This post brings up a couple of interesting tangential associations for me about how to prepare the future workforce for this kind of workplace learning. First, I'm working in the Pre-Kindergarten through grade 20 American education sector. My work with teachers of preschoolers focuses on how to help children develop the capacity to form empathic relationships that lead to the kind of collaborative learning and performance you describe. Much research has shown that this capacity is formed in the first four years of life. While it can be cultivated later on, it's far easier to establish and nurture it early. Despite the research on this, there are very few early childhood centers in America that focus explicitly and systematically on developing this capacity in children. Furthermore, I don't perceive the American K-12 school system is structured to support and nurture the skills these relationship-primed preschoolers bring to elementary school at this point in time. This leaves untapped a multi-year-long opportunity to prepare these future workers to manage and add to their personal knowledge through social and collaborative networked learning.

I'm currently writing my doctoral dissertation about the mental models elementary teachers (3rd-5th grade) have about what engineers do (I'm a former engineer). As I compare the collaborative and innovative process of engineering design with the processes of teaching and learning school science, I'm not finding in my sample and in related research enough similarity between the two processes to prepare today's students to function capably in tomorrow's knowledge workforce as you define it. This concerns me very much.

Here's my second tangential association. There's increasing pressure in American K-12 science education to include more systems thinking in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) curriculum. I'm using my engineering education research to leverage this emerging focus on systems and engineering processes and highlight the need to cultivate K-12 students' personal knowledge management skills systematically. After all, engineers have networked their knowledge in similar but lower-tech ways long before the internet existed. I'm finding that the early childhood research and the workforce development work you and the others in the Internet Time Alliance do support the need to develop social and collaborative capacities similarly. How to change the K-12 education system to support and develop those capacities in students is a wicked and complex problem indeed! I'm doing my best to address it.

Thanks for your posts, Harold. They inspire me to think more deeply and in different ways about what I do.