ you mean every single day – workdays, weekends, vacations. No matter now much you may feel you deserve a day of rest, if the day passes without some form of achievement, no matter how small, you feel dissatisfied. You have an internal fire burning inside you… Your relentless need for achievement might not be logical. It might not even be focused. But it will always be with you.”

—StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath

As Yoda might say, “The force is with you.”

As everyone else in your family might say, well, all they do now is shake their heads in recognition and groan. Not going to the beach this weekend, huh.

And back in the General’s tent, there’s a Sandbox

Here’s something I have learned about learning: A double-whammy tip I want to share with you in winning this Battle of the Learner and Over-Achiever —who as you’ve surmised, are actually waging the same battle in the War of Annual Goal-Setting. Learning and achieving is this partnership of what fascinates you (learning, or ‘Ike loa) and what drives you (achievement, or Kūlia i ka nu‘u).

At ease, don’t reach for that rifle again! You haven’t heard the double whammy tip yet!

• Less is More

• Replace, Don’t Add

Both are reasonable, and completely useful. As Dwayne coached us, they help us “engage around specifics.” (Such a great phrase Dwayne; a keeper.) They also teach us the flexibility that Rick wrote about, and I am quite sure that both Karen and Kirsten would agree these tips help us with that whole kindness-to-self effort we all found so appealing.

“Less is More” is wisdom we all have heard often, but chances are we need to “get real” and put it into practice —it’s the stuff about goals being realistic. Some people are really good at this, and you might be too, however if you’re even a tiny bit like me, your left brain keeps screaming “Less is More!” hysterically, but your right brain has somehow gone deaf and continues to pile on with the reckless abandon of “creative interpretation.”

Not to mention the fact that the world conspires these days: Remember this? “[Daniel] Pink says we have entered the Conceptual Age, where “right-brainers will rule the future.”

I said to leave those rifles alone!

This is where “Replace, Don’t Add” can be a fabulous mantra. Go ahead and be right-brained or whole-minded, but build yourself a sandbox to play in:

A sandbox only holds so many toys before they start to get in the way of your castle-building. The sand molds you wanted to do your final flourishes with end up getting buried under one of your massive towers —unless you’d left those sand molds out of the box and on the lawn until you needed them. Now you can step out of the sand box for a moment, trot over to get them, and leave behind the buckets, picks and shovels you’d been using.

Replace is so much smarter.

These Battle Lines are hereby Drawn

So guess what? I’m letting all us off the hook and calling a truce! No cross-fire from the Learners’ or Achievers’ bunkers: We’re all going to play in the General’s sandbox (—he’s out somewhere on reconnaissance dying to know about our July Theme.)

In the spirit of this “Less is More” coaching, there will be no more June postings here at Joyful Jubilant Learning. Let’s chill. (Hear those sighs of relief? They’re from our JJL Advisory Board. Told you; you’re not alone.)

If you do have some time, participate in Rapid Fire Learning or another conversation already in progress here. Otherwise, I shall expect that you are finishing up with your own mid-year assessment, and thinking about that strategy to replace a January-June target with something better that will make these next months from July through December totally joyful for the learner in you.

We are the Ho‘ohana Community, and we’re in this together, Kākou.

See you back here on Wednesday, July 1 for a brand new theme which will help renew your energies – promise!

Plus the General will be back in his tent, and we’ve got to clear out.

~ Rosa Say …your JJL managing editor, and learning with you joyfully.
~ My JJL Index ~ My homepage ~ My book ~ My blog
~ Connect with me on LinkedIn ~ Connect with me on Twitter

It’s June 25, and at JJL, that means it’s time to rapidly fire off 5 things we’ve learned during the month. Sound like fun? It usually is, so to get the ball rolling, here are mine.

1. The rewards of fatherhood outweigh the challenges!
2. Pride is the enemy of gratitude.
3. Deep relationships rarely end, even when you think they have ended.
4. Spiritual peace depends on physical effort as much as mental effort.
5. Don’t put off your dream project – start today!

How about you? Can you quickly share 5 things you’ve learned in June? The more, the merrier!
____________________

Brad Shorr lives in the Chicago area and is president of Word Sell, Inc. He helps organizations strengthen their online presence with business blogs, content strategy, and content optimization. From time to time he writes business cartoons.

