Harold Jarche

Atlantic Canada ICT Industry Needs New Models

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Stephen Downes links to a PowerPoint file (works in OpenOffice.org too) produced by the NRC, entitled ICT Industry Overview, on the state of the industry in Atlantic Canada.
There are some good snippets of information, but the slideshow medium is not meant for a lot of knowledge transfer. For instance, on open source:

Business cases have to be wrestled with, but OSS generally is impacting the way people are thinking about IP and making money – new business models required.

That’s pretty obvious to anyone who has read anything on open source, but worth repeating, and nice to hear this from our "National" Research Council. However, I feel that much of this presentation is looking in the rear view mirror. Supposedly, VC’s want to fund a "Craigslist on steroids" . Have they heard about Google and its services & tools?
In an IT Conversation about a year ago, I believe it was Jonathan Schwartz of Sun who said that the enterprise software development business model as we know it is broken. The latest software successes are not traditional enterprise applications. They’re community platforms, like Vancouver-based Flickr, which spurned VC money and was finally purchased directly by Yahoo!. The investment model is already changing, and perhaps VC’s are not the best source of advice. Enough of them avoided Skype because they couldn’t figure out the business model.
This presentation highlights the need for innovative models, experienced management (lacking in Atlantic Canada) and an understanding of market needs. I would add that Atlantic Canadian entrepreneurs should get a real deep understanding of open source and Web 2.0 if they want to stay in the ICT Industry.

Gatekeepers or Guides?

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There’s a lot of hype around Web 2.0 (AKA the social or two-way web). Some see it as the next business opportunity while others view it as the answer to all of our problems. Certainly there is a communications revolution happening right now. Educators, businesses and yes even consultants, are floundering about. Many of us, in a McLuhanesque way, are driving into the future while looking in the rear view mirror. How many people in positions of authority, power, management and consultation are acting as gatekeepers rather than guides?
These thoughts were triggered by Leigh Blackall’s photographs that have been mixed with Web 2.0 themes. If you don’t get this stuff, then watch the slideshow and let the right side of your brain absorb it.
Sometime in the next few years, it will become obvious which way we should have turned. Our schools will be different, or non-existent, and our economies and environments will have gone through enormous changes. In the near future, younger generations are going to make things happen that many of us cannot fathom at this time. How will they view us then? Will we be remembered for our vision and support or for our near-sightedness and stubbornness?

Free Basecamp Account for Educators

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Via Anol Bhattacharya is this post from the 37Signals blog announcing a free Basecamp basic subscription for educators. Basecamp is a hosted project management tool, but nowhere near as complicated as MS Project. I haven’t used it for a while but my friends at Tantramar Interactive swear by it to manage their web design projects. This basic subscription is regularly $24 per month and lets you host up to 15 projects. The company also provides Writeboard, a free hosted wiki with an easy interface.
Here’s a post from EdBlogger Praxis on how a school used Basecamp for its school improvement plan.

The $100 Laptop

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The idea behind MIT’s $100 laptop initiative is to have one laptop per child, individually owned and cared for. The lime green laptop, which sports a handcrank and a swivel screen debuted in Tunis this week. The official word is that these laptops will be produced in huge quantities (5-10 million) with governments or donors purchasing them in bulk for distribution to students. Jon Husband forwards an additional twist on this initiative that is a bit more grassroots:

"How about offering a commercial version that costs twice as much? Do it in a different semi-florescent color and those who would buy them would be buying one for kid some where."  … Well .. why not ? I’d buy one at $200 if I knew some child or woman in an underdeveloped part of the world were going to receive a laptop they could use.

Given that most of the students in most of our schools do not have their own laptop, I think that a higher-priced version for students in more wealthy countries would not be a bad idea (my previous comments on laptops in schools – One Reason for Laptops & The Laptop Furor).
Like Jon, I would gladly pay about $(CA)300 to purchase one for my children and another for someone else. If this happens, would there be any pressure on governments to not allow a commercial version of this laptop in order to appease the oligopolies?

