Your Personal Support Network

IMG_0751What is a Personal Support Network (PSN) and why is it important? We often hear people refer to their PLN – their Personal Learning Network. Less frequently mentioned, but at least of equal importance, one’s PSN is crucial for success, especially if radical changes have to be made.

A person’s PSN comprises any or all of the following:

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25 ways to make yourself unpopular: #11 Ask questions

It’s a very sad thing, I think, but one thing I have discovered is that if you ask questions, or at least the wrong type of questions, that’s a sure-fire way of attracting opprobrium. A strong word to use, perhaps, but there is little doubt in my mind that daring to question the current conventional wisdom is indeed often regarded as shameful, and usually indicative of not having fully understood the situation.

For example, a lot of people think that one device per child is a good thing to aim for. It certainly sounds admirable, especially in the context of wanting to reduce the digital divide. But when it comes to making purchasing decisions in a school, is it the most sensible or desirable target to aim for? The questions I would ask here are:

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DIY: A day in the ICT life

Many ICT strategy documents include a section called "A day in the life". The idea of this is to bring the vision to life in a way that people can relate to, by describing what it will be like in practice. The trouble is, many of these attempts at descriptive prose are completely useless. They are often boring to read, and usually either pedestrian, unrealistic or like a scene from Star Trek.
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Learning Platforms: 2 Resources and a Conference

One of the things we tend to forget when it comes to major upheavals – such as, in Britain, the so-called “bonfire of the quangoes”, which has seen the disbandment of Becta, Qualifications & Curriculum Development Agency and the Training & Development Agency – is a fundamental law of nature, namely Nature abhors a vacuum.
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25 ways to make yourself unpopular: #9 Always express an opinion

Here’s a quick quiz:

Leaders and Managers are supposed to be decisive, right?

a) Yes.

b) No.

c) Not sure.

OK, that’s a light-hearted opening but there’s a serious point to be made. It’s generally thought that the more decisive a leader is, the better. But is it possible for a leader to be too decisive?

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DIY: Carrying out an ICT health check

It’s always useful to carry out what I call an ICT health check. It’s like a medical health check: rather than wait for symptoms of disease to manifest themselves, it is far better to be proactive and have a “once over” every so often, say once a year. We rarely do, of course. Another analogy might be farmers’ footing, the practice whereby a farmer will walk around the farm every day to make sure no fences have blown down or anything like that. In short, the idea of a health check is to nip any potential problems in the bud. So what should an ICT health check look like?
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25 ways to make yourself unpopular: #8 Do not do things properly

You’re probably familiar with the saying “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly”, and its cousin, “If you want a job doing, do it yourself”. Each has a certain intuitive appeal and each, in a leadership/management situation especially, is utterly untenable.
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Technology in the media

I'm interested in how technology is used in the media, and think that in many respects the media is more innovative than schools when it comes to using the technology. I think it would be interesting to explore this, and perhaps a good way of starting off would be to join an online discussion this evening with Tony Johnston of the Press Association.
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25 ways to make yourself unpopular: #7 Do things properly

After a hiatus born of the Christmas holidays, followed by a week of intensive conference activity and then a desperate (and not entirely successful) attempt to catch up, this series is back! Thanks for your patience during its temporary absence.

Doing things properly is what I like to think of as “making haste slowly”. We live in an age where everything is expected to be decided upon, and then executed, extremely quickly. The problem is that without getting the detail sorted out in the beginning, the work can actually take longer as incorrect assumptions have to be confronted and corrected.

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