Communication is hearing what isn’t said.
As Peter Drucker once said, “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
Furthermore, one of the pre-suppositions of NLP states that ‘you cannot, not communicate – everything you say and most of what you do will communicate something, so the idea of radio silence, can have the effect of turning the sound right up.
People often, mistakingly, imagine, that by doing nothing, they can avoid personal responsibility in communication, but, I am sorry to say, this just isn’t true, non-action is not an option, as it will be interpreted in some way by the listener(s).
We communicate all the time, even when we are not speaking, whether we are aware of it or not – and by any number of methods and mechanisms, from our dress sense to what actually leaves our lips as the spoken word.
It is not just what we say, but how we say it, where we say it and what we do, which carries a whole lot more weight than the words alone.
There are the non-verbal cues, such as hand gestures, facial gestures, eye-contact, or lack of, and posture to name but a few.
Would you buy a car from someone who didn’t look you in the eye? Nah, thought not.
Para-linguistic cues, such as inflection, accent, tone, intonation, rhythm, sounds and register.
These are the things that we can see and hear, but they don’t stop there.
We communicate by both action and inaction – sometimes a more powerful message is conveyed by doing nothing, than when we are actually doing something.
But hey! The person has done nothing – oh, yeah! BUT, they have, in some way, communicated some pretty strong messages – You cannot, not communicate.
In language, it is quite striking how pauses (intentional and well-placed, pauses) can speak so much louder than the words around them, good communicators use this effectively when speaking in public.
Posture is another strong way of getting a message across – people often like to play around as ‘the-part-time-psycholgist’ interpreting body language of others and extracting, sometimes, dubious conclusions – folded arms, does not necessarily mean defensiveness nor a desire not to open up. It could well be just comfortable, however, a slouching speaker can be looked at in a very different light.
However, put these, non-verbal cues together with verbal or paralinguistic clues, and you may be on to something.
Communication is all about responsibility, and taking responsibility for the message creating the intended response with the listener – if communicators are not willing to take responsibility for this, then their communication ‘results’ will suffer – if what they say is not clearly understood, then whose fault is this then?
Communication is a game of perceptions often devoid of reality – the importance is what is perceived by the listeners – not what is said, but what is understood and remembered. It is not a binary process – there are lots of variables that need to be taken into account, by the communicator – it is not my audience / listener’s fault if they get the wrong end of the stick – the responsibility stays firmly with me!
And, whatever I do, I will be communicating in a constant stream – I cannot, not communicate!
So just remember, when you are trying to persuade people of your super-mega ideas to change their lives, don’t slouch, avoid eye-contact nor speak with a driveling, monotonous voice – you are in fact going to convince them of something – but it won’t be to ‘buy’ your ideas, you nor your ‘product’.
If your intention does not match the response that is created in your listeners, things will happen – and when they fall stony-silent when you ask them if they have any questions, they are communicating a very strong message to you – most of it can be resumed by a resounding “Nah, not interested, sorry … Next!”
Communication and trust are the two principle ingredients for successful relationships, however, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” George Bernard Shaw
10 extremely pointless inventions
10 Weird Inventions You Need To See To Believe – some of these inventions have to be seen to be believed, and even then they are just weird.
Then again, some of the things that we find around our homes and offices started out as a weird invention at some point – think of the Post-its you use everyday, bluetack or even saccharin were invented by accident and the inventors were probably thought of as slightly strange to say the least.
What’s your view of these inventions?
You may also be surprised to learn that Coca Cola, cornflakes and velco were invented by accident.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X4Mb1BZlr4
Top 10 Most Intelligent People of The World
Top 10 Most Intelligent People of The World are not surprisingly closely linked to the fields of mathematics and physics. So who are the Top 10 Most Intelligent People of The World?
There are a lot of intelligent people all around the world and we can only be amazed at the levels of their IQs.
Let’s take a look at the people with the highest IQ ever recorded – The 10 most intelligent people of the world.
The 10 most intelligent people of the world
What do the Olympic medal tables say about your nation’s sporting priorities?
Ben Oakley, The Open University et Simon Shibli, Sheffield Hallam University
Each time the Olympic and Paralympic Games come around, a small minority of nations tend to do well. On average, only 25% of competing nations at the Olympics will win a gold medal – and they’re pretty much the same ones year in, year out.
Intrigued, we dug into data spanning back to 1948 – derived from our colleagues at Gracenote Sport – to unravel how different countries approach sport, and how that affects their chances of Olympic success.
Looking back over the last 20 years, we found that the top 20 nations have consistently won more than 70% of the medals at each games. Despite the fact that some progress has been made over the last five games, the figure below demonstrates that this trend has persisted throughout modern Olympic history.