Guilt-free music online

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I don’t listen to music online, as the extent of my downloading is EdTech Talk and IT Conversations. However, our boys are starting to share their MP3’s and I was getting concerned that they didn’t understand the nasty forces out there that would do anything to maintain their oligopoly. Therefore, I introduced them to the Creative Commons search feature for media that is free to share. I also showed them Magnatune which features royalty free music. There are a number of single tracks that you can listen to and download for free in order to try before you buy.
What really impressed me about Magnatune is that artists receive 50% of the purchase price of an album (you decide on the price, starting at $5.00) as well as the fact that the artists keep all rights to the music. If this business model catches on, then the major labels have something very serious to worry about, and I have one less thing to worry about.

Is Intellectual Property an Oxymoron?

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No answers here, but as I continue to examine this issue I’m drawing some conclusions, and getting scared at the same time.

Some online sources that I’ve looked at:

Here is a quote from a 1999 article, Intellectual Property, Information and the Common Good:

The fundamental problem with intellectual property as an ethical category is that it is purely individualistic. It focuses on the creator/developer of the intellectual work and what he or she is entitled to. There is truth in this, but not the whole truth. It ignores the social role of the creator and of the work itself, thus overlooking their ethically significant relationships with the rest of society. The balance is lost.

Ideas as property will be more and more of an issue for our connected society and especially for those in the learning profession. I believe that locking-up ideas will not foster innovation or cultural growth.

A counter to multinational corporations claiming ever longer and more restrictive copyright protection are movemments like Creative Commons (CC). Through CC or Google’s advanced search (use the “Usage Rights” drop down menu) you can find audio, images, text, video, and other formats that are free to share online. You can also use a CC Licence to make your work easier to share, while retaining some rights.

Update:

I just had to add this quote from Michael Geist. Makes me proud to be Canadian:

It has been apparent now for several years but it bears repeating about the Supreme Court of Canada — no high court in the world better understands that the right balance in intellectual property law depends as much on the laws’ limits as its protections.

Teachers’ Roles in Learning & Problem-solving

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Stephen Downes recently referred to a paper written by Kelvin Tan and Cynthia Lim Ai Ming, entitled No Subjects, No teachers, No Schools, No Peers – Just problems: Arguments for a minimalist approach for maximising the scope of problem-based learning (PDF). This paper is a good review of why the process of learning, especially problem solving, should be separated from subject-based curricula, teacher-assessors and peer pressure in education.

My only criticism is that the authors have not referred to the excellent work conducted by Dave Jonassen, author of Learning to Solve problems: An Instructional Design Guide. One of Dave’s remarks that has stuck with me is that as adults, most people are paid to do only one thing – solve problems. Neither our school systems nor most of our training programs prepare people to solve problems.

Tan and Lim Ai Ming make some very strong comments in favour of the separation of content (subject & disciplines) and process (learning & problem solving). They begin by stating that, “The authors of this paper suggest that the retention of subjects or disciplines in PBL is an unnecessary obstacle to students’ learning”. The paper is then structured around these premises:

  • Learning should be based on problems, not subjects.
  • Subjects stress content rather than process
  • Individual learning is authentic [and group work may hinder this learning]
  • When the teacher is also the assessor, then the power to fail students may be detrimental to self-directed learning
  • Teachers as content experts (such as at a university) may be detrimental to self-directed learning.
  • Scheduled class times, as in any regulated school, are not supportive of problem-based learning.

In a recent interview on EdTech Talk, David Warlick talks about how the web has greatly increased the amount of available information. No one can master any content field any more. Now we see students having better access to information as well as access to more people than many of their teachers. I am referring to students who may be using IM and VoIP to chat with their friends in Asia, while the teacher is covering Asian social studies in class. The student just checks with the online friend and gets the information in context. Which information is correct – the textbook or the online peer? It doesn’t matter. What really matters, for their lifelong needs, is that students are learning how to learn and how to solve problems. However, mastery of the curriculum (content) is what the school administration assesses.

A similar content focus is seen in corporate e-learning. “Let us put your content online” some vendor may cry. We also have industry shoot-outs; to see who can convert PowerPoint content into e-learning courseware. It’s all about content because it’s easy to build a course based on defined content since there are no messy, individual, radical learners to get in the way. Only a fictional, generalized target population. My experience is that neither the public educational system, higher education nor the corporate training business have made any great achievements in facilitating learning. In many cases learning occurs in spite of the obstacles presented by formal training and education.

