When she tried working with refugees from Hurricane Katrina, Bogart often couldn’t connect with them.  They didn’t see sympathy or understanding in her face–because she can’t express those things facially.  People in conversations mirror and react to one another, and we’re usually very skilled at detecting and interpreting very small physical signals: a forced smile, a distracted glance.

This is a complicated area.  It’s not necessarily the case that people with similar paralysis can’t recognize emotion, but the inability to mimic is a barrier.  Some people cope through other channels: eye contact, for example, or voice.  The challenge has turned into a research field for Bogart.

I had no special interest in studying facial paralysis, even though I had it; there were many other things I could have done. But in college I looked to see what psychologists had to say about it, and there was nothing. Very, very little on facial paralysis at all. And I was just — well, I was angry.  Angry.  I thought, I might as well do it because certainly no one else is.

One result was a study of how people with Moebius recognize facial expressions (link is a PDF) of her study, demonstrating that the ability to mimic the expressions of others is not essential to recognizing their emotional state.  As the Times article suggests, if the strategies that people with Moebius use to understand emotion are “teachable,…they could help others with social awkwardness, whether because of anxiety, developmental problems like autism, or common causes of partial paralysis, like Bell’s palsy.”

The Times website has aslide show in which Bogart talks about having a face that can’t express emotion.

It’s an understatement scale, I guess, because even as my approval increases, the terminology is…less than exuberant, as in these examples:

• That’s okay.  (Barely acceptable.)
• That’s not bad.
• Not half bad.  (Well above average.)
• Not bad at all.
• That’s all right. (At least one Michelin star.)
• Pretty good.  (At least two.)

There’s a theoretical maximum, “really good.”  It’s like absolute zero, only warmer; you don’t find it much in nature.

I asked my children whether they’d ever heard me apply these terms.  They couldn’t say, because it’s hard to talk when you’re convulsed in laughter.

The purpose of a scale is twofold: measuring and evaluating.  Measuring is a comparison with some standard: you’re this tall (in inches, in cubits, in stacked-up poker chips).  You typed 268 characters in 3 minutes and made 4 errors.

Evaluating is forming a judgment, usually by means of a further comparison.  You’re tall for a 14-year-old boy.  You meet the minimum speed required for this job.

Thanks to Stephen Downes’s OLDaily, I came across Clarence Fisher’s connecting assessment.  It’s a rubric he created for middle schoolers “to help students think about the connections and global understandings they are establishing.”

He doesn’t plan to assign grades based on where students are–this is a conversation starter, he says.  To me, it’s a way to say to the student, “This is how it might look if you’re at a beginner level of skill.  This is more-than-beginner.  This is how it looks if you’re accomplished.”

Fisher offered another rubric in an earlier post–one to help grade student blog posts.

What I like about these is that Fisher shares what he’s come up with for a particular situation.  He even provides Google doc versions (blogging rubric, connecting rubric) in case someone wants to use them as starting points.

Pretty good, I’d say.

“Approval scale” image adapted from this CC-licensed photo by mag3737 / Tom Magliery
(images are his; cartoon balloons are mine).

Though “via Twitter” is misleading.  I learned about the closing from Jane Bozarth. Twitter’s just how the news arrived; it’s the way Jane and I usually connect.  You wouldn’t say “I learned about it by phone” unless there were some unusual significance to the phone itself–as in, that’s how you found out you’d been laid off.

For a long time, especially when Ron Zemke and Jack Gordon were among its editors, Training was by far my favorite professional magazine.  Training and Development had too much ASTD superstructure showing.  While Performance Improvement often had solid content, the gems were often larded with academic or HPT jargon and boxed in a bargain-basement layout.

It’s been a long time since I subscribed to any of these.  They all ended up on the wrong side of my cost-benefit divide for me.  As for Training in particular, I wasn’t aware it was still being published.   Hence, gerontoprise, a word suggested by Caroline Kliemt in an email conversation: surprise at learning that something has just died–because you didn’t know it was still around.

(I could have used this word in 1989, when I learned of the death at age 101 of Sir Thomas Sopwith, as in the World War I fighter plane, the Sopwith Camel.)

What I valued in professional magazine pieces was most often some combination of depth (as in detail), relevance (fit what what I was working on or interested in), and clarity.  I also appreciated combining “here’s what’s new” with a refusal to drool over bandwagons.  Training could do that well, 10 or 15 years ago.

What I disliked?  The pauses.  Once you read an issue, you had nothing more till the next one.  And, for the most part, you as an individual had no voice in what topics might occur; you were relying on the editors.  In the case of Training, I did note an apparent abandonment of seriousness as the publication went through new management, lost experienced staffers, and seemed less and less interested in connecting practice to theory.

