Brain Freeze

Sometimes when in the mundane environment of an office your brain freezes up with the plethora of issues that bombard you on a daily basis, that email inbox that pulsates with noise and problems to be solved or the people knocking at your door asking for your input or guidance. Sitting behind a desk and staring at a terminal is probably the worst environment for problem solving, it's called a terminal for a reason, despite all the narratives about clouds and connections.

Offices and cubicles box you in and reduce your thought patterns to very set routines, it is the promise of six sigma and lean to define the most optimum route of doing things and repeat with precision. It's something that often happens in schooling with curriculum, training, testing - all optimising us into routine patterns. Problem is we live in a world of complexity and sometimes routine-procedure are not good in complexity. I often hear the rhetoric from industries that they need people who can think laterally, handle problems etc and can't find people that can do this, they look to education hoping for the answer but then want to repeat the training/ schooling mantra. It's where I tend to think Illich was onto something with Deschooling Society.

An event happened this week that brought into stark relief this issue for me and one that I had ruminated on before when in my square walled office. As I looked around at colleagues, I would often ponder - what would it be like to be trapped on a mountain or an island with these people, how would we survive, who has the mindset that would be appropriate, how do you lead or manage in that environment?

We so often recruit people based on perceived IQ or qualification and prior experience, but we seldom look at an important facet - AQ or Adversity Quotient. This was something I had looked at with a company called Peak Learning, who had some very good toolsets for surfacing people's AQ. I often found myself recruiting people with a high AQ mindset over skills, working on the principle that skills can be developed if the person had the right mindset. This always held me in good stead with the people I recruited who would constantly amaze me with their abilities to think laterally and deal with situations. 

I'm reflecting on this because for such a long time I thought this was just the case with everyone, it's how I saw the world, in given situations I could evaluate multiple patterns around me and see a solution. It's difficult to explain how I visualise this, but I can almost physically see multiple patterns of probability in situations. The best way I could explain this was a scene I saw in a Hollywood film where Sherlock Holmes can predict and visualise what is about to happen.

I believe the key to all of this is understanding patterns as nicely summarised by Esko Kilpi in Pattern Recognition, quantified self and big data, I believe we will soon have systems and tools to augment our ability to see patterns in life like never before and this could lead to a profound change in our learning abilities and breaking some of our routine perceptions or the limits of our bounded rationality. 

We will start to see the web of life, the patterns within it and how we are interdependent within this network.

Anyway, back to that life event that led to me noodling on this topic. I was driving across the Norwegian Alps this week in the height of winter, towing a heavy trailer. I had snow tyres, but steep gradients, ice and bad luck ended with myself and my mother who was my travel companion being stuck on a steep climb with the vehicle going nowhere. It was desolate, cold and no sign of civilisation for miles.

You Get The Picture

We knew we couldn't push, we knew we needed high revs to pull the trailer and we knew that would just polish the ice and make it worse. My mind initially darted across all the worst scenarios of being stuck up this mountain. My mum interjected with a time worn statement "There are no problems, only solutions", it was a statement I had heard throughout my formative years. In a business setting it sounds like trite business b*llocks spouted by self help gurus, in a real world setting it gives you fortitude and focuses the mind.


We instantly started focussing on the problem domain: wheels need traction to move. How do we get traction? We scoured the location for wood or twigs - nada. Stones? Nothing. All we had around us was ice and snow. Look in the car, nothing but a tool to change tyres and some jumpers. Maybe we can score the ice with the wheel brace and create enough traction? More wheel spinning ensued. How about using the jumpers under the wheels? Worked a little, but not enough. How about the foot well rubber mats? The wheels spun them out across the road.

Each experiment tried and failed, each time we re-analysed and tried to improve. Never stopping to fixate on our predicament. How about that tunnel at the crest of the hill? Maybe it has a grit bin? We've seen grit bins in tunnels; okay it's a fair walk so how am I going to get the grit back if it has any? Find a big shopping bag in the car. Off I stomp, looking around as I go - I see a babbling brook of icy cold water, but think - if the tunnel doesn't have any grit, I can come back and scoop gravel out of the brook! (that's a back-up). I get to the tunnel and no grit bin, but on the sides of the road are plenty of piles of road grit kicked up by lorries etc. I fill up the bag and head back to the car.

