Holidays and Brick Laying

 

What do they have in common – I don’t know yet: I’ll have to wait until I finish this post.

 Holidays are good things – celebration and fun and food and presents: what’s not to like?  Oh, and Time Off from work – an Excellent thing for battery charging and sudden flashes of the Blindingly Obvious in the middle of the night.  I don’t think we’ll mention the relatives coming to tea who can be a charm or a chore and sometimes both at once. 

 Moving on to bricklaying – bet you wondered how I was going to get there.  At work (see above reference w/respect to Time Off) we put our heads down and lay those bricks.  Day after back aching, head aching day.  Stand up, straighten out and look: all those soul deadening bricks have become a wall – you’ve really been building a wall and its part of a house or a palace or a church or a synagogue or a school or some other architectural wonder. 

 Much better to stop laying bricks and start building wonderful things.  Much better to stop, recharge and celebrate than plod on laying bricks and grumbling about how many there are in a ton or a truckload. 

 Back to the first sentence: What do holidays and bricklaying have in common?  Both are absolutely essential to where we’re going.  Holidays give us time for a flash of the Blindingly Obvious (see paragraph two); that we lay a lot of bricks (not the same as laying eggs – that’s a topic for another time) and we build wonderful places and programs.   

Celebrate early and often and look up from laying those bricks! 

Differences between the CEU and the ILU

The Continuing Education Unit (CEU) has been the widely used for several decades and worked well for the industrial age when measurement of education units was based upon time or to be more precise – seat time in class. Licensing boards and certification boards could feel comfort knowing that someone was watching to ensure that the professional/participant/student was in the classroom while the qualified instructor was delivering his/her presentation. All the while someone was measuring the length of the class, the time from start to finish.

The International Learning Unit (ILU) has only been used for a few years, developed to fill a void with an emphasis based upon competency to measuring learning. The ILU requires an outcome based competency minimum result of at least 80% or better. As eLearning continued to expand how much time the participants spends in the process of learning loses importance and is being replace with comprehension, competencies, outcomes, and retention. Faculty and employers are more interested in knowing that in a learning situation substance is more important than space. Where, when or how a person learns is not as important as what and that they learn.