Nelson Croom's Blog

What's in a name?

by Tony Short

When we build our courses we often include examples and case studies which feature fictional characters. For example, questions in test and quizzes might include sentences like “If Janet has £30 and John has £35 …”. Our developers often find themselves burning up mental energy thinking up names to use in activities – names that avoid the old clichés of “John Doe” (or “Jane Doe”) or “John Smith”. We further agonise over being politically and socially correct, carefully ensuring that about half the characters are male and half are female (actually in our published courses we often alter this to reflect a particular industry – where there is a high number of women for example). And, of course, we try to avoid any ethnic stereotyping, by liberally scattering some non-Anglo Saxon names amongst our characters.

Just occasionally, our clients ask us to make changes to the names we pick. And now and again, the names we happen to choose even become a topic for discussion. So, I thought I’d ask Imago (our Learning Platform) to run a report to show what our real (non-fictional) learners are actually called. Below, for example, is a list of the top fifty first names our learners register under – is your name on the list?

Alison (792)
Amanda (600)
Andrew (1194)
Angela (687)
Anna (687)
Anne (566)
Carol (473)
Caroline (653)
Catherine (540)
Chris (864)
Christine (564)
Claire (1186)
Daniel (554)
David (1892)
Elizabeth (616)
Emma (1157)
Helen (1172)
Ian (685)
James (955)
Jane (872)
Jennifer (553)
Joanne (835)
John (1457)
Julie (1054)
Karen (1253)
Kate (564)
Laura (920)
Linda (591)
Lisa (893)
Louise (826)
Mark (1151)
Martin (571)
Matthew (540)
Michael (1050)
Michelle (873)
Nicola (935)
Paul (1456)
Peter (941)
Rachel (798)
Rebecca (800)
Richard (973)
Robert (670)
Samantha (551)
Sarah (2017)
Sharon (721)
Simon (710)
Stephen (701)
Sue (634)
Susan (969)
Victoria (487)

As you’ll see they’re all very run-of-the-mill, traditional British names. Not a sign of any Kylies or any of the many names that we try to use to reflect the multicultural nature of society. So now we have to decide whether the randomly picked names we choose should reflect our actual user population, or encourage diversity and try to engage minority groups. It seems that, when it comes down to it, even the apparently straightforward task of picking a few names out of a hat has philosophical and even controversial aspects to it. 

Believing it's interesting!

by Alan Nelson

I visited the IRRV Conference last week and was pleased to find it as lively as ever. It’s good to see first hand the positive reactions of real users of our courses, especially now that the range is so extensive.

The Euclidian range of products we have created with them is now the market leader for training and maintaining the currency of revenues and benefits officers and the new distance learning materials that support students enrolled on the Level 3 Certificate in Local Taxation and Benefits have been enthusiastically received. Indeed this year will see the expansion of their distance learning provision to support the new Diploma level qualification.

Bringing us right up to date, Institute Chief Executive, David Magor took to the main stage to announce the imminent launch of the new range of online induction and continuing education resources we are currently developing for enforcements officers (bailiffs to you and me).

Helping on the exhibition stand got me thinking about how all this started. Like so many of our clients and partners, IRRV started with something modest and expanded their offering slowly, learning as they went.

The first project was a short induction programme for benefits officers. To help us put this together, the Institute put us in touch with an author they had worked with on printed materials. Colin Holden (for it was he) and his wife Julie, are benefits royalty. At the time we first met, Colin was already well known in the profession. Julie, who was at the time a rising star, is now just coming to the end of her year as President of the Institute.

At our first meeting, we started explaining to Colin how the development process might work. In order to explain to him the sort of thing we had in mind, I showed him a course we had put together for the Pensions Management Institute. Colin seemed impressed with the approach, but less so by the subject matter. “This is pretty dry stuff” he said.

“Some people might say that about benefits administration” I replied.

Colin looked surprised. “Why would they say that?” he said.

At the time his response surprised me but now I know Colin much better and I was wrong to be surprised. Colin, along with many of his fellow IRRV members, is so knowledgeable about the world of benefits, that he does make benefits interesting. And why shouldn’t it be: it’s important, it’s complicated and it’s constantly changing.

Bringing things right up to date we are currently blessed with another enthusiastic and knowledgeable IRRV author. Bill Lovell, who is providing the content for our new enforcement officers’ course, is just as much of an enthusiast as Colin. He can describe 400 year old case law in a way that makes it fun and interesting.

In the years between meeting Colin and Bill I have come to realise how much we rely on authors who are passionate about their subject. So thank you Colin and Bill for your enthusiasm. Our job is to capture the essence of that in the finished course.

An industry divided by a common language?

by Alan Nelson

We have spent some time recently discussing our strategy for this Learning Technologies 2010. What is our objective in attending? Who do we want to talk to? What do we want to say to them?

We ended up focusing on identifying the simplest way of describing how we are different to everyone else. Now I think we are pretty clear about why we are different, and if the results of the most recent customer survey are anything to go by, our clients and partners are pretty clear too.

The problem is that lots of the other companies at the learning technologies exhibition use pretty similar terminology to describe something completely different. And they are not necessarily wrong, but as a group we end up confusing the hell of the visitors.

So here is my unofficial advice on how to sort the wheat from the chaff:

1. Remember that it’s all about people learning stuff. The technology has to be a means to an end and anyone who appears to have forgotten that is not worth spending time on

2. Decide what you want and ask about that. What advice do you need? What would you like help with? If you haven’t heard of what they do, you probably don’t need it.

3. Distrust jargon. Anyone who describes their offering as “an asynchronous distributed learning platform” deserves to be ignored.

4. Plan ahead and book appointments with a few exhibitors. They will be pleased to give you time and you’ll get much more out of a few detailed conversations than many short ones.

I hope this helps. But if you do end up as confused as ever come and see us. We’ll be offering a free translation service for gobbledegook!