This year, I’ve decided to coin a new term. Since FOMO seems to be all the rage these days and often used completely out of context, I began to think. There’s FOMO (fear of missing out), based upon the desperate desire to do everything that everyone else does. There’s JOMO (joy of missing out), based upon feeling happy that you’re not doing what everyone else is doing. However, for me there was still a gap in this mad acronym obsessed world and for my own FOMO, I felt I like had to create my own term as everyone else does, so then I can be happy in the fact that I no longer need to run with the crowd and be JOMO about it.
 
“What are you talking about?” I hear you shout at the screen! Well I suppose I should get to some sort of point here. My new term, which is not quite an acronym, but it’s close enough for artistic licence sake is MOTMO! Or Missing Out on The Moment! Yes I know it should be MOOTMO, but whatever, I’m not changing it, because it sounds cooler the other way.
 
MOTMO is basically missing out on all of the real world experiences going on around you. From what I’ve seen and experienced recently, this slaps FOMO in the face for the insane level of stupidity upon which it’s based.
 
From Sydney, to Auckland, to Himeji (Japan), to NYE back in Australia, I noticed so many people missing out on what was going on around them. Consumed by devices and the desire to ‘snap’ or film something and sending it to someone else instead of living through the experience they’re having, people are increasingly detaching themselves from the moment and appear to prefer a 2 dimensional version of life, rather than the experience of life itself.
 
A couple of years back, I went to a Village People Concert. (Yes, some of them were still alive). I had a great seat right at the front of the Egyptian Theatre in Park City, Utah and of course had to snap a few shots of the performance, mainly for proof of life that they really were still breathing, although the Indian did stop to take in oxygen from a canister between each song, so partial proof of life really. Anyway, after I had a couple of photos, I put the phone away and watched the concert. However, many people around me, had their phones out the whole time recording everything, but for what end? Are they really going to go home and watch the concert over again and have the same feeling of being there? Or are they going to post it online for a quick ‘look at me’ moment? Or will it sit unwatched on their phone until they drop it and it’s smashed to pieces on the ground?
 
Whilst the digital world is an increasingly amazing place, it’s still not essentially real. It’s a filtered and distorted version of reality which can capture people’s attention and focus it on a device, but the cost is that people miss out on the real world experiences going on around them. On a completely different level, when I was walking around the Fushimi Inari-Taisha Shrine in Kyoto, there were countless people walking around the crowd filming everything as they went. For me, this is just an annoying thing to do, but what it really means is that your attention is divided between the camera and what’s actually happening around you and with technology as such a constant distraction, the moment is being completely lost. With the busy nature of life today, are you going to go back and watch the video of the shrines and get more out of it? Or are you going to quickly forget about your video footage, because there’s so much film you don’t have time to do anything with it. Classic MOTMO in action! Rather than walking around the shrines, exploring, seeing, feeling and living in the moment which could have a profoundly enlightening effect on someone, it’s now been an exercise in watching through a crowd with a camera to capture a moment that really never happened.
 
Experiencing unique destinations, cultures and activities is what makes travel, relationships and being human what it is. Even though many people might think that getting lots of likes for their fake version of a moment is the experience itself, that’s a sad reflection on how technology has shaped people’s behaviours in recent years. On New Years Eve, once again I was watching the fireworks and so many people stood there filming it, which makes no sense, because no matter how hard you try, you can’t replicate the sights, the thunderous booms and the emotive experience of actually being there and living in that moment and it’s those moments which are fun and memorable which can never be replicated nor replaced by a snap or a video.
 
One of the most amazing places I’ve been is the V&A museum in London and no matter how many times I’ve been there, I’ve experienced something new and so many things a photo can never come close to replicating. Next door in the Natural History Museum is the Aurora Collection of diamonds which is just stunning, but I have to keep going back, because it’s so beautiful to see and experience. However, time and time again I see more and more people around me being ‘zombiefied’ by their devices and completely missing out on the moments that are constantly going on around them. 
 
