Robert Paterson: Education

The Lost Generation - Middle class Kids

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 09:42:13 GMT

Stuart sent me this. It is the best piece I have seen yet on why so many of our kids are in trouble

School and Slavery

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 23:26:45 GMT

Doug Adler and Dave Pollard on what school is really about.

Snip

It has always been in the interests of industrialized countries, or rather their captains of industry to have:

a large pool of uneducated workers
a rate of unemployment around 6%
Bread and circuses to divert the great unwashed.

It keeps the public's minds off how they are being manipulated. The purpose of school is not to educate but to socialize individuals, to get them ready for the rat race.

So, why is this becoming a hot topic again now? Maybe it's because the inherent tension between a system designed to numb minds and dedicated teachers who are tring to stimulate those minds has reached, through the constant de-funding of education - a breaking point. Maybe it's because the actions of our politicians have become so blatantly harmful that John Q. Public can't be distracted enough anymore to totally ignore them. Maybe the world has become so tumultuous and patently dangerous place, particularly for Americans, that the lotus eaters have started to awaken from their stupors and have begun to see reality through their dreams. Maybe Ajmerica is in the act of swallowing the red pill.. I don't know the reason - I can only hope that America is finally waking up.

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 10:55:56 GMT

Changing Face of Blogs. I've been struggling to get going with blogging since returning from Europe. Many of my thoughts just prior to going away had an increasingly Corporate Blogging thrust from thinking about teams to also how the news is collected. So it... [Unbound Spiral]

Funny how you make your way through life and then through blogging you find someone by accident who is like a twin?

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 10:54:28 GMT

Campaign to tackle bullying. Behavioural consultants are to be drafted into schools in attempt to stem the rising tide of bullying in the classroom. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

There is a bullying epidemic going on in many schools all over the west. Is this because there are more "bad" kids? I don't think so. Maybe it is because there is so little structural identity available anymore. What does this mean? I think that we all need to know that we fit in somewhere. If a school offers no formal tribal structure such as "houses", the kids will make their own. In this Darwinian alternative tribal system, the strong and the cool persecute the outsiders - the different, the uncool and the weak.

Yet we persist in thinking that bullying is an individual issue. Why are we so blind?

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 10:35:38 GMT

Ivy had an educational technology breakthrough las .... Ivy had an educational technology breakthrough last week: she learned to use the computer mouse. Apparently this is not evidence of prodigy status, as there is already a booming market for toddler-targeted software. The article isn't particularly well written, and I found the idea of parents spending $2.8 billion on educational toys (including multimedia) sort of repulsive. Overzealous moms collecting every Baby Einstein title and talking about the importance of a good college for their 16-MONTH-old's future...isn't it all a bit disgusting?

Pushing very young children into predefined learning activities seemed rather odious, but that first impression may not be entirely fair. And the definitions of pushing and learning are tricky. I spend a lot of time online, and my two-year-old wants to participate, so we've found a few things that we enjoy doing together online. It's certainly learning -- play and learning are completely intertwined. I had shown Ivy how to use the mouse a couple of times before, and she enjoyed zooming it around the mousepad for its own sake, but had never made the connection between the physical motion and what was happening on the screen. The week before in the SuperDuperDolphin game, she suddenly understood that the dolphin did tricks when she clicked on the pail of fish, but she couldn't figure out how to move the cursor over the pail.

Last week's breakthrough came while playing a Flash activity called Sing-a-Song Clay-Along from the Disney empire (see screenshot). It's a simple piano with four characters, one of whom is performing at any given time. I gave her the mouse and showed her how to click the button again, then let her loose on the virtual keyboard. She was concentrating intensely, but smiling when the character would sing different notes as she clicked the keys. Then I asked her to try getting the pig to sing, and she slowly moved the cursor over the pig and clicked...then went back to the piano and started clicking virtual keys. Oink, OINK, oink...to her great delight.

I suppose this is happening for young kids all over the world these days, and shouldn't be a big deal. But for someone who believes in the power of the web to transform learning and knowledge, it seemed like a significant milestone -- a symbol of the online access Ivy will have to ideas, entertainment and other people throughout her life. She won't remember the first time she used a computer, mouse or software...it's just part of her environment. I wrote a bit about Ivy's favourite online activity from her pre-mousing days: The Snake Game, using me as a guide and the Google image search as her playground. It's a great way to spend time, but her new skill gives her more control over the world...well, the virtual world, anyway.

I guess I have this vague sense of lingering guilt that she's too young to be sucked into the digital vortex, but I think that's the Luddite in me. These things she's experiencing online are more interactive than anything she'll see on TV, and allow her more control to create, explore and manipulate than any reading session might offer. But $3.8 billion is just ridiculous -- one of the coolest things about the web is that this stuff is all free. [Jeremy Hiebert's headspaceJ -- Instructional Design and Technology]

I think that games have a lot to teach us about learning. Our instructional model is wrong. How we really learn best is by "Playing". Why boys love games and hate school.

Blogging and Education - eBay???

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:42:35 GMT

Enrollment for the media courses at our community college is way down this year. Is this part of the dot-com fallout or is something more going on?

What is on offer is a one year full time class based course that costs $10,000 and teaches you to create web pages. I asked my blogging friends on PEI, none of whom are older than 24 and most younger and all of whom are experts in web based communication, - note I did not say experts in web creation.- to tell me how they learned to be so good.

They were all highly motivated and started to "play around" on the web when they were very young
They learned from each other and still do
None of them see learning about a tool or a technique as being central - one said that when they see a resume that states that the person has mastered a set of named software, they bin it immediately - wrong approach. They do not take a product approach but a holistic approach

So who takes these courses? Maybe folks who have no talent but who think that the web is hot. What happens when they enter the workforce - they meet the web version of Miles Davis or Dave Brubeck with a high school band talent - result they are peons not masters.

So what do you do if you are our community college? Maybe you have to link those who want to learn to those that can teach rather than try and teach the sheep. This is a huge shift. Does it only fit with IT?

What about automotive trades. Until now you could go to a college and learn how to fix a car. But what about Hybrids and soon fuel cells - who will stop the train for long enough to create a conventional curriculum? It can't be done. We will have to learn on the job as the job will be changing too fast. So what does the Community College have to do to create the learning environment. The same process is true for many areas - think even of construction - post Kyoto we will change radically how we build and the material will change very fast. You can't teach stuff that is 3 years out of date.

Who can we learn from? eBay I think. They have made a business through creating a safe community where people can do business with each other.

