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The ADHD Effect on Marriage by Melissa Orlon
What book are you reading right now?
This little shocker came from my wife. I was diagnosed as ADHD in early 2002, spent a spell on Ritalin that I considered dangerously addictive so opted for CBT instead – all privately as the NHS were clueless. ‘You’re not suicidal’ I was told. You’d probably be ADHD in the US, but not here – i.e they wouldn’t pay for it.
With ‘mental health’ an issue in the family, both sides, cousins and back through parents and probably grandparents this is a timely read at a time of crisis – in the hope that our 30th Wedding Anniversary in six weeks can be celebrated and enjoyed.
I got through ‘The ADHD Effect’ in two sittings – including note taking from page one. I shared highlights from my notes with my wife.
I am now (two days later) reading it for a second time and it’s like reading a second book – the bits I skimmed over the first time I now pick up. Such is my ‘Brian’ as I call it. Full of holes, like a cheese grater or sieve … or more chaotically like a ‘leaky dam’. Some brains work differently.
I’ll spare my notes but rest assured it rings true and has already proved useful by defusing some petty arguments, we’ve also laughed, hugged and even cried a little – which I guess augurs well.
Returning to the question though, it is rare for me ever to be reading just one book. It’s more likely that I have between four and eight on the go simultaneously. Some like ‘The ADHD Effect on Marriage’ are the physical thing, others are eBooks on Kindle while one or two will be a hardback. Topics currently include trees/woods, relief printing, coaching elite swimmers, an obscure history of the First World War and a book about the artist Fortunino Manatnia. Unless I feel driven as I have been with ‘The ADHD Effect’ I will read a chapter or two of each book then move on. I may also have two or more notebooks on the go – one for each book (unless it is fiction).
Rock clambering around Beadnell
Favourite places to explore a child, to watch the waves, to catch the light of the Longstone Lighthouse, to search for eye-catching pebbles.
More to remember about Beadnell …
Fig.1 Dunstanburgh Castle from Beadnell Bay at dusk this morning
Fig.2 The tide coming in across The Point, Beadnell at sun up.
Fig.3 Something I never knew about The Point where I played as a child.
Fig.4 The sea pushing in through fissures between the rocks and pools
Fig.5. The low cliffs, fingers of rock and pools where I scrambled.
Fig.6 A drain that intrigued me age 5, or 6 or 7. In a storm the waves came up through it.
This was my playground until the age of 11 or 12. Easter, Summer and even half-term and weekends were spent here. Just two walks forty years later and the smell of wet sand in the dunes takes me back to being a boy – easy to scrambled around the dunes when you are seven. The rocks, the different textures under foot, the mesmerising waves that approached closer along the rocks as the tide came in, the birds and occasional seal, the Longstone Lighthouse always flashing its presence in the distance.
The foghorn lulled me to sleep. The noise of waves constantly crashing on the rocks changes from the loud chatting of people before the curtain goes up, to a jet coming into land … it rumbles gently, or angrily according to its mood (and yours).
Yesterday I had the briefest of conversations with someone who had a deep Northumbrian accent that sounds like Norweigian spoken with an English accent.
Somehow had left two unfinished cups of coffee and a big of a burger on the stonewall above the rocks. I carried it for 15 minutes until I found a bin. The flotsam is different to forty years ago: red bull and a body board.
Undoing the blogging habit of a decade
For a decade I’ve settled into a blog post every morning.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve at least been forming a new habit. Whether 3.30am or 5.40am I get up and work on fiction ’til breakfast. That out of the way I can get on with the rest of the day. This leads to early nights. But am I missing much? ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here?’ No thanks.
A first from The OU – a TMA that was an audio file that came back with written comments and an audio file.
A very different beast learning a language. Both in the text and the spoken word there is lots to pick up on.
The contents of my brian
Fig. 1. A moment to reflect
This by the by was the title of a TV screenplay I submitted to the BBC – rejected otherwise you might have seen it on the box by now and I wouldn’t be sitting here.
