More than a thousand methods are listed in Europe’s largest toolbox for training and youth work at www.salto-youth.net/tools/toolbox/. More than a thousand tools, with new ones being added constantly. More than a thousand!

They stand for a growing dilemma and an increasingly frustrating conflict in our work as youth trainers and youth workers – the demand that methods must always be effective, evidence-based, creative, participatory, empowering, stimulating, exciting, new, crazy, surprising, powerful…

Is there a method in the madness?
Photo by Tim Chaborski

Is there a method in the madness?

The more methods you know the better you are. Methods have become a marketing tool, a part of our identities as youth trainers and youth workers. Some of these methods may even become our trademark – when you think of Madzinga, with how many trainers do you associate it? And yet, at the same time, it almost seems as if only a new method is a good method.

We are afraid of repeating ourselves. We don’t want to bore ourselves with what we do. But more importantly: frequent seminar-goers might recognise a method and consider us boring as well… Oh no!

Are we afraid of the medicine?
Photo by Winona Wilhelm

Why are we so afraid of repeating ourselves? Have you ever heard anyone say that you shouldn’t take Aspirin to fight off your headache because, you know, you took it last time already? Nobody gets excited about taking Aspirin twice. Why then are we so often afraid of using the same energiser twice? On the other hand, when in need of more complex medical treatments nobody receives the exact same dose and mix of medication, operation and/or therapy – too much depends on the situation, its circumstances, possible side-effects… It’s too complex to be simplistically repeated. Why then are we so often afraid of adapting a complex simulation exercise to our needs?

The comparison is both far-fetched and lopsided – after all, we are not trying to cure a disease through our youth work and youth training. But both the Methods Fatigue Syndrome (MFS) and the Methods Obsession Syndrome (MOS) appear to be growing stronger among youth trainers and youth workers across Europe.

In the wake of these two syndromes, methods are often fetishized and given fancy names and undeserved status. Over time, their original contexts, meanings and purposes get lost and are replaced by common beliefs and shallow clichés.

Open Space and World Café, Appreciative Inquiry and The Art of Hosting have not only become synonyms of processes for discussions that matter, they have also become catchwords with an almost exclusive focus on their possibilities, power and potential and little to no awareness of their preconditions, limits and weaknesses.

Peter Senge, in his afterword to the World Café Community‘s book “The World Café. Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter,” observed that

“the World Café is not a technique. It is an invitation into a way of being with one another that is already part of our nature.”

And yet, a technique is what the World Café is often downgraded to. We like the atmosphere, we like the idea, we like the potential of the approach – but we do not spend enough time on considering context and contents, on developing excellent questions and connecting diverse perspectives. And so, instead of discovering collective wisdom, we discover how boring and uninspiring the mechanical process of people talking and moving and reporting back can be, even when arranged in a café setting.

The World Café is only one of many examples of potentially great approaches, which require plenty of hard work to make them powerful, being reduced to a technique of seven quick steps. It’s a symptom of a spreading weakness in youth work and youth training; a widening gap between our ambitions and claims, on the one hand, and our practice and authenticity, on the other hand. Strongly overshadowed by the much-demanded efforts to document and validate learning outcomes, we are increasingly reverting to fixed curricula and reproducible sequences, to known recipes and documented techniques.

On the pathway to the recognition of youth work and non-formal learning, the pressure grows to make our work recognisable. We are writing down what we do more than ever before, and the resulting wealth of material available fuels our temptation to revert to what is already there. In doing so, we quietly open the doors for myths about training and learning to take hold.

The most prominent example is quite likely the learning style myth. Ruth Clark summarises this in her book “Evidence-based training methods: a guide for training professionals:”

“Learning styles represent one of the more wasteful and misleading pervasive learning myths of the past 20 years. From audio learners to visual learners or from ‘sensors’ to ‘intuitive,’ learning styles come in many flavors. (…) For some reason, the idea of a learning style has a kind of cosmic intuitive appeal that is very compelling. (…) The learning style myth leads to some very unproductive training ap-proaches (…) The time and energy spent perpetuating the various learning style myths can be more wisely invested in supporting individual differences that are proven to make a difference—namely, prior knowledge of the learner.”

