The subject of education

Posted on by
6

I mostly focus on workplace learning here, but I want to put together some of my previous thoughts on public education. My opinions are based on watching our two boys go through a public education system, now complete, plus a fair bit of reading, in addition to many conversations with educators over the years. If we change how we think about public education, we may also be able to improve how we support workplace learning.

school_country__abiclipa_01.jpgWe do not live our lives based on academic subjects, and no workplace is subject-based, but almost all of our curricula are stuffed into subject silos. Education systems should focus on facilitating learning and critical thinking. When students are ready to enter the workforce they will then have the learning skills to blast through whatever job training interests them. Getting the education system out of the job training business will likely make for happier learners, teachers and and maybe even parents.

What would a curriculum look like if you eliminated any specific content and any reference to particular technologies and instead focused on universal cognitive processes? Many varieties of this “curriculum” could be created, using various content areas or communication technologies. I imagine a curriculum that is open to teachers’ expertise and students’ needs, based on processes like those suggested by Marina Gorbis in The Nature of the Future:

  • Sensemaking
  • Social and emotional intelligence
  • Novel and adaptive thinking
  • Moral and ethical reasoning

What would be different about this more basic curriculum is that students would be able to choose how they would learn these process skills and how they would show mastery. Self-expression could be shown through writing, blogging, art, drama, mechanics, etc. This approach would also free up a whole bunch of teachers in administrative curriculum development positions. Without a subject-centric curriculum, teachers could choose the appropriate subject matter for their particular class and the school system could concentrate on ensuing that students have mastered the important processes.

All fields of knowledge are expanding and artificial boundaries between disciplines are disintegrating. Our education systems need to drop the whole notion of subjects and content mastery and move to process-oriented learning. The subject matter should be something of interest to the learner or something a teacher, with passion, is motivated to teach. The subject does not matter, it’s just grist for the cognitive mill.

Discussing what subjects we should teach is the 21st Century equivalent of determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The answer is infinite. The real debate in education is whether we need subject-based curriculum at all.

Connected leadership

Posted on by
1

How is leadership in a hyper-connected workplace different? It’s been an ongoing conversation here, as this comment by Stephen Downes, on leadership as an emergent property, provides a counterpoint to certain popular leadership literature, especially “great man” theories.

‘Leadership’ is the trait people who have been successful ascribe as the reason for their success.
It is one of those properties that appears to be empirically unverifiable and is probably fictional.

In preparing for our connected worker program, I reviewed my previous posts on leadership and created a short synthesis of the key points. With life in perpetual Beta as a guiding perspective, networked organizations have to learn how to deal with ambiguity and complexity. Those in leadership and management positions must find ways to nurture creativity and critical thinking. Too often there are organizational barriers that prevent this. The 21st century workplace is all about understanding networks, modelling network learning, and strengthening networks. Anyone can show leadership in these areas.

Another guiding principle for modern organizational design is for loose hierarchies and strong networks. This is succinctly explained in the definition of wirearchy: a dynamic two-way flow of  power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. As networked, distributed work becomes the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent, and diverse. Supporting social networks ensures that knowledge is shared and contributes to organizational longevity. Organizations need to learn as fast as their environments.

As a result of improved trust in the workplace, leadership will be seen for what it is – an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. This requires leadership from everyone – an aggressively intelligent and engaged workforce, learning with each other. In today’s workplace, it is a significant disadvantage to not actively participate in social learning networks.

Leadership in networks does not come from above, as there is no top. To know the culture of the workplace, one must be the culture. Marinate in it and understand it. This cannot be done while trying to control the culture. Organizational resilience is strengthened when those in leadership roles let go of control.

Related posts:

The Connected Leader

From Hierarchies to Wirearchies

The Nature of the Future – Review

Posted on by
1

Nature of the FutureWhat will the future look like? Here are some glimpses.

  • Genomera: Crowdsourcing clinical trials.
  • BioCurious: Hackerspace for biotech.
  • Lending Club: “We replace the high cost and complexity of bank lending.”
  • ScholarMatch: Connect under-resourced students with resources, schools, and donors to make college possible.
  • Foresight Engine: How would you reinvent the process of medical discovery?
  • Open PCR Machine: Do it yourself thermocycler for controlling Polymer Chain Reactions for DNA detection and sequencing.