As the round up to my final, final MA ODE module H818: The Networked Practitioner it is suggested that we prepare a timeline drawing on possible blog entries, as well as ‘appearances’ in the OpenStudio platform we’ve been using.
I’ve posted some 80 times since H818 began. I’ve posted some, I don’t know, 1000 times here since February 2010?
The surprise is to find a dozen references to H818 from 2012 and when contemplating how I got to the ideas that I delivered for H818 where these may have emerged from. This in turn takes me as far back as a visit to the Science Museum in 2010. Then all manner of things, from the launch of Martin Weller’s book ‘The Digital Scholar’ and attending seminars in Bristol on ‘curation’ and earliest indicators that I may take an MA in First World War studies having tried to write on the subject for … well, 22 years ago another failed TV play optioned by Tyne Tees Television called ‘That’s Nothing Compared to Passchendaele’ – which is what my late grandfather said to me while we watched the local news featuring a private in the Durham Light Infantry out in Saudi Arabia. He was 96 in 1992 and had joined the DLI in his teens in late 1915.
And all of this for my very, very, very last EMA ever.
And what did I just jot down
‘Word counts in an EMA are anathema to the culture of open education’
My first draft, I haven’t ever dared look, will run to anything between 6,000 and 12,000 words.
Talking of writing … never one to say never, I have committed to a week long ‘retreat’ with a dear friend and writing tutor. My goal is to work on … ‘The Angel of the North’ a story set in the era of the First World War about a woman who flies over the Western Front.
(Actually, I’ve just thought of that. She does fly with an RFC pilot/instructor … and in the final pages is about to set off to attempt to fly the Atlantic for the first time in the wrong direction. She does, as a couple of women did, impersonate a soldier to get herself into the Front Line …)
Oh boy. And I thought I was done with writing. Thought that getting 5,000 words finished was a challenge. It is, but the OU provides the parameters and schedules, the kick up the arse and the carrot that no other kind of writing has yet provided. Except for once.
Meanwhile I must get the kids to school, must walk the dog and must prepare for an online conference I madly volunteered to do a few weeks ago as if I didn’t have enough on … which will include sitting with a veteran of the Second World War this weekend, he was in the Polish Resistance during the Warsaw Uprising. I have a Sony Flip camera and digital sound recorder in my pocket determined to interview him as I did my grandfather …
Onwards to … more of the same I should think
p.s. yes, it is my ‘brian’ – the idea of the brain is so ridiculous.
Applying learning on the First World War with e-learning – some Kindle reading.
Fig.1. Applying learning on the First World War with e-learning – some Kindle reading.
I believe very much in the process of pulling apart, opening out, expanding, then editing, revising and condensing. There is an applied ‘creation process’ here – the three diamonds or Buffalo system that I sense H818 is taking us through.
Fig.2. The ‘Buffalo’ system of opening up, the compressing thinking
These days it is easy to grab and mash any content on a digital screen, but where I have a book I will, in some circumstances take pictures rather than write notes, then quickly bracket and annotate this text before filing it in an appropriate album online – for later consumption.
Regarding CC I’m afraid as the music and movie industries have already shown people will do as they please even where the copyright is bluntly stated. Academia will require and expect that everything is done by the book – the rest of the world won’t give a monkey’s … ‘we’ll’ do as we please until there’s a legal shoot up or the ‘industry’ realises that it has moved on.
Regarding eBooks, Amazon are looking at and expect to be very much at the forefront of the evolutionary of the book. Google are competing in the same space.
‘Have we reached the Napster moment in publishing?’ a senior engineer at Amazon asked.
My head, content wise, is in another place, studying First World War military history. As never before on the MAODE or subsequent OU e-learning modules, I know have content to put into these processes. For example, ‘the causes of the First World War’ might require reading of a dozen books and papers/pamphlets starting with H G Wells in 1914 and ending with books appearing on tables in Waterstones this week. Courtesy of the Internet just about anything I care to read, at a price, I can have within seconds on a smart device … or overnight courtesy of Amazon.