Ruth Clark makes, beyond her efforts to debunk learning styles as a myth, a fundamentally important observation: what makes most difference to the impact of learning – and should, therefore, make most difference to our design of learning processes – is the prior knowledge of learners.

What is the prior knowledge of our learners?
Photo by Tobias Mittmann

We know this, of course – there is a reason why we are, often intuitively, a little afraid of people joining our workshops, seminars and training courses who (believe to) know a lot about what we do and what we talk about. And indeed, this often complicates our work tremendously, because those participants are way beyond the reasonable variety of levels of prior knowledge that our methodology usually caters for.

This observation – that there is a limit to the deviation of prior knowledge that our methodology can typically handle – is also not exactly new. There are reasons why we normally publish a profile of participants with the announcement of a seminar or training course. One of those reasons is to limit the heterogeneity of the group, also in terms of prior knowledge and experience.

But the connection of cause and action usually stops one step too early in our educational practice as youth trainers and youth workers: if we know that prior experience plays such an important role, why do we still assume that methods, tools and techniques can be universally effective?

They never are. Methods are developed for a specific reason, in a specific context, for a specific group of people and a specific purpose. Within limits, they can be transferred and applied elsewhere. With creativity, their usefulness can be extended by mashing and remixing them. But none is ever universally effective.

Here are the good news: methods are usually not even developed to be universally effective. Their feverish transformation into half religion, half occult happens much after they have proven to be powerful tools. Methods are usually developed in response to a set of questions such as:

• What are our political and educational aims and objectives?
• Who are our learners, what are their needs and their experiences?
• What are our, and their, expected and desired learning outcomes?

These questions stand representatively for the fourfold, progressive sequence of planning and delivering educational experiences: (1) shared learning aims and objectives (2) learners’ needs and prior experiences (3) expected and desired learning outcomes (4) methodology and methods.

Will the cake become stale?
Photo by Livia Kpunkt

There is no reason to be afraid of devising your own method, whether or not it has been used and written down elsewhere: we know what makes a good ice-breaker or energiser; we have learnt how do develop and run a simulation exercise; we are familiar with theatre methods in their various forms… Our collective knowledge, even in small teams of two or three youth workers and youth trainers, is amazing. Let’s use it! And let’s put methods back to where they belong: at the end of our learning design process.

Only a method that serves an objective, responds to a need, takes into account prior experience and works towards a learning outcome can be what it should be: the jewel in our crown of non-formal education, the dot in the i, the icing on the cake. If methods become all there is to our cake, it will start tasting mouldy and stale in no time at all.

“I created the first one in 2009 because at that time there was an energy crisis in Europe. I just created it to amuse my friends but when I put it up on my website so many people liked it that I decided to really focus on the project of mapping the stereotypes based on different places in Europe. I was surprised by the reaction because I never really expected it to take off like this.”

Here are, in alphabetical order, Europe according to Britain and, after the jump, Europe according to Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, the United States and the Vatican.

As Yanko put it: “Sense of humor highly recommended.” Indeed :) Enjoy!

Europe according to Britain | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe according to Bulgaria | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe according to France | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Germany | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Greece | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Italy | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Poland | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Russia | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Spain | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to the United States | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to the Vatican | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Here are twelve starting points to reload EURODIG for 2012.

Photo by ifranz

01. The content. A good conference stands out due to relevant and engaging content. Making reasonable choices about the scope of the entire conference as well as individual sessions are probably among the most difficult decisions to take, but they are crucial: trying to cover everything will almost inevitably lead to broad interventions, vague discussions and little impact. At the 2011 EURODIG Confe­rence, almost all plenary and workshop sessions suffered from the—understandable, yet ruinous—desire to cover too many themes, aspects and angels at a time. My suggestion: In 2012, we give each EURODIG session a relevant and manageable focus, underpinned with three leading questions.

