This visit to Sweden I’ve decided that rather than throwing my hands up in stunned amazement at the variety of sounds in the Swedish language, I will make some effort to understand them (it only took eight years for me to come to this!).

Yesterday’s revelation was that the letter k has two distinct pronounciations, which seems freaky to an English speaker.

I’ve been reading the signs in front of churches – kyrka – and saying (in my head), something like kirk-ah.

I have been wrong.

Kyrka is pronounced more like sheer-ka because the first k is pronounced “like ch in check, but without the initial t sound” when it comes before a “soft vowel” like y, and the second k is pronounced as one might in English.

As it is in kaffe (for “coffee”), which is pronounced as you think it might be: calf-eh.

All of which means that the Swedish for “church coffee,” which is kyrkkaffe, and which has a stunning number of ks, sounds something like sheer-calf-eh.

What wonders will I find today?

Thanks to [[Olle]] for turning me on to k’s wonders.

One of the benefits of having curious nerd friends is that they’re willing to entertain my predilection for wide-ranging conversations about the minutiae of everyday life.

In today’s episode the topic at hand was office fruit delivery and my coconspirators were Olle, Luisa and Jonas.

We arrived at this destination as we were splayed out for Sunday brunch here in Malmö, and it took us through a lateral thinking slalom course that started in Portland, Oregon, took us through Salt Lake City and then to the Google Campus, to the common practice of Danish employers providing lunch to employees and finally back to Malmö where the matter at hand ended up being the job perks of the Swedish workplace.

Olle, it turns out, has a popcorn machine in his office.

“So,” I asked, “is this a usual thing, to have a popcorn machine in a Swedish office?”

(No, it isn’t; it was a vestigal perk from an earlier company occupying the same space).

But, it turns out, office fruit delivery is a thing – a normal thing – here in Sweden.

There are companies in the business, like Fruktleveransen (with strapline “Frukt på jobbet” – “Fruit on the job”) that exist to service the office fruit delivery marketplace.

And as a result the Swedish worker has a reasonable expectation of ready access to fresh fruit. On the job.

Which led us to the question: do fruit privileges extend to visitors to the office?

There was no consensus on this issue: I would certainly be offered a coffee upon arrival in an office, it was agreed, but the propriety of turning down the coffee and asking instead for an apple or banana or kiwi remains unresolved.

I may have to seek real-world evidence by showing up at Olle’s office and running some tests.

Along the road to this surprising fact, I also learned that Danish school children call their teachers by their first names.

And that there’s been something called “you reform” in the Swedish language, a move roughly analagous to a wholesale switch from “vous” to “tu” by the entire population.

I could do this, quite happily, every day.

Indeed if Cultural Anthropology didn’t sound like the dullest profession on earth I might consider taking it up.

“Optimal collaboration requires knowing when to wait and when to come in; having everyone to play the music in a band, adding a little to collaboratively build a whole. Now the challenge for me is how to apply some of this knowledge to our education system. Figuring out how to bring long term team-centered skill building into a system that is based in short educational experiences. The biggest challenge is making group work real, and collaboration optimal. I believe adjusting the way our grading system works both horizontally (adding soft qualities to the evaluation schema) and establishing long-term skill evaluations in the whole educational plan would be a good start.”

– David Cuartielles, You may all play music, but you are not a band –
on collaboration, skill learning, and our education system

“He had very good musical skills, especially in the areas he needed to have them for producing music. Equally important, he had very good social skills, because if you don’t have those, doesn’t matter how good your tracks are, you’re going to end up being somebody’s helper.”

– Saturday Night Live band leader Lenny Pickett
on Dr. Luke in The New Yorker

I’m off to Sweden for 10 days, in part to attend next week’s Alibis for Interaction conference.

The conference is subtitled “A two-day conference on the design of participatory and narrative experiences.” which, for those outside the experience design hipstersphere, perhaps doesn’t mean much.

