Hard Work

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Graham commented on my back to school post, “Screw literacy, it’s thinking that’s died“, and I replied that I would rather work with a thinking illiterate partner than an unthinking literate one. Literacy and numeracy are great skills and may make for a productive workforce but critical thinking (questioning all assumptions, as well as your own) is much more important for citizens in a democracy, especially a networked one.

Our economic, political and social future lies not in working hard but in choosing to do the hard work. Seth Godin describes the latter as:

It’s hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable. It’s hard work to tell your boss that he’s being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It’s easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It’s hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It’s hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data.

Anyone can work hard, but it takes courage to take on the hard work of changing our communities, questioning the education system or creating a non-profit organisation with no guaranteed return on investment. Hard work is not about literacy, numeracy or even civics. Hard work is questioning underlying assumptions and seeing new patterns and then taking action on this knowledge. Critical thinking is not only hard work, but it’s difficult to teach and not easy to measure. No wonder schools avoid it.

To face the environmental, social, political and economic challenges of our tightly coupled global world, we’ll all need to do some very hard work. Are our schools helping to prepare students for this? Do our workplaces encourage hard work? Do our communities support those who choose to do the hard work, especially challenging the status quo?

What hard work are you doing?

Local voices in education

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The Minister of Education for the Province of New Brunswick will be meeting with people in our area on the topic of “Building an Educated Workforce for New Brunswick”. I’ve been thinking about this for the past few days and trying to collect my thoughts on public education. First of all, I’m not keen on the Minister’s chosen topic, because we need to focus on more than just an educated workforce, we need an educated and informed citizenry. That said, here are some threads I want to weave together and would appreciate advice on this, as I doubt that I’ll get more than five minutes to either ask a question or make a point.

Sense of Urgency: Rob Paterson made an excellent initial foray into recommendations for education on PEI and this comment resonates with me as well:

By 2015 over 50% of Islanders will be over 50. By 2030 50% will be over 65. We know for sure that every child will be precious and that we have to have as many young as possible who can be both good citizens and flexible. They don’t have to all be PHD’s – they have to be net contributors – they have to be like their great grandparents who also had to cope with a lot of change.

We have to ask a big question first. What kind of person needs to emerge from our school system that will enable us to get through the crisis of – the end of cheap oil, the end of commodity agriculture, climate change, a health care cost crisis, a world torn by conflict over religion, oil and water?

What is the product of our existing approach? Is it that most of kids will be able to cope or not?

The Technology Battles: Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach shows how disconnected our schools are from the reality of the Internet Age:

We have a generation of students arriving in our classrooms that are more and more comfortable with technology, in fact, more comfortable than we will ever be. And that makes many of us very uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that we react with banning and filtering rather than modeling how to connect with content experts and teaching responsible net citizenship.

From the Trenches: The resident experts on public education in our home, both teenagers, gave two pieces of advice for the Minister. One said to get rid of homework; “I actually like going to school, but the homework on top of classes is what ruins it”. The other just wants to have motivated teachers.

My own sense is that the current education system will remain as it is for the next decade at least, unless there is such failure that new approaches, such as abolishing schools, will be attempted. We are stuck with the current system, and many vested interests such as unions, administrators, bus services and dual-income families do not want to see major systemic changes. That said, I feel that a pragmatic approach, without destroying the school system, would be to allow for experimentation. Let motivated teachers, parents, businesses and non-profits get together and create options. The Minister needs to foster a climate of decentralized experimentation. Options include the International Baccalaureate program or cooperative training and education with the local community.

The great weakness of this industrial education system is that it is a monoculture, based on a standard curriculum, and like an agricultural monoculture is more susceptible to disease and rot. To prepare for a climate, society and economy that none of us can predict with certainty, we need diversity in our thinking and in our skills. No single system or approach can do that.

Learning Technologies Bootcamp

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Janet Clarey and I will be facilitating a Bootcamp on Learning Technologies at the Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning Conference on 24 September. If you’re planning on attending the conference in Santa Clara (24-26 Sept), there’s still some room for this pre-conference session.

On a more social note, I haven’t heard about any beer tastings at this event, but there is a wine tasting on the last day. I’ll be arriving on the Saturday before the conference if anyone wants to get together. I think that this is going to be a lot of fun and it will be great to connect with the bloggers whom I’ve seen on the presenters list.

