Link is in fact behind a firewall. We have a corporate subscription.

I will see if I can re-produce with CLC permission.

Sorry about the late post but am in the middle of merger activity!

Kind Regards,

Rob

I agree with you that there is a complete disconnect between what goes on in the classroom and what happens in the “real world.” Teacher education programs certainly do not prepare new teachers for the reality of the information age – faculties of education are still focused on the industrial model of education.I’ve had several student teachers in my classroom in the last few years and I have found that I’ve had to undo what they have been taught so that they can function in the information age. Simply put, the teaching profession has to wake up and smell the coffee.

“Pumping out dis-empowered learners into a world where manufacturing jobs have disappeared, where we are competing with others globally, where the jobs of tomorrow require curious, self-directed, self motivated, collaborative workers, and confident, life-long learners is analogous to pumping out Hummers in a time of great global transformation.”

http://preilly.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/the-big-3-bailout-and-education/

Asked last year by ASTD what currently frustrated him about the training and development profession, he said:

“The same thing that frustrated me 45 years ago—the fact that it’s a solution in search of a problem. People have developed all this wonderful stuff around learning and development, and it’s become a thing in and of itself rather than something that exists to help people be more effective in their jobs…

“In fact, training has become in many ways the enabler for bad management because now the default solution is to fix the people. You’ve got vendors inventing things, business publications promoting them, managers reading them and thinking they should be doing this, and the training department going along with it all too eagerly. It is a whole business.”

My impression of what training is all about is not very good, frankly. When I have been offered trainers, I have usually been unimpressed by the credentials of the training. “Learning to write better research papers”. Ok, Mr Smith, how many research papers have you written… oh! Zero? I have written lots… what are you going to teach me exactly?

I see a lot of support staff spending what seems to be a large fraction of their time in “training”, usually for the most mundane things. The minute my organization ads a new web form, everyone seems to get a day of training. Isn’t it great? How much does it cost? 30 000$?

Some years ago, there was a major investment in “endnote”, reference annotation tool. EndNote does something almost entirely trivial. The people who took the training should know how to use a Word Processor, if they do, this new tool takes 5 minutes at the most to learn.

Almost everything I have learned, I have learned on my own. Of course, I am a social beast and I have learn by emulation to others, but if I want to set the time on my VCR, I will “train myself” thank you.

That is, of course, not entirely fair for training in the workplace. In terms of “important training”, the famous video “Inbox Zero” comes to mind. This one was an eye opener and I really wish more people within my organization would “take this training” (read: watch the video).

In short, I certainly acknowledge the value training can add, but I must say that I have never taken it seriously. If I were to become a CEO (which will not happen), I might just take training for something to keep the employees happy, and get the unions out of my office.

(I’m equally harsh with the IT department, but that’s for another day. Maybe.)