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Power Without Authority
4 Sep
“If a rhinoceros were to enter this restaurant now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I should be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.” — G.K. Chesterton to Alexander Woollcott
25 Trends in Learning Technology
1 Sep
What are the hot new learning technologies? Well, I’ve read all of the literature (well, almost all…) and here is my list. Some of the trends are high-level and deal more generally with the field itself, others are about specific technologies. But if you wanted to quickly get up to speed on what’s happening out there, then this list of keywords would be a great place to start.
“Curation”
Learners have access to an overwhelming amount of content. Who is going to decide what information is the most relevant or what are the best courses? Crowd-sourcing, aggregation, and expert opinion will become more popular as there is an increasing emphasis on the quality of information over quantity.
- Blogger’s opinion about industry is well-respected and provides community with real-time data on emerging trends
- A LMS lists available courses with user ratings from 1-5 stars
- Aggregators (ex. Scoop.it, bagtheweb, Bundlr, Storify)
“User-Focused Design”
User interface design has become a central disciple in the elearning market and it’s becoming increasingly popular for all learning technology. In this way, the shift is away from pure engineering power to elegant functionality. The success of a technology is now commonly measured by the “ease of use” not just the processing power.
- LMS systems maintain their backend machinery, but user only sees personal learning environment (PLE)
- Internal search functions mirror Google’s simple search box
- Data is presented as a series of simple, graphical boxes mirroring the design of mobile phones apps
“Democratization”
This is a broad trend that moves the power away from traditional experts, content creators, and learning professionals into the hands of the learners themselves. This shift touches informs all learning technology. In general, learning technology professionals are increasingly focused on how to empower individuals and groups rather than how to influence or sell to them.
- Open-source LMS and content creation programs Crowd-sourced aggregators that show user ratings
- Communities of Practice
- Wikis, blogs, messaging User-focused design
“Continuous Learning Environment”
The broad idea means that the distinction between production-time and learning-time is becoming increasingly blurred. Mobile learning and performance support tools are good examples of how “learning” and “work” are becoming increasingly integrated.
- Performance support technologies
- LMS systems that collect informal learning data
- Mobile technologies that allow learning to take place anywhere at any time
- Less interest in instructor-led training
“Augmented Reality”
Augmented reality allows digital enhancement to overlay the physical world via digital screens on tablets, smartphones, or some predict wearable devices. Built upon the use of mobile devices, includes trends like the use of QR codes as well as performance support tools based upon context.
- Augmented reality app on mobile phone overlays technical specifications of machine needing repair (ex. Mataio, Aurasma Junaio)
- QR codes on medications link to instructional videos on proper application
- Xbox Kinect camera is easily accessible and has been used successfully in some learning applications
“Informal”
Studies prove what most people already know; most learning takes place on the job in informal settings. In the past, most of this learning has completely escaped measurement and tracking. This trend touches many learning technologies as the field tries to get a handle on the continuous learning environment.
- Tracking informal learning in a LMS (ex. Tin Can API)
- A twitter hashtag is provided during a conference to facilitate networking
- Performance support provides learning as needs arise
“Cloud”
Generically “the cloud” refers to the entirety of a computer network (typically the internet), which connects all software and hardware to a central infrastructure. This trend refers to a growing integration of the internet and formerly closed employee learning systems. The advantages are increased efficiency, and interoperability.
- Cloud-connected “smart objects” will provide real-time data to better adapt performance support to user’s immediate needs
- Cloud-based LMS (ex. OpenSesame)
- Cloud-based content authoring tools (ex. Udutu, Composica)
- Cloud-based mobile app development tools
“Googlization”
A trend that describes the expansion of Google’s search technologies and aesthetics into more markets, web applications, and contexts. This means a greater emphasis on self-serve learning based on large databases of knowledge. Internal knowledge management, CoPs, wikis, etc. are all expected to contain relevant information which the employee can access quickly via simple user-focused interfaces.
- Internal systems searching mirrors user experience of internet searching
- LMS interfaces are increasingly focused on providing users with simple, uncluttered designs
- Internal knowledge is catalogued according to popularity or user ratings
“Analytics”
Learning analytics are increasingly important both for gathering data on users actual behaviors and for backend problem identification. Sophisticated analytics are no longer limited to expert statisticians. This trend is about gathering as much raw learning data as possible and also how to best make meaning of it.
- LMS systems are gathering smaller units of data for more precise measurement (ex. Xyleme)
- Web analytics (i.e. Facebook, Google) are informing learning assessment and evaluation
- LMS systems are improving data analysis and reporting
“MOOCs”
A massive open online course (MOOC) is a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation (sometimes thousands), is openly accessible via the web, and runs over several months like a traditional classroom course. MOOCs offer courses from traditional educational institutions and/or from custom providers.
