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

Connectedness

The other day there I was invited by Twitter ( Josie Fraser ) and by Gmail chat ( Mark Van Harmelen ) to join the George Siemens keynote at the 2008 Emerge Conference which as I understood had Slideshare notes ( gone down ?  )

Stephen Downes comments on the ‘inward’ nature of Twitter fish bowls and I have to agree with him. Which herd ? is also a good point.

What struck me was that across the blogsphere and micro-blogosphere there is a sense of anxiousness as to the continued foray into cross-polination of inclusion permission. Psycho-geographics of participation as Josie . Nice term !

Almost as good as ‘Architectures of Participation ‘ that Kim and I tossed around with NMC and CogDog last year.

The session was interesting but mostly from a voyeurs perspective. Talk, question, answer, talk. Lots of tools and nowhere to go. I’m kind of getting the connectivism message but it’s seeming a little black and white of late….is it just me or do we need some colour in the slides ? I’m still not convinced that a staggered head does much for the future identity drillers.

Strange…..I watched the bridge between Twitter and the event on parallel screens. It’s interesting seeing the timing dynamics between the presentation chat, Twitter and the larger > video as each stage has it’s own masters and magicians. All in all well worth the 30 min drop by.

I’ve been following this participation idea through a lot with the FLNW crowd and exploring things myself a bit however, I’m pretty well content with the dynamics of openess as a political and participatory empowerment process…….. through which ‘permission’ is often not granted but almost always dynamically generated for reason.

Take for instance my up coming presentation at the Western Institute, TAFE NSW CSHT&R Faculty Forum where I’ve forcibly re-morphed ‘Technology In Delivery’ to ‘Technology in [Delivery] Teaching & Learning. CogDog threw in his tidied desktop and lucychili let me have her ’spam’ – penguins and all.

Thanks guys…..desktops have changed so why are we still using IE6 in TAFE ?

Maybe that was my desktop Macs. confuse and amaze me.

If your a Vista refugee you’ll be able to see things in ppsx. – erk. Failing that download the ppt. or if inclined to chase the pdf. around.

So where’s the learner ? Chasing their own technology……… that we choose to shut out of our organisations ? Perhaps the heavy hand of connected[delivery]ness is really an over simplified equation. Danah must be right…it’s ‘their’ technology right…wrong…..we can plan parties using email too you know. Bah !

Let them have rock n’ roll. Sure there were fatalities but none more so than self-absorbed conservatives claiming it was work of the devil only to fall prey to it’s social evil.

Like my Twitter feed in this blog/site.

Blocked but not silent in spaces where once Twitter’s feared to mention the expletive.

All in all a good day. At least now you know how much it will cost to hire me.