Work

business & working

Court understands what teachers’ college should already know

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An Ontario Superior Court has directed the Ontario College of Teachers to find an alternate method to evaluate an Iranian refugee teacher’s qualifications without “official” documentation.

To teach in Ontario’s publicly funded schools, a teacher must have a Certificate of Qualification from the college, which was created in 1996. Officials there deemed her few documents insufficient to judge her abilities to teach and refused her requests for a personal interview or to develop alternate means to evaluate her abilities.

Will this first crack open the floodgates of competency-based testing for professionals? Too many professional associations have used the premise that only official documentation from a recognised and accredited institution is acceptable to show competence in a field. This is a load of hogwash, but it has helped to create entire industries around training, certification and accreditation. Some of these industries have transformed into oligopolies and monopolies, such as for the healthcare professions.

The Court has recognised that there is more than one way to exhibit competence in a field. I would go farther and say that a formal training or education program has less correlation to actual competence in a field than a well-designed performance based evaluation. How you become competent in a field should not matter. What matters is actual performance. However, such an approach would put many training and education programs out of business.

Perhaps this decision is an indication of changes to come. Formal training already accounts for very little in the IT or Web media sectors. Most employers want to see actual products or code, and don’t really care what credentials the worker has, as long as he or she can produce the goods.

School’s Out

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This morning we woke up to the message:

Mon Jan 08 2007 06:08 AM: ALL schools in District 2 will be closed today due to weather conditions.

For me, it’s a regular work day, though I’ll try to get a bike ride in between first light and the first snow flake. My wife’s workshop is in the house, so it’s a regular day for her too. If we were home-schooling (an option we’re considering), it would be a regular day all over. No cancellation or re-arranging of schedules would be necessary. We would be two free-agent parents with two free-agent learners. In 2001, Dan Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind” and “Free Agent Nation”, wrote:

“Home schooling,” though, is a bit of a misnomer. Parents don’t re-create the classroom in the living room any more than free agents re-create the cubicle in their basement offices. Instead, home schooling makes it easier for children to pursue their own interests in their own way — a My Size Fits Me approach to learning. In part for this reason, some adherents — particularly those who have opted out of traditional schools for reasons other than religion — prefer the term “unschooling.”

The similarities to free agency — having an “unjob” — are many. Free agents are independent workers; home-schoolers are independent learners. Free agents maintain robust networks and tight connections through informal groups and professional associations; home-schoolers have assembled powerful groups — like the 3,000-family Family Unschoolers Network — to share teaching strategies and materials and to offer advice and support. Free agents often challenge the idea of separating work and family; home-schoolers take the same approach to the boundary between school and family.

The number of free-agents has increased in this country, especially with corporate outsourcing and ubiquitous access to the Internet. We’re still the minority, but this continuing economic/demographic shift is bound to have its effects on school, work, taxation, leisure time and everything else. I believe that the magic number is 20%. Once 20% of people are doing something, it seems that everyone is doing it, and then the pace quickens.

Public Domain Day

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From CopyrightWatch.ca:

Take these examples: Billy Bishop’s Winged warfare : hunting the Huns in the air; Ernest Bilodeau’s Autour du lac Saint-Jean; C.A. Chant’s Our wonderful universe; the Earl of Bessborough’s A week on the Jupiter River, Anticosti Island; Maurice Lalonde’s Notes historiques sur Mont-Laurier, Nominingue et Kiamika; and Mina Benson Hubbard’s A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador are all in the public domain in Canada as of this morning.

Yet a March 15, 1939 letter from Billy Bishop to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King; the papers of Ernest Bilodeau; C.A. Chant’s astronomical notebooks; Lord Bessborough’s letters and documents pertaining to his tenure as Governor-General of Canada; Maurice Lalonde’s political correspondence; and Mina Benson Hubbard’s exploration diaries; will all be protected from unfettered use by Canadians for another 42 years.

Note that through most of our collective history, copyright has been the anomaly and the public domain has been the default.

Centre for Learning Technologies – Lessons Learnt

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As I was going through some old reports I came across an article I had written about the CLT. My first job out of the military was as Project Manager (Learning & Performance Systems) at the CLT. This was probably the best job I ever had and much of what we did has formed the basis of my current consulting practice.