—A postscript from the Editor today, one I am sure Brad won’t mind!

—Also of distinction on the 25th this month, Hau‘oli la hanau – Happy Birthday to JJLer Virginia Beck today :-)

In March of this year I published my first book that required me to go out on “tour” (nothing fancy, I assure you), and talk to as many folks as I possibly could about its contents, and the people whose lives had touched mine in the process of writing it.   This meant two to three talks a week, to anyone who would have me, and being very “outreaching” to anyone who showed interest in any aspect of my work.

I had some personal goals for this process, which I will share below, but basically I wanted to approach this process of talking about my work first as a privilege.  Isn’t it great when anyone wants to converse with you about things you passionately believe in and care about?  

Second, I wanted to learn, like Karen Wallace, our beautiful JJL sister, some patience with myself while  I fumbled through this process.  (See Karen's post: A time to consolidate, a time to be kind). 

I wanted to be kind to myself when things didn’t go well, and to try to focus on what went right.  That meant not over-fixating on the one question I had answered badly in a Q and A, or the reference to some such thing or other that I hadn’t cited correctly.  I didn’t want those screw ups to be the things I most recalled from each talk.  I wanted to be in the pleasure of conversing with folks who wanted to talk with me about this work–learning from them, most especially–and also to see how much of a friend, reliable collaborator and nurturer I could be to myself. 

This was a real challenge, having a deeply, passionately ingrained habit of self-critique and judgment towards myself—a harsh governess’s voice, I realized.  The voice I used internally, with myself, was uncompassionate and demanding, spoken in a tone I would never, ever direct towards another living being, blade of grass, tree or compost pile.  So why use that harsh voice with myself?  Why not try to be kind, and focus on enjoying the process?

How’d I do on my goals?

•    I learned a huge amount about talking to different groups and kinds of folks.  To some extent every group is like improv.  It helps me to arrive early, mix it up with people for about 45 minutes or an hour before I start a talk, and get a feel for what individuals are interested in.  Because education is a topic so many people feel involved in, and have personal experience with, it is especially important to get a feel for the group.  I am a relational speaker—I like people to talk with me and to each other rather than for me to talk at them, and I can do this better when I have a sense of who people are and what draws them to the gathering or my book.

•    I need to be well-prepared.  I am not my own best friend if I am second guessing myself about whether I’ve got the right slide deck, thought through my remarks enough, got things buttoned down.  As soon as I’ve convinced myself that I’ve “done my thing”—proven my own competence to myself–I loosen up, the whole process becomes easy, I start listening fully, and having fun.  I had fun!

  •    I did use a kind of mental discipline—Buddha mind and mindfulness practices—to not focus on everything that didn’t go well.  For the most part, that was a huge stride forward, and great training in general.  I was teaching my critical facility not to be over busy, uber dominant.

•    I had one really big screw up.  (Hey, I think we should make that the theme for a month here at JJL—telling a screw up story and what it taught us!)   But I really learned a lot from it.  I was able to mine my missteps for important learning, and become a better friend to myself.

The whole process—looking upon this book roll out as a privilege and a learning opportunity—has been like a big, dunking dip in a flowing river.  Come on in!  Talking around like this also brings lots of great folks into your life—and you wonder how they could all meet each other and learn from each other…

Which was another step in my journey.  What does what I’ve learned from this process say about the next step? The next dip?

How are you kind to yourself? 

And how do you regard your own learning as a privilege?

Kirsten Olson (www.kirstenolson.org) is a writer and educational consultant.  She is most recently the author of Wounded By School:  Recapturing the Joy In Learning and Standing Up To Old School Culture.   

The end of June.  Almost half way through the year.  The perfect moment to take stock of the progress I've made on the things I set out to do, and learn, at the start of the year.

I look through my lists, my jotted resolutions, my declarations of intent.  Things I've written, posted, shared, not least objectives I've set out here.

Hmmm.

Langage learning: making serious headway with Gaelic.

A new garden: learning how to grow fruit and vegetables, and develop a new relationship with the land, with the earth, with the food that I eat.