Whatever my practice, this content is mashed-up in my head.
If I mash it up through screen grabs, notes, sharing in social media and blogging then this is another expressing of what is going on in my head – though controlled by the parameters of the tools and platforms I use – currently a wordpress blog, SimpleMinds for mindmaps, and ‘Studio’ for layering text and images over screengrabs i.e annotations. As well as what ever Kindle gives me in the way of notes and highlights.
This kind of ‘extra corporeal’ engagement or visualization of what is going on in my head with the content gives it an life of its own and an extra dimension while also re-enforcing my own thoughts and knowledge. I’m sure that I am rattling along this learning curve at a far, far greater pace then I could have a decade or two decades ago. Patterns are more apparent. And I am spotting too many misappropriated images too. The idea that you can grab a frame and relabel it is 100 years old!
Fig.3. How I filmed the Front. Geoffrey Malins
For example, the footage from the ‘Battle of the Somme’ is often ‘grabbed’ with subsequent combatants and authors claiming these to be original photographs of their own – they must have had access to the negative. This footage, as I am very familiar with it, is repeatedly put into films and documentaries completely out of sequence.
As reference above is correct – I find ‘grabs’ from the film footage and photographs taken by Ernest Brooks who accompanies the ‘cameramen’ around the Somme in June/July 1916 constantly claimed as another person’s own photograph or belonging to their collection.
A false or alternative impression is therefore built up.
Then, across YouTube, sections of TV dramas and films are snatched and cut into a person’s own re-hashing of a different story. Harry Patch died age 111 or something – the last veteran. A tribute to him uses footage from the TV drama starring Daniel Radcliffe called ‘My Boy, George”.
Are we therefore seeing with text, stills and moving images what has been happening to music for the last decade or more – deliberate, and often illegal sampling and mashing, rehashing, exploiting of someone else’s work? If so what impact will this have on content in the future? Does too much of it start to look familiar, rather than original? Or does originality come out of this process too?
The conclusion might be that people simple sidestep the stilted, stuck, formal process of academia – where the sharing process is so desperately slow. The paper I read on use of audio and tracking in a museum I thought was reasonably current as it was published in 2008 but the technology used comes from a different era – 2003. Research done in 2006, initially submitted as a paper in 2007, published the following year.
An R&R department functioning like this would be left behind.
Knowledge must leak, must be shared sooner, and where those share a work in progress it should be commended.
Kolb’s Learning Cycle
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| From E-Learning V |
Fig.1. How we learn online. J F Vernon (2012)
Kolb’s Learning Cycle (1984) is typically expressed as a four-stage cycle of learning, in which ‘immediate or concrete experiences’ provide a basis for ‘observations and reflections’. These ‘observations and reflections’ are assimilated and distilled into ‘abstract concepts’ producing new implications for action which can be ‘actively tested’ in turn creating new experiences.
What’s going on in there?
Fig.1. Self-Portrait – early 1977 – age 15 – 6b pencil drawing on cartridge paper
Before and after …
Fig.2. Self-Portrait – early 2010 – age 49 – 6b pencil drawing on cartridge paper
But what does it tell you about what is going on in that head? This is what interests me. I am still the boy and always will be. I am the child who can remember his first day at school age 4 years and 11 months, who can remember two nursery schools before that too.
Learning Design looks like this
Gagnés events of instruction:
1. Gaining attention . The scene opener, even the preview or title sequence.
2. Informing the learner of the objective . Laying out your stall
3. Stimulating recall of prerequisite learning . Tapping into what has already been understood – creating empathy.
4. Presenting the stimulus material . Presenting the case, offering evidence that might impress or inspire, that could be controversial and memorable.