These are all discussed in the book, The Nature of the Future, by Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future.

We are quickly finding out that when we go from a centralized communications infrastructure to a distributed one, when we connect everything and everyone, the result is not just to make things faster, better, and bigger. The social system itself acquires a fundamentally different quality: it becomes more diversified, more emergent, and often unpredictable.

This book provides probably the best background, and foreground, reading for most of the ideas discussed on this blog: complexity; the changing nature of work; the need to integrate learning into our work; and the primacy of cooperation in networks. Dedicated chapters cover money, education, science, governance, and health, with interesting future scenarios supported by current examples. While automation and robotics may be taking many jobs away, Gorbis identifies unique human skills which will continue to be important. These should be the core of any public education program.

  • Sensemaking
  • Social and emotional intelligence
  • Novel and adaptive thinking
  • Moral and ethical reasoning

As Gorbis writes, and I wholeheartedly agree, “Learning is social”.

We need to learn how to work better with machines, letting machines do what they are good at. Gorbis shows how machines and average people can outperform experts at playing chess. “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”

On the future of health care, Gorbis sees a new role for doctors. “In a socialstructed health care system, the doctor is not an omniscient God but a great conversationalist, astute observer, and insightful partner, that is, she is less a robot and more a real human being.” Doctors will be more like nurses, and with increasingly advanced technology, nurses will be more like doctors. I wonder if in the future, their roles will merge?

Gorbis identifies a major disconnect in our economy.

  1. Our technology tools and platforms are highly participatory and social.
  2. Our business models, by contrast, are based on market, i.e., monetary rewards.
  3. conflicts [between these two priorities] are likely to grow simply because the number of such endeavors [Twitter, Facebook, etc] is growing exponentially.

Gorbis concludes that “much new value and innovation will move from commodity-or-market-based production to socialstructed creation.” This reminds me of the T+I+M+N framework. A networked economy is not a mere modification of a market economy, but a form in itself that can address issues beyond the capabilities of markets.

Would I recommend this book? Yes. There are few people who would not benefit from this synthesis of the forces of technological, economic, and societal change coming at us. I will close with some practical advice, applicable to all, but especially for anyone entering the workforce.

In a world where people’s jobs will not be given to them, each individual will need to look deeply and understand what she or he is good at, how she or he can contribute to multiple efforts and navigate multiple roles and identities as a part of different communities.

Cooperation in the networked workplace

Posted on by
1

* This post is sponsored by Microsoft Office 365 *

This is my second post on productivity tools for the networked workplace. First, I want to elaborate a bit on collaboration and cooperation. Two types of behaviours are necessary in the networked workplace: collaboration and cooperation. Cooperation differs from collaboration in that it is sharing freely without any expectation of reciprocation or reward. Collaboration is just getting things done. Cooperation is what drives the extended enterprise — customers, suppliers, partners and anyone else touched by the business.

In my previous post I discussed how Microsoft tools differed in supporting either collaborative or cooperative behaviours, or both. These facets align with the digital competencies required in the networked workplace.

collab-coop competenciesCooperative competencies of 1) sharing openly; 2) communicating effectively in communities & networks; and 3) contributing to knowledge networks; are often given less attention by management than the more job-focused collaborative competencies. But yesterday’s soft skills are today’s critical skills. New tools for cooperation, like activity stream platforms can support open sharing. Yammer is one such platform, and Jared Spataro, at the Microsoft Office Division, has this to say about Yammer’s place in their business model:

What should I do?  In my customer meetings over the last few months, people have often asked, “What should I use for social?  Yammer or the SharePoint newsfeed?”  My answer has been clear: Go Yammer!  Yammer is our big bet for enterprise social, and we’re committed to making it the underlying social layer for all of our products.  It will power the social experiences in SharePoint, Office 365, Dynamics, and more.   Yammer’s unique adoption model appeals directly to end users and makes it easy to start enjoying the benefits of social immediately.  And because it’s an online service, Yammer gives us the ability to innovate rapidly-updating the service quickly as the market evolves.  So whether you’re an Office 365 customer or running SharePoint on-premises, Yammer will provide the latest innovations and best user experience.

yammer for cooperationThe above image is a continuation of a review of Office 365 I posted to Slideshare. In Yammer’s case, it is clearly a platform focused on cooperation. Like other activity stream, or micro-blogging, platforms, Yammer enables serendipitous connections by making work more transparent. As Ross Dawson says, Yes you can ‘engineer’ serendipity. Yammer would be one tool to help with that engineering.