For me the big challenge is how can we create a safe community where we can learn from each other?

eBay have revolutionized retailing as a result. No inventory! You think that education has no inventory - think again - it is all about inventory - they are called courses and departments - they build and sell. Changes in inventory are exceptionally slow. But the pace of change is accelerating. Formal learning cannot keep up and will only fall behind.

It is also all so expensive. Canadian university fees were up 7% this year while inflation is about 3%. School costs are rising much faster than inflation and the degree is falling in value as more kids enroll. Student debt will be cancer on the next generation. But if you get out of build and sell you get out of your main costs - inventory.

So here is the challenge. What small place that knows it cannot compete with the large traditional centres will have the balls to set up the eBay of learning?

Blogging - St Paul - The Real Needs of Business

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 11:57:54 GMT

New movements tend to stall when the "in group" want to keep the movement within the
"in group"

The same may be true for blogging. The number of people that know about what a blog is among my clients is very small. Intuitively I would say less than 2%. What would put them off? Anything technical. Blogging has to be made really easy.

Why do I mention St Paul? At the outset of Christianity there was a huge debate. The "In Group" as lead by the surviving disciples of Jesus insisted that to be a Christian you had to be a Jew. This meant adult circumcision for the men and backseat behind a screen for the women. Quite a "technical" hurdle!!!. Paul argued that all men and women should be able to become Christians - guess who won? Pride in coping with the technical sides of blogging is a block for take-up.

The real opportunity is when a group of "Ingroup folks" maybe like "socialtext" really engage with organizational life and find the fit. Step 1 has to be"Easy does it" Easy does it demands that anyone who can type can set up a good blog and that there are a number of great templates. We are exploring Typepad to see if we can make it even easier.

Step two has to be finding the immediate felt benefit. This is more challenging and I think demands that we find parts of an organization where building a community will help - maybe in the entire support area. This is where the whole KM issue rears its head. The idea of content management is an exceptionally stupid idea that flies in the face of how we understand knowledge. Only a small fraction of knowledge is explicit - the vast bulk is implicit - ie it is ten times better to talk to someone about an issue than to try and find what he has written about it. Who wants a manual when you can be walked through? BP has been a leader here in seeing that their key system issues is to find a way of connecting people with questions to people with answers. Each employee has a personal website that amongst other things has a lot of info about what they know. The deal at BP is that if you have question you search for the person.

Why should we care anyway? Blogging is our path back to being human at work. Blogging reveals who we are to not only others but more importantly to ourselves. For the first time mankind - the great tool maker - who has used tool making ingenuity to make the world and himself into a tool, or a thing, has created a tool that renews and brings back what it is to be human.

So like Paul - we are faced with an historic choice. We can relegate blogging to geekiness and tool making or we can work to change our relationships back from machine to human.

What do I mean by this bold statement? We can change democracy by making it essential for politicians to be real and to listen to us. We can get the issues that make sense on the table other than spin. We can make management of organizations transparent and give organizations a human "Cluetrain" voice. We can change how we learn - from each other rather than from institutions. We can change healthcare by empowering fellow sufferers to help each other rather than to rely on the priests of medicine. We so change the world as Paul did.

Blogs for What Business?. Jimmy Guterman's new piece on business blogging (sub. required) is sure to cause a stir. He charges the blogging community as being "self-absorbed and elitist" and says its not essential for business. He cites a Forrester study to back up his claims:

You don't have to believe me on this. Finally, some data asserts that blogs are hardly a popular pursuit. If anything, blogging is more marginal than its critics contend. Forrester Research (FORR) conducted an online survey of 3,673 people and found that 79 percent of its respondents had never heard of blogs, 98 percent had never read one, and 98 percent said they'd never pay to read or write one. Blogs can be wonderful things, but if a mere 2 percent of Internet users read blogs, the pastime is far from mainstream. The Forrester survey notes that the typical blog reader has been using the Web for an average of six years. For the most part, blogs feature the Net elite writing to the Net elite. This continues to be the case only as long as the elite are underemployed.

I believe what Jimmy is saying is that there isn't a consumer market for blogging and that it isn't essential for businesses to address it. The problem is we are at the very beginning of a technology adoption lifecycle. Some serious companies have forecasted this market to grow and made their bets accordingly. Every time a journalist tries to wrap themselves around the existing market, what's visible are early adopters. What stands out are the leaders in using blogs for publishing, who benefit from preferential attachment as the earliest entrants. And if you take the innovator dialogue to seriously it looks like a one ring circus.

The other story folks pick up on is unclueful attempts by businesses and PR firms to market to bloggers as an emerging and influential segment. Any attempt to treat bloggers as a segment will fail. Today the influence of participants who act more as producers than consumers is the attraction. The number of participants is growing at 400% per year, and that's before AOL's entry.

But the real story in the consumer market is how increasing numbers of real people are using blogs , but as a way to communicate an form their own communities. Its that skinny tail of the power-law distribution that's going to wag the market. A way to share with friends, communicate post-by-post and remain open to new people joining your community. Conversational Networks provide the most value to your average Jane.

Rick Bruner does make the case that there are lots of businesses using blogs in the consumer market and points out this is like the web in 1995 and where the weblog as publishing market is headed. And many of them are making money. I agree that more evidence in this area would help, always does, but give it time for these new ventures to tell their story.

There is another story of weblogs and business that is less visible because the real action is behind the firewall. At Socialtext we are adapting weblogs for use within enterprises. Weblogs are one Enterprise Social Software tool, because they are necessary but not sufficient for communication and collaboration.

The enterprise market is entirely different than the consumer market. What is in common is an efficient, and dare I say fun, way of having conversations that contribute to productivity. Maybe its time we start telling more of our customer stories, but the distinction between consumer and enterprise needs to be made. [Corante: Social Software]

PEI Fall Election 2003 - The Real Platform and the Real Issues

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 14:43:11 GMT

Questions for all those who plan to run for office in the upcoming PEI Election

1. The economy - In the next 4 years (the life of the government) the potato processing side of our economy will collapse and will take down its surrounding infrastructure. As it collapses - US markets will close, there will be a drought/flood/ more disease etc, it will try even harder to survive and threaten our water and environment even further.

Will the new government use up all its resources to "save the jobs" or will it work to create an alternatives such as a local food system?

If they choose to "save the jobs" they risk the new future of tourism - eco tourism. A last ditch attempt to "save the jobs" will threaten in turn our landscape and will turn away the real future for this sector. The days of the beach holiday where families are satisfied with a cottage with 7 others on the Brackley Point Road are over as well - demography and shifts in values are seeing to that. Golf is also oversold and over capitalized.