Not that I need five pounds of theory per day.  Connecting practice to theory (having a basis for doing what you do, other than “feels good for now”) can help you avoid hopping onto too many of those bandwagons.  (As Claude Lineberry once said, “Computer-based training isn’t the answer.  Computer-based training is a question.”)

I do think Training was a true resource, especially if you were new to the “learning profession” and doubly so if you were pretty much the only one in your organization doing what you were doing.  Like the defunct TRDEV-L listserv, Training was a step toward a virtual community.

You’ve got many more options for community now, which helps explains why the magazine folded.  One corollary, though, is that  you’ve got to wire up those connections yourself.  You need to think about where you can nourish and expand your professional interests and passions: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, news feeds, virtual conferences, face-to-face conferences, whatever.

But that’s true for any valued network in your life, I think.

CC-licensed images:
Going-out-of-business photo by Unhindered By Talent / Nic McPhee.
Saskatchewan telephone image by Colros / Colin Rose.

I don’t do that often; I’m a poor proselytizer.  But I’m not bad at explaining.

There are two main routes to having your own blog.  The simpler one, for most people, is a blog hosted on sites like WordPress.com or Blogger.  You don’t have to consider domain name, hosting services, or any of that stuff.

You do have to figure out how a blog works, which like many things can seem quite complicated from the outside.  I’m a WordPress fan, but its distinction between Post and Page is not intuitive, and the explanation in the WordPress Codex isn’t much help to a newcomer.

( *** Tech term alert: if you don’t care about WordPress, feel free to skip the next paragraph. ***)

A WP novice doesn’t immediately grasp whether, when, or how to use categories.  She doesn’t necessarily see the distinctions between publish, preview, and save draft.  It’s not obvious how to write a post and set it to appear automatically at a later time. And that’s just the writing-a-post stuff, not the admin controls, the use of plug-ins, or the tradeoffs that come with switching your theme.

The second route to having a blog is to have your own domain (like my www.daveswhiteboard.com), to have that domain hosted (by a hosting service or, for those with lots of tech time, on your own), and to install blog software on your domain the way I’ve installed WordPress on mine.

None of that is all that hard, necessarily — but it’s comparable to learning to drive a standard transmission car when you only know how to drive an automatic.  There’s more stuff going on, more that you have to think about, concepts you need to incorporate, skills you need to build.  The effort can well be worthwhile (either for the stick shift or for the domain), but it’s not essential.  At least not in the way that food, shelter, clothing, and shortbread are.

My own impression of a blog, way back when, was “here’s my big thought of the day.”  After nearly four years, I know quite a few bloggers.  Most of them don’t see their blog that way.  Still, you can see the parallel with the (relatively) uninformed picture of Twitter as “here’s what I had for lunch.”

My first blog is a collection of stories by and about people from Cape Breton Island, where I was born.  Most of them aren’t by me.  My second blog began as a way to keep in touch with my parents, who’d been online for a few years but had trouble when it came to reading email, finding items they’d previously read, and opening attachments.

My point is not that you ought to blog for your family stories or to keep in touch with your parents.  Instead, it’s that if you’ve got something you want to share with one or more people at a distance, and you think you might have a number of things to share, then a blog’s one way you can do that.

A longtime colleague and friend has a serious-hobby interest–to preserve his privacy, I’ll say this interest is in Japanese ceramics, because it’s not.   He collects Japanese ceramics, he makes trips to examine them, he meets often with people also interested in ceramics.

He asked about making a web page to summarize lectures about Japanese ceramics, I suggested a blog to accomplish this–far less a technical leap for him than a full-blown website.  I walked him through WordPress.com’s setup.  He made practice posts (so he learned by doing simple versions of the real task).  I’ve spent five or six hours all told helping him maintain and troubleshoot his blog.

He does almost nothing the way I would.  The most recent post doesn’t appear on the main page.  He has white type on a dark background.  He has dozens of photos in a single post.  He has enormously long posts (no “click to read more” for him).  He doesn’t allow comments.

And yet…

He gets email from strangers who him for sharing in this way.  Guest lecturers collaborate with him because they’re so pleased to have their material circulated more widely, especially by someone attuned to nuance in the world of Japanese ceramics.  He’s chugged along for two years with a slow rise to about two posts a month.

I’ve learned a lot from helping him.  In particular, I’ve been reminded of the difference between an option, a preference, and a recommendation.  You could argue that his blog might be more “successful” if he changed some of his practice–but I believe he knows what he wants to say, how he wants to say it, and quite a bit about who might want to hear it said.

CC-licensed images:
Tow-away hours image by Brett L.
1940 Oldsmobile manual image by Hugo90.