My reason for attending is simply this: a lot of my paid and volunteer work – all of it, probably – involves working with other people in groups of one form or another.

In my day job I work with a decentralized New Hampshire-Prince Edward Island team co-creating websites and mobile apps; after-hours I help coordinate the PEI Home and School Federation – an organization of parents that exists soley on the bedrock of parents getting together to improve education – and I work the community to spread the word about the virtues of open data and accessible technology.  And, of course, I’m a father and a partner, and our family is nothing if not an ongoing “participatory and narrative experience.”

Common to all of those roles is a need to find ways of improving communication, interaction and engagement.

If we’re discussing the school calendar around the home and school table, for example, how can we ensure that everyone’s opinions are heard? Indeed, how can we help ensure that everyone is in a position to form opinions in the first place?

If I’m trying to convince people with the policy and financial purse strings of the value of having wireless Internet in schools, how do I tell them the story of why this is important, and how do I make them realize that we’re both characters in that story?

If I want my work to be more rewarding, and to create a greater sense of a collective shoulder to the wheel, how do I do that?

How can I help make Christmas morning more fun?

My deeply-ingrained terror over social interactions of any kind gives me an appreciation for the power of deconstructing situations in which people come together and then figuring out how small interventions can improve the quality of that coming together.

So I’m going to Sweden with the hope of learning more about those small interventions.

I leave tonight; I’m back on the 28th of October. When I’m not conferring, I’ll be spending time with friends, getting some work done, and enjoying all that Malmö has to offer. And if that wasn’t enough fun, I’m dropping in, virtually, with the help of my friends Olle and Jonas on the annual conference of the Association of Professional Librarians of New Brunswick to help my friend Don Moses spread the word about “makerspaces in libraries.”

Take care of the Island for me while I’m gone.

It’s the Annual Convention of the PEI Teachers’ Federation today and tommorrow at the Convention Centre in Charlottetown and, as I do every year, I went undercover  for a while this morning to see what I could see (my cover was quickly blown as I ran into [[Oliver]]’s homeroom teacher, IT teacher, and resource teacher within 5 minutes of arrival; they didn’t out me, though).

Dipping into the convention is a great opportunity to see “behind the scenes” of teaching: there’s a trade show spread out over the halls where you’ll find everyone from the publisher of your child’s textbooks to the friendly folks from Crayola hawking their new magical whiteboard crayons. There are also booths from organizations like the PEI Home and School Federation, Healthy Eating Alliance, the School Milk Foundation and the Community Legal Information Association.

And, of course, there are teachers.

A lot of teachers.

And so walking through the halls is sort of like swimming through “concentrated essence of teacher.”  You have to gird yourself lest it all turn into your worst grade 6 nightmare. They are friendly, fortunately, and don’t seem to mind interlopers.

And so I recommend that if you’re an interested parent – or, indeed, an interested citizen who wants to see what your teacher employees are up to – you drop down Thursday or Friday for a few minutes. Nobody will ask you for ID and as long as you carry yourself a little teacher-like you should get away with it.

In honour of the PEI Teachers’ Federation Annual Convention, happening this week here in Charlottetown, here’s an adaptation of the original Fixer’s Manifesto released on teachinghumans.com:

As I type there are perhaps 45 minutes left in this season’s run of Anne & Gilbert, the musical theatre extraganza that’s been running since June 18 across a paper-thin wall from our headquarters here in the Reiventorium.

One hundred and thirty-four performances.

One hundred and thirty-four renditions of “Seesaw Girl” and “May I Offer My Umbrella?” and “Forever In My Life.

I’d hazard a guess that, outside of the cast and crew, nobody but me has heard the show more this summer; not all 134 performances, of course. But certainly good sections of 70 or 80.

At times it’s felt like it was never going to end: no matter how wonderful a musical is, having it on an endless loop playing in the loop next door seems like a subplot from LOST.