Today, many higher education institutions are creating innovation centres that are outwardly focused and revenue-generating, so in the spirit of learning from our experiences, I’m posting the article here.

Overview

The Centre for Learning Technologies (CLT) was an applied research, consulting and resource centre for the use of new media in learning, knowledge management, and workplace performance support. Bridging the gap between research and practice, the CLT aimed to link learning theory, business practices and research to real-world, organizational challenges and applications. Clients included private corporations, public organizations and higher education institutions. The specialized consultants and researchers were located at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB.

The Centre offered an objective source of resources and services through four market offerings, each with projects focused on learning, knowledge management, and performance support. The four market offerings were:

  1. Innovation Practices
  2. Professional Services
  3. The Learning Community
  4. Usability, Human Factors Specialty Center

These areas had been identified as gaps during an industry assessment conducted by the CLT with the support of the New Brunswick Government’s department of economic development. The four areas above were identified as niche areas, with no other organizations in the region offering these services at the time. The project areas: learning, knowledge management and performance support were identified as growth areas in the Organizational and Performance Improvement fields and corresponded to the expertise available at the CLT.

History

The Centre for Learning Technologies was established in 1996 at Mount Allison University. The Centre was created through the support of several private and public organizations, with the majority of the funding coming from ACOA. Assistance came in many forms including start-up operational funding, capital financing and business guidance. Funding for capital costs, such as the new building, was in the range of $3.5M while operating capital was approximately $200K.

Contributing partners included:

  • NBTel (now Bell Aliant)
  • Digital Equipment Corporation (later Compaq – HP)
  • Andersen Consulting (now Accenture)
  • Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA)
  • Federal Government Infrastructure Program
  • Royal Bank of Canada
  • Bragg Communications
  • Mount Allison University
  • Weston Foundation

One of these contributions, the secondment of a business development officer, spanned a period of two years. The original concept for the CLT was as a multimedia Centre of Excellence with a mandate to help the university and organizations across Canada in the area of new media learning. The mandate and focus of the CLT changed as it developed, moving to a focus on bridging the gap between applied research and practice in workplace performance. The main rationale for this move was the requirement to become revenue-generating and self-sustaining after its first year.

During its five years in operation (1996-2001) the CLT generated about 85% of its costs. The remaining 15% was covered by the university. By its last year, the CLT was closing this gap. The university’s administration decided to close the CLT in the Spring of 2001, citing lack of profit and little alignment with the university’s main business of undergraduate education as reasons for closure.

Observations and Lessons Learnt

  • The lack of operating capital (barely enough for Year 1) forced the CLT into a business model that pushed it away from the university’s core mission, thus alienating the Centre from any potential internal supporters.
  • The CLT was not aligned with a specific academic department. The original intent was to have the CLT work with the Education Faculty, but this department was closed just as the CLT was created.
  • The revenue-generation mandate forced the CLT to focus on external clients and strong relationships with internal university departments did not develop. There were few internal champions of the CLT at Mount Allison University.
  • The original proposal for the CLT spoke of considerable potential revenues and profits. These unrealistic expectations did not help in seeking funds to offset revenue shortfalls.
  • It took five years for the CLT to develop a professional reputation and a client base. By 2001, clients were approaching the Center directly.

Informal economy; informal learning

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I’ve read most of the Toffler’s books over the years, including Future Shock, The Third Wave and Powershift; and have yet to read Revolutionary Wealth. I agree with Lawrence Fisher (S+B) that the value in their work is not crystal ball gazing but making sense of various patterns:

In retrospect, Mr. Toffler was less a reliable prophet than a brilliant synthesist. Future Shock and its successors, The Third Wave (Morrow, 1980) and Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (Bantam, 1990) were at their best not when predicting what would happen, but when drawing from a vast array of disciplines – science, technology, sociology, and religion – to explain the circumstances of the world at large.

Their latest book says that we are seeing huge growth in the informal economy, “According to the Tofflers, countless other industries and institutions face waves of “prosumers”, who produce and consume products and services outside the monetary economy. This is a historic change in the way wealth is created, the Tofflers write, spearheaded (for now, at least) by the United States.”