It follows that if some nations consistently perform very well, others repeatedly do not. One group which appears to perform relatively poorly is Muslim nations – which we define as those nations where around 50% of the population is Muslim. We found 53 nations that meet this definition, which collectively account for 18% of the world’s population.
Econometric models have consistently shown that bigger populations and greater wealth are closely linked with medal success. But based on these trends, Muslim nations perform well below what we might expect. For instance, Muslim nations only won 61 (6.3%) of the medals awarded at London 2012. By comparison, the top-ranked nation at the games (the US) racked up 104 (10.8%) of the medals, with only 4.5% of the world’s population.
There are several reasons which could explain this relatively poor performance. For one thing, the Olympics largely features typically European sports, such as swimming, rowing and cycling. All of these require significant facilities and investment to develop medal winners. This doesn’t play to the strengths of many Muslim nations, which tend to be more successful in combat sports and weightlifting – events where there are comparatively fewer medals up for grabs.
The gender balance
All things being equal, you would expect nations to win medals in proportion to the medals available for each gender (47% women, 53% men). The fact that women won just 15 (25%) of the Muslim nations’ 61 medals at London 2012 indicates that Muslim nations under-perform in women’s events particularly.
When we considered the top ten nations in London 2012, we noticed that Korea and Italy also under-performed in women’s events, and over-relied on men for their overall success. By contrast, in recent years China has actively targeted success in women’s events. This has proved to be a highly successful strategy: 57% of the nation’s medals in 2012 were won by women, which led to second place in the medal table.
Other nations with strong contributions made by women include the US – where college sport provides a fruitful pathway to develop young talent – and Australia, which has targeted elite sport success for men and women since the 1980s, when it set up the Australian Institute of Sport. Meanwhile, with their successful equestrian programmes, Germany and Great Britain won nearly 10% of their medals in mixed or open events at London 2012.
Positive approaches to women’s sport will only become more significant, as the International Olympic Committee works towards its goal to achieve gender equity in the 2020s.
Paralympic power
As you might expect, there is a strong correlation between the nations which dominate the Olympics, and those which succeed at the Paralympics. But a few nations buck the trend: some perform better in the Paralympics than the Olympics, and others significantly worse.
To illustrate this point, the figure below shows the index scores of Paralympic success compared with Olympic success for London 2012. An index score simply enables us to make a like for like comparison between the two events. For example, the US won 6% of medals in the Paralympic Games and 12% in the Olympic Games. So, the US has an index score of 50 ([6% / 12%] x 100 = 50), which means that it achieved only half the success in the Paralympic Games, relative to the Olympic Games.
The higher the index, the greater the nation’s Paralympic success, relative to its performance in the Olympics. We did this calculation for all nations which won at least 15 Paralympic medals.
North African nations Algeria and Tunisia – which also happen to be Muslim nations – excelled at the Paralympics relative to the Olympics. Of the traditional Olympic powers, better performances were also seen by Ukraine, Australia, China, Canada and Spain – three of which have been recent hosts (Sydney in 2000, Beijing in 2008 and Barcelona in 1992).
By contrast, the US and Japan performed relatively poorly at the Paralympics, suggesting that elite disabled athletes may not be receiving the levels of support which are provided to elite able-bodied athletes.
Fuller explanations for these variations are complex, but social attitudes towards disability must play a part. For instance, British parliamentarian and multi-Paralympic medallist Tanni Grey-Thompson cited the role of television coverage as a key factor in the US’s modest Paralympic performance.
Bizarrely, in a country where you have Title IX about women’s entitlement to sport at university and they have had scholarship programmes for disabled athletes for 40 years … the public do not get to see it [on television].
As the Olympics and Paralympics play out in Rio throughout August and September, we’ll probably see the same old suspects dominating the medal tables. But dig beneath the surface, and you’ll find that the results can tell us a thing or two about each nation’s sporting priorities: especially when it comes to the success of their elite women and disabled athletes.
Ben Oakley, Head of Childhood, Youth and Sport, The Open University et Simon Shibli, Professor of Sport Management, Sheffield Hallam University
La version originale de cet article a été publiée sur The Conversation.
Social Learning – we all do it
Social learning theory integrates behavioral and cognitive theories of learning in order to provide a comprehensive model that could account for the wide range of learning experiences that occur in the real world.
Some feel that Social Learning lacks structure – or at least the structure that they are used to – a teacher, in a class, a fairly rigid form of curriculum …
There is nothing wrong with structure, in fact it’s a great thing and we all need some form of structure in our life, although structure overload can impose barriers that are both frustrating and limiting.
A great many structured learning systems and models tend to almost disregard the ‘learner in the loop’ effect in learning, putting the emphasis, sometimes unintentionally, on isolation rather than on involvement and accountability.
Elearning is a good example of this, although a lot of Elearning is touted as some form of social learning as a new concept – something I have been writing about since 2009 on my blog, learning 3.0 – although the evidence for the social element, is at best, somewhat flimsy.