Photo by pablolizardo

02. The context. Making choices about contents priorities allows to zoom in and debate questions in a meaningful way, but it also carries the risk of loosing sight of the larger context. (Not making a choice and scratching the surface of many aspects carries the same risk, of course, which the 2011 EURODIG Conference demonstrated formidably.) Understanding the larger issues and frameworks when debating specific questions helps to make the discourse on internet governance an informed exchange. My suggestion: In 2012, we produce a conference reader ahead of EURODIG, introducing the larger context and framework as well as all sessions with their foci and leading questions.

Photo by spierisf

03. The crowd. EURODIG wants to be a platform for discussions on internet governance between stakeholders from all over Europe. Way too many stake­holders were absent or underrepresented – some by default, some by choice, some by coincidence, some by mistake. Where were the net activists from La Quadrature du Net or Digitale Gesellschaft? Where was the Creative Commons movement? Where was the Euroblogging scene? Where was the open data movement? Where was the digital rights movement? My sug­gestion: By the end of 2011, we have spoken to all missing stakeholder groups, trying to make sure that EURODIG will become relevant and useful for them.

Photo by tudor

04. The dialogue. EURODIG is, in theory, all about dialogue. In practice, the conference featured a series of speakers, followed by a series of audience inter­ventions from the usual suspects. Almost all panels and many workshops followed this pattern – death by powerpoint instead of inspiration by dialogue. Conferen­ces have been re-thought for a while already, and while it’s not useful to flippantly apply the format of unconferences to EURODIG, there is much to be learned from them. Let’s mix in some Pecha Kucha, Open Space, Fish Bowl, Foo Camp, Knowledge Café, Speed Geeking and add our own inventions. My suggestion: In 2012, we run the conference in a completely re-developed format.

Photo by johnmcnab

05. The facilitation. In every conference, there are gaps of knowledge between attendees, there are power differentials at play, and there is often a—perceived— lack of time. In almost all sessions of the 2011 EURODIG Conference, the facili­tation did not address this and was problematic: from acoustic feedback to dying batteries, from introductory monologues to judgemental commentary, from roaring speedtalkers to hushed whisperers, from manipulative openings to biased conclu­sions (sponsors as moderators?!) we had to witness an impressive array of shortcomings. My sugges­tion: In 2012, the entire conference will be facilitated by a team of experienced and, importantly, neutral moderators.

Photo by stuant63

06. The planning. The planning of the EURODIG Conferences is intended and designed to be participatory, with email groups serving as the main tool for communication. It’s easy to join the groups and join the preparation, but the flip-side of all this is that the planning is quite inefficient: it takes long, is documented badly, and de facto the plans are finalised in last minute manoeuvres by some of the key people involved. There is a common misperception about self-organised and anarchic participation vs dominant and hierarchic facilitation at play here… My suggestion: In 2012, we facilitate the session planning in several steps, document it well and finalise it two months before the event.

Our series of overviews on internet governance in Europe:
(1) Council of Europe | (2) European Union | (3) United Nations | (4) UNESCO | (5) OECD | (6) Civil society

Photo by evilerin

07. The speakers. The line-up of speakers for the 2011 EURODIG Conference was absurd in many ways: too many speakers, too many men, too many persons who had little to say, too many speakers who didn’t know how to present well, and too many panelists unfortunately combining these two weaknesses. It was amusing at the best of times and downright painful at the worst of times. Dialogue does not thrive from dozens of panelists with powerpoint presentations, and it wouldn’t even help if they were great speakers. Let’s please stop this altogether. My suggestion: For 2012, we choose not more than five keynote speakers, men and women who have something to say and who can get their message across.