Work objectives: things that will contribute to my defintion of success in 2009.

Personal objectives: embracing the opportunity to learn to eat joyfully.

Oh dear, oh dear.

I've so little progress to report.  It really is the perfect opportunity to beat myself up, and set even more determined objectives for the six months to come.

Except, that's not really the point of the learner's journey, is it?

As Rosa set out so wisely in her opening post for this month's theme:

And that's what I've been learning. 

Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans (John Lennon)

Plans change.  Stuff happens.  People wake up. 

It's been a big year for me, in lots of good ways.  Other people I
know: friends, colleagues, family are going through huge changes too. 
Some unsettling, some exciting, some terrible, some wonderful.

That's the main thing I've been learning about… and it makes the rest of the plans look kind of pale by comparison.

And the other thing?  Well, I can't yet quite encapsulate what the learning is, and what it means, and how it's going to affect the way that I work, and write, and live (but I know that it will, in each of those areas and all the others too).

It's around the hero's journey, and the archetypes that we live by.

I read this book in March: The Hero Within, 6 Archetypes We Live By and have been recommending it to pretty much everyone I've spoken to since.

Here's a line I quoted from it on my Confident Writing blog: Heroes, Ripple Effects and Community

And here's another article I found a few weeks ago, from a chance link on Twitter.  It's on The Hero's Journey, by Joseph Campbell, shared on the Quality of Life Project:

And that helped me to capture the learning of the six months of the year.  Stuff happens.  Life happens.  That's how we move forward, and that's how we learn.

It seems like a pretty important lesson.

