Fall semester starts tomorrow. Part of me is anxious, mostly because I am already so busy I’m not sure what my class load is going to do to my life.

But the other part of me is really excited. I was one of those nerds who loved going back to school because it meant you got to read and study. I love new books, I love researching, so starting class again makes me happy. I know, I’m weird.

Here’s what I am taking this semester:

• Introduction to Program Evaluation (or, is what you designed actually working)
• Performance Systems Analysis (this is the first HPT – Human Performance Theory – class I have taken, should be interesting)

After this semester, I have to do an internship and take one more class and I’m done!!

So what did I do in the 3 weeks I had between summer and fall semester?

• Went to PodCamp, caused a stir because myself and some other ladies pointed out that people still face discrimination
• Worked on updates to the Ionix Network Configuration Manager courses
• Presented to EMC Education’s upper management about value networks, web 2.0 technologies, and all the work we’ve done to drive participation in the EMC Proven Professional Community
• Got my son off to college
• Talked about zombies
• Started reading Secret Six (which is probably going to be the first thing I’ll have to give up)

Looking at the list of what I did and of my classes, it looks like there are some synergies between all my activities having to do with information. My undergrad degree had a heavy emphasis on usability, particularly how users approach information searches. Of course, since one of my kids is on the autism spectrum I have been a life-long observer of how differently people can see information.

It sure seems like there is probably a thread that runs through program evaluation, HPT, discrimination, and value networks. Its very strange how I see all of that the way I do an IP or FC network…

But that’s a post for another day. Its my last day of summer break, so I should go do something fun. I’ll probably be a nerd and read my new schoolbooks though.

Last night I listened to Stephen Downes’ lecture at #teched about Personal Learning Environments. One quote stuck with me:

The learner is the product of education

To me that means the product of education isn’t a diploma, or a certificate. The product of education is the delta between the individual’s knowledge from when they started the instruction and when the instruction is over.

That makes lots of sense to me. It started me thinking of my daughter. For those of you who don’t know, my daughter has Asperger’s Syndrome. She was not formally diagnosed until she was a teenager, but I always knew her little brain worked differently than most everyone else.

One reason she was diagnosed so late is that she talked very early. She was saying words at 4 months, and talking in sentences before she was 1. She took a long time to learn to walk, and thinking back I believe its because she was having sensory issues. We’d hold her little hands and try and coax her to walk, but if we let go she would sit down and emphatically tell us NO!!!! My friends used to tease me because my daughter would sit on the ground and say, “Mom can I have a cookie” but she couldn’t walk. She was probably about 12 or 13 months at the time.

Of course we encouraged it. So did my brothers, who were all teenagers at the time. They loved having a little parrot around. But looking back, she wasn’t really having conversations. She had just figured out using words was a good way to explore the world. She never did the thing where babies crawl everywhere and stick things in their mouths…she asked questions. She would ask the same question 6 or 7 different ways. And we’d answer 6 or 7 ways if we could. But she could talk before she was one, so didn’t that prove that she was smart and perfect? (And yes of course she is brilliant and as close to perfect as you can get!).

The other thing that is typical of folks on the spectrum is that they usually have at least one special interest. It becomes all they want to talk about. That gets very, very annoying. One of my daughter’s earliest special interests was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don’t remember much about it, but she must have been going on and on about Ninja Turtles because one day I told her that the Turtles were named after famous artists.

She couldn’t believe that. So I took her to the public library and we checked out four children’s picture books about Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael. Now was my daughter content that I had proved the names came from artists? Was she content to just look at the pictures?

Of course not. She wanted to know the stories behind each of the famous works of art. This led to a new special interest – Greek and Latin mythology stories. At some point a few years later I couldn’t take the Greek stories anymore had to branch off again, I told her that the constellations all had stories too. This sent her off on a journey to discover everything about that topic. I think this helped solidify her love of stories.

So what does this have to do with Downes?