- Approaches to instructional design must increasingly account for large-scale interaction
- Coursea, Udacity, edX, Academic Room, Erasmus, Kahn Academy, Codeacademy, Minerva
“Mobile”
Mobile means both that the workforce is increasingly mobile (asynchronous work, geographically dispersed, and/or employees not tied to a specific work station) and that the usage of mobile devices (tablets & phones) for workplace learning is dramatically increasing.
- Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trends which put emphasis on interoperability and personalization
- The development of mLMS systems (ex. Blackboard Mobile, CertPoint VLS, Xyleme)
- Employee accesses internal wiki when working in the field
- Mobile content authoring tools (ex. eXact Mobile, dominKnow Learning, Emantras MOBL 21)
“Open Source”
Increasingly learning technologies are being developed for free use. Often design and implementation details are available as well to allow for the evolution of these technologies by their users. A main principle of open-source development is peer production and collaboration with free distribution being the ultimate goal.
- Open-source course authoring tools (ex. SoftChalk)
- Open-source LMS (ex. Moodle)
“Social”
The term “social learning” naturally calls to mind social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Yet social e-Learning tools can include a wealth of other options, including blogs, wikis, discussion groups, email and online content discovered using search tools. The emphasis is on getting information from the community or from trusted individuals within their community rather than relying on experts.
- Learner asks for assistance on Yammer rather than through formal chain of command
- The integration of collaborative activities and social networking into a LMS (ex. SkillSoft Ingenius)
- Communities of practice are internal learning communities that direct their own projects
- Document and media sharing (ex. Basecamp, Google drive, Dropbox, SharePoint)
“Optimization”
In an attempt to keep up with changing technologies organizations must make sure content makes the best use of the device it’s displayed on. The ability to access CBT on a mobile phone is good, but not if the content has not be appropriately optimized for those devices.
- Starting with a PDF training manual and optimizing the information for use on a mobile device
- Using Adobe Edge (or other HTML 5 based software) to create different versions of the same informational webpage for desktop, mobile phone, and tablet
“Gamification”
Gamification’s proponents argue that it works by making technology more engaging, by encouraging users to engage in desired behaviors by showing a path to mastery and autonomy, by helping to solve problems and being more engaging, and by taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.
- Providing achievement points and scoreboards for completed courses and assignment in LMS
- “Serious Play Awards” find the best learning games each year
“Interoperability”
This trend is about ensuring that technologies and systems can work with each other without compromising security or usability. Users now interact with many systems simultaneously (LMS, social networking tools, desktop, mobile phone, video conferencing software, etc.) and these systems need to work together seamlessly.
- Getting LMS content to work on employee tablets within security protocols
- Ensuring that internal talent management systems (learning, recruitment, performance, etc.) support each other (ex. Cornerstone, WorkForce, Ellegro)
“Adaptive”
Content needs to be adaptive to the delivery systems and adaptive to the learner’s performance. The user interface needs to be organically adaptive; i.e. the user doesn’t have to change settings, the interface naturally adapts to user behavior. In addition, courses are becoming more adaptive to learners as they progress.
- A LMS that provides suggestions like Amazon’s “because you bought this, you may also like…”
- During an online course, wrong answers send someone targeted information
“Personalization”
As tools integrate more and more information and more and more users they risk becoming more and more depersonalized. To counteract this, there is a growing trend towards personalized solutions that allow users to create custom solutions for their particular needs. In addition, personalization is the acknowledgement that workers are increasingly blending their work and personal lives.
- Personal learning environment (PLE) allows user to set learning goals, manage learning, and communicate with other in the process
- Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) accounts for personal device preferences
- Web feed management programs (ex. FeedBurner) allow learners to craft the information to which they are exposed
“Self-Service Learning”
Self-service learning is a movement towards employees making their own non-linear choices about what learning content they need and when they need it. For example, employees are more likely to Google search specific pieces of relevant information when they need it rather than signing up for a course that they hope to apply later.
- LMS includes smaller chunks of content that allow learners to be more targeted in what they want to view
- Learners are allowed a variety of learning methods to satisfy a competency/proficiency gap
“Video”
One of the major trends in authoring is the increased production and implementation of video-based information. This isn’t about high-production films, but smaller chunks of user-generated content sparked largely by increased usage and familiarity with video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. The plethora of cameras and the lowered barriers on bandwidth and cloud storage means that videos are becoming increasingly commonplace.