As I mentioned in my last post, a tool like Lync can greatly enhance workplace collaboration as well as support internal cooperation. Yammer can extend that cooperation, with the real potential for business innovation resulting from connecting with people outside the department or enterprise.

If you don’t think you need to increase cooperation for your enterprise, then perhaps it fits into one of the two categories of companies that IDG’s Bill Laberis identifies in a short, but pointed, video. Fostering distributed work may not be suitable for 1) financially troubled companies, or 2) companies who don’t trust their own employees. For these companies, no networked productivity tool suite will help.

—

Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Office 365 but I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

ten years

Posted on by
20

ten of spadesOn 21 April 2003, jarche.com went online. It started as a single web page, later upgraded to a Drupal powered site and then changed over to its current WordPress configuration. About 2,350 posts have been published so far, with over 6,500 comments [+1 million comment spam have been blocked]. Many thanks to Chris at tantramar.ca for keeping this site running for so long.

So what has changed and what have I learned over the past decade?

It is easier and more acceptable to work from home, live in a different time zone, and work with people you may have never met face to face. When I started, the mainstream media were making fun of blogs. Now every media outlet has one, if not many. This blog has helped me connect with people all over the world. Without it, I doubt I would have lasted 10 years as a freelancer.

My early Blogger site is still online. I moved my blogging here in February 2004. In 2003 social media were primarily blogs. While blogs now face a lot of competition, I have noticed that the influence of a single blog post can be much greater today, as it gets re-posted on various other platforms. I would still strongly recommend blogging, especially for freelancers. What I’ve learned about blogging is that you have to do it for yourself. Most of my posts are just thoughts that I want to capture.

One advantage (?) of living in a remote and rural part of the country is that I need to have a wide focus. There are not enough potential clients around here, so there is no local market. Because of this, I saw the world as my market from the onset, and the past 10 years have shown that it’s possible (though sometimes difficult) to do international work and not live in a major metropolitan area. Sackville boasts a population of around 5,000 people and the nearest major cities are Boston (900 KM) and Montréal (1,000 KM).

One of my guiding principles is accepting life in perpetual Beta, meaning that things keep changing and I have to keep learning. In 2003 Twitter did not exist and WordPress was only released in May of that year. Twitter is now the main source of referrals to this blog, surpassing Google, while WordPress is the number one blogging platform in the world. This month I tried two new RSS readers, as the social media landscape keeps changing.

Probably the most significant change in my work came with the formation of the Internet Time Alliance, in 2009, with my partners Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, and Clark Quinn. Not only has this international think-tank exposed me to new networks, but it’s a wonderful support group, where I can bounce around my half-baked ideas.

Thanks to everyone who has connected here over the past 10 years and especially those who have shared their knowledge and experiences. I look forward to the next decade.

All models are wrong

Posted on by
Reply

friday2Friday’s Finds:

“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.” – George Box [1919-2013] passed away today – @fhuszar

“The true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald – via @goonth

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” ~ T.S. Eliot – via @ethnobot

“Managers complain that employees do not think outside the box, but it is the management system…that keeps them firmly inside.” ~M.Addleson – via @janhoglund

Innovation Teams Don’t Work – via @petervan

The companies that are the most successful at maintaining cultures of innovation understand that sometimes – nay, many times – innovations fail. Those companies accept the risk of that failure and have a culture that allows for failures and encourages risk taking.

Public good or playing markets? The real reason for MOOCs – via @ShaunCoffey

In fact, though the MOOCs clearly have a potential to grow immensely, these figures are strikingly similar to what was achieved during the last wave of e-learning euphoria in the early 2000s.

Been here before

During this earlier wave, all of the US investment banks in the late 1990s and early 2000s extended the hype cycle from the adventures of dot.com companies directly into e-learning start-ups.

Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Securities, Hambrecht and Co, Sun Trust, and many others relentlessly spruiked the e-learning industry as destined for fabulous growth trajectories and mouth-watering revenue streams.

Activate your knowledge

Posted on by
2

PKM is much more than processing information. It’s about ideas, conversations and especially relationships. Most of all, PKM is a framework to actually do knowledge work. It is a framework that helps move from an awareness of knowledge to activation of its use in the context of getting work done.

