ARSE Rating Scale

I regularly read Guy Kawasaki’s “How to Change the World” blog. It’s an interesting read because Guy looks at ideas from an entreprenurial aspect – something that is mentioned in our new curriculum documents but we as educators often shun for its dirty connotations. Actually I think I first discovered Guy through his work on “The Art of the Start” (condensed video), but he has also had some valuable stuff to say about Powerpoint.

In his latest post, Guy discusses the ARSE: Asshole Rating Self Exam .The ARSE ‘index’ is a tongue in cheek (OK very bad pictures generated with that unfortunate phrase) self evaluation of a person’s rating on the asshole scale. If you skim through the questions you can see exactly what the whole thing is about.

Meandering through the questionaire, it struck me how easy it is to fall into the asshole type behaviour. How easy it is to rest on the certainty of the knowledge that we have and to make assumptions about the people who don’t have that knowledge or (worse) disagree with us. I thought about the whole 2.0 bandwagon that the interweb world is on – did you know that some people are looking at our capital city becoming Wellington 2.0, or that Seth Godin is looking forward to Web 3 and, horrors, Web 4?

The start of the New Zealand school year also signals the countdown to our first ICT PD conference. Every year I look forward to these gatherings for the networking and for the new ideas that are generated. Every year I am saddened by the number of people who have garnered some jargon, some cool tricks and present these in the name of learning.

I have some predictions for Learning@School 07:

1. Web 2.0 will be the most overused phrase
2. There will be some talk of School 2.0
3. There will be a lot of back-patting and self-congratulating
4. The best stuff will happen away from the conference centre

And then we will all go back to real life where interweb connections are flakey, where BOTs can’t quite see the point of sending money on all of this technology anyway and where Remuera politicians can use kids as news-bait.