- Short instructional/how-to videos
- Video messaging, video blogging
- Live feeds
- Video conferencing (ex. goto meeting, Lync, Skype)
- Flip Camera, mobile phone cameras, Go Pro
- Youtube, Vimeo
“Performance Support”
The idea behind performance support is simple; provide the right amount of help at the right time. A simple example is word-processing programs that spell check as you type. This concept is shifting the focus of learning interventions from a series of “learning and then performance” steps to a parallel structure in which learning is integrated into the performance of tasks.
- Call center electronic performance support helps operators navigate complex internal systems
- Participants attend an instructor-led course on “work/life balance” and afterward receive daily messages reminding them to get up and stretch
- Online help system prompts a user who seems stuck on an action step (user repeatedly selects “undo”)
“Virtual”
An umbrella term that has a range of meanings, but generally refers to web-based models of traditional real-world activities and locations. Virtual workplaces and teams are an increasing reality with tight budgets and more support technology. Growth in this area is around access devices (mobile phones, teleconference rooms), communication infrastructure (cloud, radio networks), virtual depth (virtual worlds, 3D graphics), and adoption (telework, virtual conferences).
- Teleconferencing and telepresence allow for meaningful collaboration
- Virtual worlds and virtual conferences mirror physical spaces allowing for greater complexity
- Multiple learners login into a virtual world for a disaster preparedness simulation
“Second Screen”
Attention is no longer undivided. Multitasking rules. Kindle readers tweet commentary about the ebooks and magazines they’re reading; folks chatting on their iPhones use their tablets to turn real-time conversations into live streamed blogs. The mix of device mobility and multiplicity makes the use of multiple screens at the same time the norm rather than the exception.
- Participants in an online course are encouraged to visit a website while remaining in the course.
- During conference presentations, presenters can encourage audience members to visit web resources more resources even while talk is going on.
- A learning professional may have an instructional video running on iPad while she experiments with the lesson on her desktop.
“Haptics”
Haptic technology is tactile feedback technology which takes advantage of the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions to the user. This mechanical stimulation can be used to assist in the creation of virtual objects in a computer simulation or to control such objects. It has been described as doing for the sense of touch what computer graphics has done for vision.
- The Smart Board is an interactive whiteboard that uses touch detection for user input, e.g. scrolling, right mouse-click
- Information desks include touchscreen interactivity
- The application of Nintendo Wii to learning
“Back Channel”
This trend is about leveraging organic communication channels that users create to supplement the formal channels. Within the sphere of social networking tools, this is about using Twitter, Yammer, or other messaging services within the context of learning environment without attempting to alter it or force it into traditional modes.
- A conference may offer back channel twitter hashtags or Google hangouts
- Employees share problems and solutions through internal Yammer accounts
SOURCES: ASTD, Bersin& Associates, Brandon Hall, ADL, eLearning Guild, I/ITSEC, Masie Center, USDLA, NMC Horizon Report, SALT, CLO Magazine, Benchmark Learning.
The Wisdom of the Mountain
21 Aug
In my reading I come across a lot of parables. I’ve adapted this one slightly. I hope you like it.
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In ancient China, on top of Mount Ping stood a temple where the enlightened one, Hwan, dwelled. Of his many disciples, only one is known to us, Lao. For more than 20 years, Lao studied and meditated under the great master. Although Lao was one of the brightest and most determined of disciples, he had yet to reach enlightenment.
Lao struggled with his lot for days, nights, months, even years until one morning, the sight of a falling cherry blossom spoke to his heart. “I can no longer fight my destiny,” he reflected. “Like the cherry blossom, I must gracefully resign myself to my lot.” From that moment forth, Lao determined to retreat down the mountain, giving up his hope of enlightenment.
Lao searched for Hwan to tell him of his decision. The master sat before a white wall, deep in meditation. Reverently, Lao approached him. “Enlightened one,” he said. But before he could continue, the master spoke, “Tomorrow I will join you on your journey down the mountain.” No more needed to be said. The great master understood.
The next morning, before their descent, the master looked out into the vastness surrounding the mountain peak. “Tell me, Lao,” he said, “what do you see?” “Master, I see the sun beginning to wake just below the horizon, meandering hills and mountains that go on for miles, and couched in the valley below, a lake and an old town.” The master listened to Lao’s response. He smiled, and then they
took the first steps of their long descent.
Hour after hour, as the sun crossed the sky, they pursued their journey, stopping only once as they approached the foot of the mountain. Again Hwan asked Lao to tell him what he saw. “Great wise one, in the distance I see roosters as they run around barns, cows asleep in sprouting meadows, old ones basking in the late afternoon sun, and children romping by a brook.” The master, remaining silent, continued to walk until they reached the gate to the town.