Photo by opensourceway

08. The website. Wordpress 2.9.1? Cforms 11.4? jQuery 1.3? WP-Tables 1.7? You must be kidding me. I could hack this site and take it down in just a few minutes, and so could many others. I don’t mind that the design of the page is, well, outdated; it can be improved. I don’t mind that the page navigation is, well, confusing; it can be changed. I do mind that the software used to run the site is out-of-date, exploitable and vulnerable; it’s just altogether wrong. An excellent conference site, built with WordPress, is re-publica.de, let’s learn from them. My suggestion: For 2012, we re-develop the website from scratch and make it great: good-looking, easy to navigate and filled to the brim with quality content.

Photo by unanoslucror

09. The venue. I guess oxygen and daylight are overrated, and smelly fitted carpeting and asbestos underappreciated? Sava Center, “erected in 1977 as a modern building complex,” we look at you! Let’s try to find modern convention centers, built with humans and social interaction in mind, respecting modern ecological and energetic standards, and offering decent food for vegetarians. Powerplugs and reliable internet access points are pretty good, but it would be great if they weren’t needed to take attention away from the immediate environ­ment. My suggestion: Before the end of 2011, we develop a concise list of criteria for our conference venues to inform future host countries.

Photo by jona

10. The youth. I was involved in the New Media Summer School, and am thus particularly biased on this point, but why do we perceive young people always as young? This makes no sense — we don’t treat all older attendees as silver surfers, or all civil servants as governmentals, or all business people as money­makers. Why then do we treat young people first and foremost as young people? It’s disempowering and disenfranchising. Let’s put some effort into looking at people’s competences and contexts instead of stereotyping them because of their age. My suggestion: In 2012, we treat young people as we treat everybody else at EURODIG: as experts on internet governance.

Photo by fräuleinschiller

11. The documentation. The documentation of each year’s EURODIG is pretty extensive: reports of the sessions are online as well as complete transcripts, messages from EURODIG ollow each annual conference, and in 2011 some visual documentation was thrown into the documentation mix. Little of it seems to have a noticeable impact though — partly because the docu­men­tation reflects the lack of conclusiveness of many of the debates, partly because the docu­mentation does not manage to convey the progress of the discourse in a way that can be picked up. My suggestion: In 2012, we run the conference with a full reporting team, including a general rapporteur and a visual sensemaking team.

Photo by horiavarlan

12. The outcomes. Discussions are nice, dialogue is great, but it shouldn’t be an infinite loop of indecisive and inconclusive debates. Where are our demands? Where are our commitments? Where are our concise summaries? Where are our state of play documents? Where are our position papers? There are reams of possibilities to trigger, and document, concrete outcomes — they may not hold for everyone in the audience, they may not be the ultimate truth, they may provoke disagreement and friction… And yet! My suggestion: For 2012, we find a way to sum up the conference with some clear recommendations, clever suggestions, new questions and decisive calls for action.

What are your ideas to improve the European Dialogue on Internet Governance?

Much of my work at the junction of online and offline learning draws on the absolutely stellar WordPress community. At the beginning of this month, Matt Mullenweg—founding developer of the open source WordPress software—wrote a piece that instantly resonated with me, “1.0 is the loneliest number.”

Referring to first versions—of software, hardware or anything—Matt argued that

“if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.”

Oh how well do I know this! The number of iterations articles on Nonformality go through is embarrassing, but at least I am not embarrassed by most of them. The downside? Tardiness; I just wish I could write more and publish sooner.

Whenever I produce something—a report, a book, a website, a concept—I spent soooo much time making sure that the ‘one more thing’ is also perfect. The less likely a product is to be regularly updated, the more time I spent to perfect it. And when I *finally* surrender to mounting time pressure, I usually have plenty of reason to still be embarrassed about this or that or the other…

There is only one manuscript for a report that I can think of from the past five years or so that I did not think of as embarrassing. It was very embarrassing to ship it, however, because it was almost a year late; occasionally, I spend so much time endulging in perfectionism that the resulting delay becomes the most embarrassing part…

Which is why I will press the shiny blue «Publish» button now. Because:

“Real artists ship.” – Steve Jobs, 1983

Our biggest advancements in 4000 years?