Will the new government spend all their time and money in keeping this side of tourism alive and "saving the jobs" or will it support eco tourism that fits who we are and where the market is going?

We are seeing the end of the lobster fishery this year. The processors have not sold the spring inventory - changes in world taste and too much of a production based approach - the fall season has seen stocks collapse. The industry is also over capitalized. There are too many mussels in the bays and they do not have enough feed - notice how small they are. There was huge die off of Malpeque oysters this spring. Are you looking at the reasons for this failure?

Will government "save the jobs" in the fishery? There are already $100 million in loan guarantees out to this sector alone.

Will we waste our limited resources on saving what cannot be saved or will we build the new?

Do we understand that it is our economy that produces the cash to pay for the education and healthcare that we feel is so important

2. Energy - Do we understand that we can break fee from oil by going to wind? Do we understand what this type of freedom might mean. Who chooses gas and oil over wind? Tell me why you prefer to be a slave to the oil industry when we could be free?

3. Education - is the issue about keeping schools open or is the issue how badly our kids are doing? Why is there no data available on drop out rates? Why will we not allow measurement? Why do we sit by and allow 40% of Islanders to leave school basically unable to read and write. Is the issue money? In the US they have poured money into this problem and have seen no improvement! Why are boys doing so badly? If more than 30% of boys are on drugs to get them through the school day is it the boys or the system?

Answer these question please Mr Politician before you waffle about money, school opening and class size

4. Health care - Our health care system now costs over 400 million a year and is growing exponentially faster than our economy. If this trend continues in 4 years time Healthcare will cost more than 60% of our budget. Don't talk about services anymore - tell me if you understand this dynamic! Tell me how you see what we have to do to get this growth stopped. Tell me what your plans are if you fail.

Why do you not talk about the fact that we spend half the total lifetime spend on care in the last 6 months of life in a vain attempt to defeat death. That is about 200 million a year! Tell me how you plan to help us and the medical profession deal with this most important cost driver.

Tell me that as our population ages and we have the oldest group in North America that you have a strategy for seniors that will shift them from being dependents to contributing members of society.

Tell me that you understand that drug use is growing at more than 9% compounded and will soon be the # 1 cost in the system. Tell me that you understand that most of this drug use is for lifestyle issues such as depression, hypertension and cholesterol. Tell me that you understand the research that these so called threats are minor when compared to our personal ability to cope.

Tell me that you understand that most of our ability to cope, to learn and to think is set by the age of 6. Tell me how you intend to shift resources to get behind this knowledge.

Summary

Tell me that you understand that it is not business as usual. Tell me that you understand that we are coming to end of the industrial system Tell me that you can see how fragile our world is today. Tell me that you would, like to ask us to help.

My sadness is that of course the election will not be fought around these questions but about the same old stuff of my job versus yours - of being bribed with our own money - of offering simple solutions to complex problems - of blaming the others.

It is even more sad that we have run out of time. In the next 4 years - the life of the next government - the forces will converge. Our resource based economy will fail and our primary social institutions will fail as well.

But we can surely attempt to change the political conversation? Is this not our responsibility. Politicians do not lead they follow.

Can we not use the tool of the internet to talk about the real issues? Why not pillory those who talk rubbish. Why not support those who talk sense?

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 10:01:50 GMT

Missing the Librarians for the Trees.

The Myth of Generation N

"For decades, social scientists and technologists have alternatively predicted the emergence of 'computer kids' or a 'net generatio'”—a cohort of children, teenagers, and young adults who have been immersed in digital technology and the digital way of thinking since their conception.

This new generation, the thinking went, would be everything that their parents weren’t when it came to technology: They would know how to type, partake in electronic communications, and be able to rapidly figure out how all this stuff worked. They would be so adept at using computers that calling them 'computer literate' would be an insult. They would see society as something to be mastered and hacked, not something that they need to fit inside.
Certainly, a lot of evidence supports a 'net generation' effect. Although there are no reliable statistics on computer literacy, good figures do exist on Internet usage, thanks to the Pew Internet Project. According to its survey released earlier this year, 74 percent of people in the United States age 18 to 29 have Internet access, compared with 52 percent of those age 50 to 64. Among the over-65 set, Internet access plummets to just 18 percent. And in my own age group, 30 to 49, 52 percent have some kind of Net access. These figures certainly argue for the existence of a 'Generation N.'

But the more time I spend with the kids who should be members of Generation N—today’s high school and college students—the more convinced I am that the notion of universal computer competence among young people is a myth. And the techno-laggards among us risk being relegated to second-class citizenship in a world that revolves around, and often assumes, access to information technology....

Experts in human-computer interaction say that the real difference between teenagers and their elders is teens’ willingness to experiment with computers, combined with their acceptance of the seemingly arbitrary conventions that are endemic to contemporary computer interfaces. In other words, teens aren’t worried about breaking their computers, and they’re not wise enough or experienced enough to get angry at and reject poorly written programs. The teens just deal with computers, as they are forced to deal with many other aspects of their lives. These strategies, once learned and internalized, are incredibly effective for working with today’s computer technology....

...Unfortunately, with the changes overtaking our society, today’s kids who don’t have tech experience and tech aptitude are going to be left behind much faster than their elders.

And that’s the danger in believing that time will give us a population that’s completely computer literate. Remember, the Pew study found that 26 percent of young adults do not have Internet access. An even bigger determiner than age is education: only 23 percent of people who did not graduate from high school have Internet access, compared with 82 percent of those who have graduated from college.

Certainly, more kids today are growing up wired—but millions of them are not. Meanwhile, we’re rebuilding our society in ways that make things increasingly difficult for people who aren’t online. For example, people who don’t want to (or can’t) buy their airplane tickets on the Web now typically have to wait on hold for 30 minutes with the airline or go through a travel agent and pay an agency fee—sometimes as much as $50. When I needed to renew my passport, the local post office didn’t have the form: they told me to download it from the Internet.

This is a problem that won’t be solved through more education or federal grants. As a society, we need to come to terms with the fact that a substantial number of people, young and old alike, will never go online. We need to figure out how we will avoid making life unbearable for them." [Technology Review]

First of all, bad title because when you cite statistics such as "74% of Americans ages 18-29 have internet access," that's pretty much a "generation." Did every member of the "greatest generation" fight in World War II? No. Did every member of the "baby boomers" smoke pot and protest the war? No. But yet 74% of a generation that has internet access doesn't qualify as a critical mass.

