Trust Is Earned

More expressions of anxiety here ……..till they delete the space.

You(r) Tube

Finally DET NSW has relented.

Announcement received a short while ago;

Dear Colleagues,

I’m pleased to announce that after careful consideration from today the website YouTube will be available within the department for all staff.

YouTube is full of excellent teaching resources. And with YouTube now part of Google it has much stronger safe search features which we have been able to enable within the department.

I’m sure staff will use the YouTube resources in an appropriate manner consistent with our acceptable usage policy. This is the first step in making other internet resources available to you and your students in a safe manner.

With my best regards,

Michael Coutts-Trotter
DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
MANAGING DIRECTOR OF TAFE NSW
26 June 2009

We are adults after all.

The Paradox of It All

 me:  hi
speaking with Bill about taking things forward into a sponsored scholarship Masters
 Robyn:  cool
thesis?
 me:  yes
Doctorate eventually
just need to get started and make it a working venture that pays
 Robyn:  cool
  Robyn:  need to fly back later
 me:  ok
 Sent at 11:58 AM on Friday
 Robyn:  http://techticker.net/2009/04/17/sydney-educators-networking-group/
 Sent at 2:48 PM on Friday
 me:  ACCESS DENIED
Access to the requested URL has been denied in accordance with #### Computer and Communications Device Usage Policy CEPG1005
If you need access to this website for business purposes please raise a System Access Request.
Please call the Service Desk on ######for further details.
Category: “Humor/Jokes”
check out the category !!!!!!!
lol……very worth blogging about !
 Sent at 2:54 PM on Friday
 Robyn:  good grief
must be the ticker part
 me:  lol
either that or I’m in the completely wrong workplace…

Poopie Pant Brigade

[ image : nothingful ]

Two things always fascinate me with working with others, most expecially in large organisations.

The silent white whisper and the put-you-down humour antics.

The first is a well known and highly refined skill of switching between normal office conversation to a barely audible whisper primarily reserved for bitching, gossip mongering and personal, facile and juvenile innuendos.

The second skill of put-you-down humour antics requires a great deal of pyshcological bullying experience or a set of ice blue eyes and pyscho-curly hair to match. Generally the second attribute is reserved for face-to-face encounters, usually ( consequentially ) in the presence of others and often reserved for the victim in an ongoing and derogatory manner befitting school yard tit-for-tat ….mainly tat.

The silent white whisper skill requires the user and the receiver to “collaborate”….thick as thieves in on a supposed joke, piece of information swap or just plain downright bitch antics. It can also be a phone conversation where the receiver and sender use instant messaging to alert each other of the incoming call and using the volume feature on the phone turned up on the microphone end and down on the speaker end to keep a continuous flow of trite rolling from one end to the other.

The put-down humour however is less planned and more advantageous….barbed shit-canning, fun-poking, derogatory and stand-over by nature. Some say the attribute owes it’s origons to cultural under-development however I’m of the opinion that it is a highly refined cross-border osmotic range of behaviours usually reserved for the infirm, mentally ill, insecure or for juvenile-trapped-adults-with-poopy-pants.

Either /or both traits and skills are little more than a entry point for an unhealthy workplace. Both human attributes are easily defined as offensive and inconsiderate.

If you value either you need your head read and failing that please consider pushing your own vaporiser key into the slot for activation.

Have a lovely day

Uncontrolled Versions

After years of hunting around for it I finally located the very form which has served as a metaphor in many a public presentation around the traps over the years.

The story goes that whilst working with CLI a number of years ago my then boss at the time had provided me with absolutely very little to persuade me that sitting motionless behind a a molded plastic screen would further advance my career any more than it did sitting motionless on the other side of Australia.

After all, I’d up-rooted my family and moved to NSW to extend my career not kill it and here I found myself sitting in the dead-centre ( no pun intended ) at the Centre for Learning Innovation, TAFE NSW.

Lo and behold Leigh Blackall turns up and in front of 40 people in the boardroom proceeded to convince at least 50% of those present to go forth and be anything beyond an unthinking auto-moton.

To this day I’ll never forget the feeling that it gave me to receive news that if I wished to push something as simple as using del.icio.us to network bookmarks for research purposes that I’d have to fill in a request for innovation form and submit that for approval.

Heaven forbid…….I’m sure my inability to digest such inane bureaucracy got the better of me and to the horror of some I jumped ship after 5 long winded months where I got to update TALO more than my own blog site.

Ah well….I learned that innovation is not a granted request…rather a ground swell of initiative that follows it’s own sweet path and more often than not does not fit neatly into boxes. Perhaps next week I’ll find some more un-thinking examples for us to reflect on and to move away from…..