We dust the road all around the wheels, start up the car and it gets a little grip and moves, but not enough. I need to be throwing grit in it's path as it's edges forward to get enough speed to move. How will I get back into the car? Sliding side doors! Leave one open and I can jump in! We edge forward as I am sprinkling ahead of the tyres and then we're off! I'm running down the road and jumping in the side of the car and bingo! We're out of our predicament. Quickly learning from our situation we make it to the tunnel and decide this may happen again and there might not be a tunnel, so restock the grit bag! Euphoric at our ability to tackle the situation. Thankful we don't have to be solemn and admit we're two British idiots trying to drive across extreme terrain to emergency rescue services.

So the moral of the story? This situation brought alive to me the essence of innovation.  The divergent thought, the prototyping, the analysing failure and improving, the convergent thought on the solution.

It was a real life Marshmallow Challenge or Candle Problem. As we rolled off up the mountain further we discussed how we had approached this, how it related to those thoughts about being stuck on a mountain with work colleagues and the AQ angle. I realised how lucky I was to have been nurtured to do this from an early age because of that mantra and approach by my mum, for this I am eternally grateful. I think maybe some moments stuck on a mountain need to happen more often, because the freeze brought my brain alive again in ways that had been dulled slightly in the boxed office.

Here is a little video of the trip, to get a better sense of the experience:



Norwegian Road Trip from Jon Harman on Vimeo.

Brick Dust on the Forehead

There is something deeply liberating about not being affiliated to one specific organisation, it gives you the freedom to be more, well, yourself really. This is of course fairly ludicrous, shouldn't you always be you? But there is something about organisations, institutions and industries that just seems to stifle who we really are and I think it's mainly about becoming compliant. Seth Godin covers this very neatly in The Icarus Deception. So why am I thinking about this? Because I know that this compliance training starts in education and enough is enough.

I attended a conference about Legal Innovation and Legal Education this week, well I say attend, I followed the #innovatelaw tag on Twitter from my fireside here in Norway - but you catch the drift. 

It was all reasonably polite and the debate was sincere etc, but there just came a point when I had that moment of clarity: 

I've listened endlessly, read endlessly and talked endlessly about innovation and education in law and I'm bored with it. Not bored because I don't care or don't think that there are endless possibilities, I'm just bored because so little happens. When I first came into the industry there was talk of the Training Framework Review which went on endlessly ad infinitum with very little happening, the LETR showed more promise, but as that went through the very wide and transparent debate around the country (kudos to the team on how open and transparent they were) I still had to listen to a lot of people from industry, regulators etc pontificate about legal education and then demonstrate they knew very little about learning, they were simply interested in maintaining the machine of compliance that exists and curating a museum of how it was. The Bar Standards Board were by far the worst offenders I saw of this. So often at these debates or discussions, I saw the voice of the student drowned out or not represented. I have sat in meetings and listened to colleagues talk about rigour and brightness required, yet know nothing about brain cognition, multiple intelligences or divergent and convergent thought. 

I have attended numerous "future law" talks and conferences where the usual suspects like Richard Susskind regurgitate Kurzweil's singularity for lawyers and when he's not available they actually get Ray in to talk about The Singularity, which I'm sure was really helpful and pragmatic to the lawyers in the audience. I've been to a talk by a barrister explaining to me "The Cloud" and how they've moved all their documents to Ipads via the cloud (essentially they had discovered Dropbox) and it all scares me. It scares me because I know you're better than that. I know you can be innovative and creative, it's an innate human characteristic. 

Before we go to that though, I've got to just say this talking and chin stroking has just got to stop. If we're going to change or innovate let's at least throw off the shackles of what is stopping us. I want to follow Howard Beale's example and just shout "I'm Mad As Hell and I'm Not Going to Take It Any More!"

Does that feel better? Okay. So we need to accept that if we're going to get anywhere we have to stop fixating on the "i" word,  the more you use that word the less likely you are to actually do it. We need to go back to basics and think "play" which means a bit of de-programming how you've been educated.

Now nobody is going to set up a Legal Education Council, with a nice committee etc so we may as well stop debating that now. Sure we can go and ask for some money from The Legal Education Foundation and we should (they have £200million somewhere). But as Jobs said "No-one is going to give you permission to put a dent in the Universe, you just have to do it".

So why not just set up a brain trust of people that want to do this, play, prototype, gamestorm it, hack it and try some solutions - we know the problem domain, it's time to move onto building solutions. 

Guess what in the 11 years since I first heard all this debate starting, the world has invented some really cool tools for collaboration virtually, thus making it less onerous for people to create movements. We don't need any committee halls or lecture theatres, let's use Google Docs, Basecamp, Voicethread, Hangouts etc, etc. 

