​Computer games are fun! Let’s be honest! Who hasn’t sat on a computer or device for hours trying to move up a level or defeat a boss in some sort of computer game. Candy crush was my poison and it was totally addictive until I deleted it and went cold turkey. I’d managed to complete 257 levels before I’d realised I was an addict and had to stop.
 
Similarly, other games such as Diablo (1,2 & 3) and COD (Call of Duty) became temporary black holes for my time, sapping away hours upon hours with mindless action, collecting lots of gold and killing countless zombies, orcs and dodgy Russians! Whilst this was a lot of fun, I did get bored with them quite quickly. However, the danger for many people, including myself, is when addiction and time spent on these games consumes everything and reaches unhealthy levels.
 
Game play is a clever art in itself, which is designed to play on people’s desire for endless hits of dopamine and adrenaline. It’s the reward for success and the fight or flight mechanism which has ensured our survival through the ages. However, what’s the cost of this unnatural stimulation of these chemicals in our bodies?
 
I recently saw a kid engrossed in a café game on a tablet. Having run my own café, I watched for a bit, interested to see what sort of idea a game developer had come up with for this. The basic idea was that you, the player, was preparing meals, serving customers and collecting money all at once. The game was timed and so as the time elapsed, the customers became increasingly dissatisfied when not served. Whilst this is true and challenging in real life, as customers don’t like to be left waiting, what’s the point of this in a game targeted at kids?
 
As I watched, I noticed the level of anxiety increase in the kid who was playing. The speed at which the customers appeared increased, as did the frustration of trying to achieve the goals of the game. With so many games like this targeted at children, there needs to be more done to regulate such designs. With processes designed specifically to manipulate the behaviour of children, there needs to be a level of accountability that comes from these developers. What moral code of ethics are they working under that makes them feel justified in designing systems that increase anxiety and build addictions.
 
The long-term impact of this is yet to be seen. However, there’s already an increasing trend of greater mental health problems in children and teenagers. It’s high time that software developers who target children with their products, provide age warnings, based upon potential anxiety and addiction, rather than just sex and violence, for their products.
 
Games can and should be enjoyed by those playing them, not as yet another source of anxiety and degradation to people’s mental health that they can become. Parents should be vigilant in their approach and assessment of games for their children, but at the same time, there really is a moral and ethical responsibility for developers to do something about this growing issue, when just like smoking, their products can have a lasting detrimental effect on people. 

Whenever you mention the word ‘audit,’ it gets everyone on edge! Visions of tax audits rush to the front of our minds with suit clad accountants sporting thick rimmed glasses slinking into your office to quietly demand to see your books. With a stern, set expressionless face, they shuffle through crumpled receipts and punch digits on their oversized calculators, only occasionally glancing up to inquire, “Was that mountain bike really for work purposes? Are you just pretending to be a mountain bike instructor?”
 
It really is an unsettling feeling for people, as nobody likes to have strangers come through and make judgements about their finances or work. However, what if we’re looking at this from the wrong point of view? For the moment forget about tax audits and think about workplace audits. What are they? What should they be for? What benefit can they bring?
 
An audit within the workplace can be for many reasons, but basically they’re to test and assess if what’s being done, is the most effective and safe way of doing things. As a result, this can bring huge benefits to the organisation. However, it needs to involve an experienced and impartial third party. This not only helps remove internal personal agendas, but also allows for a fresh look at processes and procedures which we are often too close to as program developers and managers to see for ourselves.
 
From a safety and risk management point of view, it’s excellent (and essential) to have your programs and systems regularly audited. This is not to strike fear into people and ‘keep everyone on their toes,’ it’s to ensure your organisation is doing the best work possible in the safest manner possible.
 
Having worked for a number of dysfunctional organisations in the past, I’ve seen first hand how desperately they needed someone to come in and ask, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Sometimes, this can work internally. However, it’s always far more powerful to have an independent point of view expressed.  
 
Unfortunately for the places I worked, with a sense of such misguided self-confidence and arrogance, they refused to let anyone take a serious look at what was going on and in two cases it just got worse. This lack of transparency and idea that everything’s ok because someone with a boss hat on said so, only added to the risk profile of the organisations. The reality was that the more they tried to internalise everything, the greater the risks became.
 
