Canadian Attitudes on Post-Secondary Education

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The CCL has just released survey results stating: “Public to Canada’s leaders: pay attention to post-secondary education“. There’s lots to review in the 80 questions that were asked of Canadians from across the country, summed up by the CCL President:

“What this poll tells us is that Canadians recognize that education and training are necessary to support economic growth and strong communities. They understand what a knowledge society means, and they want Canada to become a knowledge society,” said Dr. Paul Cappon, CCL’s president and CEO. “This is a message to our country’s leaders that higher education and skills training must be a national priority.”

Because I’m the type of person who reads the fine print, I found the responses to Question 54, available in the complete report, much more interesting:

Do you think that a college or university education is necessary for a person to be successful in today’s work world, or do you think that there are many ways to succeed in today’s work world without a college or university education?

  • Yes, necessary – 9%
  • No, many ways to succeed – 47%
  • DK / NA – 11%

Therefore, almost half of Canadians do not believe that post-secondary education is necessary to be successful in today’s work world.

Perhaps they had already read Will Richardson’s post, Dear Kids, You don’t have to go to College.

Update:

Here is another survey that I reported on last year in Work, Education & Taxes, where the results show that Canadians may be getting too much formal education, without any economic benefits. One comprehensive survey showed that Canadians have the highest rates of formal learning in the world, while another report indicated that there is a productivity gap in this country. If education can be directly correlated to economic productivity (as the CCL’s public statement infers) then we have a problem with the effectiveness of our post-secondary institutions. I’m not quite so sure about the correlation, and would not lay the blame on academia, but neither do I think that formal education is the key to economic productivity.

The Police and the Blogger

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We have an interesting story unfolding here in New Brunswick about a blogger, Charles LeBlanc, who attended a conference, observed a protest and wound up being attacked and charged by the police. First of all, I’m not a political blogger or even attempt to be a journalist. As any online writer knows, there’s more than one kind of blogger in the world.

This story is interesting for a number of reasons:

  1. The police used Mr. Leblanc’s blog to do research prior to the conference, so they knew who he was, but the arresting officer said in court that he had no idea what a blog is.
  2. The police say that they didn’t recognize Mr. LeBlanc as a media person and that he was too scruffy.
  3. The police deleted evidence from Mr. Leblanc’s camera.
  4. The judge is not amused with the police actions.

Personally, I don’t know if Mr. LeBlanc is a good journalist or not, as I don’t read his blog. However, the mainstream media seem to be using the term blogger in a pejorative sense, though it is not for them to decide what constitutes a journalist. Neither is it up to the police to decide what constitutes journalism in our society. As the Internet blurs traditional lines of work and authority, I’m sure that we’ll see more confusion when hierarchy meets wirearchy, and media clash. I also wonder how this will affect our educational institutions, especially the schools of journalism.

Michael Geist has more on the legal aspects of this case.

Let’s get to maybe

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Rob Paterson has been reflecting on his reading of Getting to Maybe, and I was so taken by these ideas that I walked down to our local independent bookstore and bought a copy. I’m only a few pages into the book and I come across this paragraph:

Similarly, we organize our schools to be efficient in supplying education to large numbers and largely unresponsive to the wide range of learning styles and capacities that we know exists. Then we diagnose those who cannot learn efficiently as suffering from learning disorders and attempt to treat them, not the system.

Digression: As I write this, our son comes home from school, grabs a quick snack and goes upstairs to do his homework – a number of math exercises; the obligatory, nightly English assignment but no additional work tonight. As he leaves, I wonder how many adults appreciate bringing work home. Do schools assign homework because it will toughen students for the real world, or just to make them miserable?

On the bright side, I’m looking forward to delving into Getting to Maybe as it seems to be upbeat and positive, as described on the jacket:

Getting to Maybe applies the insights of complexity theory and harvests the experiences of a wide range of people and organizations … to lay out a brand new way of thinking about making change in communities, in business, and in the world.

Training – the 8% Solution

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Does your organisation live in complicated or a complex world?