I know revolutionary talk and all that is very zeitgeist at the moment, and that is not the reason I raise this - it is because our futures and our kids futures need this, we need to start solving some of the great big problems on the way - that needs law, but it's going to need a much more agile, creative, inventive, collaborative bunch of lawyers and legal services to deliver it. So we have to start now with legal ed to get ready. Time to break down that dusty brick wall that has been giving me a headache for too long.

The Backchannel Comments

Happy FF Halloween

It's a tradition of sorts to make a few Halloween vids for Twitter folk, here is this year's episode:



featuring: @_millymoo, @bhamiltonbruce, @lifeincustody, @richardmoorhead, @legalbizzle


and from the archives:

Skeleton Dance feat: @bhamiltonbruce, @paulbernaluk, @richardmoorhead, @lifeincustody & @_millymoo

The Time Warp feat: @jezhop, @_millymoo, @lifeincustody, @charonqc & @richardmoorhead

The Monster Mash feat: @charonqc, @kilroyt, @benwheway, @ikenceo & @brianinkster

Math Camp Massacre feat: @jezhop, @legalbrat, @rupertwhite, @annanev, @alicemorrissey & @legalbizzle

Night of the Living Dead ish feat: @charonqc & @_millymoo

And of course the one that kicked it off:


feat: @lifeincustody, @_millymoo, @richardmoorhead, @stevekuncewicz & @jonb1966

Got more #FF vids planned for the future.... Watch this space.

Whilst in the archives I also found this early action horror trailer I made on VHS (hence degraded quality) for GCSE media, yep that's me with a shaven head and jumping off a bridge.

The Futures of Legal Education and the Legal Profession 2013 CEPLER Conference - The Perfect Storm of Legal Education

On Friday 18th October I gave a talk at CEPLER 2013 in which I outlined the work I have done in legal education, along with ideas and views I have on the topic.

Here are the slides from the talk:

You can also see the Twitter back channel feedback from the talk here.


I covered many aspects within my talk about higher education bubbles, student zeitgeist, learning design etc, etc. As promised what follows is a list of recommended resources to widen knowledge on these topics.

I have found Sfard (1998) On Two Metaphors of Learning an extremely useful paper on thinking about and opening discourse about learning not being uni directional from the tutor.

I think seeking out student opinion and listening to the zeitgeist of that experience is important, I often use the Youtubers videos on education to illustrate this, particularly Dan Brown's An Open Letter to Educators and Suli Breaks I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate, Message to Those Struggling in Education and Why I Hate School But Hate Education

Books about Higher Ed bubble, marketisation and failings that are recommended reading:

Molesworth et al The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer
Arum & Roksa Academically Adrift
Harlan Reynolds The Higher Education Bubble
Christensen & Eyring The Innovative University
Siemens How Large Systems Change
Leadership Foundation The New HE Climate: Disruptive Inovations
Ernst & Young University of the Future
Barber, Donnelly & Rizvi The Avalanche is Coming

Also be wary of the totality of the "education is broken" meme prevalent in education, predominantly pushed by publishers and venture capitalists all ready with a "solution" - most of these themes are brilliantly pulled apart by Martin Weller at: Broken Education Tumblr and it's also worth keeping an eye on The MOOC Research Initiative to avoid the MOOC Hype.

I first experienced MOOCs by attending Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (2008) which was where the term "MOOC" was first coined, it opened my eyes to the work of Stephen Downes, George Siemens and Dave Cormier - pioneers of new pedagogic approaches such as Connectivism and Rhizomatic Education. This course ignited a fire of exploration about education that no traditional model could have achieved, it opened up a great discourse with global educators along with connecting me to further interesting work in educational technology and innovation. That year I started an annual mind map of the things I learned. I strongly recommend doing it and using it for reflection. It also got me thinking about object orientated design with my colleague:




Around the same time as I absorbed and processed all of this I made a video of stats for legal education that was kind of a meme in education at the time, whilst the stats have evolved, as have some of the thinking, the message remains fairly strong still.

This all then lead to studying an MA in Online Education and Distance Learning (which I strongly recommend the modules of for anyone interested in educational innovation and development) and reading further about Learning Design:

Open University Learning Design Initiative
Learning Design for 21st Century Curriculum
Learning Design Support Environment

Laurillard (2001) Rethinking University Teaching
Laurillard (2012) Teaching as a Design Science
Wiliam (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment
Schell The Art of Game Design
Gray, Brown & Macanuffo Gamestorming

When you mix learning design, pedagogic theory and neuroscience together, you start to get a compelling picture of techniques, strategies and approaches that are effective.

