That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.

by Doris Lessing as shared by Pat_Lorna.

Pat and Lorna hail from Canada. They’re recent follows of mine and outgoing entrepreneurs. They have this to say on their profile:

We teach entrepreneurs how to create, market and monetize content for more prospects and profits. And we are also TheCoolestCouple.com.

Cute right? But they actually share a lot of interesting things.  If you’re into chitter chatter this isn’t your follow, but if a bit of business wisdom and a great attitude is, then I recommend you follow Pat_Lorna.

Successful information work requires the following:
1.Generalization. Finding opportunities comes from examining information from across a wide range of sources and disciplines.
2.Humanization. Opportunities, by their nature, involve seeing the world in new ways and making connections that we didn’t think of before. This requires human imagination, creativity and intuition.
3.Decentralization. Cross-disciplinary, creative work gains strength from greater diversity and more points of view. To manage this kind of activity requires collaboration rather than control.

With those words, Dave Gray sums up what’s important about Information Work.

Dave defines Information Work for us:

Information work transforms raw data into information which improves our lives. Its focus is not on things but what they mean. In peace and in war, in work and in life, better information leads to more opportunities, better decisions and better results. The primary method of information work is not efficiency of production, but rather, proficiency of induction – the ability to find patterns and imagine possibilities. A valuable information worker is one who can find or create meaning that was previously unseen.

Dave writes in Creativity in the Classroom, how the Industrial revolution covertly shaped the educational system. He then follows up with showing the depth of that influence and where the shortfalls are for our modern society, a society of Information Workers.

I highlighted the ‘requirements’ above because those skills are the ones I see sorely lacking and hardly encouraged in my work experiences. My civilian career as a System Analyst is where I see this most often, the challenge of Industrial versus Information structures and rewards.

The one management fails on most is number 3, Decentralization. Often managers don’t see the need for cross-displine training or work, or even cross-team.  Until recently, our AS/400 programmers on two closely related teams where under two different senior directors and rarely coordinated well or worked cross-team easily.  Sadly it took real life consequences to bring about change, but the change is happening.

That’s where the workers become just as much a problem. Typical Industrial mind set is to go to work, learn a skill, master it, keep doing it, retire.  That works great if you can keep making the same tire for 30 years or cutting out the same pre-fab part. It doesn’t work for crap in a quick paced business with lots of Information Work.

Fellow workers, much like me, were brought up in that old style mind set.  It’s hard to shake. You see this in cases where as soon as something is in a gray area between teams people are quick to shove it to the ‘other’ team.  They are also not anxious to pick up work that is overflow from ‘other’ teams. Heck, not only are folks resistant, I’ve seen out right hostility. I don’t fault them though. It’s in our blood.

Dave Gray’s article, Creativity in the Classroom, recommends tackling the ongoing problem at its source, our education system. I couldn’t agree more.  An immediate change is called for and in my opinion I see no reason teachers couldn’t start down this path today.

Sure, all of these testing requirements present a wall to change as they reward memorization over thinking skills. Still, I’d encourage educators to begin incorporating work on Generalization and Humanization.  Beyond that, we often talk about well rounded but what we do in practice is round out what we memorize with number facts, historic dates, and the rules of participles. How often do we focus on diversifying creative activities and focus on learning a variety of skill sets.

I’ll give up on my mini-rant here. Do me a favor, go read Dave Gray’s Creativity in the Classroom today.

き

KI – One of the basic Hiragana characters. Hiragana is phonetic in nature. The characters represent sounds, and can be combined to form the sounds of words. Hiragana characters are used for Japanese words only.

Hiragana is composed of 50 sounds, of which 46 are currently in use. One interesting thing is the base characters can be modified to other sounds with the addition of small marks.

し　じ

Above left is the sound si and with the addition of the dot, it becomes zi or ji sound.

I can see there will be much to learn for me, but what I’m hoping to gain first is a familiarity with the various symbols. Once I can recognize a majority, it will easier to begin the work book.

Thanks to @thepete and @pacificIt for the recommendations about entering Japanese characters. I played with that on the computer at work today, and now used it here on the Mac. Rocks!

I’m beginning a list of online resources for learning Japanese. Most sites will be free, so perhaps this will leave off some of the better sites.

• http://www.guidetojapanese.org/index.html#contents
• http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jwb/wwwjdic?9T
• http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Shrine/7047/hboth.htm

That’s just a few links. The plan is to get them all organized and posted on a Page vs a post.Please contribute any links that might be helpful. 

Japanese for Busy People I: Kana Version includes CD (Japanese for Busy People Series)

So I’m interested in learning Japanese. The above book comes recommended from one of my contacts as a best of type book for learning. This particular version is the Kana version, meaning it will not be Romanized or Western text.

Also recommended is of course finding a local school. I’m interested in doing both actually.

If you have other recommendations, do leave them in the comments or contact me directly.

Interested in tutoring an adult? Live in Missouri? Drop me a line.

Finally, if you have some books in Japanese, and you care to part with them, be sure to think of me.

Your future reader of Japanese,
Todd

Update: Another resource, The Japanese Grammar Database. Many thanks to @eladyland on Twitter.