The Community Gold Rush

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Social Networks have become quite popular on the Web, with services such as MySpace and Facebook commanding billions of investment dollars. Social Networks are the new public spaces, though they’re no longer owned by the government. We’re moving from the town square to the online community. What makes online public spaces different from physical ones is that in the online world what you say will remain there for a long time; the conversations are searchable and can be be copied; and we may never know who has viewed what we have said or written. Each of these facets can be seen in a positive or a negative light, depending upon your perspective.

With the huge rise in popularity of Facebook, we are beginning to see a backlash on the social networking system, that tends to mundane and frivolous aspects of our lives. Facebook and MySpace have been banned for public employees in the US, Canada and Australia, as well as in many schools. While it is true that Facebook conversations seem to be primarily focused on friends and family, business uses are on the upswing. Facebook is becoming a business platform that allows workers to let their friends know who they work for and maybe what they’re selling, so companies can leverage this as a viral marketing tool.

One of the limitations of Facebook is that the data are stored on someone else’s server, and the rules can change without notice. Skype, a free voice over IP service, had a recent outage for several days, leaving millions of users without communications. Depending on these free services for business may not be a wise decision and at this time it may be best to use web-based services in addition to other communication and networking tools. Another option would be to build your own service.

In contrast to the casual and chatty tone of Facebook, some niche business social networks are starting to mark out their own, but smaller, territory online. These include Sermo for physicians; E-Factor for European entrepreneurs and Emerald InTouch which supports collaboration for researchers subscribing to Emerald’s professional journals.

The Emerald service is built upon Elgg, an open source platform developed and serviced by Curverider of the UK. Emerald has taken the free software construction code of Elgg and created a niche network focused on research, extending Emerald’s basic offering of online journals.

Given the backlash against social networks once they reach a certain level of success, businesses may opt for smaller, controlled gateways to further online social networking. Since networking has always been an important aspect of business, it’s doubtful that these tools will be ignored by the majority of businesses. The trick will be to remain as open as possible to attract members, allow users to control who and what they connect with and offer a valid business reason to remain a member and invite others.

The competition to become the prime community for your niche market may be heating up and we may see another Internet real estate gold rush, as in the first Dot Com era.

Opting-in

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Now that we’re inundated with information, e-mail and invitations to the next great Web 2.0 thing, pull is looking a lot better than push. Pull means that the individual decides what to read or who to talk to. I wrote about this earlier, in Please don’t push my learning.

One reason that I have been such a fan of Elgg is that this open source, social learning platform has at its core the concept that the individual has to decide to opt in, whether it be to connect with an instructor, a learner, a community or a group. According to Time, the growth of Facebook is due to its basic premise of opting in:

Maybe that’s why Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older: they’re refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet’s founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook–it’s just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you’re annoying folks, you’ll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid.

The huge success of Facebook may be an indicator that it’s time to reconsider push business models, push marketing and even push learning.

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

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This is my first turn to host the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. I tried to focus on environmental themes, and I got a couple, but most importantly, all of these blogs come to you from Canada.

  1. First off is Robert Paterson of Prince Edward Island. Rob has been involved in many nonprofit organisations, from helping to create the Queen Street Commons to his work with National Public Radio. There’s a lot to pick from, but I would recommend his recent post on the Food Trust of PEI, which is focused on informing consumers of food what it is that they’re really eating.
  2. Next is Dave Pollard of How to Save the World. Dave’s posts usually address some deep subjects and there’s a wealth of practical information too. His recent post on the Essential Capacities for Communities is worth a read for any nonprofit consultant.
  3. Chris Corrigan from the west coast is quite experienced with open space technology and this week talks about More on Presence, Circles and Granola.
  4. Another west coaster, Jon Husband, shares his experience at Wirearchy. Read Jon’s recent post on how games are becoming mainstream workplace learning fare, at Playing Games at Work.
  5. Joan Vinall-Cox works in higher education and seems to be a natural blogger. Check out her Top Ten Tools for work and learning.
  6. Dave Cormier is currently working at the University of PEI and also co-founded Worldbridges, a unique nonprofit business. Dave recently posted An Introduction to my blog – Two years in review.
  7. I would be remiss if I didn’t include the photo blog created by one of our summer students at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute. Mark has just finished his term but I hope to continue to post some photos during the year, in my capacity as Director of Education. There are great photos and explanations about a wide variety of North American wildlife.

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Keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.

Face to Virtual

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Earlier this year I ran a workshop on informal learning in the workplace for about 25 people. This followed a year of web-based sessions with Jay Cross & Judy Brown, in which we used various technologies to connect with people around the world.