Mayer & Moreno (2003) 9 Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning
Saljo (2010) Digital Tools and Challenges to Institutional Traditions of Learning
Krashen Comprehensible Input
Dror  Making Learning Memorable
Clark (2010) Don't Lecture Me
Borden (2009) What Learners Need
Schell Learning is Beautiful
Hellinger 5 Essentials of Personalised Learning
Betts The 2 Sigma Problem
Mitra School in the Cloud
Siemens Intro to Learning Analytics

I strongly believe the world of work is changing at a radical pace and will do for our children. That requires us to really engage with what education they need, be it legal or general.

PSFK The Future of Work Report
Snowden The Cynefin Framework
Lima The Power of Networks
Betts Learning Locker
Robinson Changing Education Paradigms

I hope these resources and readings are helpful. I try to bookmark interesting articles etc on Delicious and need to update links again soon, if you want to delve deeper, dive into the Rabbit Hole

Here are some examples of the work done at The University of Law on the LLB:





The next educational adventures are working on Law Without Walls new LWOWx and a MOOC that embraces the ideas of Wayseeing amongst other exciting challenges. I'll keep the blog posted.

For more coverage of CEPLER2013:

Law Sync CEPLER Pt 1 Law Sync CEPLER Pt 2

Ed Lines CEPLER Reflections Pt 1 Ed Lines CEPLER Reflections Pt 2

Law Sync Storify of CEPLER Twitter Back Channel

Goodbyes (sort of)

So here's phase 2 of my all change for 2013 plan. I'm leaving the UK to live in Norway full time, which meant selling the house and jacking in the job. Done.

So all that's left is to say goodbye in person. With limited time (I have to pack up my house and speak at CEPLER 2013) before I go, my friends at This is Your Laugh have kindly let me hijack and piggyback on one of their excellent comedy nights.

So if you fancy coming along to say goodbye with a drink and a bit of comedy, I'll be at the stunning Grand Union Bar, Chancery Lane on Tuesday 15th October from 7pm until late. The comedy show starts at 8pm and you can buy tickets here (I'd like to point out that this is not some money making for me, it is supporting a venture I love and believe in though, so your attendance/support of the comedy would make my night)

For those that can't make it, make sure you come and visit the mountains someday soon.

Home is Where The Heart Is from Jon Harman on Vimeo.

Growing Pains

I get a phone call from O, he has a situation that he wants help with. He has a habit of doing this, he has many habits in fact. Imposing favours upon people though is his least skanky habit. To fully master this he has also perfected verbal intimidation and threats.  Think Ben Kingsley in Sexy  Beast and you will know O, now imagine him as an Irish Muslim smack head and the picture is complete. I never fully understood how a so called Muslim shot up speed and kept to his faith. He was a walking embodiment of contradiction who was partial to Ska music.

He wants me to take his friend Paddy to hospital, he thinks he is ODing but won't call an ambulance. If I oblige I am taking one more step into his world, if I don't he will hound me and tax me whenever he sees me. It's a no win for me. 

Already you're asking how I know O, what was I thinking? Right?

It's not just large cities that have decay, small cities have it too and it's harder to escape or avoid if you live in the wrong part of town.

I think I met O in the local dive where all the skaters hung out, it was the mix of cheap booze and the fact no-one ever pulled an ID check that made it so appealing. He took an instant liking to me, I seem to recall it had something to do with picking a Stax records tune on the jukebox. Who knows. All I know was it was impossible to say no to him from day 1. 

Within days I was helping him move house, a place in decay with burnt pieces of foil crumpled and littering the floor, he told me to watch my hands when picking stuff up, didn't want to get pricked by a syringe. It was trainspotting before it was invented.

When I returned from the hospital there was a small gathering, Nancy Spungen/Courtenay Love wannabes lounging on the floor, whilst a rat like boy called Ping mixed up bags of glucose powder and amphetamine, keeping the most undiluted  for his "Percy" consumption.

I soaked him up, every despicable action and sneer, I soaked it up in my lexicon of observation. One day he would become a character in a script or just be training for a future journalist. I absorbed these people like a voyeur in training, fascinated and repulsed all in one followed by seeds of empathy. 

Months later I saw him kick his girlfriend into a miscarriage. All so quick. All so hectic. You shout, you scream, but it's all over as quick as it began. Ashamed that I couldn't stop or didn't stop it. Panda eyes of depression looking back at you. Nobody cried when he eventually hung himself; just another character melting into the pot of a time gone by. A scab that had been picked.