We have to stop looking at a degree as the end result of education. I found ways to use my daughter’s special interests to help her learn more, to help her have more than one special interest. This is important to unlock the potential off of us have. Early on I fell victim to measuring what she needed based on norms – I should have realized her speaking so early was telling me something else.

My friend calls me about her friend’s son quite often these days. She thinks the boy must be on the spectrum, and asks for advice (the boy reminds her of my daughter). The boy is 11 or 12, and his special interest in Mario. He carries a Mario doll to school, he is obsessed with plumbing and mushrooms. They met a young Japanese lady at the beach and the boy immediately drew her a picture of Princess Peach. My advice to her: make sure the parents play Mario! That seems so obvious.

Relationship to Corporate Learning

It seems to me we have to measure by the change in the individual learner. If that is what we measure, how do we create the best environment for individuals to learn? We can’t individualize instruction, so how do we show them the path to the things that will help them learn? How can we help them get from Ninja Turtles to Persephone?

I have blogged about my experiences at the Simmons School of Management Leadership Conference. One session had me boiling inside – and they didn’t even have a Q&A session! I thought I’d write a bit about the session that bothered me, and why it bothered me, as the themes are very important in a connected world.

The session was a Leadership Seminar led by Annie McKee. Many of the first statements made were very good. For example: we are living in a time of profound changes that are reshaping the social structures around us. And these shifts are causing the basic systems that had been in place to crumble as they become irrelevant.

Ok, so far I could agree with it all.

Then the conversation started to focus on what makes a  good  leader. Statements such as “leaders touch our hearts” and “good leaders move us as complete human beings, they move our mind, body, heart, and spirit”. Hmm, ok, maybe I can buy that.

But then things were said that fully engaged my resident oppositional attitude:

Humans are good at reading social cues

OK, that is just not true. EVERYONE is not good at reading social cues. For instance, adults on the Autism spectrum may not be able to read social cues. Plus, social cues are tied to culture. If you work in a global organization, you may be good at reading the social cues from your own culture, but if you are on the other side of the world working — there is a chance you miss certain signals because they aren’t relevant in your culture.

But, not everyone is as sensitive to this topic as me, so I kept listening. Then I heard this:

Good leaders know how to draw people to them, and how to use and manage emotion in a positive way

OK, so good leaders can manage their emotions, use emotions to influence others, and are good at reading social cues. Basically they can’t have any sort of Executive Functioning Deficit. The things listed as signs of good leaders are the opposites of symptoms of many disabilities.

Then the conversation switched to the discussion of mirror neurons:

Mirror nuerons are what make us physiologically attuned to pick up social cues

Well that is not exactly what mirror neurons do. Marco Iacoboni, the neuroscientist best known for his work on mirror neurons, had this to say about the hype:

I think there are two key points to keep in mind. The first one is the one we started with: mirror neurons are brain cells specialized for actions. They are obviously critical cells for social interactions but they can’t explain non-social cognition. The second point to keep in mind is that every brain cell and every neural system does not operate in a vacuum. Everything in the brain is interconnected, so that the activity of each cell reflects the dynamic interactions with other brain cells and other neural systems.

So mirror neurons have a specific specialized purpose for interpreting actions, not non-social cognition. Of course the first thing I thought when these neurons were mentioned was: what about people on the spectrum? Are their mirror neurons broken?

The final straw in the presentation was this statement:

If you lead, how do you make emotions contagious across the airwaves?

This is just crazy. You can’t just send emotion over the airwaves, you have to be sure you are transmitting over a frequency that can be picked up by everyone you are supposed to be leading. So this means adjusting that frequency so that people on the autism spectrum, people from all cultures, countries, and creeds are able to receive the signal and decipher it.

This presentation cut to my core for several reasons:

• My daughter is on the spectrum. I would never her want to be at a professional conference where someone said she was “broken”, or even “dangerous”
• I think culture is vital to innovation. Perhaps this presentation would work if we had a pan-global identity – but we don’t. We have to work at making our intentions known, and cutting other people slack when they don’t “get” us right away.