As much as I enjoyed the face-to-face session, I found it rather limiting. For instance, there was no back channel of text-based IM conversation going on simultaneously, nor could I pop a link or file to everyone while I continued the conversation. I found that face-to-face was a tad too  linear and not as productive as some of our virtual sessions.

Jay Deragon [who has an excellent blog worth subscribing to] talks about the increased productivity that virtual work can drive.

The number one reason that professionals want to participate in virtual teams more frequently is simple: increased productivity.  As the size of the virtual workforce in America today is growing, so is the likely impact on productivity and profitability for organizations. More than 90 percent of those surveyed agree (35%) or strongly agree (56%) that virtual meetings save time and money. We used to think that meeting face-to-face was the only way to build trust and teamwork. Armed with new technology and new best practices, we’re learning new ways to connect on a human level with people anywhere, anytime, said Dr. Jaclyn Kostner, author of Virtual Leadership.

Virtual work significantly reduces useless meetings, eliminates commuting time and helps each worker focus on what is important. Because you can’t watch each person and tell them how to do everything, the organisation must come up with real performance measurements, and that in itself will increase productivity.

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On effective teaching

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School is on in some parts of the world, like Texas, where Christian Long is returning to teaching. Our kids don’t go back to school until September 4th, but I was going through some saved RSS feeds and I came across these guideline on a post from last year titled Why we still need teachers, and it just seemed appropriate:

Rather than a minimally-guided problem-based learning approach, we see effective teaching when …

  • The goals of teaching include facts, principles, process, and application
  • Learning is interactive and not one-sided (wholly teacher- or student-focused)
  • Learning from example and problem-based learning are not mutually exclusive
  • The ties between theoretical and practical knowledge are explicitly looked for and taught if students don’t get them.
  • The limits and assumptions of information and subjects are considered, and applications to the real world, constantly reinforced.
  • Teachers are taught to be very aware of working memory demands of material – so they are able to provide organization or scaffolding for students unable to assimilate information or problem-solving steps.
  • Finally, practice and instruction in problem-solving are given, so students don’t get all A’s, but later flunk life.

I wish all returning teachers and students good luck in the coming year and may you be passionate in your teaching and learning, because that is what really counts.

Are our small towns ready for the next economy?

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Is it a trend when more US citizens move to Canada, hitting a 30 year high last year? I like to think that as we all become interconnected that it will be easier to choose where we live and how we do our work, making obligatory daily commutes a thing of the past. Much as I want that, most people don’t have that option and few employers are willing to offer it. Rob Paterson notes that some professionals are moving to PEI for the lifestyle and bringing their work with them.

I’m now in my fifth year as an independent consultant working out of a very small town. There are several others choosing to work from the home office and doing business anywhere. We’re still the minority though. The big question is whether this will become a trend and develop into the norm – people choosing where they live first. If it becomes the norm then there will be some fundamental societal and economic shifts; perhaps nine shifts.

Small towns are attractive to certain  types of people. I think that they appeal to young families as well as the newly retired or semi-retired, who want a slower pace of life. The challenge for small towns will be to offer what these folks really find important.  High-speed internet or even free municipal WiFi may be important. Access to a good passenger train service (with wireless Internet) may also be important.

There is an opportunity for small towns to position themselves as preferred locations for an Internet economy but the race may get fierce, as communities see their tax base leaving for greener pastures. The Canadian Maritime provinces need to establish the infrastructure that will attract knowledge workers and keep them here.  Companies like FatKat Animation in Miramichi are setting the example. However, our communities will also need good restaurants, multi-cultural experiences, openness to alternative lifestyles and all those other things that educated folks seek out.

It will be a big challenge to move from our not so distant agrarian economy to a knowledge economy, but if we miss the boat, we’ll end up as an economic backwater. What would attract you to move to a small town in Atlantic Canada? [by international standards, there are only small towns in Atlantic Canada]

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants Coming to Town

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I’ll be hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants next week (27 Aug) . This will be an open call but special consideration will be given to environmental themes (due to my work with AWI) as well as any fellow Canadian bloggers. Drop me a note if you have something of interest and want to be one of the required 7 (no more & no less) highlighted posts.

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If you’re not familiar with the Carnival, the hosts change from week to week but you can subscribe to the feed. This week’s post is by Michele Martin on her Bamboo Project Blog with several interesting links.