Reason 543 Why You MUST Stop Site Blocking: Your Employees Can't Solve Their Problems On Their Own

I couldn't have put this better myself. So I won't. Here's an excellent article by Michelle Martin's The Bamboo Project. The link takes you to the original article which I have simply reproduced below. Of course, it's probably blocked by your institution :/

Yesterday was a typical day for me as a knowledge worker--lots of unrelated problems to solve, ranging from troubleshooting an issue with a Wordpress blog I was setting up for a client to gathering information on employment statistics for people with disabilities. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in having this kind of wide-ranging work to do. Even the specialists among us have found their job duties broadening in this tight economy.

For me, solving these problems turned out to be relatively easy. I work for myself and don't have to worry about site blocking, so was able to easily access and search the blogs, social networks, videos and forums that gave me the answers I needed. If necessary, I would also have been able to access my own networks through social media.

Unfortunately for the vast majority of front line workers at the organizations I work with, this would not have been the case. For them, many of these sites are blocked. If "blog" is in the title or URL, they can't go there. If the information is on a social network or forum, they can't visit it. Forget YouTube and its vast array of tutorials. Even many basic websites are blocked.

At the same time, their managers will complain that staff don't solve their own problems, that they aren't innovative or creative in their work. Well of course they aren't--they are denied basic access to the people and information that might actually help them get their jobs done! They are forced to rely on people within their own organizations--many of whom don't have the answer either--and on those websites the powers that be deem to be "acceptable."

When I do trainings and presentations, participants will frequently ask me how I "know so much." It's simple. No one is blocking my access to the web, so when I have a question, I can get an answer. I'm empowered to get information and solve problems on my own. If you want people to do their best work, they need the same access.

Well said! Not only do I see the Access Denied sign almost every day at work but the screen also tells me my attempt has been logged and if I'd bothered to read the rest of the small print it's probably also been passed to HR to add to my file and someone will be talking to me about retraining and mind adjustment in due course. I am so tempted to type in some really bad site addresses and don't know how I've resisted that to date! To be fair, IT technicians do usually free sites up for me when I ask them but I'm usually in the middle of trying to get some answers and waiting for however long it takes them to do that isn't an option.

People wonder why I do so much work at home.

Why work doesn't happen at work

A brilliant talk by Jason Fried, well worth sparing 15 mins of your busy time at work to watch!

There are 9 million bicycles in Bejing

I was never particularly brilliant at Geography, which probably explains why I often ask "Where am I?" but that's another topic, but I did spend many hours with a small paperback Atlas, especially those little maps of the world where the sizes of the countries were changed to reflect their population, fridges per person or whatever.

I'm still fascinated by statistics and maps, though, and The CIA World Factbook is one of those sites I can wander around for ages. You learn that there are more girls than boys in Ukraine, for example, which may explain why there always seem to be a lot on stage in most of their Eurovision entries. And there's not a lot going on in the phosphate mines on Christmas Island these days but no doubt many of its 1,402 population will be enjoying a vaguely palindromic Christmas Island Christmas soon, knowing that no other country can do that.

Back in the 1990s the data was available in a huge workbook with hundreds of sheets and that was a great tool to use in Excel classes. Now it's all web page stuff and not so easy to play with. However, it's still got a massive amount of well-displayed, and reliable, data which is updated every two weeks or so. The whole shooting match can be downloaded too, free, which is nice when the internet breaks down in class and you need to give students some research to do. With so much data available, thinking up some questions to keep them interested shouldn't take long - and there are maps galore too.

You might also have a giggle at the Kids' page which includes the classic line "CIA employees gather intelligence (or information) in a variety of ways, not just by “spying” like you see in the movies or on TV (though we do some of that, too).

Good ideés

The talented people at Ideé Labs have added some new tools to their set. You may know about Multicolour Search Lab, which will find images matching whatever colours you choose, and TinEye, which will locate where duplicates of an image (maybe that photo of you when you were 2?!!) have been used (with or probably without your approval) on a web page somewhere.

The new ones (to me, at any rate) are the Visual Search Lab, where you enter tags and get pictures displaying that particular combination, and BYO Image Search Lab which finds images similar to the one you provide.

Whatever you may be teaching or training people to do, I am sure you'll be able to find a way to sneak one of these into a lesson. Or stick a collage on the wall, for no other reason than it's about time those old posters were binned. (But that's the subject of another article to follow!)

Naughty but nice and a lot quicker

Yes, I know I should have done them in August. But I didn't and I've just spent most of the day knocking out 10 schemes of work and a slightly ridiculous-sounding 300 lesson plans. It was blowing a gale outside and raining so that helped keep me indoors.