Thankfully, most organisations aren’t as bad as this and what an audit will usually find is that there are some great things happening. This reinforcement of what you’re doing well as instructors and program directors, is an excellent morale boost for everyone and a wonderful validation of the great work you’re doing.
 
There are also always going to be areas in which you can improve and the audit can cut through a lot of the organisational blindness to reveal some key areas that have been missed, fallen by the wayside or simply can be improved upon. Again, in most cases, this is just part of a continuous improvement process and shouldn’t be seen as anything personal or daunting.
 
As an outdoor ed professional, I’ve had my work audited and I’ve also conducted external audits on other schools and organisations. The end result of each and every one of these was reinforcement and positive improvement for the programs.
 
Unless you’re an absolute buffoon and have been pretending you can run a program when you have no idea what you’re doing nor any real experience, there’s absolutely nothing to fear from an external audit of your program. For any school or organisation running outdoor programs, it’s essential to have your work regularly reviewed to ensure the best risk management and operational management practices possible, because at the end of the day, you’re better off having an experienced outdoor ed professional coming in, working with you and reviewing your work to help reduce risks and prevent incidents, rather than a team of lawyers soullessly trawling through everything and interrogating you after something has gone seriously wrong!

​I’ve always wanted to go to Vienna, attracted by the music, the architecture, the history and of course the gigantic pretzels. Recently, I had that chance and took a slow train from Zürich to Vienna. The almost 8 hour ride in itself was an interesting one, traveling along the Swiss countryside, through the tiny country of Lichtenstein and over the snow capped Austrian alps.
 
Going in winter other than the cold, it was dark by 4pm, which was another thing to get used to. It would feel so late, but not even be close to dinner time. This completely messes with your desire to eat!
 
In Vienna, I started my day with a bus ride around the city centre, just to get a bit of a handle on the layout before adventuring out into the city. What caught my attention right away was the stunning architecture and the prolific number of buildings of the same period. In many old cities, you get a few really amazing historic buildings. However, in Vienna, it’s absolutely covered in them. There’s nothing more stunning than seeing street after street of amazingly designed buildings and churches that have been well-maintained over centuries.
 
These classic stylings are contrasted with gritty punk style graffiti plastered over the underpasses and bridges around town as well as the stunning modern high rises bathed in glass. After a lap around town, I found myself at the Opera House. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to go to the opera, but that’s definitely on my to do list for next time around. From the Opera House, my next stop was the Schönbrunn Palace. The moment I walked through the gates, I was stunned! This was the most impressive palace I’d ever seen.
 
The Schönbrunn Palace was built in the 17th Century and was designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and became the imperial palace for the Austrian kings who also had a successive reign as Holy Roman Emperor until the position and title was dissolved in 1806. Whilst I won’t go into all the historic details of the Holy Roman Empire and its emperors, needless to say, it was often a poison challis at odds and in conflict with the Pope and all his cronies. Such an important position however, require an important house and Schönbrunn is certainly a house suitable for an emperor. It was even nice enough for Napoleon in which to take up residence for a little bit when he was invading all of Europe. Had he stayed and not tried to invade Russia, the world might be very different today.
 
From the later Middle Ages, right through till the beginning of WWI, Austria was a military power house and one of the strongest central powers in Europe. However, it wasn’t just the military power for which Vienna was a hub. Due to the wealth that came with empire and trade, the Austrian emperors used a significant amount of this wealth to promote the arts. Mozart was a favourite of Empress Maria Theresa who discovered his talent and helped to promote it by putting him on a retainer. However, as you can see from the architecture throughout Vienna, art, design and culture have been a vitally important part of life in the city.
 
Inside the Palace itself, the walls, ceilings and floors are designed and painted in the most intricate and bold way. No doubt much of it was to impress guests coming to the Palace for functions, but regardless of the motives, it’s left an amazing legacy for the world. Without such patronage, countless musicians and artists would never have been able to follow their dreams. Instead they would have had to get boring awful jobs sweeping muck off the pavement, as flushing toilets had yet to be invented.
 
Since you weren’t allowed to take photos, you just have to go there yourself to see how stunning this Palace really is. The high ceilings, the grandeur of the dining rooms and bedrooms and the sheer scale of the structure is mind blowing. However, the room in which Mozart played his first concert is quite humble in comparison.
 