Actually, I don't even think of kids ages 18-29 as netgens. My personal definition would be kids age 15 and younger. If you're generous and figure that the internet has been mainstream for six years, then you really need to look at netgens as kids that have grown up during that six year period and their younger siblings. I know the 18-29 age group came of age with computers, but the internet is a whole new ball of wax. Email, the web, and instant messaging are changing our society even faster than computers did. And these kids that grow up taking this stuff for granted are already ahead of my 35-year old self in how they assume and assimilate an interconnected world.

I know folks like Walt will sigh when they read that, but it's true. The way we take time-shifting technologies like VCRs and walkmans for granted is how these kids take the internet and wireless access for granted. It's just there, as it should always have been there. You mean it wasn't always like that? As I've noted before, my kids think every laptop can connect to the internet, and at high speeds, too. They have no idea that you might ever need a cable to do it, either. They think every camera can instantly display the picture it just took and pretty soon, they'll think that all cell phones can take pictures.

But what about the author's original point that 26% of this generation won't be computer or net-literate? Well, my question is how sad is it that he doesn't note the single most important support net for those people - libraries? Who could teach them information literacy in the digital age, either in school or in general classes at the public library? Who can provide them with free access to purchase that airline ticket or download that form? Who can provide them with the backup print resources that they need? Who can find information for them when they can't do it themselves?

The same folks that are there for every other past or future generation - librarians. And you know why the article's author encounters high school and college kids who aren't information literate? It's because politicians keep cutting library budgets, insisting that they're not important anymore. In some states, like California, they cut school librarian positions until there are almost none left. In some states, like Florida, they decide that critical institutions like the State Library are expendable and no longer need to be funded.

So how come Technology Review doesn't mention that?

[The Shifted Librarian]

I have been talking about the low levels of traditional literacy on PEI. This article and Jenny's comments reveal an even greater need to be able to read. If you cannot read - you cannot participate in the online world. Soon there will be no alternative. Government services, business and social communication will increasingly go online and the alternatives will dry up. Maybe the Libraray will be the home of the illiterate? What a concept!

Boys in trouble at school - Trouble for all of us

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 11:58:30 GMT

I had coffee with a colleague yesterday who has a 7 year old son.. We were talking about education - specifically about the poor literacy rates on PEI. She works at our Community College we are working to find better ways of remediating this problem. But then we turned personal and I asked her how her son was doing. He is 7. A month into grade 1, she was told that she/he had a problem. Her son was too active. Here is a dialogue from another page but I think it sums up what she heard.

Snakes and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails
Is That What Little Boys Are Made Of?
Anyone who has had a little boy knows that the little darlings can run you ragged. Even before he crawls, he is naturally more active, more exploratory about his surroundings and more mobile than most baby girls.

          By the time your little boy is five, he's still as cute and playful but all the more hard to control. Is it only your child, or is it all boys?

          Soon the innocence of boyhood yields and it seems that the natural ants-in-the-pants that our boys have always had is an invitation to diagnose problems. That which was once considered normal behavior is now a cause for alarm.

          What happened?

          From infancy to the early toddler years, parents accommodate little boys. Experts say all toddlers should roam and explore, but it just so happens that the more unbridled sex is the male. Until he starts school, even the most disciplined little boy is not satisfied with long periods of quiet time. Then school begins, and the environment that once understood the boy for what he is now expects him to act complacently, quietly, and without the motion that predated his school years.

          "This child has attention problems," the Kindergarten parent hears.

          "Your boy is very sweet, but easily distracted," reports the first-grade teacher.

          "We've told him repeatedly that he is not allowed to wrestle and push others," the third-grade teacher sighs.

          "He's had four warnings and he still doesn't bring in his homework," hears the ninth-grade parent.

          Sound familiar?

          Much of the current drive behind school reform stems from the belief that the cookie-cutter approach to education doesn't work. Perhaps what is expected of a boy these days is in conflict with normal male energy and curiosity.

          Schools, for the most part, are dominated by women, and boys are taught to the "rhythm of girls," says Archibald Montgomery, headmaster of the all-boys Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland and treasurer of the International Boys School Coalition. It's not an evil conspiracy, he points out. But it does lead to some troubling outcomes.

          For example, boys are ten times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, according to a 1997 American Psychologist article. Is it because they are more prone to ADD or have we ceased to distinguish between the different nature of boys and girls? It's partly both, but experts agree that ADD is often abused and overdiagnosed.

          Dan Kindlon, along with Michael Thompson, is the author of Raising Cain, Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (Ballantine). He points out that a more effective approach to dealing with ADD-like problems might be to fix the environment, rather than focusing on a fix for the child. In other words, high-paced, hyperactive schedules can lead to lack of sleep and high-paced, hyperactive behavior.

          A mother of four boys recalls when her youngest was two and she took him to the doctor. Anne Roche Muggeridge describes what happened:

          "He was one of those kids who is never out of motion while awake. During the examination, he kept reaching out to the interesting medical paraphernalia around him, and I kept gently fending off his little fingers."

          "Is he always like this?" the doctor asked.

          "Yes, he is always like this," she replied.

          "Perhaps we should put him on Ritalin."

          "Over our dead bodies," said Mom. "He is not disturbed. He is disturbing."
Muggeridge has an intuitive mother's insight into the different nature of boys. They are more tactile, "squirmier," more active - especially in group settings - and often develop at a slower rate than girls.

          Parents who take time to question the suggested kid-fix often look to boys' schools for more understanding. When a school environment is designed to suit the needs of boys, that school then has the luxury - "the honor" Montgomery calls it - of structuring the curriculum to boys' special needs. Because their fine motor skills don't develop as quickly as girls, for example, he doesn't schedule cursive handwriting into the curriculum as early as it might appear in a co-ed setting. Boys at his school are also allowed to move around the classroom more and allowed to be tactile. Their activity level is celebrated.

          Not every parent can afford such an environment, and many would prefer the traditional co-ed school. But a parent can have a huge effect upon how her boys are treated. For starters, don't immediately accept the "Billy has a problem" approach from the educators. While they may mean well, it could be anything from the kind of reading instruction to the level of rigorous coursework (or lack thereof) that is making Billy fidget. While you want to cooperate, explore deeper into how the school is structured. Are there cooperative groups for the children? Oftentimes boys don't excel while facing other classmates as the teacher is teaching. Boys are naturally more competitive and less group oriented than girls.

          Is there enough activity time? Are children engaged in creative play throughout their school years and given a chance to express themselves through various art venues? Finally, does the school allow enough flexibility for teachers to address the uniqueness of their classes with materials, activities and special events?

          At one all-boy school, science class is done almost entirely outside. The boys engage in earth, wind and sky observations and the excitement of preparing for their "natural history" class is used as a carrot by the teacher when trying to get them through the more passive English or math classes.

          Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails? You bet. Rather than try to change their nature, we should find educators who see the challenge in it" (Parent Power)

How's it going with your sons? Is he a problem or merely a boy? Surely when more than 30% of boys are failing at school it is time to look at the school rather than at your son?

"Ha revenge!" you say as a woman. So what kind of man would you want in your life or in your daughter's life? An aware and capable partner or an angry deadbeat who is frightened of where women are in the world today? Behind PEI's bucolic vistas, are dark homes where sad men take revenge on capable women whom they fear. Last summer a young woman who was studying at our community college and breaking out of her life trap was murdered. Her murder has not been solved. So what might have been the motive? A visitor from away who is a serial killer motivated by deep desires or someone whom she knew motivated by fear of losing her? You make up your own mind.

Universities - Where next?

Sun, 10 Aug 2003 19:32:51 GMT

We live today in one of those periodic times, when shifts in beliefs and in communication technology drive a fundamental change in how power is defined and exercised. What are these trends and how do they manifest themselves in the lives of universities? How can universities, with their unique cultures and management processes, cope and even prosper in this type of environment?

What is going on? What are these trends and what do they mean for managing a University? In particular, what do they mean for the social and human aspects that HR will have to plan for?

A revolution in demography - By 2020, most people in the developed world will be over 50. This is a unique demographic event in the history of nature. This aging of society will affect all aspects of the social and work world. It will be especially challenging for organizations that rely on a stream of young customers or those who rely on the young to replace the old as participants. Universities are vulnerable in both ends of the age spectrum. Who will teach? Who will be the students? How will we attract and retain staff and students? Our previous assumptions about the answers to these questions will have to be revisited.
A revolution in values. There is a pronounced shift in organizational values in the developed world. The shift is from an acceptance in organizations of a top down and process driven approach toward a new set of values that built on self-expression and dialogue. This values' shift is proving a challenge to all organizations In particular, all "customer" interfaces in every field of service delivery are being challenged by this new values set. There is no reason why institutions of learning should be exempt from this shift. where the managerial culture is authoritarian. For academia, the shift is especially challenging as it demands also a shift in pedagogy from where the teacher and content is the centre piece to where the student and dialogue is the centre piece. What is meant by this shift? What is the right course to take? How will we get there? Our current approach to delivery and to teaching itself has to re-evaluated.
A revolution in technology - It is not an illusion, the pace of technological change is accelerating in a non-linear manner. The web revolution has however only just begun. The impact on society will be similar to the advent of the railway which radically changed how and where people lived and worked in the 19th century. We can expect no less of a revolution today. While the new design for society is not yet clear, the new design for service delivery is emerging with some clarity. New technology enables the customer to access the service provider on his terms and at times that suit the customer. The new manufacturing process, as developed by Dell, has turned the Ford model of make and sell on its head. The adversarial customer relationship of the transaction economy, is being replaced by a community and relationship based model as exemplified by eBay and Amazon. How will this affect education? Many say that education is different. This may be a dangerous assumption. These technological and cultural forces are located already on the edge of the Academic world and are becoming ubiquitous. They fit the new values and they fit the new service/cost criteria as we are seeing in the airline industry. They will bear down on how universities operate. What will happen to high cost, place and content based universities when an educational equivalent of Southwest Airlines or EBay emerges? Other organizations in other sectors that have not thought about this threat now face extinction.
A revolution in educational costs and service expectations - A generation ago, post secondary education was an elite process. Now it is expected to be accessible to most young people. This has lead to a massive expansion in the scale of universities and to a new and challenging relationship with government. Governments, in many parts of the developed world, see universities as engines of economic and social development. As Governments pay many of the bills, their social and economic expectations are becoming important parts of the university agenda. In response, Universities have had little choice but to adopt many of the features of the industrial workplace. Mass production of content and mass processing of students has enabled student participation to rise but at the cost of a significant increase in infrastructure costs and a corresponding reduction in organizational flexibility. Development and fund raising have become critical skills of the President. Coping with Unions and labour relations has become an important Presidential skill. As a result, the culture of business is seeping though the academic world. Paradoxically, as more students participate and as the direct and indirect costs of education rise for the student, the value of a BA is devalued in the work place. The average student can no longer afford a 4 year term at university away from home. Something in the cost mix will have to break. The current system cannot deliver the price and the quality that the student can afford and that the staff can tolerate. The result is a growing conflict between the internal stakeholders. All the stakeholders intuitively sense that something has to give but have circled their own wagons to defend themselves. How can Universities break the deadlock between their constituent parts? Is it likely that the conventional process of fighting this out at the bargaining table will work? What new process would give us the chance of reconciling the fears of the competing groups?

What operational issues will be exposed by these trends? -

Bearing in mind, a very small pool and a huge demand, how will we attract and retain the key academic and specialist staff that we need? Rank this issue in importance? Is this a survival issue or just a tough one to deal with? What are the financial implications of getting this wrong? What are the reputational issues of getting this wrong?
How important will dealing with the subset issues such as pay and work place culture be to the attraction and retention issues? Is money the only issue? What can you afford bearing mind the pressure on the cost front?
Is transforming our costs merely about finding new cuts or will they come from a redesign of how we do things? How will conventional cuts affect the ability of the university to deliver? What will happen to morale and to students? What will increasing risk of more internal conflict mean?
Will finding more effective and ways of teaching more for less be about the application of new technology or is it about finding a way to change our mindsets about how to do this differently?
Is affecting change itself an issue of power or is it an issue of understanding how we change from a psycho-social perspective. How important is being able to change?
How important is it to reduce the centrifugal forces that are affecting our university? Can this be done as a matter of power or are there social and organizational design issues involved?
How can we reduce the inertial and complexity drag of our union environment? How important is this in a rapidly changing world? Can we use power to do this?
Our health and benefits costs are growing at a non linear rate. How substantive is the threat to our financial health? Is solving this issue a matter of power or design?

More here

What is going on at Universities? Growing cultural complexity!

Sun, 10 Aug 2003 19:26:21 GMT

I have been talking to a number of universities about what their world feels like today. Here are some of my early views.

The bottom line - Universities have become too complex for conventional management processes and conventional HR approaches which have a tendency to seek conformity and are based on both a mechanical mindset and the belief in cause and effect. Many enterprises have complexity such as different divisions, but at a modern university the complexity is overwhelming.

What is it about a modern university that is so complex? It is because there are a number of distinct cultures that are on a trajectory of conflict. This conflict is based on scarcity, the need to change the nature of universities completely, which will mean that the conflict will become very bitter.