5. Providing learning guidance. Offering a way through the maze, the thread through the labyrinth or the helping hand.
6. Eliciting the performance . Now it’s their turn.
7. Providing feedback . Sandwiched, constructive feedback on which to build.
8. Assessing the performance . How are targets going?
9. Enhancing retention and transfer . Did it stick, could they pass it on and so become the teacher?
Analogical Thinking in Business, Organisations and Mangement Styles
Fig. 1. The School of Communication Arts (1986 intake)
(My idea on how to promote the School of Communication Arts. Which one am I?)
In the past I used successfully the idea of ‘nurturing’ to represent first a school (Arts College) and then my own services to graduate recruiters.
Analogical thinking, from Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ to the invention of Velcro.
(Indeed neurologists believe there is a gene that causes human beings to think in metaphors and that it is exactly this that allows us to invent, in fact creativity in the face of adversity still rings true today, though we are not facing a Sabre-toothed tiger at the entrance to the cave, or changing climate with the onset of the ice age.)
Analogy – transfer of an idea from one domain to another.
Metaphor – resemblance or flavour. A way of making the strange familiar p.85. Or the hard to comprehend (trees, ecosystems, architecture, traffic lights).
Morgan (1986)
Kinds of metaphor:
· Mechanistic
· Ecological
· Social
· Cognitive
· Systematic
Metaphors as labels:
Manager as captain or conductor.
Morgan (1986, 1997)
· Machine
· Organism
· Culture
· Brain
· Political System
· Psychic prison
· Flux
· Transformation
· Instrument of domination
ACTIVITY 4.1
1) Pick three metaphors (a, b, c) for organisations, for instance the organisation as machine, organism or political system.
2) List the characteristics you associate with each.
3) Try and relate each characteristic to a feature in an organisation that you know.
4) What features of organisations do these characteristics highlight, and what do they conceal?
A) As an orchestra, ABB, 1999. A corporate cliché I have seen applied to Abbey National and others. Visually it may have resonance, though the cost of featuring musicians, let alone playing a piece where used is prohibitive to all but the largest organisations. The characteristics are of complementary divisions ‘playing the same tune’ with woodwind, strings and brass, for example representing the different businesses. With a single conductor it may better fit the largely privately owned enterprise, say a Richard Branson and Virgin, or a Russian Oligarch, though no longer News International and the Murdochs. The features perhaps work for News International with newspapers and TV interests, even having a go with MySpace being largely media, whilst Branson is more the empirical Napoleonic conqueror of anything going?
B) As a strawberry plant, i.e. a federal organisation that has grown organically rather than by acquisition, perhaps like a clearing bank? Perhaps like a franchise such as Kall-Kwik. Or a retail chain, appropriately, such as Body Shop. The characteristics I think of are independently managed businesses that sell the same range of products, with common branding and sales materials, though with some localisation. This works well in relation to the plant performing differently on a variety of local soils/climates i.e. the same organism but in different settings/opportunities to flourish or not.
C) As an empire, where a holding company or private equity group has gone on the acquisition trail buying up businesses for the opportunity, rather than as sets of businesses that complement each other, so take over, create economies of scale in management and Head Office functions. The characteristics here feel as if it should be military with no good outcome, ala ‘Wall Street’, though there are or nave been more benevolent, squid give groups or holdings companies in the past such as the long gone Ferguson Industrial Holdings PLC, or perhaps Unipart Group of Companies (UGC). This suggests a dictator at the top, though the leaders can be benevolent even if a tall pyramid is the business structure.
If the organisation doesn’t fit the metaphor, it is too simplistic a metaphor!
The metaphor can intone a favourable or negative bias. For example, if asked in research to describe the organisation you work for as a car do you want it to be a Citroen 2CV, or a VW Golf, a Rolls-Royce or Ford Escort, a 1980s Ford Cortina or a Triumph Stag?
A business that is a machine I the digital age is surely going to get left behind through its rigid bureaucracies and hierarchies, a predilection for quantitative measures (ROI and KPIs) too?