Outside the Palace, the gardens are extensive and you could spend a whole day just walking up and down the immaculately kept grounds. There’s even a zoo next door and some amazing greenhouses with exotic tropical and desert plants and wildlife.
 
Even though the Schönbrunn is the grandest of the palaces in Vienna, it’s actually just one of many. Although quite impractical as houses these days, various other palaces have been turned into museums and galleries which house some of the most stunning artworks I’ve ever seen. The Belvedere Palace (which is closer to the centre of Vienna) has an amazing art collection, including works by Klimt and Van Gogh. No matter how I describe these works, it will never do justice to actually seeing them yourself. This is really the key point to any place which has cultural experiences different from your own. Without going there and experiencing it for yourself, you can never truly understand the history, the lives that were lived and the amazing talent that artists, designers and musicians brought to the culture of a nation that has out lasted centuries of turmoil, war and everything else that goes with the human condition.
 
For me, I only scratched the surface of what Vienna had to offer, but if you want a truly unique and amazing experience of history, art and music, then Vienna is the place to go. It’s worth doing a bit of reading up beforehand to give you a greater picture and context of how and why Austria became such an important central power in Europe, but well worth the time as once you have this context, everything else makes far more sense.

The undo button has become an integral part of our lives. Something doesn’t work on the computer, hit the undo button. Get killed whilst playing a game, hit the undo button. Not happy with the last hour of work you just did on a project? Hit the undo button several times, or better still go back to a previous version of the work and start over. There are so many aspects of our lives to which the undo button is being applied. However, for students who have grown up always being able to undo something, what happens when there’s no button?
 
Education and in particular eLearning, is reliant on the idea of undo and redo. However, life is not always like that. We can’t always just unwind something that we’ve said or done by pressing a button. This is where experiential education becomes so important as part of the educational mix. To put it simply, actions lead to real consequences and we might or might not like the outcome. Just as in real life, if we don’t like the outcome, we still have to live with the result.
 
Being able to undo almost anything and everything at school is creating a generation that’s ill-equipped to deal with the discomfort of making real decisions that have real consequences. Having grown up with the ability to change an answer or retake a test because their parents complained too much is having a detrimental effect.  This occurs especially when students find themselves in a situation in which a poor decision can have massive ramifications and no quick and easy reset.
 
The reality is that if students don’t practise making decisions and experience real consequences, then they become unable to adequately assess real risks when they arise. They are ill-equipped to face the challenges that life throws at them.  
 
This is not to say that students need to be tossed into a bear pit so they can quickly work out how to escape with nothing more than a toothbrush and an elastic band. (Even though this may be quite useful for some students to experience, it’s not quite what I’m talking about.) It’s about the ability to put a student outside his/her comfort zone and facilitate situations in which the student needs to make decisions for himself without the ability to change his mind and do something different half way through which magically changes the outcome in his favour.
 
Whilst the undo button is a great function, the reality is in life, relationships and work, our actions might have us do or commit to something that can’t be undone. If you think about this more seriously, how much more care and effort needs to go into a decision that you know you can’t easily reverse? If you can’t just flippantly try and undo as a digital experiment might allow you to do, what do your thought processes need to look like to make an informed decision?
 
The challenge for educators today is to retrain student behaviour to understand this critical factor. We can’t afford to risk our next generation not making any decisions because they feel afraid they can’t just reverse them and might very well have to live with the result. Therefore, educational programs, activities and even our whole curriculum, needs to be more reflective of this.
 
Create situations in which students must make binding decisions. It could be with the building of a structure that can only be done once. It could be cooking with limited ingredients. It could be anything where the only way to solve the problem is by continuing to move forward and not have the option of resetting or restarting. Whatever way you structure the exercise or learning activity, there should be no easy way out. If failure occurs, then talk about why this happened and then keep moving forward.
 
The whole point of this is to help students cope with real decision making. While “undo” is great and I’ve used it a lot, the other side of it is that it has the potential to set an unrealistic expectation for life. Life is challenging. Life has consequences. Life truly has no undo button. However, if you’re prepared to make decisions, push outside your comfort zone, weather the storm and ride the rollercoaster of life, then you really don’t need the undo button after all.