April 2011, Newsletter, Kiwi Scrum

Kiwi Scrum has 2335 members. That's a tiny part of the 60,000 New Zealanders, who are active linkedIn users, and where are the 290,000 other NZ members of linkedIn who never show up? Some of them are in your office. Some of them are your friends. These numbers are shocking. The Digital Literacy level in NZ is appallingly low. Each of us is responsible. Learning is a social activity, and we give people social permission to be full members, or we deny that permission to them. It's in our attitude.

The April LinkedIn hint:

Connections: I still keep meeting people who say, "Why should I bother to connect to other people? It's not important to me, to have a lot of connections."

To which I might reply, assume you want something, perhaps you need to talk to the CEO, of a company like yours, but not in the NZ Market. You have an investment proposal; and a go/no-go decision to make. You are thinking, "I need to talk to someone who knows the business, but isn't a competitor". You are also thinking, "If I can find the right person, there might be useful things we can offer each other in the future."

So you search, and with your 23 connections you can "see" 8000 people and none of them the person you want. You trundle off to LinkedIn and you PAY $60 or perhaps $130 a month so you can "see" more, and LinkedIn loves you.

If you've got 500+ connections you'll be able to "see" about 7 million members and finding what you want might be easier. With my 9400 connections I can "see" just on 20 million members. ( I might add here that the quality of my network is declining over time because LinkedIn restricts the ability of people like me to keep building new connections.)

The Useful Common:

The Useful Common is the publicly available resources we can all use to help us learn and to help us in our work. Too many people have no idea what those resources are, or how to use them. Take a simple thing like a News Reader, for instance. Kiwi Scrum members are better informed than the norm, but I expect that only five out of every one hundred use a news reader. What a shame. What a clear indication that our digital literacy is very low.

I've written about the use of News Readers and other Internet tools in my Network Ambassador Blog.

Engage with other people and Groups:

Groups of all kinds are another feature of the Useful Common. I have a 30 second lesson on how to become an expert on almost anything you like.
[Lesson begins]
1. Find a group that knows about the subject of interest and join the group.
2. Be interested and ask polite intelligent questions.
[Lesson ends]

Sadly, about 60% of all internet users NEVER to join any groups. They cut off the opportunity to learn at the first hurdle. (Let me test that number, which I just plucked out of the air.)

I found 60 LinkedIn users for whom the median number of connections was 197. Of those 33% are not members of any LinkedIn Groups. 197 connections is a high median. These people are not typical. Remember the 60,000 New Zealanders visible on LinkedIn and the 290,000 we can't find. All my chosen people are part of the 60,000.

Let's do it again. Of 350,000 NZ LinkedIn members only 60,000 can be seen, so the rest are inactive non-joiners. Of the 60,000 we can see only about 66% are joiners, but let us be generous and call them 100% joiners. What proportion of NZ LinkedIn members, are people who avoid joining groups? 290,000/350,000 which gives us 83%.

Now you know why the digital revolution never happened, and why the "knowledge wave" passed like a 10cm tsunami. It's not true that "everybody is on Facebook", and even of those who are members, as with LinkedIn, many people never visit their page.

We do need to extend digital education to everyone, not only to the elite 5%. Since all learning requires social permission, there needs to be a revolution in attitudes, before the majority of New Zealanders become skilled in the use of even the most simple digital tools.

Invitations

I've been standing on the street inviting people in Christchurch to join one of twenty-five Neighbour's Forums, which extend across the city. I've signed up over 650 people. Most of these people have never done anything like joining a large public open space previously.

If you send even knowledgeable people an email invitation to join a group, they would typically do nothing with it. People don't join groups, remember. But when faced with a friendly chatty person saying "join my group", about 50% are happy to sign up. The digital literacy of New Zealanders is poor. People hide their lack of skills and confidence, behind a wall of silence.

Using the Internet is a private act. People know that they lack skills, and don't know what to do about it. The few courses offered are NOT what these people need. (Both Senior Net and the community colleges fail here.) Recall my 30 second lesson on how to learn anything.

Volunteers

I've also attended MANY community meetings in Christchurch where hundreds of people who are working as volunteers for various organisations were attending. It is my strong contention that in a knowledge society, the volunteer is king. You can't expect people to learn, and use their new knowledge well, if they are acting under "instructions". People learn best when they choose what they will do. People work best when they have a real say in how the work is organised.

Volunteers are restoring Christchurch from the inside and making it functional again.

The Value of Engagement

Your future lies in your ability to learn. We are all cursed by the ability of our old brains to retain and to keep re-using "knowledge" that was long ago superceded. Hence the saying that, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks."

In fact it's entirely possible for old dogs to learn new tricks, but first they have to unpack their old bag of tricks, and throw most of the content away. Ivan Ilich called this process deschooling yourself.

In Christchurch right now people need to visit the various suburbs of the city and the central city as they can get access, on foot or by bicycle. Take in the magnitude of the damage. Go back a second and third time. Each visit reinforces what your old brain doesn't want to know. When we have deschooled ourselves we might begin to reimagine what a NEW Christchurch might be like.