The dominant culture of the university is the academic culture. In the past the academics also ran the university so there was an alignment between the dominant culture and management. That was a time when universities were like large clubs and were not part of the mainstream of life and high on the government agenda. This is no longer the case. The president is tasked with running the university and the largest group, the academics now play a blocking role. The main culture conflict is between the guild of academics and the President who represents a new culture that is an anathema to the guild - a business culture. The complexity is amplified by what I see as a "slave revolt". At a lower level are 2 grieving groups. A new class of teachers: the TA and the Sessional Lecturers who are treated like helots by the Guild and who will fight for status. A rising group of administrators who in the past were cleaning staff but now are IT professionals and Lab technicians who also want status.

These groups are all unionized and their issues are being built into a deteriorating negotiating environment and into difficult meetings in the Presidents office where one side tries to win over another.

The President is the only person who can see the big picture. All the groups are hunkering down to win their own battles. This is what the President sees.

Fees for undergraduates are already too high as are the total costs of attending 4 years. Now $60,000 for a 4 year term they are expected to be $100,000 in 20 years time. The average debt on leaving is over $25,000. The theory was that with a degree, high paying jobs were a certainty. As the pool of graduates has got larger this is no longer a valid assumption and many are crushed by this debt. They are seeking a better way and will jump at a credited course that does not demand 3-4 years residency. Presidents know that their model of product push on campus will be disintermediated by an electronic alternative. Presidents want to find ways of structurally reducing these costs.
The new demography will cut the number of undergraduates severely in Canada in the next 10 years. Between numbers and money something will have to give. Presidents want to look at other groups such as seniors but this does not fit the system.
Over 50% of faculty in North America will retire in the next 10 years. Already there is a race to hire. Academic wages are going up to both attract and to retain good staff. Just as Presidents will have to cut costs, the core costs are under pressure to go up. The tendency is to ask government for more - but government will be coping with rising healthcare costs and will back off universities. Or to raise fees! Presidents would like to broaden the type of candidate but the faculty demand that the PHD is the benchmark.
Another way to reduce costs will be to change the delivery system of courses from face to face to electronic. The heavily unionized faculty will defend this to the death. Defending IP is their by word. In fact this is a smokescreen. The point is that within the universities, faculty do not understand the new medium and don't want too. They don't pay a great deal of attention to undergrads any way. Their status and pay is determined by where they are on the publishing research track and not by teaching. So they are creating a new underclass the TA and the Sessional lecturer. Presidents need to get into the faculty and help them see that holding on too tight is not in their interests
One of the things that faculty hate the most is the idea of a university becoming like a business. They see the President taking the university to that place. They want it to be a club again. Their club. So they still do all their hiring within the confines of their own discipline. The need to replicate themselves and the tenure system. In so doing they will by design add to the costs and the complexity of the enterprise.
There are 2 new groups at universities that will increase the complexity and tension in the next 10 years. In the delivery system are the TA and the Sessional lecturer which have become essential in the undergrad world. They both teach and mark. They are the face to face undergrad world. At the moment these are helots - poorly paid and low status. But tensions are rising - after all they do the work. The other group is the ever expanding Administrative world. In my day these were literally servants. Now they are a heavily unionized group of bitter people who feel put upon and without status. Many of them are in the IT area and are lab technicians. We can see the same trend in medicine.

The bottom line? The modern university has at least 4 cultures on a collision course. This type of cultural tension cannot be solved at the negotiating table. Some type of visioning process will be needed and a new managment process that can include these forces.

More later

Learning and Games

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 14:27:06 GMT

I had lunch with Dan and Steve yesterday and one of the items we talked about was why boys are so turned off by school. Our bottom line that real learning was as much about motivation as any other factor. Becoming expert at something seemed linked to motivation. Is this why boys like games so much? Is there a lesson for so called educators like me?

Jeremy Hiebert has some great stuff on learning and play.

I read last week that boys are starting to turn away from action flicks. The stated reason was that they preferred the interactivity of games and th amount of contro that they had in games.

I am old but here is a question for the young turks out there. Is there something deadingly passive about the instruction method used at school? Is there somthing about the teacher being a "Mom Clone" that pisses boys off?

Is part of the appeal of most good games that they demand real skill and that the skills cannot be learned quickly? Is another part of the attraction that the good games have compelling ladders of challenge? Is another part of the appeal that truly amazing games have all of this and allow you to compete with a large community?

Finally what if we made school more like games? Anyone read Scott Orson Card's books?

Kane on Education

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 11:29:36 GMT

"The last obvious policy is in education. There is already a gathering counter-consensus in the UK around educational reform, led by voices like Tom Bentley of Demos, CreativeNet and the Scottish Council Foundation: they want to stop "factory schools turning out factory minds". The creative child can imagine new problems (rather than have them handed down to them); mingles ideas easily from one realm to another; makes mistakes, as long as they lead to more interesting solutions, and focuses on goals with all their powers of attention. That's a text-book list of the psychological attributes of play.

Yet creative education should be about more than producing fodder for the "creative industries", or a better class of info-worker. The democratisation of creativity could save lives - or at a minimum, turn those lives away from self-destruction. If the play ethic means anything tangible, it is about occupying the gap that drug culture occupies in our poorest communities. And that gap is created by the distance between "work" as it stands - job-seekers allowances, McEmployment of all kinds, the spiritual tedium of "workfare" Britain - and the individuals who cannot (or will not) conform to its dictates.

Drugs, you could say, are the dream-seekers' allowance: the most expedient way to boost your sense of human potential, when all the official routes heading towards that end seem rubble-strewn, or impossibly long, or depressingly unrewarding. This also explains the traditional hot-link between narcosis and pop culture. If your chemical dreams spur you to activity, then dancing, socialising and fucking - or making other people dance, socialise and fuck - is often the most gratifying way to make your mark on the world; to align your inner state with your outer reality.

What Ibiza has really "uncovered", for all its reckless, oafish hedonism, is an inarticulate but deeply-felt rejection of the false dignities of contemporary labour. "I’m largin' it" should be taken literally: it means, My precious self is bigger than this mousy, pointless social role.

An education for creativity which wanted to be truly “inclusive” would have to listen to this elemental and popular desire for playfulness. It’s an unruly vigour which has its subterranean link to an earlier, more carnivalesque Britain, evidently not entirely swept away by industrial capitalism. A time of "happy Mondays" and "the soul's play-day", when 18th century Gloucester bishops complained about "loutish mobs that are drunk with the cup of liberty".