So for all the MOFOs who have FOMO and need to video everything, you’re destined to continue to MOTMO some of the most amazing experiences in life. When you go somewhere, it’s not about the photos you take. It’s what you experience there in each and every moment that’s the most important thing. Keeping this in mind, for your next adventure somewhere, take a few photos as triggers for the memories of where you went, but most importantly, live in the moment whilst you’re there. 

MOTMO definition in the Urban Dictionary
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Motmo

As soon as you read the title of this article, you either thought ‘hmmm how interesting’, or ‘wow this is going to be boring…’
 
One of my frustrations as an outdoor ed teacher and director has always been the quality and timelines of incident reports. They’re often too brief, fail to mention important details and arrive days after the event through a great deal of chasing! Sound familiar?
 
This comes down to a few things, which include the level of training and experience staff have had in responding to incidents and injuries, the culture within the organisation and the type of reporting methodology being used.
 
Training is an interesting one, as first aid training doesn’t usually cover the how and why you should do an incident report. Some of them do, but often it’s fairly basic training to call emergency services and let them handle things from there. However, if you’re responsible for students, you’d know that’s quite impossible from a practical point of view. More often than not, it’s not even a case of calling emergency services. It’s more about handling the situation at hand yourself. Therefore, some level of training is needed around what you should be putting in a report. Details such as time, location, circumstances, supervision, weather and others involved all become important to the equation. So if you haven’t read up or done anything around reporting, it’s definitely time to do that.
 
The second area is culture. Is there an expectation that you need to report? If not, I’d be concerned about the organisation. Legally, in Australia and most likely all other counties, you need to report any injuries or incidents as you have a duty of care within your organisation. Having said that, I’ve worked for places in the past that had a very casual approach to this, until something happened. Then it was a major drama, chasing reports and asking all the wrong questions way after the fact. Hence there needs to be a culture of reporting. Even if something were a near-miss. where no injury occurred, but could have been potentially catastrophic, you need to report it! I can’t stress this enough. There’s so much value that can be gained by reviewing near misses and incidents to develop better systems and practices for your organisation.
 
The last area is methodology. The harder it is for staff to do an incident report, the less likely you are to get one. Interestingly enough, this occurs at all levels of an organisation and just because someone is a manager, doesn’t mean they’re more likely to report. In fact, it’s the opposite. They’re less likely to report incidents which occur, maybe because they think ‘they’re in charge’ and don’t need to, or more likely, they address the issue and end up too busy with other things and forget about it. When nobody is chasing them the same way they chase others, then you can see why there’s an increased likelihood they won’t report something. This then feeds straight back into the cultural issue and has an overall negative impact on the organisation and its risk and reporting profile. This can end up with things just ‘slipping through the cracks’ to the point that the organisation suffers a major incident.

So basically from that, make it easy for yourself and everyone in the organisation to do a report. It was this arduous and cumbersome reporting process at one school I worked for which led me to designing and building the Xcursion platform. Basically, I had to solve my own problem to try and help what was in my opinion a dangerous and dysfunctional organisation get up to speed with its reporting. As a result, teachers could then have fast and secure access to student info and complete an incident report on their mobile which was sent back to school as soon as they hit the complete button.
 
Making this process easy for staff, not only massively improved the speed of reporting, but it steeled teachers through exactly what they needed to report. Consequently, this made a huge difference to the organisation’s attention to incident and injury reporting and helped to start building the culture of risk management which was so desperately needed.
 
Ask yourself, ‘How does your organisation look in terms of incident reporting? Is it easy and timely to do, or is it a time consuming pain? Is there an expectation that everyone reports incidents and near misses alike? Does everyone feel confident in the training they have to identify, manage and report on incidents as they happen?’
 
If you’re not confident of your response, then maybe it’s time for some staff training and new systems to be put in place to ensure that you are. ​

Waitangi in New Zealand is the birthplace of the nation! Visiting the scenic outlook in the Bay of Islands, you can’t help but be impressed by the place in which the signing of two completely different treaties was done, thus creating a united nation, that was about to become bitterly divided.
 