Here are some thoughts on education from the interview:

S+B: In the book, you write of education’s failure to move from the industrial age to the knowledge economy. Is homeschooling a prosumer response to this crisis?
TOFFLER: Yes, now that you mention it. It is an important and growing form of prosuming. The parents do it themselves, because the market does not supply what they want or need, or for that matter what the market needs.

Think about how we learned to use personal computers. PC use went from zero to hundreds of millions of people who know and use PCs routinely, and nobody went to school to learn how.

Instead, chances are you found a guru, and a guru was anyone who bought his PC a week before you bought yours. And there were user groups – volunteers passing valuable knowledge back and forth. If you agree that the PC has had an impact on productivity in the money economy, then the fact that people taught each other how to use this thing without money changing hands is another example of what a big impact prosumers can have on the money economy. Add these things together — homeschooling, teaching how to use PCs, Linux, etc. – and you begin to understand this big invisible economic force. People have written about each of these pieces, but haven’t seen them as part of a huge nonmoney economy interacting with the money economy.

It’s not just parents, but knowledge workers inside and outside of organisations, who are taking learning into their own hands. As the non-money economy is affecting the measured economy, informal learning is affecting education. More and more, we can do it ourselves, whether it be printing our own photographs or learning a new skill. Homeschooling is getting easier with the Internet and so is learning for yourself. Formal training and education (one size fits nobody) can’t react quick enough to our changing needs and expanding fields knowledge.

That’s where I see the importance of understanding informal learning within organisations. It’s happening anyway, and at an accelerating rate. Organisations should look at tapping informal learning, not controlling it. The more free-thinkers and independent learners that an organisation has, the more resilient it will be in times of change. This of course is subversive thinking for any command and control organisation, so perhaps we really need new organisational models. The film crew is an example.

Formal education exploded as we moved into the industrial age one hundred years ago, with larger organisations demanding Taylorist job functions. As the industrial age gives way to a networked age, there is less need for well-defined, cookie-cutter jobs. With fewer standardized jobs, why do we need standardized education, or even standardized training? [I know that there are exceptions to this statement, but they are becoming fewer]

Proximity

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Graham Watt and I get together for coffee fairly regularly and discuss almost everything, ranging from kids to education to communications theory. Graham has posted several comments on this blog and recently I took one of his comments and made it a post, The Communication of Bias. I thought that it might be a neat idea to have Graham as a guest blogger, so here is a post that has more humour than any of my straight-laced, and always trying to be balanced, blog posts. They may even a become a regular feature.

We don’t have a productivity problem. We have a proximity problem.

by Graham Watt

We’re just too damn close to the U.S. Not politically. Physically. It’s turned us into American junkies. We’ve faced south so long now our asses are frozen solid. We don’t even bother inventing anything any more because they’ll do it sooner or later down there and we can just copy or borrow. Business learned this ages ago.

But it’s not just business. It’s us too. Look at television shows and movies. We’ll take their mediocre lives over our mediocre lives even if they don’t ring exactly true. We can compensate for that. Let them make them down there. We’ll just watch them.

All these problems with our low productivity relative to the U.S. can’t be solved only in economic terms. They have to be solved by addressing our proximity problems.

We have to get a handle on where we are, not who we are.

That’s snow out there, not rose petals. And that tingling feeling in your fingers isn’t stroke onset, it’s frostbite. I once saw a piece in the Montreal Gazette during a cold spell which showed us how to put plastic bags in our shoes to keep warm on cold days (an article taken from a Fort Lauderdale newspaper). I read that and I swear I could hear a whirring sound as all those fur traders buried on Mount Royal started spinning in their tombs. We haven’t got a clue where we are. It’s like we’re ducktaped to the side of a manic rhino lumbering through a swamp (Boy, I hope he knows where he’s going!).

Yes, proximity is a problem, isn’t it?

Who needs research when you can just let those other folks do it. Yet, there was a time when we actually did some neat innovative stuff. That was back in the days when pawsta was pronounced pasta. and Viet Nom was Viet Nam.