Teachers would have to find ways to tap into these disruptive energies, and turn them into a repertoire of usable life-skills. That means, among other new approaches, that the much-abused "media and cultural studies" would at last get its proper curricular due. Bringing context and history to pop songs, computer games and tabloid tv could provide kids with an exit route from the cul-de-sac of these escapisms, into richer areas of cultural tradition and understanding. From Big Brother to George Orwell (or from Ibiza Uncovered to Epicurus) is surely a worthwhile educational gambit.

Economists who've read their Marx often talk about education as part of the "reproduction of labour" - the place where the character of the good worker is made. The play ethic wants an education which aims at the reproduction of creativity, the nurturing of the good player’s soul. Children should leave schools feeling motivated, in command of their faculties, and capable of expressing themselves in forms and behaviours which both please themselves and others. Why would such a child choose the temporary utopia of drugs, over the actual joys of skilful self-creation? Why would they not choose to play?"

If you woke up and found that you were 8 again and had to go back to school, how would you feel? Would you not want a school that was more on Kane's lines than the one you send your kids to now?

Play versus Work - Maybe the thought of a lifetime of "work" is putting boys off school?

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 11:18:47 GMT

Here is an extract from Pat Kane's body of Work on Play - Thanks to Ross Mayfield for the link

"Yet why believe in work, when work doesn't believe in you? The constant watchwords of the new capitalism are flexibility, creativity, self-improvement. Workers are urged to "get up to speed" with a runaway world: we must become mobile and tensile, enterprising and capable. We must harness our chariots to the sun of intense global competition.

Yet these injunctions come from companies which hire you for a year, six months, maybe even less; who might be taken over at any time in some City of London or Wall Street manoeuvre; who try to wriggle out of long-term entanglements like pensions, wage and holiday agreements; and who shed labour whenever their position in the global marketplace shows the slightest competitive disadvantage. Trying to excel for companies that are themselves transient, provisional and unforgiving might come to seem like the grandest folly.

When that realization comes - that is, when the work ethic crumbles before your eyes - then an intellectual vacuum opens up at the heart of contemporary capitalism, which desperately needs to be filled. Over the last decade, a procession of not-big-enough ideas have tried to fill the space - "downshifting", "work-life balance", all those slackers and idlers. None of them with much success or distinction.

They all try to speak to our deep common anxiety: that if we keep up our loyalty to the work ethic, in a world where competition, mutability and innovation rule supreme, we will destroy ourselves. The LSE's Richard Sennett calls this the "corrosion of our characters" - where the acids of the new capitalism eat away at the old industrial virtues of self-discipline, sacrifice and duty.

We need a new, similarly powerful social ethic for these hyper-demanding times. Some other world-view that can give a coherence to the frenzy of activities and interests that we scatter across our busy lives. Something - anything - that could make all these demands for "creativity" and "achievement" even worth the effort.

I PLAY, THEREFORE I AM

Welcome to the play ethic. First of all, don’t take “play” to mean anything idle, wasteful, frivolous or even necessarily childish. The trivialisation of play was the work ethic's most lasting, and most regrettable achievement. This is "play" as the great philosophers, and recently mind scientists, have understood it: the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person.

“Man plays only when he is in the fullest sense a human being“, said the great German Romantic Friedrich Schiller. “As man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom, then his activity is to play", agreed Jean Paul-Sartre. The classic 20th century psychologists - like Jean Piaget, Donald Winnicott and Erik Erikson - all understood play as our most effective way of mastering the complexities of our world, rather than submitting to its routines.

And now that we can watch the very synapses of our minds perform, through medical neuro-imaging, the powers of play are even more confirmed. Those who clear space in their lives for activities that are pleasurable, voluntary and imaginative - that is, for play - have better memory, sharper reasoning, and more optimism about their future. As the dean of play studies, the University of Pennsylvania's Brian Sutton-Smith says, "the opposite of play isn't work. It's depression. To play is to act out and be wilful, exultant and committed, as if one is assured of one's prospects".

So to call yourself a "player", rather than a "worker", is to immediately widen your conception of who you are, and what you might be capable of doing. It is to dedicate yourself to realizing your full human potential; to take an essentially active, rather than passive stance towards your environment; and to be constantly guided in this by your sense of fulfillment, meaning and satisfaction.

The play ethic is what happens when the values of play become the foundation of a whole way of life. It turns us into more militant producers, and more discriminating consumers. It causes us to re-prioritise the affairs of our hearts, to upgrade the quality of our emotional and social relationships. It makes us more activist in our politics, but less traditional in their expression. And most of all, the play ethic forces us to think deeply about how we should pursue our pleasures - and how we reconcile that with our social duties.

So, like the work ethic, the play ethic is a set of feelings and principles about how we should be active in the modern world. But the difference between the two is huge. Work is always (to coin a phrase) the involuntary sector - the realm of compulsion and necessity, where men and women have to do what they have to do. But as Sartre says, play is what you do when you feel at your most free, your most voluntary. When every positive decision you make about your life carries both a risk, and a promise, of something new and challenging taking place. This is why the play ethic isn’t “the leisure ethic”: the last thing it involves is slumped relaxation."

This is an extract from a 4,00 word piece and a wideranging site with tons of material

What is going on with Boys and Men in Education

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 10:52:09 GMT

There is a North American problem for boys and school. Boys are doing very badly in the education system. But on PEI, we have reached a crisis.

We have the highest drop rate for males in high school at 22.6%. Male literacy is in the basement. In 1998 82% of females could read at a level 3 compared to only 60% for boys. Way below the national average. In a 2001 survey of grade 12 - 62% of females said that they planned to attend university. Only 42% of boys made the same claim. UPEI is granting 1.8 degrees to women for every one for men. In 1998 28% of women in the 25-29 age group had degrees, in line nationally, but only 17% of men.

Anecdotally I hear that in 2003 70% of freshmen are women at UPEI. I hear that medical schools, law schools even engineering are packed with women. There have been rumblings about boys doing badly but this is surely a crisis? We surely cannot accept that it is all the boys' fault. There is something really wrong about how we raise and school boys.

We have to have a serious look at schools and ask what is it about how we run them that turns boys off. We have to look at how we as parents raise our boys as well. How have we taken their desire to achieve away?

There have been rumblings about this issue but surely we are on such a poor track that we have to step back and apply our best efforts to re- engage the male gender in their education.