Wandering around the grounds and listening to the stories of this historic place, I felt a mix of emotions. Despite the tour guide calling Australians convicts and claiming that we copied their flag, which is obviously not true, because ours is clearly more original than theirs. However, that wasn’t the reason for my mixed emotions. Our guide gave an informative and what I thought was a balanced account of what was essentially a good way to unite a nation, that went terribly wrong. The good intentions of the tribal chiefs was certainly not reciprocated by the English, as they vied for control of every piece of land on which they could get their hands, so that the French, Dutch and the Spanish couldn’t.
 
New Zealand was another potential colony that was resource rich and another spot in the Pacific over which Britannia could rule some more waves. Australia has far more beaches and better surf than New Zealand. Despite having dodgy surf, beaches and hobbits, New Zealand remained an important piece of land for Britain which was at the time in the midst of various wars and skirmishes with almost all the other European powers in an attempt at securing land, resources and trade routes throughout the world.
 
It was also a time when a private company (The East India Company) found itself in charge of an army and running a nation. To say that colonial powers lacked a moral compass would be an understatement. However, this is not about dwelling on the past. It’s understanding it and putting the past into context with what has happened since. For years, Maori people were subjugated. However, they believed so strongly in the version of the treaty they signed, not the English version, they continued to fight for its fair and equatable application in law.

​The English being English, instead thought their version of the treaty was correct, which nobody in fact had signed other than the English themselves. Today that would be legally considered an unenforceable contract. However, when you have an enormous navy and a standing army with lots of muskets and cannons, it’s fairly hard to argue against that.
 
The end result was essentially a civil war between the Maori tribes and the English settlers that dragged on. However, the sheer size of the English forces eventually overwhelmed the Maoris and they had to seek alternate and more peaceful and political means of the proper application of their treaty. This came in the form of Maori representation in the New Zealand parliament and continued to build momentum over the next 100 years and remains a strength of their system of government today. Protests and a huge political protest walk from the north to the south of the island was also instrumental in improving the rights of the Maoris which had been lost through a version of a treaty to which they never agreed.
 
In the 1840s, Waitangi was also the largest trading port and commercial hub of New Zealand. With the signing of the treaty, this all moved to a new capital, in Auckland, which for the local area was devastating. However, the long term benefit for the Bay of Islands has been enormous. It’s preserved the natural beauty of the area and protected the land and waters from the impact that a major city such as Auckland has. The Waitangi site also fell into ruins, however, was bought by Lord Bledisloe who then donated it back to the New Zealand Government in perpetuity. This also preserved the site and the original house was restored and the accompanying Maori house, which uniquely faces south was turned into a place of living history.
 
To gain an understanding of the early Maori and European experience in New Zealand and why New Zealand is what it is as a nation today, the Waitangi Treaty Grounds are a must if you’re visiting the North. It was a remarkable experience and I met wonderful and friendly people.

​​I did a Q&A interview a while ago for an educational publication, so thought I’d put a bit of it up here as a summary of a few of my thoughts and experiences in Outdoor Ed and hopefully help shape a few ideas for the year ahead!
 
 Q1. Why did you become an Outdoor Ed teacher?
 
Ironically, I became an outdoor ed teacher more by accident than anything else, but in the end it all made sense and was a perfect fit for me. I’d been involved in lots of camps when I was at school myself and really enjoyed the different experiences. However, when I finished my degree in History, I was working part time across three different jobs. A full-time position came up in Kangaroo Valley at Glengarry (Scots College’s outdoor campus). I was in the area at the time anyway and they needed someone who could teach history. The job combined both academic classes and outdoor education. Mentored by an excellent teacher, I learnt most of the outdoor skills on the job and subsequently completed by Cert IV in Outdoor Rec. Looking back on motivation though, I’ve always had that drive to learn new skills and learn by doing. That’s why it was such a natural fit. I found being in a classroom all the time teaching academic lessons didn’t feel right, whereas the experiential learning style of outdoor education suddenly opened up a world of opportunities to teach important problem solving, teamwork and leadership skills that could be beneficial to students throughout their life-time and not just help them get through an exam.
 