We were a big physical country then with very few people and airports, so deHavilland Canada designed Short Take-Off and Landing aircraft (STOL). The Beaver, the Otter, the Caribou, the Buffalo, (Gee, they even had Canadian type names too).They could land on little airstrips and lakes throughout the country. We sold tonnes of them. Most of them are still flying around, because they’re simple and you can fix them easily.

Remember the DeHavilland Dash-7? With the world’s most advanced STOL technology; a 55-passenger pressurized aircraft as quiet as a school bus, that could land in 1000 feet. When they tried to let it fly into Toronto Island airport there was an incredible outburst of indignation. All about noise and danger. You would have thought it was the Hindenburg with a load of plastique in it. The real problem was the Dash 7 was designed and built right in Toronto. Had it been designed and built in, say, California, the Toronto city fathers and those environmentally sensitve mothers in the Beaches would have been clambering over themselves to buy this thoughtful, sensitive and passive technology. Would have reflected well on the city. But hey, all the good stuff is down south isn’t it?

So it isn’t just business, it’s us. We don’t screw up because we try. We screw up because we don’t have to try. And it’s all of us.

That’s the proximity curse.

So forget about productivity. Our problem is proximity. We have great copyability because of it. We’re actually quite nice people, given that we look at the U.S. as if it was the J Crew catalogue.

But does anyone else actually believe proximity’s the problem? Not on your life. A new study from the Conference Board of Canada recommends that we hunker down even closer to the U.S. to get our productivity up. What’s that mean, exactly?

Copy more stuff?

Assemble more of their cars here?

Watch more of their TV programs?

Speak more like they do?

There was a time when we had clearer heads. Must have been a zillion years ago. We liked the squeak of snow on leather. An old fur trade doctor named John Rae once snowshoed from Hamilton to Toronto just for a cocktail party. No big deal. And I’m certain he wasn’t wearing a “hoodie”. In those days, another guy invented a motorized contraption that could go like crazy on all kinds of snow. sold a slew of them. Ended up making planes, trains and boats, and got so big and successful we started hating the whole idea. It wasn’t normal doing that stuff in Canada.

A long time ago another bunch of guys used to get in canoes and go from Montreal all the way to Alberta and back again. All without Vibram soles on their boots or Gore-Tex jackets, GPS’s or Tony Robbins CD’s. And they did it while singing songs. They had nature-tech canoes made of bark and if one sprung a leak they stopped, got some spruce gum from a nearby tree and some bark, patched it up, and got going again.

What was their secret? Well, they did stuff relative to where they were, not some place 500 miles south. And they weren’t doing this because they heard other guys were doing it in the U.S.. They did it for money and adventure. Ahh, you say, but that was then and this is now. Well, I have news for you. It’s only now in the U.S.

The day we understand that the problem is proximity, and we turn around and let our asses thaw, is the day our productivity will begin to grow.

Getting to Maybe – Review

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I’ve just finished reading Getting to Maybe. This is a book about social innovation in complex environments (our world). It covers the stories of many social innovators and discusses the various parts of a common path that many take. This is a path with no map and no destination. Getting to maybe, or “if only …”, starts with the first step of realising that here and now is the best and only place to start. A chapter is dedicated to each identified step, but these are more like checkpoints than actual steps in a process.

Next is standing still, which is the requirement to reflect and listen, now that you’ve got the fire burning for some decisive action. The tension between reflection and action is a major theme of the book. Powerful strangers are those who can suddenly help you and your cause, now that you have started the journey and have opened your mind. Some time during the journey you get into the groove and “let it find you”, playing part of a cast, as in a jazz ensemble. The worst point is cold heaven, when you feel hopeless, as the authors say:

“Those who struggle to make a difference have to face two paradoxes. The first is that success is not a fixed address. The second is that failure can open the way to success.”

From cold heaven may come a chance to have hope as well as a pragmatic understanding of the realities of the world, or to “catch the moment when hope and history rhyme”. This is the time to ensure that whatever has been created does not stagnate and may even call for creative destruction as the environmental landscape changes. Finally, the door opens and the end of one social innovation can lead to the beginning of another.

There are no answers in this book but I think that it may be an inspiration for many who are on the journey of social innovation and need to know that they are not alone.

gtm.jpg

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.

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.

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.