2005

This is a continuation of my notes from 2004 … I see that 2005 was the year I started digging deeper into PKM/Networked Learning.

David Williamson Shaffer’s paper on Pedagogical Praxis: The professions as models for post-industrial education provides a theoretical model, with three case studies (biomedical negotiators, online journalists and architects using complex mathematics), on how educational institutions can better bridge the gap between learning in formal education and learning in the workplace.

Perhaps the power of new technologies to bring professional practices closer to the purview of middle and high school students provides an opportunity to move beyond disciplines derived from medieval scholarship constituted within schools developed in the industrial revolution. Learning environments such as those described here, based on professional learning practices and deliberately constituted outside the traditional structure of schooling, suggest a way to move beyond current curricula based on the ways of knowing of mathematics, science, history, and language arts.

As the last few intellectual thrusts of “Probing McLuhan” wound down, a figure rose from the crowd and said a few words. The voice was eerily reminiscent of the Master, as was the rhetoric. It was Eric McLuhan. “The new media won’t fit into the classroom”, he told the audience. “It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of the counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask.”

For the first time that afternoon there was silence, and it spoke volumes.

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One challenge in this business of designing systems is to constantly question our models and assumptions – a very McLuhanesque perspective: “The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.”

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Social media & the McLuhans’ Laws of Media:

In looking at the newer social networking technologies [for learning] we could say that they:

1. extend the learner’s voice;
2. obsolesce the course as the unit of education
3. retrieve the Oxford-Cambridge collegial education model
4. could reverse into a meaningless “echo-chamber” (Wikepedia definition of “echo chamber: Metaphorically, the term echo chamber can refer to any situation in which information or ideas are amplified by transmission inside an enclosed space.)

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On running a virtual team:

Stick to small groups, and
if you’re the leader, give up control, because
there is no leader, so
have complete trust, and
allow for total transparency, but
provide clear & achievable goals, while also having
an open ended final goal.

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Adam Kahane; “If we want to help resolve complex situations, we have to get out of the way of situations that are resolving themselves”.

Gloria Gery: “Training will either be strategic or it will be marginalized.”

I was listening to an interview with Steven Johnson on CBC Spark and he suggested that it’s a good practice to take regular notes (like my blog) but also important to review them regularly. I’ve gone through my 2004 posts, which was my first year of full-time blogging on this site, and here is what still remains interesting. Note that in 2004, blogging was not mainstream yet.

In 2004, I posted for the first time — Learning is business, and business is learning — finally.

I was keen on The Cluetrain Manifesto, only five years old at the time, and noted a few lines I really liked:

“Fact is, we don’t care about business — per se, per diem, au gratin. Given half a chance, we’d burn the whole constellation of obsolete business concepts to the waterline. Cost of sales and bottom lines and profit margins — if you’re a company, that’s your problem. But if you think of yourself as a company, you’ve got much bigger worries. We strongly suggest you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: “I am not a company. I am a human being.”

I also wrote —

Social networks, communities of practice, expertise locators, etc. have more potential and utility in this medium [the web] than centralized systems such as LCMS (learning content management systems)” [The year before I had been working for a company selling an LCMS].

as well as:

I find that there is still a lot of snake oil being sold as e-learning. If you can help people find what they need, when they need it, in the right context to be useful, then you will have effective content management and/or performance support. The rest is what a friend of mine calls ‘shovel ware’.

More thoughts & comments from 2004

Many companies are trying to find ways to motivate their knowledge workers. This makes me wonder about Peter Drucker’s comment that the corporation as we know it won’t be around in the next 25 years (Managing in the Next Society, 2002). Perhaps the actual structure of work, especially the Corporation itself, is an obstacle to knowledge work. Instead of tweaking the mechanisms of the corporation, through job redesign or cultural initiatives, we should be re-examining the basic structure of the corporation. It is an industrial age creation, designed to maximize physical capital and may not be optimal for maximizing “knowledge capital”.

The network, with its dynamic conversations, is where a lot of knowledge work gets done, and we should be looking at new laws to recognise networks in a similar way that we recognise corporations as legal entities. Is anything like this happening?

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Business models that allow leadership to prosper will be essential. These potential leaders, from an “aggressively intelligent citizenry”, need to be free from corporate non-disclosures or government gag orders, and the most effective business model could be the free agent working within a peer network. As tenure was essential for academic freedom, so an unfettered business model may be necessary for future leaders. If all individuals had the rights of today’s corporations, what kind of societal benefits would ensue?

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My conclusion for a while has been that knowledge cannot be managed, and neither can knowledge workers. It will take a new social contract between workers and organisations in order to create an optimally functioning enterprise. Adding management and technology won’t help either. This is the crux of everything in the new “right-sized, lean, innovative, creative” economy – getting the right balance between the organisational structure and the knowledge workers.

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This piece of advice is worth a revisit:

Each of us is given five balls. One is rubber and four are glass. The rubber ball is work. If you drop it, it will always bounce back. The other four glass balls are family, friends, health and integrity. If you drop them, they are shattered. They won’t bounce back.