Many days I would leave for lunch as the show was getting started and marvel at the fact that when I returned an hour or so later it was still running.

But I made it. I even grew to – sort of – love it. Certainly I foung myself whistling the theme from the finale more than I thought I’d ever be whistling, well, anything. Here’s a little taste of what my workday has been punctuated by since, well, forever:

Congratulations to all concerned for what appears, at least through the walls, to have been a banner season.

For more than a month now Oliver and I have been walking to Birchwood Intermediate School every morning just past 8 o’clock. The old walk up Prince Street to Prince Street Elementary was simple: we walked up Prince Street. Birchwood is northeast of our house, though, and so there are a seemingly infinite ways of getting there.

Actually, it turns out that there are 30 ways.

I figured this out using something called Pascal’s triangle. Here’s a simplified version of the street grid that covers the ground between the corner of Prince and Grafton (home) and the corner of Birchwood and Longworth (school) overlaid with the Pascal’s triangle’s binomial coefficients.

It took me a while to get my atrophied brain to understand Pascal’s triangle: this tutorial helped as did this animated GIF from Wikipedia:

This explanation sums it up well:

The first and last entry in each row of Pascal’s triangle is a 1. Every other entry in Pascal’s triangle is the sum of the two entries in the preceding row that lie to the immediate left and right.

So, in other words, we could go Prince-Kent-Hillsborough-Fitzroy-Weymouth-Longworth, or we could go Prince-Euston-Longworth, or we could go Grafton-Cumberland, or we could go Grafton-Hillsborough-Euston-Longworth. Total up the number of possible routes and the total is 30.

If we happened to take any of the 10 routes that pass through the corner of Longworth and Euston, we pass by a Maritime Electric pole in front of 27 Longworth that, for the first few weeks we walked by, looked like this:

I’m a tall guy and that guy wire, often hard to see in the morning sun, was positioned at the right height to catch my head if walking 2-by-2 with Oliver.

But problems have solutions, we tell Oliver.

And so I wrote a quick email to Kim Griffin, personable and award-winning “Manager, Corporate Communications & Public Affairs” at Maritime Electric. She was quick to reply – on a Sunday, no less – and by Monday morning the guy wire had been tightened up and shrouded in a protective and easy-to-see yellow shroud.

Many lessons learned.

News came over the wire this morning that the Province of PEI has prospected a “defence” company to locate on the Island: Island welcomes defence contractor Portsmouth Atlantic. The news release makes it sound like this company is making kittens and apple pie:

“Portsmouth Atlantic is a dedicated centre of excellence for new innovation in environmental management systems for marine technology and specifically a world-leading maker of systems that protect warships from chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear hazards. This is a company with decades of experience, a solid reputation and a growing presence in world markets.”

What goes unstated is that the parent company of Portsmouth Atlantic, Portsmouth Aviation is an arms manufacturer; in addition to making happy products that just keep soliders safe, they also make things that help kill people:

Our more recent activities include the integration and certification of Paveway II / Enhanced Paveway 2 and the Freefall 1000lb Bomb onto RAF Typhoon; the expansion of the release envelope for UK and US weapons on export Tornado, and the provision of hardware and flight trials support to Eurofighter Typhoon partner Nations.

The Royal Air Force has a handy guide to this sort of weaponry.

The last time our government tried something like this was in the mid-1980s when Premier Lee prospected Litton Industries to build an anti-missle radar system on PEI; his successor, the elder Premier Ghiz, under public pressure, subsequently cancelled the deal. Here’s the story as it was told in The Provincial State in Canada: Politics in the Provinces and Territories:

“The strategy will be directed toward finding, and working with, industries which are compatible with the Island lifestyle” is, while perhaps a touch vague to be truly useful, not a bad place to start an economic development strategy. I, for one, would prefer that arms manufacturers not design and manufacture their wares here, and, especially, that our tax dollars not be used to incentivize them to do so.