And if you are lifeworthy, you can take it.

~~~

Have you come across ideas about archetypes in your learning so far?  I'd love to hear more about any resources, books, teachers that you've come across… or indeed ways that learning about archetypes has helped to shape your own learning hero's journey.

———–

Joanna Young, author of Confident Writing, is a writing coach who helps people to realise the power of their own words.  This month her theme is breathing space. 

You'll find her most days on Twitter @joannayoung where you'll find her sharing weather reports and photos from the west coast of Scotland, quotes links and ideas on writing, and confidence, and a whole lot of other nonsense besides.

For years people have been telling me that I should be a teacher. Frankly, I always thought of myself more as a learner, but going into 2009, I wanted to try my hand at teaching to see if it was for me. The problem was finding a teaching situation. Amazingly, more by luck than by design, the perfect opportunity landed in my lap.

Having signed up for SOBCon09, the blogging convention spearheaded by Liz Strauss and (JJLer) Terry Starbucker, I was looking forward to what promised to be a spectacular learning event.

Then, about 4 weeks ahead of SOBCon, Stephen Smith reached out to me. He was scheduled to make a presentation to the group on content optimization, and his partner had been forced to drop out. He asked if I could present with him.

Suddenly a learning opportunity had become a teaching opportunity.

We put together our presentation, Writing for the Web – Inside and Out, over the course of the next few weeks. We thought it went over pretty well, so we decided to expand on the presentation and offer it for sale online.

Suddenly a content optimization teaching opportunity had become an e-commerce learning opportunity.

Stephen and I re-edited a 30-minute audio discussion, recorded a 40-minute slide show, and developed a few supporting materials to round out the training package. We then created a hub site for our content optimization training program, with Stephen handling the technical end and me creating most of the content.

SOBCon was in early May. We introduced our Writing for the Web training program in June. The whole experience was like cramming for final exams. I'm glad to have this opportunity to write about it, because doing so helps reinforce what I learned about teaching – and learning.

• I learned that teaching makes you a better learner. When you have a responsibility to inform others, you cannot take shortcuts or gloss over details. You have to know your stuff. As we were preparing our slides, Stephen and I both learned from each other, which in the end, made us far better and more thorough teachers.
• Inquisitiveness is essential for teaching as well as learning. Thinking you know everything – and we've all had teachers with that mindset – is a dangerous game. The deeper we dug into our topic, the more there was for us to learn. In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), resting on one's laurels isn't really feasible, because innovation and best practices change literally on a daily basis. When you stop learning, you stop being an effective teacher.
• Teachers must see the world through their students' eyes. One of our challenges in putting our course together was determining the degree of difficulty. How much HTML and SEO jargon was too much? Did we need to describe this or that process in three steps or six? As we mulled these details over, we began to get a much clearer picture of who our students were – very valuable indeed from both a learning and marketing perspective.
• Teachers learn from their students. The most important enhancements we made to our downloadable training program came from questions at our live SOBCon presentation. Despite our considerable efforts, we underempasized or completely missed important areas of concern. Teachers who rely totally on lectures miss the teaching benefit of classroom discussion. I imagine their lectures go stale very quickly.

Mini sales pitch. If you are interested in learning more about our training, follow this link to our Writing for the Web course descriptions. If you're looking to make your website or blog more appealing to human readers and search engines, our training will help.
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Brad Shorr lives in the Chicago area and is president of Word Sell, Inc. He helps organizations strengthen their online presence with business blogs, content strategy, and content optimization. From time to time he writes business cartoons.

Wow, it’s hard to believe 2009 is already about halfway over! Now, what did I do with that pesky “to-do” list?

Hey, if you’re like most folks, you probably started the year out with a set of things you wanted to accomplish this year. You know, books you’d like to read, new stuff you’d like to learn, places you’d like to visit – stuff like that. Well, I must admit, I generally don’t create such lists because they’re always a source of disappointment by the end of the year.

Yeah, I know; those of you out there who are *ahem* highly-organized are probably jumping up and down and screaming at the computer screen, “WHY don’t you set out some clear, definable goals, Robert!” Or something.

But that’s not to say there aren’t things I’d like to see happen! After all, what’s a life without aspirations, right? So I guess the question is, what did I have in mind for this year?

Truthfully, the things I most wanted to see happen this year were 1) to finally get paid for writing something, and 2) well, to be honest, if I could accomplish #1, I’d be a happy camper!

So how’s that goin’, you ask? Well, let’s see… here’s what’s happened so far:

1. Sold an article – To my amazement, I sold an article – and actually got paid for it! (sound of crowd cheering) Seriously, I have a photo of the check to prove it, but to tell you the truth, I’m as surprised as anybody. My friend Marcus Goodyear over at The High Calling accepted one of my articles and published it on May 31. As an added bonus, sometime in the next year or so the article will appear at the website of Christianity Today. To say I’m thrilled is an understatement!

2. Published an ebook – I’ve seriously thought about publishing an ebook for quite a while now. But until I ran across the Smashwords website, I really didn’t have a clue how to go about doing it. Anyway, just for practice I submitted a PDF book I wrote back in 2007, “Poke It With a Sharp Stick”. It’s not much, just a collection of six stories from my blog, Middle Zone Musings. But at least it was a good learning exercise. I even offered it at a “set your own price” at the Smashwords site for awhile – and made a few buck, too! But no need to look for it; it’s since been archived it.

3. Publish a “real” book – Really, the ebook thing was just practice for publishing a REAL book. (Semantics aside, I still can’t think of a book as “real” unless I can hold it in my hot little hands, flip the pages, or scrawl notes in the margin. Surely it’s not just me?) The good news on that front is, I’m nearly finished with it! What started out as a paperback book has now become THREE books: an ebook version, a paperback version, and a hardcover version enhanced with full-color photos and extra material (to add value and justify the higher cost). Hopefully it’ll be finished by the end of June – certainly in July.

One thing I’ll say about publishing a book – there’s no way to understand the hoops and loops you’re gonna have to go through unless you’ve actually, y’know, done it yourself. I’ve had to completely re-edit the darned thing at least 5 times due to some niggling little detail I learned along the way. It’s been, and will probably continue to be, one heckuva learning process!

But then again, what’s life without learning, right?

So there you have it – what’s happening, and where we are. Gee, with this accomplished in just half a year, imagine what the REST of the year might bring!

Robert Hruzek currently lives in Houston, Texas, and is usually employed as an engineering project manager. He has traveled, lived and worked in many locations within the United States and around the world.

Robert writes on the Web at Middle Zone Musings. It’s a comfortable place to have a cup of coffee, swap a few stories and share practical ideas for the real world. He doesn’t ask for much, just a bit of your brain every now and then. Why not drop by, take a load off, and relax for a spell…