Q2. Why do you think Outdoor Ed is so important to students? What benefits have you seen?
 
Outdoor education is vital for the modernisation of our education system and provides massive social, emotional and academic benefits for students. It’s often just seen as this ‘fun’ part of education that’s disconnected from everything else. If done poorly, then it absolutely is! However, if outdoor ed programs are being run properly, they build strength, maturity and leadership within a school that’s not otherwise possible. In broad terms, the core principles of outdoor education are problem solving, risk taking, adaptability, teamwork and leadership. If you’re developing these key skills in students right across the year levels, this helps all other aspects of your students’ learning and sets them up with important life skills. This is becoming increasingly important as technology has negatively impacted on our children’s ability to problem solve and manage situations in which there’s no instant answer. We risk the situation now that technology will leverage and shape the next generation’s behaviours and emotional states to their detriment, rather than our next generation leveraging and shaping technology for their benefit. I believe if students have a strong and confident grounding in the ‘real-world,’ they can shape an increasingly digital world in a positive and pro-active way.
 
Whilst I’ve seen many students grow in confidence, face fears and develop friendships they would have otherwise not made, one powerful experience that’s stuck in my mind was when we were out in Bungonia Caves in the Southern Highlands of NSW. We had ventured through a number of caves that day. However, the most challenging one, was the shortest one. Taking the group down into the cave, we gathered in a small area at the bottom. Here I briefed the students on the challenge ahead of them. We had to work together to get out of the cave, however, we had to do it without our head torches!
 
You can imagine the gasps of horror from the students as they realised they had to make their way out in darkness, by which I mean total darkness! There were no luminescent glow worms to help them out. You couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face, which is hard to describe, but even when you’ve been in there before, the experience is unsettling. The only way out was to shuffle along a cramped passageway on your stomach, whilst holding onto the person in front of you.
 
This is a confronting exercise, yet one that can produce some powerful learning outcomes. It’s got nothing to do with the cave itself. That just provides the situation and framework for the activity. It’s about how the group works together to solve the problem of being robbed of one of their most important senses. It’s vitally important though that an activity like this is debriefed afterward, by which I mean each person in the group has the opportunity to share their feelings with the group and reflect on the experience. It’s through an effective debrief process such as this that the majority of the learning in outdoor education occurs.
 
When we finally emerged from the cave and debriefed the challenge, one student, who was afraid of the dark and had been extremely anxious to begin with said, “I could feel my friend holding my hand and he didn’t let go. He kept talking to me the whole time and I knew I'd be ok.” This then led into a wider discussion about the importance of looking after each other and how simple actions can make a huge difference to the life and experience of someone else.
 
You never know what to expect when reflecting on an activity, but the bottom line is that it’s a must for each and every program you’re running. It’s through this sort of reflection, that students, as well as teachers, are able to learn the most. This learning can have long-term ramifications for students facing all sorts of other fears. It helps them build confidence, strengthen friendships, and ultimately develop the critically important resilience everyone’s talking about in education today.
 
 Q3. Do you think building resilience through outdoor education helps students who are affected by bullying?
 
Outdoor education also helps students deal with issues of bullying. On the one hand, students who have experienced bullying have a great opportunity to face their own fears, push the boundaries of their comfort zones and develop confidence in a supportive learning environment that’s totally focussed on building positive relationships. I’ve seen some wonderful turn-arounds over the years where students have been disengaged and fearful of group experiences, but, through the right peer support and mentoring, have re-gained their confidence despite previous experiences.
 
