Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?

This week’s challenge for #rhizo15:

What can we measure that isn’t learning? Think about all the other facets of the human experience… can we do better? What about all the fancy tools we’ve seen… can they help? Should we throw it out all together? Can we help people measure themselves? Is there a better way of looking at it?

My first thought was about all kinds of things we can measure that don’t really tell us much. How many times was the letter ‘E’ used in Dave’s post? How many ovals does can a high school student properly fill in? Well, I guess some people think that the number of ovals that a high school student fills in actually tell us something about how much the student knows or how effective the teacher is, or something like that.

In truths that she learned
Or in times that he cried
In bridges he burned or the way that she died

So let us step away from more academic pursuits. I work in social media. I measure hits on my website. For those who haven’t heard, hits is an acronym for “How Idiots Track Success”. These days, social media ninjas, I think that’s what they call themselves now, talk about engagement.

Many years ago, I was at an online marketing conference where the topic was Return On Investment, or ROI. That’s how people in the world of business like to measure things. I titled my blog post, OMMA: The ROI of a Smile. It is a long and tedious blog post, but it ends off

Too many are still trying to calculate the ROI of being in control, instead of the ROI of a smile.

I don’t remember if it was at that conference or some other where I tweeted the question, “How do you measure engagement?” I expected replies about the number of retweets, likes, or comments. But the best response was from a woman I know who was waiting for someone to pop the question who replied, “the size of the diamond”.

Measure in love
(Measure, measure your life in love)

But back to Dave’s question, “What can we measure that isn’t learning?”

There are things that aren’t learning?