Paces

Has The Time Come For Holistic Business Strategy in Conductive Education?

Some people I know (you don't need names) don't like "holistic" as a applied to conductive education. Indulge me a moment. SAHK have sought to apply conductive education to and embed it within their business model holistically, one might say, if by that we mean, the whole.

"The Time Has Come For Holistic Business Strategy" says Brian Solis - now what could that possibly mean? You'll have to check the link yourself, as I'm not quite sure. 

I quite like this though which certainly applies to Paces:

"What’s the biggest problem in business today? .... I contend the biggest problem is that each business has too few people looking after the whole of the business. .... What’s the solution? I believe ... it is time to for organizations large and small to adopt a holistic business strategy that empowers more employees to think about the whole of the business...."

We tried that a year or so ago. Without much success, it has to be said. There was too much opposition to setting up a Ning social network, which was the plan. Maybe the time will come again?  (Andrew Sutton felt similarly the that SAHK's Pre-Congress social network initiative was a disappointment. I was encouraged that it had happened at all. Brian Solis is more of Andrew's view, if I read the blog post right.)

Why stop at employees? Why not include all those people the charity exists to servce?  Starting with our parents.

Then poking around the links from Brian Solis's posting, I stumbled across this, which seems to take the holistic business beyond our beneficiaries:

Michael Porter’s publishing of this great article on “Creating Shared Value” has really inspired me to put my nose to the grindstone and invest in advancing this big idea – that we must think about not only the whole of the business, but also the whole of society and the impacts every member of the broader ecosystem has on the other players and the ecosystem itself. (My Focus on Holistic Business Strategy - Chris Heuer).

Well, that might be over-cooking it just a bit. Nevertheless, aiming for more employees and parents in thinking about and giving direction to the whole business rather than just their bit of it is quite a challenge.

Anyone for an orthofunctional organisation? Now for another glass of red wine.

World Congress live - well not quite. #WCCE

Just been up to my blog and am absolutely amazed to see how many visitor-places have been mapped in the past 24 hours - 317 - incredible. 

Does this show the demand for 'World Congress - Live!" news and pix?  If so, I'm sorry that "Live from World Congress" is working out not even as well as the low expectation I had of my experiment.

In case any one is interested in the experiment itself, though, this quick assessment:

1. Connectivity - a SmartPhone is absolutely essential for doing this live.

2. Connectivity - my ancient Sony Ericsson cell phone (on which I could get low grade pix) has gone into "searching mode" after great first day; I'm thinking this is showing up connectivity issues.

3. Connectivity - just come off Skype to Dru at home and no video pictures; another sign of poor connectivity.

4. Will try to sort out new batteries for Canon camera tomorrow morning.  Need then to export pix to iPhoto and then to Flickr. Awkward and tedious. But will give it another go tomorrow night, all being well.

5. Twitter. Tweeting from 15" MacBook Pro, equally awkward - balancing on knee not satisfactory at all. Don't know if I will try again. Let's see how the sessions work out tomorrow.Hashtag #WCCE if I do.

OK. That's where I'm at just now.

 

 

First pic from #WCCE Hong Kong #Cond Ed

By way of seeing if I can, here's a first pic from the 7th World Congress of Conductive Education from here in Hong Kong - Pre-Congress Workshop 2, Andrew Sutton's presentation "Researching Conductive Education: Past and Future" on Sunday 5 December. The full text of Andrew's presentation can be found as his blog post "What I intended to say".

I experimented with tweeting direct from the Workshop, using hashtags #WCCE and #CondEd - until the MacBook Pro became too uncomfortable on my knee and the battery ran out - bot about the same time! Quite pleased I could - though made me realise that an iPhone would make the task so much easier.

I've taken some pics on my camera (see note on iPhone above). Just now I'm trying to sort out how to export these from iPhoto to Flickr.  I'm stuck on step one just now - the exporting to somewhere useful bit.

 

Living with Cerebral Palsy in the Web2.0 Era

I've only just caught up with this great post back in mid-August from Glenda Watson Hyatt (@GlendaWH on twitter) Living with Cerebral Palsy in the Web2.0 Era.

She begins her post: Three weeks ago today I had the pleasure of presenting with web accessibility consultant and speaker Tom Babinszki on the panel “Living with a Disability in the Web 2.0 Era” at the Plain Talk Conference held in Alexandria, Virginia."

Glenda types at 10 words per minute with her left thumb. That's a simple fact of her life. It's a simple fact of our lives who know her that she's a great blogger.

Take a look for yourselves and, as they say in the coffee shops, "enjoy".

Oh - and why aren't you blogging?

Top tips for reporting our impact #CondEd

With thanks to @NCVO on twitter:  "Reading: Top tips for reporting your charity’s impact"

"... a recent report from New Philanthropy Capital, Talking About Results, says that charities are much better at talking about what they do than why they do it and what it achieves ..."

I've been trying recently to work out how Paces can make better coordinated use of social networking on the internet to reach out to parents and friends.

I've also been pondering lately how Paces and, more generally, CE can report better what we do.