In 2011 it seems archaic to think of teachers or tutors in this way, people who are moderators, coaches or facilitators. (The ecological metaphor is used with a cartoon not dissimilar to my own p.88 not shown here for copyright reasons, to represent people as seedlings or potted plants).
From Table 4.1 metaphors of businesses in relation to:
- Character
- Flair
- Structure
- Climate
- Style
- Authority
- Form
- Control
- Decisions
- Strategy
- Adaptability
- Orientation
- Approach
- Procedure
- Attitude
ACTIVITY 4.2
Take expressions of the above for a ‘Machine like business, as 0 on a scale and
‘Organic’ as 10, then decide where:
a) you place your own organisation and b) yourself.
ACTIVITY 4.3
I’ll do this one offline.
Other metaphors might include:
- Brain
- Knowledge
- Learning
Network (Morgan, 1993) business as a spider-plant.
Federal (Handy, 1989) business as shamrock
Chaos and complexity.
Brains and cities.
Supporting ‘patterns of transformation that emerge spontaneously in complex adaptive systems’. (Henry 2006:95)
Complex adaptive systems: termites, flock movements, (anecdote of the aeroplane simulator managed by parts of an audience that collectively cancels out the oddball, incompetent, inattentive or would-be plane-crashing individuals) p96 (Berreby, 1998:45 and Clark, 1997:75).
Self-organisation
‘people do not need to be told what to do: they are intelligent agents continuously learning and modifying their behaviour on the basis if feedback’. Handy (2010:97)
See DVD 2, Video 3
N.B. The metaphors chosen tend to reflect the chooser’s values. (Henry 2006:98)
Activity 4.4
What metaphor would you use to describe your organisation?
Activity 4.5
Describe the process of management as you experience it.
- Warlike
- Sporting
- Spiritual
Activity 4.6
A metaphor to describe my management style.
Activity 4.7
Note metaphors to describe daily management styles.
Activity 4.8
Take a current task, associate with it an appropriate metaphor then give it another that is far removed from the first.
Organisational paradigms p.104
Functionalist paradigm – world as an objective reality.
Kolb (1984) drawing on Pepper (1942)
Four ways of thinking about the world:
- Mechanistic
- Realist
- Organicist
- Pragmatic
And thinking styles:
- Assimilator
- Converger
- Diverger
- Accommodator
Table 4.2 Organisational metaphors and paradigms
Activity 4.9 WHAT METAPHOR WOULD YOU OFFER FOR MANAGEMENT IN THE 21st CENTURY?
I’ve experienced many, including from the table:
· Chaos/postmodern/play
I know of:
· System/participatory/co-create
I like the sound of:
· Drama/interpretive/enact
For the 21st Century I like the model of the modern ideas lab in which innovative ideas are trialled, developed then kicked out with a chunk of financing to thrive however turns out best!
This is the sink or swim analogy.
But after suitable teaching/coaching. Or perhaps a metaphor of procreation, raising and nurturing a child then letting them go? So organic or animal (or in particular mammalian or human).
Stacy (1996) and danger of controls, procedures and Pre-specified objectives.
FURTHER READING
Morgan, G. ‘Paradigms, metaphors and puzzle-solving’, C9 in Henry (1999a)
FROM MY OU STUDENT BLOG
‘Consider this medium as like talking with your fingers – half-way between spoken conversation and written discourse.’ (Hawkridge, Morgan and Jeffs, 1997, quoted in Salmon 2005)
Salmon, G (2005) E-moderating. The Key to teaching and learning online.
REFERENCE
Berreby, D (1998) ‘Complexity theory: fact-free science or business tool?
Strategy and Business, No. 10, pp. 40-50.
Clark, A (1997) Being there. Cambridge, MA. MIT
Henry, J & the MBA Course Team (2006, 2010) B822 ‘Creativity, Innovation and Change’ Book 1 ‘Creativity, Cognition and Development’. The Open University Business School
Morgan, G. (1986 2nd 1997) Images of Organisation
Mind Bursts 