When you are developing training, are you addressing complicated or complex issues?

Via Rob Paterson, and the book More Space, are two important differentiations between complicated & complex systems given by Johnnie Moore, in Simple Ideas, Lightly Held:

complicated = not simple, but ultimately knowable (e.g. the wiring on an aircraft)
complex = not simple and never fully knowable. Just too many variables interact.

If you are working with a complicated system, such as an aircraft, then the entire system is knowable, even though it would take much time and practice. Training would be the right tool to develop your skills to fly or fix the aircraft. I know, because I’ve designed aircraft training. There’s a lot of stuff to know and do, but training works and people can eventually master the system.

Complicated systems and the training for them can be controlled. Complex systems and learning how to work with them cannot.

If you are working with a complex system, you will never be able to know everything. For instance, the environment and communities are complex systems that cannot be controlled, only influenced. There are no right answers, there are many ways of trying to achieve your goals and there are too many variables to control.

The other day I was asked about the essence of implementing informal learning, and I believe that it is the act of giving up control. This is scary for many inside the organisation, but it’s the only way to manage in a complex environment. As the world becomes more networked, interdependent and environmentally challenged, all organisations are moving into complex environments.

Here is an indicator of how complex our work is becoming. It used to be that you could master the majority of what you needed for your work. This is no longer the case, as shown by Robert Kelley of Carnegie-Mellon University, when he asked this research question (via Jay):

What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?

  • 1986: 75%
  • 1997: 15-20%
  • 2006: estimated 8 -10%

This is one more reason why informal learning structures (not procedures) are necessary to support individual learning in a complex environment, where it is impossible to control the process as we could with training. Informal learning is the way in which your employees, bosses and colleagues will have to learn that significant other 92% of knowledge necessary for their jobs – today. It’s not that we don’t need training; we just need a lot more informal learning.

Red Ball Internet

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I went to what my wife calls my downtown office for a coffee this afternoon and read the latest copy of Here magazine. It featured an article on Moncton’s Red Ball Internet. Based on iBurst technology, Red Ball offers wide area wireless Internet access. Subscription fees range from $12.95 to $54.95 per month.

There is a definite appeal to having no cables and an always-on, dedicated wireless connection. Advertised download speed is 1 mbps which is not anywhere near as fast as ADSL (~ 3 mbps), Aliant’s Ultra service (~ 5 mbps) or cable (~ 8 mbps). If you are constantly traveling around the city and need internet access, then Red Ball would be a good service. This iBurst technology also has potential as a service offering for conferences and conventions. I could see bloggers wanting continuous access during conferences.

What really caught my eye is that this service is available only in Atlantic Canada:

“This is definitely a wonderful story; it is a North American first,” gushes C. Sean Adams, leader of business development for Red Ball. “This service is not yet available in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, only in Greater Moncton. We see this service doing for the Internet what the mobile phone did for telecommunications. It is a cost effective, mobile option for Internet users who want the high speed without the high prices.”

The Modern Chautauqua

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Of Conferences, Chatauquas and Boundary Objects, at Green Chameleon, discusses the relationships between small independent conferences; large-scale commercial events; academic sessions and then muses:

If the KM conference scene really is a complex ecosystem, then the failure of any element of it can have unpredictable, perhaps negative consequences. If the role of the conference really is to perform a boundary object role between different communities (vendors, experienced practitioners, corporate sponsors of KM, novice practitioners, thought leaders), then anything that fractures the communities and sends them into self-serving spheres, will surely drive the profession into stagnation and decline.

At the moment, it seems to me, out at the periphery, the cracks are already showing on the walls. Unless the stable centre recognises this, and unless we find new models for the economics and formats of conferences, and new models for collaboration and interaction between communities, my fear is that these cracks will spread. I hope I’m wrong.

The article also refers to those American traveling cultural shows called chautauqua.