Tina Roth Eisenberg, a swiss designer working from New York, asked this as an icebreaker question during a creative morning, a monthly breakfast lecture series.

Some answers—see them all here on Flickr—are predictable, others not. What’s yours?

»Here’s what I LOVE about reading on the Web, when I get into a link flow that dances me from blog to blog, post to connected post and comments, and after about 20 minutes of just letting myself be carried away by the threads of conversations I land on something that makes a small part of my brain blow up in wonder.«

Alan has described it differently, though I agree with him as much:

»… I have often marveled at the gems I find by random link walking from blogs- like a hike without a map — from one story that catches my eye, I am curious about a link that leads me down a lovely path, and before I know it, I am finding beautiful information…«

On his little journey that day, Will found the Western Cape’s University concept and approach of rip-mix learners – a project where students make recordings of lectures, compile notes, collect material and remix all this to create educational resources for their peers.

The concept sends my thoughts in all sorts of directions — and it certainly goes a long way to show that our trainings in nonformal education have much room to improve. Take Will’s way of capturing his travel of clicks:

»At every point, my decision to click was motivated by an interest for context, for moving more deeply into the one idea in the maze of stuff that was pulling me most at the moment.«

Exactly. And I wish we could (instead of moving towards more formalised and structured courses so they can be evaluated properly) find a way in which we allow learners at our trainings and seminars much more to follow their hunches in the same way. How cool would that be?

2008 really is «The Year of the Frog».

The year essentially is a global public awareness campaign aiming to raise awareness and understanding of the amphibian extinction crisis which, according to the organisation «Amphibian Ark»,

“represents the greatest species conservation challenge in the history of humanity.”

2008 also is

• the International Year of Planet Earth,
• the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue,
• the International Year of the Potato, and
• the International Year of Sanitation.

But for me, 2008 will always be the year of the frog – not the least because I bought Mr Froschkönig, the star of these pictures, from «The Crafty Hedgehog» over at tragically addictive etsy.

It was some five months ago, that with this sad event Nonformality went on hiatus. It was not really planned, but there was no way we could have just kept on blogging as if nothing had happened… The grief was still too near.

«Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.»

Samuel Johnson

∞

«Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.»

Mark Twain

So in the end, we do come back at last to share our joy in
writing, discussing, thinking and (of course) provoking.

What can you expect?

A few surprises, for sure. We used the previous months to work hard on our first book – hopefully the announcement will appear here before too long and should already be reason enough to stay tuned!

We will also pick up our series on intercultural learning by Lene from «The Sparkle». The previous three articles of Lene were always greeted by many opinions and discussions, and we are confident the coming three articles will do no less.

To get you started again or afresh or at all:

The Derdians. How to build bridges when the ones who need the bridges have a culture?
Celebrating Experiential Learning. But what if Kolb was misinterpreted?
Intercultural Learning. One concept to embrace it all?

We hope it will be fun!

Obviously, asking questions remains part of our writing and thinking on this site. We will, for example, ask ourselves and you why first mornings of so many training courses and seminars are so dreadful – and why intercultural evenings commonly are a parody of the concept of intercultural learning. And our thoughts and eyes are on much more…

From everybody here at Nonformality,
thanks for paying attention. Love,

Dig into the archives until our frontpage reappears.
All pictures courtesy of the great CARF @ FLICKR.

Peter Lauritzen, Head of the Youth Department at the Council of Europe, contributing author at Nonformality, but especially a beloved friend and mentor, passed away on May 29, 2007.

You will be missed, Peter – here, there, everywhere.

We will be back soon.

The wonderful place this came from.

What do you mean you have never heard of SYATP?!

My Lord!

See you at the Pole is an annual gathering of Christian students of all ages at a flagpole in front of their local school for prayer – during an early morning hour preceding the start of school day. (source).