I’m more convinced than ever that there is a great need to educate people about what it means to be on the autism spectrum, and how by just changing our views of “broken” and “dangerous” can enable very smart, focused, creative people to contribute even more to our society.

That is one way I hope to show leadership in the future.

Ok, I give! CCK08 is officially killing me! I’m going to try and hang in there. I think the problem is that the topics are so meaty, and interesting, that I want to only do this class and nothing else.

For instance, this post has been sitting in my head for a while. I just haven’t been able to get the words together to do real justice to the idea in my head. So I put it off, and the idea gets bigger. Then I get frustrated. It’s such an evil cycle.

How are people on the Autism spectrum affected by a network? I’m just going to bullet point my main ideas, feel free to pull them apart. I do believe that if we are talking about a new theory of learning, we have the opportunity to investigate this theory for ALL learners. So I think we should take some care to think about how this new theory of connectivism works for folks with learning disabilities.

So here is the list of my thoughts on autism and networks. It is not referenced, I just don’t have time. These are merely the thoughts of a mom with a child on the spectrum:

• Some learners won’t give any (expected) feedback about being connected to the network, but will learn from the network.
  I say expected because they probably are giving some sort of feedback, but it’s just not at the frequency that the rest of the world is listening for.
  Obvious examples of this would be non-verbal people with savant qualities. These people have an expert level of knowledge or skill in one particular area. Did this quality come from the sky? Or are they plugged into the network somehow?
• The lack of social awareness may help attach to a classroom network, but being overwhelmed with sensory data may prevent that attachment.
  One of the hallmarks of Asperger’s Syndrome, which is on the autism spectrum, is that a person with this syndrome won’t understand social cues. They have a hard time making friends (connecting to the network?), are loners, etc. But they usually also have one or two special interests for which they are experts. People on this end of the spectrum are usually very intelligent as well.
  Maybe because their lack of understanding social norms is what helps them excel in school. They are not distracted by the social cliques at school because they just don’t see them. They don’t see the social circles, so they are left out them (excluded from those networks?). But this helps them have more attention for the lessons. So while socially they seem disconnected, they are very tuned into the classroom instruction.
  That is, if they are able to tune out sensory information. Many autistic people have very sensory integration problems. So while they are oblivious to social cues, every sensory cue that is in the room is handled as a major issue to be addressed cognitively. Florescent lights, someone sweeping the hall outside, kids whispering, all of that is hard to filter if you have sensory integration disorder. Since their sensory filters don’t work to filter sensory input properly, autistic kids may be too flooded with information to attach to the classroom network.

That’s all I have so far. Sorry there’s not more hard evidence attached to my idea. What have I left out?

This post is going to be rather free form because I feel like I have so much in my brain that I need to get out.

One of the common explanations for the difference of connectivism and constructivism is that constructivism happens in your head, and connectivism happens out in “the network”.

My question was what about people with autism? You have autistic savants that don’t interact with the network, but they are absolute experts in their special interest.

Well someone has been studying that. Allan Snyder has figured out a way to turn off the left temporal lobe to induce a savant-like state. Basically the idea is that if the left temporal lobe is shut off, sensory data from the outside world (dare I say the network?) has direct access to your brain. It gets right to the brain’s processor, going around all of the filters that left temporal lobe has for us.

So, maybe info flows through the networks (just like computer networks), but the data is processed through filters in your left temporal node to be processed by your brain into information that is relevant to *you*. The filters are what create the relevant. Autistic people are able to absorb more of the data in raw form because their filters are inhibited for some reason.

It is obvious info flows through the network: someone that follows me on Twitter because of CCK08 saw me tweeting about autism (my daughter has Asperger’s Syndrome). Her daughter was just diagnosed as being on the spectrum, and she asked me for links so she could get some more information for herself. I threw together a quick blog post of resources. I’m pretty tapped into a very helpful network that helps me help my daughter, and now my CCK08 classmate is able to join that network too.

In networking terms, my classmate learned my routing table.

Maybe I will try to draw a picture of this from a (computer) networking point of view. Tomorrow.