The flip side of this is that if you have an effective outdoor education program designed to foster positive supportive relationships, this ultimately filters back into the culture of your school to create a safe supportive environment in which bullying becomes totally unacceptable. Having experienced a terrible culture of bullying at the school I went to myself, this has always been one of my key drivers in education. If we as teachers, are creating safe, supportive places for all students, this translates into far better academic, sporting and cultural outcomes for each and every student.
 
Q4. What kind of training would you recommend to teachers wanting to teach outdoor ed?
 
From a hard skills point of view, you need the minimum of a Cert IV
in Outdoor Recreation to be an instructor. This covers your technical skills in roping, paddling, riding, skiing etc and helps you in operational group management. I’d also recommend you train and practice Wilderness First Aid and get yourself a bus licence. If possible, do a NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) course in risk management. This is an American organisation. However, they’re standout leaders in outdoor education training and this would be hugely beneficial for you as an outdoor professional.
 
In addition to these activity-based skills, if you’re going to be a truly effective outdoor ed teacher, then you need get a job somewhere other than a school, do some travelling and gain some real life experiences. The work outside a school doesn’t mean working with an outdoor ed company either. It means a job as a waiter, in retail, in a workshop or some sort of job in a completely different industry.
 
Even though this might sound odd on the surface, no matter what activity you’re doing, (hiking, kayaking, canoeing, etc) your main role as an outdoor ed teacher is going to be reflective learning to develop life skills, adaptability, teamwork and leadership with your students. Since you’re working on such an emotional level, you need to be authentic in everything you’re saying and doing. You can’t be teaching students to be adaptable and resilient in the real world, unless you’ve experienced some of that world yourself. Being genuine and authentic with students is critical to your success as a teacher in this field. There have been a number of times where I’ve taken a break from teaching and worked in business, retail and hospitality. As a result, I’ve found myself looking at the world in very different ways and these non-teaching experiences have helped me to become far more reflective on my own teaching practices and helped me to continuously improve on them.
 
 Q5. Do you have any advice for prospective and current Outdoor Ed teachers?
 
One of the biggest challenges for outdoor education teachers is to relinquish control and let students take ownership over their outdoor experiences. I will qualify this though, as you still need to consider the age and maturity level of the group. However, to be an effective outdoor ed teacher, your ideal role, especially in an extended journey- based program is to sit back and be the safety backup, only stepping to do something if you foresee elevated levels of risk or safety issues that need to be actively managed. Otherwise, let your students take the lead. Let them take ownership of their experience.
 
What's the point of spending time and energy setting up an outdoor ed program aimed at building leadership, teamwork and initiative, then subsequently provide no opportunities for students to actually take responsibility for any of this themselves?
 
So often, I see teachers ‘run’ programs, in that they take the students out, plan for them, navigate for them, constantly give instructions on how to do everything and determine the whole schedule for each and every day. For teachers, to give up the reigns and allow students to be challenged, experience new things and grow from this, might feel awkward and difficult at first. However, if you don’t allow this to happen, then you’re wasting some fantastic educational opportunities.
 
You need to stand back and let your students to take on the risks of leadership, decision making and self-management and allow them to have the chance to shine and the chance to fail! They're going to learn far more from this than they ever will if you were to jump in and stop them before they fail. All you need to do is frame an effective debrief if they aren’t successful, to create a great learning opportunity from this. Conversely, when they show initiative and leadership, use this to extend and challenge your students. You will be amazed the difference this makes.

​Q6. What achievement are you most proud of being a teacher?
 
For me, there’s really not a single achievement of which I'm most proud. Instead there are lots of small moments that turned out to be extremely important moments for the students I was teaching. I think this is what makes me really proud to be a teacher and love the work I do in outdoor education. When you see one of your students overcoming fears or succeeding in something they’ve constantly told themselves they can't do, it's an amazing feeling. I think of the boy who overcame his fear of the dark in the cave, or another student who was able to swim at the beach after overcoming his fear of the ocean. These are the things which make teaching amazing. It’s not the big headline results of a standardised test. It’s all the little moments that have a lasting impact on a student’s confidence and helps to build the strength in who they are and what they can do life.