The Blended Learner

Academically Adrift

In a press release dated January 18, the Council for Aid to Education (CAE) observed:

A combination of factors has created an unprecedented crisis in undergraduate education in the United States. Our nation has 47 million high school dropouts, equaling one-sixth of the U.S. population. Forty percent of students entering college do not read, write or perform math at a college-ready level. Only 57% of enrolled students graduate within six years. All of these statistics reflect enormous challenges that face postsecondary education. Rising costs, now combined with declining revenues, make it much more difficult to reverse this troubling situation.

The press release coincides with publication of Academically Adrift, a scholarly indictment of higher education in the United States. Everything I've read about this new book rings true to my experience - not just of higher education today, but for the past 25 years (as mirrored in the Frontline documentary, Declining By Degrees). This cancer has been a long time growing.

Higher education is part of a larger system and an ecology. It is not an industry unto itself. If higher education is failing, then we may safely presume that its feeders - the public schools - are failing too, and of course they are just as miserably.

What about workplace learning? Given the corporate propensity to objectify employees as assets, measuring learning by the numbers, it should come as no surprise that training is in an equally sordid state: almost universally marginalized, underfunded, unprofessional.

All of this is arguably true, yet we live in an age of almost limitless access to knowledge, an age whose tone of youthful exuberance even William Blake could have admired. How can we be so smart and at the same time so stupid?

The question sounds like an oxymoron, but it is more like an anthropological finding about our culture. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert ask the same question night after night, during the most intelligent and yet silly hour in broadcasting. How can we be so smart and at the same time so stupid?

 

Management Reeducation

  

Over the past three years we’ve witnessed the demise of the Imperial CEO, whose irrelevance and wealth exceeded even the Windsors. Now in the Harvard Business Review, columnist Lynda Gratton signals “the end of the middle manager.” As a professor of management practice at the London Business School, she knows whereof she speaks.

How did the pointy-haired boss die? Gratton believes that educational technology killed him, and might yet bring him back in a new form.

She explains that middle managers - though ubiquitous - are not intrinsic to business organization. They are products of a bleak evolution: the de-skilling of the workforce that began with the Industrial Revolution and continued for about 200 years.

Over time, she explains, workers became less knowledgable, less skillful, less proud - and more commodified. They evolved from human beings into human resources, human assets, human capital. Use any term you like, they all have the same objective meaning. In one of my favorite movies they are dubbed replicants.

Thus arose a need for resource, asset or capital management of those former beings - by middle managers whose role is to organize, observe, measure and supervise. By standardizing this hierarchical model, industry adopted the ant colony as its organizational paradigm.

Have a look at E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler's The Superorganism. Would that people were ants!

From time to time great managers have sprung from the lingering master craftsman class - consider Steve Jobs and Jim Dyson among boomers. But most middle managers are not masters of the crafts they steer. They were or aspired to become executives: masters of money whose precise contribution to the value chain has been increasingly hard to fathom. Pointy-haired bosses.

Gratton believes pointy hair will die out because technology is enabling the re-skilling of the workforce and empowerment of workers to become masterful human beings, as they were for most of history. As online laborers in modern times become smarter, more capable, more independent and autonomous - and younger people at least are doing just that - they will not suffer fools as gladly as their parents or grandparents did. 

Gratton knows that her requiem for pointy hair will not be welcomed by real middle managers doomed to extinction, so she sugarcoats her prediction in two bright colors:

1. Invest in acquiring more personal knowledge or competencies in your area

2. Invest in developing personal proficiencies in other, more valuable areas

By learning how to become a modern master craftsman - or just by learning how to do something useful for a change - the pointy-haired boss can reemerge as an expert individual contributor. A far different aspiration than becoming an executive, but given what passes for corporate leadership these days, a far nobler one as well.

Crowd Accelerated Innovation

TED curator Chris Anderson, in his article Film School (Wired Magazine, January 2011), has something new to say about "Crowd Accelerated Innovation." And I quote:

A crowd is simply a community, any group of people with a shared interest. … The community needs to contain at least a few people capable of innovation. But not everyone in the community need be, There are plenty of other necessary roles:

• The trend spotter, who finds a promising innovation early.
• The evangelist, who passionately makes the case for idea X or person Y.
• The superspreader, who broadcasts innovations to a larger group.
• The skeptic, who keeps the conversation honest.
• General participants, who show up, comment honestly, and learn.

Different people may occupy these various roles at different times, including that of innovator. Innovation is a response to a particular set of challenges or inspirations. Every mind is unique. Presented with the right fine-tuned pattern of incoming stimulation, I suspect, most people have a shot at coming up with something wonderfully new and fresh. But even if not, they can still play any of the other key roles.