Be Inspired! Shirley Ayres Consulting

I feel privileged that through my blog I have connected with people from all walks of life across the world. I have had great conversations and been asked many challenging questions.  My thanks to everyone who has shared their thoughts and inspirations with me this year and contributed guest posts.  I will continue to provide an independent voice promoting excellence in social care and children’s services in 2011. With the urgent need for closer working between health and care I am pleased to share the thoughts of a student nurse on #demo2010.

“I have never felt moved to write an article about anything before but watching the recent developments with the student protests I felt the overwhelming need to write something more than the 140 characters that twitter allows.

I am a student, but before you back away in fear I would like to point out that I am not a “normal” student. I am a student nurse. I tweet under the guise of @justa2ndyear, though that is a relatively new venture for me.

As a student nurse I differ from other students in many ways, like my colleagues in social work; teaching or medicine, I have a longer academic year but I also (whispers) have my tuition fee’s paid for me AND I receive a bursary. Not that the bursary comes close to covering the cost of living for myself, my husband and my 2 children. In fact I also do regular night shifts and frequently will do the required 30 hours on placement (earning the equivalent of  £4.29per hour from NHS Bursaries) and then between 12-36 hours night shift work too. This is before I even attempt the academic work or spend time with my family.

Admittedly, I am probably viewed as a bit of a “tuition fee anti-Christ”, I do not have to worry about finding £3,375 a year to fund my studies, let alone the £9,000 proposed by the current government. The reason I support the protests is not for me but for my son. He is 12 and that means in 6 years he will be university age.

Unfortunately for him I am training to be a nurse in a country that has yet to value its key workers. Where bankers and footballers earn more in a week than nurses and teachers do in a year. This means that if i’m very lucky, when he goes to university in 6 years, I may be earning £34,189 (that is if i reach the top of band 6 – which is highly unlikely given the current spending freeze within the NHS), so best case scenario means that his tuition fee’s will equal 26% of my gross annual wage. The more likely scenario is that I will be middle of band 5, earning about £24, 554 which would mean paying about 36% on tuition fee’s. Lets hope those lottery numbers come up soon.

I come from a family where education is highly valued. Higher education was, for both of my parents, a privilege gained through hard work rather than money. I hope I have instilled in my son the same sense of drive and ambition that my parents gave me. The belief that if you work hard you can achieve. I would hate to have to tell my son that despite his hard work (he is currently fourth overall in his year) I cannot afford to send him to university.

It is for this reason that I fully support the actions of many students, including those who were in occupation at University College London (who can be followed on twitter @ucloccupation). I firmly believe we have a right to protest against issues we believe are wrong. If we didn’t it would all be a bit too Orwell ’1984′ for my liking.

However, I watched in horror the coverage of the protests and the actions of a few that have tainted the message of so many. I appreciate that the media present the story in a way that will maximise sales and that one must take a balanced view of what is reported. However, sometimes you just cant argue with the evidence.

The photograph of David Gilmour’s (of Pink Floyd fame) son Charlie swinging from the Cenotaph on a union jack sealed the deal in terms of the nations feelings towards the students cause. And thats without even mentioning all the other vandalism and destruction that was caused, all in the name of a “demonstration”.

What upsets me the most with all this is the total lack of thought demonstrated by these young people. I’m sure it didn’t even cross their minds that some of the people named on that memorial were the same age, if not younger, than they were when they died fighting for the freedom they so easily abused. 

I believe education should be available for those who work hard and are capable of achieving, not just those who can afford it. However, in a time of economic crisis when cuts have to be made, should we even be considering offering any support to those who feel that violence and destruction is an appropriate way to behave?”

Tags: #demo2010, education and training, student nurse, student protests

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Euan Semple

One of the delights and benefits of social networking for me has been the amazing people I have connected with. I first linked with Euan when reviewing the excellent http://www.iriss.org.uk/ website. Their recent report Social media in social services confirms my own thinking and research about the issues associated with unblocking access to social media in social services. Thanks Euan for contributing your thoughts and helping people understand the potential of social learning though social media - two hot topics for local government!

 So why bother with social media? Isn’t it just vanity publishing or time wasting teenagers? Maybe. It can be both of those. But it can also be one of the most powerful ways to understand what we do and why, learn as we go, and share what we learn with others. In fact social media is, in many ways, all about learning.

Learning what is interesting, learning what works and what doesn’t, and learning who knows what they are talking about – and who doesn’t! Take one the simplest and earliest forms of social media, blogging. Starting to blog about your job is a simple and inexpensive way to improve both your own and your organisation’s learning. Even if no one ever read your blog having the reason to think about what you do, and why, is immensely valuable. Sitting down at the end of the day to spend five minutes reflecting on what happened, and what you have learned from it, can make you much more aware of what is most important in your day’s work. Publishing that thought as a blog post then makes your insights available to others who might agree, disagree, or, in the comments on your blog post, develop and refine your insights.

This is learning at its best. Learning as you experience things through thoughtful observation and shared understanding. It is also social learning. Building a network of other blogging professionals gives you access not only to their accumulated experience but also to the possibility of building powerful business relationships. Many of those whose blogs you read may be in other organisations, or even in others remote parts of your own organisation, and your ability to connect and form relationships with these others may be severely limited in the “real” world. Reading each others experiences and insights on your blogs is a remarkably powerful way of connecting and establishing shared experience.

Once you have this online network of trusted fellow professionals really interesting patterns will begin to form in what you each find interesting enough to spend the time blogging about. These patterns themselves represent another level of learning, organisational learning. What do we as an organisation find important or challenging and what are we doing about it? Unlike static, stored, documentation, the networked, conversational style of blogs gives a more effective overview of what is currently most interesting to your organisation.

The best thing about social tools is that they are easy to get started with and can be very inexpensive. Each individual can have a go at blogging, or at the very least reading blogs, and with a little patience and confidence begin to open up this amazing opportunity for individual and collective learning.

About the author: Ten years ago, while working in a senior position at the BBC, Euan Semple was one of the first to introduce what have since become known as social media tools into a large, successful organisation. He has subsequently had four years of unparalleled experience working with organisations such as Nokia, The World Bank and NATO helping them learn how to make the most of this wired-up world of work. Euan is highly connected to some of the most influential movers and shakers of this new environment and his workshops have already been experienced by many diverse audiences worldwide. 

Contact Details: http://www.euansemple.com/

 Twitter: https://twitter.com/euan  Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/euansemple

Tags: Euan Semple, leadership, local government, social learning, social media

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