The 4 'top tips' for talking about results are:

• Bring it back to Why
• Use the voices of the people you support
• Think about how you measure success
• Be honest

I shall now go in search of the New Philanthropy Capital report. You can follow their top tips to the Ask Charity website - one I'd not previously come across and will explore after lunch.

Remembering Dr Hari

Andrew Sutton has published on his blog a post "Remember Maria"

Reading it reminded me that in our meeting room at Paces Campus hangs a picture taken at the 1993 Sheffield Summer School. I took it down and scanned it in. Here it is:

The Conductor on the left is Elizabeth Pappert. (Hello Elizabeth, wherever you are, from all of us in Sheffield.)  My daughter Sarah is in the middle in the grey sweatshirt. Who is the conductor behind her? And wouldn't it be great to be able to name all the children and, especially, to learn where they are now. Sarah was 28 last Saturday. Time flies!

There must be literally hundreds of (often treasured) pictures around the world. Does anyone agree it might be a good to set up a Flickr account to collect them in one accessible place?   (I only have this one picture of Dr Hari - but I'd be happy to set up a Flickr account if given the right encouragement).

Changes afoot (2) - thinking it all afresh

As I continue experimenting with changes to this blog, I see that I first posted on May 30th 2007 -  "For Starters". At lunch-time that day I was attended a meeting of OFFER (Sheffield's voluntary sector network) on the subject of child Poverty. There is no link to OFFER here as it ceased to exist through lack of funding from April this year. Things change.

I wrote in that post that the new blog was to be a fresh start in sharing news with "Paces' People first and our many friends too. So you can keep up with what's going on". If you read that sentence again, you will notice how old-fashioned it seems as a way to use the internet, in a world of Facebook, Twitter and a host of other social networking applications. No longer is the internet just another tool for "telling" people what some-one thinks it is good for them to know. 

Since then, as well as Facebook and Twitter, I have experimented with many new tools, learning (albeit slowly), such as Ning to set up discussion forums, Mindmeister for visually mapping strategy, Wikispaces for collaboratively writing & collecting documents, Netvibes for aggregating blogs about CE ; all the while trying to find out how these new tools could engage more people with Paces and with conductive education. (I was truly honoured that an idea of mine was taken up by the organising Committee of the 7th World Congress).

One consequence of course was that all these experiments happened in different places, with no real links or easy inter-connectivity.  I still do not yet know how to resolve that but recently I have been asked twice how we know that there is a demand for Paces' services among parents of children with cerebral palsy. (An easy, but not entirely whimsical response, is to ask how many people knew they wanted an iPhone before Apple invented it. I had an iPad in my hands yesterday for the first time. The day before yesterday I had no desire for one. Now I want one!) Whimsy aside, it's a solidly good question.

I also had put to me a thought which became the subject of a post: "What does Paces need to be like for parents to invite us in to their lives?" and this led on to pondering what Paces' internet presence should be like if it were built on the basis of that thought.

It's much too early to know that answer yet, but the thought has led me to explore first what I might do with this blog. In short, I am where I began in 2007 - trying to "make a fresh start".

Also, it's much too early to know the full consequences and benefits to Paces and CE in the UK of our "Proposal" to DfE to be invited to submit an application for Free School ("Academy") status. However, tomorrow we have a meeting of Trustees, Governors and staff with Tom Legge of the Place Group which supports schools seeking to become Academies. I will come back to this in a later post.

Things change. And we must - between us - constantly think it all afresh.

OpenData - now for charities like us. Hat-tip to @watfordgap

You may know that as well as Conductive Education I also have a passing interest in social networking, web2.0 and so on. I profess no expert knowledge, being merely an enthusiastic "dabbler" with, here and there, some understanding, fed by an active curiosity and an admiration for those who are the real creatives.

My great thanks then to @WatfordGap (Paul Webster of NAVCA in Sheffield) for his Tweet that alerted me to the couple of links "not to lose" in his blog post "Opening up data. Local authorities, now charities":

• Open Charities - which has opened up the data behind the Charities register (more information here)
• Openly Local - which is an amazing resource of open data, links and social media accounts of many local authorities

Both of these sites are "works in progress". Sheffield, for instance, is not yet included in "Openly local" but I was to explore Rotherham, which is. Both repay exploratory poking about.  The link to more information here is a fascinating read, too, on the problems presented in accessing and manipulating the data from the Charity Commission.

It's fun. But more than that, it's starting show the way Information is going and the things that might be possible with Open Data.

Conductive Web

For some time now I have occasionally been adding to a website of links to blogs about conductive education and to blogs by parents who have some interest in or for conductive education.

Do take a moment to visit "Conductive Web".

If you have any comments or if you can recommend a link, please let me know.

Facebook CE2.0 Group and some social media tools - #CondEd

Just a reminder of the Facebook Group CE2.0 - "the interface between conductive education and Web2.0

I've added a post with a link to some useful tools for tracking conductive education across social networks on the internet.

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Nb #CondEd is the hashtag for conductive education for those on twitter.