My earliest inspiration on the power of personal knowledge management came from Lilia Efimova and her research on blogging as knowledge work. Lilia’s knowledge framework, as explained in her doctoral dissertation: Passion at Work, shows that knowledge work is done within a context and that awareness of context can be developed through ideas, conversations and relations.

PKM EfimovaActivation of knowledge happens in the context of tasks and so the cycle continues.

The top sector represents the domain of developing ideas, which requires the filtering of vast amounts of information, making sense of it, and connecting different bits and pieces to come up with new ideas.
In this process physical and digital artefacts play an important role (Halverson, 2004; Kidd, 1994; Sellen & Harper, 2001), so knowledge workers are faced with a need for personal information management (Landsdale, 1988) to organise their paper and digital archives, e-mails and bookmark collections.
– The sector of conversations reflects the social nature of knowledge work (Brown & Duguid, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and incorporates the spectrum from passively followed conversations to collaboration with others focused on performing specific tasks. Conversations contribute to both developing ideas and relations with others.
– The lower sector represents the domain of relations, since effective knowledge development is enabled by trust and shared understanding between the people involved (Cross, Parker, Prusak & Borgatti, 2001). For an individual, this means a need to establish and maintain a personal network (Nardi et al., 2002), to keep track of contacts (Whittaker, Jones & Terveen, 2002), or to make choices about which communities to join and which to ignore. [Passion at Work, page 11]

My interpretation of this over the years resulted in the – Seek (filter) Sense (discern) Share – framework, showing PKM as a process of moving ideas and conversations through relationships of people in networks, communities (CoP), and work teams.

PKM at workPKM is completely contextual. That’s why it’s so personal. PKM is rather useless if it is separate from work. PKM is a way to integrate learning and work. PKM is pretty well the antithesis of formal education and training. Knowledge only emerges through the work, it is not predetermined. With PKM, there is no curriculum. Work is learning and learning is the work. This is relatively simple to understand but often difficult to put into practice. I run workshops on PKM but the most important part is putting ideas into practice. We have found through experience that it usually takes at least a month of practice, with reflection and feedback, to become proficient at PKM.

The risky quadrant

Posted on by
5

Donald Taylor asks where your learning & development (training) department resides.

  1. Are you unacknowledged prophets, with a manager or executive who understands that you need to change, but the organization lags behind?
  2. Are you facing comfortable extinction, like the once dominant but now bankrupt Kodak?
  3. Or are you in the training ghetto, disconnected from the business and unable to be part of any change?

training extinctionThe reality today is that risky leadership is needed. As Don notes:

If both the department and the organisation are changing fast, this is a great opportunity. We can invest in new procedures and systems, build our skills and experiment with different ways of working with the business, and the business – because it is also changing fast and open to new ideas – will respond. It’s in this quadrant that we find really progressive L&D teams that are making an impact. While they are undoubtedly leaders, this quadrant is also risky, because that’s the nature of change.

Unacknowledged Prophets: If you are in this quadrant I would advise you to bide your time, build up your skills, create alliances, and wait for opportunities. As Stephen Berlin Johnson says, “Chance favours the connected mind.” Get collaborative, cooperative & connected. Louis Pasteur said that “Chance favours the prepared mind“. Be prepared.

Comfortable Extinction: This is a difficult quadrant because there is no understanding of the need for change. Everything is just fine. If you are the only person in your organization without rose coloured glasses, I would try to become a lone unacknowledged prophet, preparing for the inevitable crisis. If nobody sees it, then it would be best to let the training department drift into obscurity so that others can take the lead in promoting cooperation, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Sometimes it’s best to let natural selection do its thing.

Training Ghetto: Getting out of the basement and becoming relevant may take some time, which departments in this quadrant may not have. I would suggest first moving from training delivery to performance improvement. Get someone (yourself?) skilled at performance consulting. Forget about social learning, for the time being, and focus on performance support tools and job aids. Become useful to the business by bringing practical tools that can be used right away.

So how will you get to the risky quadrant?

The Connected Workplace

Posted on by
4

The Connected WorkerToday’s digitally connected workplace demands a completely new set of skills. Our increasing interconnectedness is illuminating the complexity of our work environments. More connections create more possibilities, as well as more potential problems.