If you do the sums that's nearly 700 pages. Now, I can type pretty quickly but that's beyond even my old PA's capabilities in a single day. Luckily, there's the new version of my Scheme of Work and Lesson Plan tool which made the whole job a lot easier. Still clunky, but it does the job. (I'm hoping a nice young chap called Steve will help with a web version soon!)

You fill in all the bits and pieces related to the programme and lessons on one spreadsheet. Then some nice formulae copy the text into the right places on either a Scheme of Work sheet or to the appropriate one of 30 Lesson Plan sheets. Those sheets are set up to look reasonably good when printed on A4 and I can now run off whichever items I need as and when required.

In reality I usually find the notes I scrawl on the back of an envelope in the car a few minutes before the lesson starts are what I actually do but on occasions like next week, when someone is likely to come and watch the proceedings I'd better look a bit more organised.

Of course, if you happen to work for one of those institutions that say "You'll be downgraded if you don't use the standard institutional form" or it's on the wrong colour paper, even, in one place I've heard about  ". . . using anything other than Arial size 11" then you, like me will be very naughty. But it is nice and a lot quicker.

I've added a sample you can use to the More page of the webtools site if you're also running a bit late with this task.

Binging - it simply neither looks nor sounds right

It's amazing to watch students searching on the web these days. I nearly typed googling but that doesn't actually describe what they do . . .

You see at one of the places I lecture the IT technicians have made Internet Explorer the only browser they can use and left all the Microsoft defaults in place. That means the search box is for Bing. But that doesn't seem to affect students because as soon as you ask them to do anything they type google into the address bar anyway which produces a list of sites from which they choose google.co.uk and then, finally, type what they want to know about in the box. (In fact, they'd probably do this anyway even if the technicians did change the deafult search tool to Google.)

If we had Chrome then they could just type the search term in the address bar and they'd save a lot of time. I did ask why some of them did the long-winded thing and thought it might have been because they all now used Chrome at home but no, they just seem to have got into the habit and some didn't even notice the Bing box

I suppose that instead of googling we might have been talking of students binging. Hmm. I guess now I understand wht that never took off.

Facebook for teaching and learning?

This is a reply I gave to a question on the excellent JISC Curriculum Champions list today which I thought may be of wider interest.

I've been experimenting with Facebook pages (as well as lots more!) over the years. In one institution that I'm associated with these have only been accessible on phones or via proxy browsers in class so of little use there but, after almost zero activity of value for two years, I have found a remarkable increase in the last few months by students and colleagues from home and discussions, sharing of thoughts, constructive comments and links to pretty relevant resources surprisingly (to me!) unlittered with rubbish or 'I'm just getting Luke to make me a sandwich' stuff which they now seem to reserve for their own personal pages.

I won't pretend that anything marvellous is happening but it's a familiar, dead easy to use environment and the new input each week has been something I have been able to refer to and expand on, or encourage more research into, in normal sessions. In particular, I've seen students helping each other with tasks and saying what they think about topics which doesn't seem to be happening much on the VLE.

In another institution access is not initially restricted and although one or two tutors have set up course or module pages none seem to have had much impact. It really does still seem to be something mostly used out of the classroom. This place has installed a control mechanism that enables tutors to monitor students' screens from a staff pc and as purely social use gets their access pretty smartly cut there have been quite a few mistakes as it was difficult to distinguish a personal page from an 'approved' one! I guess the topic (project management) hasn't lent itself to as much interest in research and sharing there as the other (web design) where there are links and visual interest a-plenty.

What does appear to be working well are pages set up in some Work Based Learning sectors I've been involved with. All the participants are adults and spread out across the planet, occasionally meeting for practical workshops. The simplicity of creating photo albums, for example, has enabled people who I know have pretty low ICT 'Office-type' skills to share examples of what they've done at these workshops. Discussions do have regular and generally organised input and a little direction from tutors which helps a lot. The main purpose of the pages was initially just to promote an organisation's events and activities and the inclusion now of nice comments, images and links to resources has had the pleasant effect of enhancing its image and their workshops.

There's nothing being done here that couldn't be done using other applications but Facebook just kinda works for many. I certainly wouldn't describe any of this as particularly significant, however, as there are lots of new tools around and coming up which enable more efficient and manageable delivery of course materials and interaction which will, I feel, be ultimately be preferred to facebook (unless fb develops its own app further in that direction!). In particular the advent of sites people can contribute to (and tutors edit) simply and the marvellous RSS feeds from tutors, students and authoritative source blogs will make a big difference to life in the classroom. Twitter is also proving to be an excellent tool for finding and sharing really up-to-the-minute ideas and resources and, indeed, many of the most valuable posts of those facebook pages were, in fact, auto feeds from Twitterfeed or similar!

Lastly, here's a video I found of a recent discussion in the States that you may get colleagues talking too. Some odd spelling in the comments - not mine, I should add!