Social learning is not a new concept, Social Learning – what we have been doing all along, although it, apparently, can cut some ice as a selling point for an LMS (Learning Management System) or a CLMS (just add ‘Content’ on the front of the former).
As I have argued before, in L3.0, in my opinion, virtually [sic] all learning is social learning, and has been that from the beginning of time, although we have tried to engineer the nature of learning into structured systems that go heavily against the grain.
Social learning is when learners learn together and from each other, leveraging any tools that enhance that learning – in the Web 2.0 world, that can mean just about anything on the Internet, including social media and all the advantages and disadvantages that this may offer. It can provide fabulous opportunities and implications for learning, but, and this is a big but, the roles of learning professionals will and have to change fundamentally.
The benefits of social learning, although the term may not have been formally used, has been argued for decades by the likes of Lev Vygotsky, Albert Bandura, Carl Rogers et al. The question still remains as to why the take up has been so slow and often shunned by learning professionals. There are those that have a firm belief in the social learning model, but it is still seen, in many circles, as a novel phenomenum.
It’s not about the tools !
The tools that share the appelation, « social », such as social media – Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, LinkedIn, Yammer, Daily Motion etc., etc., are all great tools, but they are not social learning, however, they can be a part of it, as books, role plays, problem solving, forums, discussions etc., can too.
Humans are social animals by nature, basically there are 10 points that need to be addressed in order for social learning to work effectively in the majority of learning settings :
- OBJECTIVES – objectives need to be clearly set regarding what is to be learnt and agreed upon by the learners – better still if they are instrumental in setting the goals of learning. There is no point setting objectives without the buy-in of the major stakeholder, the learner, although many learning models do just that. Put simply, have a goal – as when we set out to get nowhere, we usually get there.
- GROUP – being part of a group is a key element in social learning – Social, doesn’t mean informal, in fact social learning can be very formal. In order for it to work there needs to be a deep feeling of belonging to a group or team and participating in the group as much as possible – learning is not a spectator sport.
- VOICE – all members of the group need to feel that they have something to say, it may be to add something to the discussion, to ask questions or to support other members of the group, but it has to be in a setting where dialogue is free from judgement.
- COMPETITION – Sometimes called gamification in virtual learning settings, a healthy culture of competition, either individually or for groups is a good motivator.
- FEEL GOOD FACTOR – Nothing is more demotivating than feeling that you are banging your head against a brick wall, and this is so true in any learning situation. Feeling achievement and progress in learning is essential, which, in turn, leads to an increase in self-confidence and self esteem.
- SUPPORT – Learners need to feel supported, not carried, both by a facilitator and by the members of the group. Without support learners can lose track of the big picture, feel isolated and feel that they are not advancing towards their goals, aims and objectives.
- AUTONOMY – Not to be confused with independence, but more on inter-dependence, working together in collaborative mode. Autonomy simply means that learners are empowered, responsible and accountable for their learning – more about the how, where and when they learn, but also the way in which they learn. Learners who have a active stake in their learning, usually ensure that they succeed.
- VOCABULARY – The choice of vocabulary used, clearly reflects the way you view learning and your role within it. Using vocabulary such as ; « Class, lessons, teacher, student, classroom etc. » will also have a clear impact on the way your learners learn, the way you work and how learners view the power dynamics in learning. This may seem petty, but think about it. “Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- ACCIDENTAL LEARNING – Informal learning should be encouraged as much as possible, as a lot of what we learn on the fringes of what we set out to learn is hugely important. Sometimes we disregard what was learnt in a learning episode. As Seneca put it, « Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. »
- REFLECTION – Reflective learning is one of the main ingredients that go into Lifelong Learning and learning how to learn – one of the core skills in learning. Reflective learning is a way of helping learners step back from their learning experience, helping them develop critical thinking skills and improve on future performance by analysing experiences in learning. We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it, than we do from learning the answer itself (Lloyd Alexander).
Social learning should be fun, as when we enjoy what we are doing there is a good chance that we will learn [something], however, social learning is not just for fun.
Collaboration and interconnectivity in learning exponentially increases the rate at which learning occurs – the old adage, ‘two (or more) heads are better than one’ has never rang truer.
In the age where companies are banning the use of Internet, YouTube, facebook and Twitter et al., we could perhaps question this, in terms of social learning, or at least as far as informal learning goes.
There will always be time-wasters who spend hours on the Internet doing non-job related stuff, but should we worry about how much collaboration and learning is passing under the corporate nose, through these social blanket bans ?
Social learning has been here for ages, literally, and is set to become more a part of the learning landscape in the future – Social Learning – what we have been doing all along.
“Everyone and everything around you is your teacher.”~Ken Keyes