On the negative side, we are seeing that simple work keeps getting automated, like automatic bank machines. Complicated work, for which standardized processes can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labor.

On the positive side, complex work can provide unique business advantages and creative work can help to identify new business opportunities. However, complex work is difficult to copy and creative work constantly changes.

But both complex and creative work require greater implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge, unlike explicit knowledge, is difficult to codify and standardize. It is also difficult to transfer.

Implicit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships. It requires trust before people willingly share their know-how. Social networks can enable better and faster knowledge feedback for people who trust each and share their knowledge. But hierarchies and work control structures constrain conversations. Few people want to share their ignorance with the boss who controls their paycheck. But if we agree that complex and creative work are where long-term business value lies, then learning amongst ourselves is the real work in organizations today. In this emerging network era, social learning is how work gets done.

Becoming a successful social organization will require more than just the implementation of enterprise social technologies. Developing, supporting, and encouraging people to use a range of new social workplace skills will be just as important. Individual skills, in addition to new organizational support structures, are both required.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) skills can help to make sense of, and learn from, the constant stream of information that workers encounter from social channels both inside and outside the organization. Keeping track of digital information flows and separating the signal from the noise is difficult. There is little time to make sense of it all. We may feel like we are just not able to stay current and make informed decisions. PKM gives a framework to develop a network of people and sources of information that one can draw from on a daily basis. PKM is a process of filtering, creating, and discerning, and it also helps manage individual professional development through continuous learning.

Collaboration skills can help workers to share knowledge so that people work and learn cooperatively in teams, communities of practice, and social networks. In order to support collaborative working and learning in the organization, it is important to experience what it means to work and learn collaboratively, and understand the new community and collaboration skills that are involved. “You can’t train someone to be social, only show them how to be social.” Practice is necessary.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every existing business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust. The 21st century connected enterprise is a new world of work and learning.

For example, traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are changing. Probably the biggest change we are seeing is that the content delivery model is being replaced by more social and collaborative frameworks. This is due to almost universal Internet connectivity, especially with mobile devices, as well as a growing familiarity with online social networks.

Work is changing and so organizational learning must change. There is an urgent need for organizational support functions (HR, OD, KM, Training) to move beyond offering training services and toward supporting learning as it is happening in the digitally connected workplace. The connected workplace will not wait for the training department to catch up.

#itashare

We need more sandboxes

Posted on by
1

Earlier this week I wrote that practices like personal knowledge management (PKM), and its potential for enhanced serendipity can give us the underlying structure to become better hackers and more creative. Behaviour change comes through small, but consistent, changes in practice. So how do you move from responsibility, to creativity, and potentially to innovation? Play, explore and converse. But first you need to build a space to practice. PKM can be your cognitive sandbox.

But what can be done at the organizational level to promote playing, exploring and conversing?

Informal learning environments tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum and for standardized tests. But people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions, about their own medical treatment, say, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands. For that, we have a robust informal learning system that eschews grades, takes all comers, and is available even on holidays and weekends. – Scientific American

Organizations should think about building sandboxes as well. These could be shared resources, like the museums used by schools in the article, or even virtual spaces. The greatest challenge, if organizations did create learning sandboxes, would be resisting the urge to control them. Perhaps the best way to develop a “robust informal learning system” that eschews control would be through joint efforts, public and private. We have museums for the public, mostly aimed at basic levels of learning and often focused on children. Is there a new role for museums to develop spaces aimed at working adults? Can these be aligned with market needs? Instead of boring courses for the unemployed, how about access to a maker space instead? Again, it would mean giving up control.

Last year I witnessed a company close operations. A very good benefits package was provided as well as access to “re-training”. This was provided by an HR services company. Courses were available on how to write a resume or how to search for a job. I heard from attendees that these courses were interesting but not that useful. I suggested that something like PKM might be useful. However, the company would not provide anything beyond what the HR service provider offered. The company had met its legal commitments and it was time to turn the page.

sand playInstead, some employees set up their own sandbox. It was just a blog, connected to LinkedIn and other social media. People shared stories and passed on opportunities to others. Now this filled a gap, but it was temporary and the network was not that strong. Imagine if this sandbox had been in existence prior to the closure and was already a learning community of practice? What if community managers were already plugged in to other networks? Would this not be better for employees, the company, and especially society? Let’s build some sandboxes.