My friends in my late teens were like characters from a Larry Clark film, by-products of a wasted generation trying to see a point in a decade of recession, the eighties had failed, so why have aspiration when ultimately it would all get repossed anyway. Coke was out, speed and H were back in. Cheap drugs for a cheap era.

Frosty was the charismatic pusher compared to the in your face Ping. Frosty was a stereotype of a pusher, trying to be Jim Morrision, whilst in reality he was more Jim Jones with his Kool Aid.

Summer came and Frosty had to fake his own death over some deal gone wrong. His mum crying in the papers, big show for a little man. 

His second coming a year later was not really thought through and I only saw him for a fleeting moment before he disappeared again.

It's funny the people you know when you're growing up, whilst transitory through a couple of formative years - it teaches you so much about human interaction. Whilst I was happy to disassociate, I learnt a lot about keeping your wits about you, having spider sense and seeing the patterns. This has proved invaluable in later years. The one story that still haunts me is the one of T.

T was the sweetest guy you could ever know, short and unassuming he was the insular one of a large group, a cliche in many ways of the high school geek, long hair and a Metallica T shirt. All T ever really wanted was some love, I suspect his home life was not good as no-one was ever allowed to go there.

One cold night in the pub, drunk with fake IDs T and some others were playing pool. Some girls came over and one swooned around T like we'd never seen before, it was like they saw something in him that no other girl ever had. Slightly unnerved but welcoming the attention, T played along. Within a short time period they were whispering in the corner and then the moment came and she pecked him on the cheek and said something that you could tell in hindsight ripped his heart in two. She laughed and ran off. He was silent and slumped back to us, others goaded him about what had happened. He was still silent. It had all been some joke, some windup by another group that T didn't get on with. A cruel hoax for someone else's momentary jolly. Nobody consoled him, nobody asked him if he was alright, just a buffet of "Plenty more fish in the sea" platitudes. T said he was going to go home and no-one stopped him. 

T left the pub and went to a local dilapidated warehouse and jumped to his death. There was a lot of discussion that he was drunk and fell, but I know the truth and I carry that knowledge with heavy heart.

I have never wanted to ever do anything in my life that would make someone feel that way and always try to keep a sense out for when people are having a hard time, you can't solve it or carry the pain for them, but empathy and a hug or human connection can make people realise that society is not ruthless and cruel. 

These things I saw in my formative years I still see played out in life, we as a society are still the children we were in the playground. There are the pushers, the bullies, the tormentors, the geeks and the misfits. As I watch the news of politicians, the media, the banks and the demolition of vulnerable people I can't help thinking it's time we grew up. I have seen my childhood acquaintances time and time again in new incarnations, disguised as business people, celebrities, politicians, civil servants and so forth. But I learnt not to stand idly by like I did as a child. That's all we can do.

Change and Rest in Peace @colmmu

They say a change is as good as a rest, I'm trying a little of both at the moment. Resting up in Norway after a knackering couple of months and changing numerous things, starting with the Twitter handle.

It's a weird feeling changing the name you have been known as in an online community. It shouldn't feel strange but it does. I've wanted to change for a while as the idea behind the original moniker is no longer fitting, colmmu was originally my secondary account on Twitter, it was going to be my "professional" identity and thus colmmu stood for College Of Law Multi Media Unit, which is where I worked. Unoriginal, boring and trite - which was the intention of that account. I had another account where I was more myself, but I'm not one for split personalities and running two accounts in different personas was impossible for me and I started being more myself with colmmu than the other account, so I deleted it and kept going.

Over time it bothered me that the handle was a reference to my job, one that I often had to explain to people. When the College became a University, it became even more redundant and I wanted to really claim it all back for myself. After all it was not an official account in the slightest.

So, why kaoticoddchild? It has history with me, I'm chaotic, sometimes odd and try to maintain a strong essence of childhood wonderment at the world. Oddchild is also how everyone misreads my wife's name, which has always amused me.

Letting go of colmmu is just the beginning of a process, I'm gearing up for lots more change because I have a deep fire burning in my soul to shake a few things up in this world. More on this later... the first step is letting go and I'm am reminded of an excellent text extract by Richard Bach:

Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all -- young and old, rich and poor, good and evil -- the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.

Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current was what each had learned from birth.

But one creature said at last, "I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom."

The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed against the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!"

But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.

Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.