There the master gestured to Lao, and together they sat under an old tree. “What did you learn today, Lao?” asked the master. “Perhaps this is the last wisdom I will impart to you.” Silence was Lao’s response. At last, after long silence, the master continued. “The road to enlightenment is like the journey down the mountain. It comes only to those who realize that it is the walk down not the climb up that makes the difference. We struggle to rise to the top of the mountain, to work on our perfection so that we might become enlightened. Yet, the more we struggle, the further we get from the truth. It is not the view from the top that matters, but the view from where you are. Like the cherry blossom, you have accepted your destiny and stropped struggling. You have given up your search for truth and thus you have found it.”
When the master stopped speaking, Lao looked out to the horizon, and as the sun set before him, it seemed to rise in his heart.
The Invention of the “Employee”
3 JunThe toaster. The hula-hoop. The employee. They are all inventions. The following excerpt is from Gary Hamel’s book The Future of Management.
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While it’s easy to smile at the misguided beliefs of those who came before us, can we be sure that our management beliefs wont appear equally archaic a decade or two hence? For example, most 21st-century managers seem to regard the notion of an economically dependent and willingly biddable “employee” as an immovable cornerstone of corporate life. Yet the idea of spending your entire life working for someone else would have seemed strange, even repugnant to most Americans living before the Civil War. In the 19th century, America was a “republic of the self-employed,” as Roy Jacques so aptly puts it. Nine in ten white, male citizens worked for themselves. “Manufactures” as the census labeled them, typically employed no more than three or four individuals. Most of the folks who labored in tanning sheds, bakeries, and smithies dreamed of one day setting up on their own, and many would eventually do so. Having escaped Europe’s economic feudalism, America’s 19th-century artisans and laborers would have been dismayed to learn that millions of their progeny would one day become permanent “wage slaves.”
Fact is, the concept of the employee is a recent invention, not some timeless social convention. Indeed, one doesn’t have to be a Marxist to be awed by the scale and success of early-20th-century efforts to transform strong-willed human beings into docile employees. The demands of the modern industrial workplace required a dramatic resculpting of human habits and values. To sell one’s time rather than what one produced, to pace one’s work to the clock, to eat and sleep at precisely defined intervals, to spend long days endlessly repeating the same, small task-none of these were, or are, natural human instincts. It would be dangerous, therefore, to assume that the concept of “the employee” – or any other tenet in the creed of modern management – is anchored on the bedrock of eternal truth.
Gary Hamel, The Future of Management, page 130.
Simplicty
14 May
“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”
– Henry D. Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 27 March 1848
Falling in Love
20 Apr
The following is an excerpt from Byron Katie’s book “I Need Your Love – Is That True?” (pages 61-65).
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Falling in Love
The search for approval from friends, associates, and family members is a full-time job with no vacations. At its center lies the search for ultimate approval, the search that all the songs are about, for the person who will look at us and say, “You’re the one.” We call this “falling in love.” In this chapter we’ll look at falling in love and becoming a couple, and we’ll see who is really “the one.”
Falling in love is usually understood completely backward, like so many other important things. There’s no mystery to falling in love. We have fallen out of the awareness of love and are ecstatic when we find our way back, misunderstanding how we did it. Remember the little girl doing flips in the corner of the playground? She has the key. Look at her face, lit up with the excitement of perfection. She’s overjoyed just to be there with her legs and arms to play with. There is absolutely nothing more that she wants or needs, and she’s too absorbed in the moment to realize it. The flip she does is an expression of love itself. When she does the flip again, looking to see if she can win applause, she shifts her focus outward and cuts herself off from love. But love doesn’t go anywhere; she just loses her awareness of it. Later in life, people call experiences like this “falling out of love” and think that they’re about the other person.
The little girl is innocently misdirected. She begins to think that the way back to her happiness—to a perfect moment—depends on the reaction of the other kids. Even though the awareness of love is always available, years might pass before she has it again, years she devotes to searching for love and approval outside herself.
When you’re constantly trying to be likeable, you leave no gaps in your life in which you can just breathe and notice what you already have, no chance to experience the unlimited options that those gaps are filled with. Even after you’ve attracted admirers and supporters, you’re still busy seeking results. You have to make sure that your friends do all the things friends are supposed to do—invite you to parties, send work your way, console you when you feel depressed. And it‘s never enough. You’re constantly on the lookout for any evidence that you’re not approved of or adored.