 

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I had read about chautauqua in Nine Shift (recommended reading):

In 1920, chautauqua, those great cultural and educational programs that traveled from rural small town to small town, bringing history, music, and entertainment to an agrarian society, had its largest attendance. Some 25 million people were said to have attended a chautauqua that year. The following year they folded, never to put up a chautauqua tent again.

It’s fascinating to look back and see what is taken for granted at a certain point in time. In 1920, with millions of people going to chautauqua, you probably would have the majority of Americans not predicting their demise. Yet, one year later, chautauqua are finished.

Perhaps the commercial conference will follow the same path. Who knows? Looking into the past can show us that we too should not take current conditions for granted. Personally, I’m drawn more to the unconference.

Commons Lens

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I’ve just created a Squidoo lens on the subject of the Commons. My aim is to provide a single point of access for anything related to the Commons movement in order to help out communities that may be interested in starting one or linking to others. Any information, resources, photos or advice would be appreciated. One way to help would be to use “Commons” as a del.icio.us tag.

Systems Thinking

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I’m working on a couple of projects where I wanted to review some thoughts on systems design so I went to my bookshelf and re-read sections of Jamshid Gharajedaghi’s book, Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture.

In both hindsight (evaluation) and foresight (analysis), this advice resonated with me:

There is a need to deal with the problem independent of the solutions at hand. We have a tendency to define the problem in terms of the solutions we already have. We fail most often not because we fail to solve the problem we face, but because we fail to face the right problem. Rather than doing what we should, we do what we can. In the systems view, it is the solution that has to fit the problem, not vice versa.

This book can be a tough slog because it breaks new ground on almost every page, but after three years I still value the methods and the case studies contained within it.

e-Learning Project Management Book

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The Canadian eLearning Enterprise Alliance (CeLEA) has recently released its new e-book Plan to Learn: case studies in e-learning project management. Edited by Beverly Pasian (who is working on her PhD in project management) and Dr. Gary Woodill (who has recently become Senior Researcher at Brandon Hall Research), this volume of 22 case studies from 8 countries documents the successes and failures of a variety of e-learning implementations. Case studies are drawn from the higher education, K-12, government, non-profit and corporate sectors. The book also contains a thorough review of the literature on elearning project management. To obtain your free copy, go to www.celea-aceel.ca.

This 192 page PDF from CeLEA covers dozens of case studies on e-learning management (focus = A-DDI-E). Almost all of the cases are academic situations, using the online course model, so this book would be best suited for those developing e-learning in higher education. There is little mention of performance support, knowledge management, communities of practice, or informal learning. Nor is there much reference to aligning the learning methods to operational or business requirements.

One exception is a case study on developing math skills for nurses at Mount Royal College. In this case, the work requirement, or gap, was quite clear:

According to a May 2004 study published by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, one in nineteen adults will be given the wrong medication or dosage upon a hospital visit.

The goal was defined, though too academic in my mind:

The goal of the online Nursing Math Tutorial was to ensure that nursing students were successful in their clinical courses without the need for so much time.

A better goal would have been to reduce the number of incorrect dosages. This is obviously the performance they were really trying to achieve.

The design considered the context of the work:

The intention of the tutorial was to provide practical information to the learner, that being the basic principles and illustrations of math sequences and their relation to practical clinical settings.

However, the ADDIE model seems to have been too constraining and resource-intensive:

In the creation of the online Nursing Math Tutorial, the successes arose from creative project management solutions, which conserved resources and maintained a higher quality of student learning as a result.

I’m wondering if a better approach in this case may have been to create a series of contextual visualizations on the necessary math concepts. These could then be placed in an online collaborative environment, such as Elgg, and the learners themselves could have constructed meaning around these visual artifacts, through discussions with each other and with facilitators. Some of the visualizations could also be the test objects, such as, “here is a case, calculate the dosage”.

For those in the thick of e-learning course development, you may find some helpful nuggets in these pages. Most of the cases discuss tools for learner-to-learner discussions, so we are seeing clear moves away from just information dissemination. However, if you’re looking for innovative performance-oriented alternatives to ADDIE, you will have to look elsewhere.