Another wonderful event bound to September 27 until eternity is the World Tourism Day, instituted by UNUNWTO, 2006 organised under the exasparating theme of “Tourism Enriches”.

Impressed? Well then:

Read on to find out what else September 27 has been good (or bad) enough for in the past:

1590 – Pope Urban VII. dies after sweet 13 days in papal office. Unlucky numbers!
1601 – King Louis XIII of France is born to masturbate in public.
1810 – Napoleon is defeated by the Portuguese and British in the Battle of Busaco.
1818 – Adolph Kolbe is born to invent the production process of Aspirin. Thank you!
1822 – French academic Jean Francois Champollion deciphers Egpytian hieroglyphs.
1825 – The world’s first service of locomotive-hauled passenger trains opens.
1905 – Albert Einstein publishes his paper revealing the relation between energy and mass.
1919 – American scientist James Wilkinson begins his career as a numerical analyst.
1924 – Bud Powell was born to become a most influential jazz pianist.
1937 – The third GDR Minister für Schwermaschinen- und Anlagenbau sees the light of day.
1938 – Ocean liner Queen Elizabeth was launched on Glasgow’s wonderful river Clyde.
1940 – Germany, Italy and Japan sign their tripartite pact forming the Axis.
1942 – Glenn Miller and his Orchestra performed for the last time.
1952 – Dumitru Prunariu was born to be the first Romanian cosmonaut, on a Soyuz 40. Yeah!
1964 – The Warren Commission releases its disputed findings on JFK’s assassination.
1970 – Jordan’s King and Yasser Arafat sign Jordan Peace Deal.
1975 – One half of Frankly Speaking brings joy to this world.
1976 – Francesco Totti was born to become one of the best Italian football players.
1978 – The German left-wing daily tageszeitung – taz publishes its Dummy in Berlin.
1979 – The German Bicycle Federation (ADFC) is founded in Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein.
1983 – Richard Stallmann announces the GNU project – remember, GNU’s not Unix!
1986 – 24-year-old Metallica Bassist Cliff Burton dies in an accident.
1996 – The Taliban drove the Afghani Government out of Kabul.
1998 – 16 years of conservative cabbage rule in Germany ended.
1998 – Google is established. Yes, it’s their own cake, not mine!
2002 – East Timor joins the United Nations after gaining indepence from Indonesia.

Ach and have I mentioned that Gwyneth Paltrow turns 34 on September 27? Well, in 2006 she does anyway…

All in all, a rather fine day :)

See you back in a few short days.

Enjoy Easter, Passover, Vacation, Holiday, Family, Food and Love.

All Yours,
Yael, Andreas and the Nonformality Team

Technology wasn’t there yet, of course. Only in recent months and years software has evolved enough to survive the missing physical presence of the other. Coming to think about it, this geeky stuff actually almost renumerates, because you can have decent discussions and exchanges with people you have never met and never would. Quite amazing, really.

Technology wasn’t the only problem, though — the people weren’t there either, were they? Just remember the resistance of so many, refusing to use the internet… Let alone go beyond consumption to a more pro-active approach. And still today, on this blog and elsewhere, there are some who cannot or would not post their article themselves — they submit their stories and contributions in Word documents, as handwritten scripts, or typed with a good old typewriter.

Writing had to come a long way, too. How do you write for the world wide web — for a virtual audience? The same way one would write for print media? Certainly not. The same way one would talk with their friends? Even less so. Like a book? A radio show script? A cartoon?

It seems though that we live in a priviliged time in which things, at last, come together: The technology exists to allow for a discourse of high quality. People think and increasingly use the internet to share their thoughts and observations. And more and more often they do so in ways which are readable, sometimes even more than that — enjoyable, provoking, thoughtful, inspiring, arguable.

And this is exactly what Nonformality is here for: to provide technology and space for meaningful thinking and constructive discourse on learning.

Come in and enjoy to think, disagree and discuss!