“Falling in love” is a powerful experience. If you look back, you may remember it as a moment when you stopped seeking. You stopped because you thought you’d found what you were looking for. Your mind was no longer filled with the effort, the desperation, of seeking. What you found is what you had in the corner of the playground and never really lost. But now you think it’s coming from another person, someone who is “the one.”
Many people fall in love for the first time as teenagers. By that time the simple playground joy has vanished (actually you left it, but that’s not how it seems). Dark thoughts appear—anxiety about how you’re not all right and how no one can ever love you. Then the miracle happens: Suddenly there is someone to love, and you can stop searching. Maybe it’s a boy in your chemistry class or a singer you saw at a rock concert. Maybe it’s a movie star or your best friend’s new girlfriend. With this kind of love you’re just as happy when there’s no hope of return. You don’t mind if a kiss is completely out of the question because you have braces on your teeth, or because you would never betray your friend, or because there is no possibility of meeting the rock star. These may be the very reasons that you let yourself love completely.
When you look back on that first crush, it’s possible to see that the girl you adored had nothing to do with it. Years later you can run into her again, stare at her all you want, and not have a clue what you saw there. You would have done anything to marry her, and now you’re grateful that she never noticed you.
If the love isn’t coming from the other person, then who does that leave for the love to come from? There’s only one person left: you. You gave yourself the experience. The blissful feeling was not caused by how wonderful or sexy your best friend’s girlfriend was. It was you who felt the wonder and the excitement. Someone held up a mirror and showed you your heart.
There are those who say that a crush is a delusion, that it wasn’t real because it all came from you. Another way to look at it is that the crush was as real as any experience you’ll ever have: you just made a mistake about where the joy was coming from. The source wasn’t the brown-eyed girl or Leonardo DiCaprio; it was your own long-lost capacity to experience pure joy. When you had the crush, you found your way back to the child doing flips, just for herself. That’s the one you abandoned in order to seek an identity that you thought others would recognize. What we may think of as “first love” really takes us back to love itself, which is what we are to begin with.
You find other ways to fall in love when you get older. As you leave your teens, the worst of your awkwardness diminishes; your approval-getting skills get better with practice. After many trials, you may find someone who approves of you so much that they tell you, “You’re the one.” You like that. You like to be approved of that much. And maybe you approve of them for other reasons as well (and maybe not, and even that won’t necessarily stop you).
Since you’ve been approved of, you can ease up for a while: there’s much less straining to please and charm. Without your efforts getting in the way, love just flows. You bask in the happiness of it. Sometimes it seems like there’s enough love to include everyone and everything you meet. Again, you’ll probably think it’s all about him, the one who thinks you’re the one. But the happiness is really you returning to yourself. Love was there all along; only your painful thoughts obscured it.
How long does that joy last? Grownup love is like the crush—it lasts only until painful thoughts cover it over. “What if she doesn’t really love me?” “He doesn’t listen.” “She shouldn’t have flirted with that guy.” Any one of these thoughts will destroy your happiness. And one way or another, that happiness will have to vanish as long as you believe the thought that love—the joy you stumbled into—depends on the other person.
Most people believe that having love in their lives and escaping loneliness depends on finding some special person. This is an ancient belief, and it takes courage to question it. But if you do, you’re in for a big surprise: You can feel love either with or without someone in your arms. And no, that doesn’t mean that you won’t have a partner. Why would it? When with and without are equal, you notice that both are good: life allows all flavours, and all of them turn out to be your favourite.
The old song asks, “Why do fools fall in love?” Actually, only fools don’t fall in love. Only a fool would believe the lonely, stressful thoughts that tell him that anything could separate him from another human being, or from the rest of the human race, or from birds, trees, pavement, and sky.
The Key to Happiness -Build a Boat
1 Apr
If you observe a truly happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his child, growing double dahlias or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that had rolled under the radiator, striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours each day.
– W. Beran Wolfe
Late Bloomers
22 MarThe following is excerpted from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 article “Late Bloomers.”
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Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job.
“I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff and I didn’t know if the parachute was going to open. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of law. I could have had a good career. And my parents were very proud of me—my dad was so proud of me. . . . It was crazy.”
He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 a.m. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer. He had discipline. “I figured out very early on that if I didn’t get my writing done I felt terrible. So I always got my writing done. I treated it like a job. I did not procrastinate.” His first story was about a stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. It was sixty pages long and took him three months to write. When he finished that story, he went back to work and wrote another—and then another.
In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper’s. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It won the Hemingway Foundation/pen award. It was named a No. 1 Book Sense Pick. It made major regional best-seller lists, was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews, and drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le Carré.
Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.
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“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” -George Eliot
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