A shift in emphasis away from content delivery changes the role of the teacher/trainer. As Tan and Lim Ai Ming note, teacher as assessor and teacher as facilitator may be conflicting roles. The same goes for teacher as expert and teacher as guide. The separation of trainers and assessors is common practice in the Canadian military, where the trainer is responsible for assisting each learner, and a separate group (the Standards Section), confirms that operational standards are met through summative evaluation. When properly implemented, it is a good training system.

Today there is no shortage of information on most subjects. However, many graduates lack critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Facilitating the development of these skills, not mastery of a defined subject area, should be the role of educators and trainers. I believe that this will only happen when they abandon the roles of assessor and expert and become true learning facilitators.

Laptops in Schools – The Maine Experiment

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Via Will Richardson is this post from Dave Weinberger on the State of Maine’s laptop in schools initiative for every student in Grade 7 & 8, as well as this comment about a high school principal:

Robbin Wall, the school’s principal, welcomes us. The school is 5 years old. Every student has a laptop. (Among the speakers today — via video — is Angus King who was governor when Maine gave each student a laptop.) Principal Wall says that this school is focused on training professionals; it offers no extra-curricular activities.

On Will’s post there are comments that this kind of approach to education is too narrow and students will burn out. Thinking a bit more on this, I don’t see this as a critical problem. The schools that I see have already reduced physical education and art to such a lowly state that concerned parents have to supplement them with outside activities anyway. If the school only focuses on one area, that may not be so bad, as I don’t believe that public education can solve all of our problems. I would recommend that you read all of Weinberger’s post and follow the links. Again, there are no easy answers.

Work, Education & Taxes

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David Livingstone, of the Centre for the Study of Education and Work, presented at the CSTD conference on a 2004 study that interviewed 9,000 Canadians. One of the findings that I found most interesting was that Canadians have the highest rates of formal learning in the world. A large percentage of our workers have diplomas and degrees. On the other hand, I heard on the radio this morning that there is a productivity gap in this country, and as the Globe & Mail reports:

No one can pinpoint precisely why Canada has fallen behind to such an alarming extent. The explanations range from relatively low investments in technology and equipment to lagging private-sector research and development and the fact that marginal effective tax rates on capital are high. But Mr. Goodale knows the consequences of such dismal numbers.

The truth is that no one really knows, but many lobbyists and special interest groups use these kinds of statistics to further their own agendas. Universities will say that we need greater access to higher education and conservative think tanks will call for more corporate tax cuts. Well there doesn’t appear to be a direct correlation between education and productivity if we examine our credentialed society and our perceived low productivity. In New Brunswick we have the lowest corporate tax rate in the country and one of the highest rates of unemployment. Recently our unemployment rate went up while it dropped everywhere else. So the answers are not simple, as H.L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Personally, I’m tired that our politicians and business leaders revert to pat answers for complex problems, such as “we need to raise personal taxes to pay for our social programs”. Perhaps productivity is the wrong measure. John Ralston Saul, in The Collapse of Globalism, states that since the mid-nineteen nineties, “…two-thirds of American corporations paid no federal income tax.” Many of these corporations have branch offices in Canada – same people, same agenda.

As a society we have to understand what is important and how we can make our communities work. That means understanding the complex forces at play. Lowering taxes or decreasing tuition rates are simple solutions that won’t address the root causes. The same goes for understanding how our organisations and businesses work. There are no pat answers and the flavour of the month won’t solve our problems.

Some of the places I visit to get a better view of these issues:

Drucker on Listening Carefully

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Peter Drucker, one of my inspirations on business and management, passed away on Friday. He was 95 years old. Elliott Masie sent out a few words in an e-mail on Peter Drucker, including this comment:

I had the privilege of meeting Peter Drucker almost fifteen years ago. We had a conversation about the role that "training" could play (or not play) in the development of effective leaders. He challenged me to ask 100 leaders how they became leaders and to listen carefully to their answers. He predicted that I would find that the leaders pointed to strong role models, mentors who were brave enough to tell them the truth and opportunties that allowed them to perform, rather than slickly packaged leadership courses.

In tribute to Peter Drucker, and his incisive mind, let’s continue to ask the tough questions. Is there a direct link between training and performance? Is there a direct link in the specific case that you are involved with?