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 15:56:10 GMT

collaborative learning and institutional culture. There have been a few interesting posts lately about collaborative learning. Many of them spout the relentlessly cheerful “we tried it and it was amazing and I wish more teachers would shift their paradigms because the students love it so much” line. (Hmmm. Perhaps my frustrations are already leaking through, eh?) Happily, Seb Paquet pointed me to Martin Blanche’s post on “Obstacles to collaborative learning.” (Permalinks are broken, alas, so go to his main page for now.) I’ll take the liberty of quoting them here: * Students and lecturers are more familiar with a knowledge-transmission model of education and don’t... [mamamusings]

More good stuff on the shift or not the shift to a more collaborative learning model. One thing I am sure of, try the transmission model on adults who have been away from school for a while. They hate it!

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 20:47:43 GMT

Enabling collaborative learning.

Sebastian has found Martin Terre Blanche's wonderful blog. He quotes a good post on obstacles to collaborative learning.

Students and lecturers are more familiar with a knowledge-transmission model of education and don't always understand what is expected of us in a more constructionist environment.
We have too little information about lecturers' and students' backgrounds, networks and skills - so often we don't realize that there is somebody in the group who could teach the rest of us a lot about some aspect of what we're studying.
No or very limited mechanisms for students to talk back to the lecturer and (especially) to talk to one another.
Inadequate 'course memory'. Lecturers often are the only bridge for this year's students to the knowledge created by last year's group - students don't get to see what last year's group did. There is no mechanism for students who want to stay in the group after the course is officially over (and who could be a useful resource for next year's students) to do so. [Martin Terre Blanche]

Reading through this list made me realize that the people who pioneer new modes of communication in hi-tech conferences these days are in the process of fixing these issues - through backchannelling and real-time blogging, the product of which most often gets turned into permanent, hyperlinked, googlable archives for the benefit of those who aren't there.

Here are some more obstacles elicited from one of Martin's readers.

[Seb's Open Research]

So good to have Seb back blogging again. The ideas in this post are dear to my heart as I teach online at UPEI. I have found that effective teaching online demands a really different pedagogy from the sage on the stage model of content transmission. I laugh when some e of my colleagues in the faculty worry about their content being stolen when I have found that what works best is dialogue, By about week 3, I hardly post at all and the class have taken over.

What I find works is to have a big idea for a class - This term we look at how businesses that use the principles of the Natural Step are not only doing good but doing well. Thus solving the paradox of the supposed choice between the planet or jobs which seems to paralyze movement.

We have at the core of the class 2 books The Ecology of Commerce by my old mentor Paul Hawken, who comes here to PEI on August 13-14th, and The Natural Step for Business by Brian Nattrass and Mary Altomare. Each week we have a series of questions that we use as a formal structure and we have assignments which are posted for all to see. So far it looks pretty conventional. But 40% of the mark goes for participation judged on quality and quantity. I have found that this feature gets the juices going. With a class of 20 we get about a 1,000 posts in a 6 week half semester. Very soon we shift gears up from the abstract to how each of us can make a difference. We leave the world of the case studies and we look at ourselves. By week 4, we have lost the academic voice and we are in Cluetrain territory where all of us are revealing a great deal about who we really are as people. The material has become an excuse to explore our lives.

If we are lucky a student goes very deep and this stimulates the rest of us to open up as well. So the content is really only a catalyst. We have gone back to the Socratic method and it is hard to tell the prof from the student. We use WebCT which is very clunky but we mainly just use the discussion tool. I would love to use Groove which I find very smooth and has great features such as images and drawing tools. I have found that it is the quality of the conversation that counts the most. Asynchronicity is a popular feature with both me and the students. I get up very early and many of them work and post late. I have even taught while on vacation in Thailand! There is huge resistance to this type of approach from most faculty because they know no other way of teaching. Many of the younger students have a problem too as they have come from school, and also know no other way of learning. I have found that my adult students fit best as they have long ago left school and are very comfy with taking a leading role themselves. They also want o lear so that they know something new while many of kids take a course because they need the credit - very different.

A lot more has to change before this approach is commonplace. School itself is a huge barrier as it en-cultures the kids to be passive learners.

Organizational complexity - A New Math Required and New Tools

Sun, 13 Jul 2003 18:54:16 GMT

I am doing some OD work for a university. One of the issues confronting all universities today is a quantum increase in organizational complexity. My ingoing sense is that the mechanism's for managing complexity are poorly understood and that as maths changed at the turn of the century to take complexity into account, so we have to look for novel ways of managing complexity at universities.

My thesis is that we manage today as if cause and effect were our universe. Our systems are too complex for this midset and if we remain in cause and effect, conflict will be the only result. Some type of systems tool is required. A start may be some type of council that brings all partiers to the table - but I get ahead of myself.

Let's look at the world of 1969 when I went up to Oxford and then at the world of 2003 for a modern urban university in Canada

When I went to Oxford 35 years ago, my college, Christchurch was mainly an undergraduate college attached to a cathedral. The Dean ran both. He and the Dons ran the college with a handful of secretaries and a lot of servants and he and the Canons ran the Chapter again with a few secretaries and a lot of servants. Christ Church was part of a Coop called the University where a few Dons sat on committees and set policy. That was the University - a few committees.

Our world was really the college. Small and compact. 90% of the teaching was in the college. We all lived in college. Each college had a its own funding. Christ Church was immensely wealthy with large endowments of land that had accrued over hundreds of years. There were few of us. All of us that went paid fees and it cost me then about L1,000 a year in fees and I spent about another L1,000 on having a good time. We were heavily subsidized by the college but it also lived well within its means. Our accommodation, though splendid, was also spartan as only an all male place of the time could have been. In my quad, the only toilet was on the ground-floor, and the building was 6 stories high. We used the sink for most things! The only baths were in the basement in one corner of the quad. When this was pointed out to the dean who built the quad, his reply was that " they are only here for 8 weeks at a time". I think I only had a handful of baths in the 3 years that I was there. I would go home on the weekends for a clean up.

Again my point - a simple set up with not much money flowing either way and almost no government involvement. The world was the college and the faculties. Being small there was little managerial complexity. All who were not faculty were in effect servants or students. There were no money problems and, apart from maintenance, little need for capital investment. The money fit inside the capital envelope of the college. The university ran a few libraries and exams. The simple college was our world where everyone knew everyone perhaps better than they wanted too.

I use Oxford as an example because it was the model for many other universities. But now what is the university world?

Money and social engineering are compelling drivers. The state has entered the game in most countries and has funded a huge increase in enrollment which has driven a huge increase in the capital requirement. Coed is the norm and modern plumbing has entered the male preserve at great cost. Equipping my college with toilets and bathrooms on every floor cost over L20 million! Imagine the plumbing issues in 16 -1 19th century buildings.

So what are the issues in many Canadian Universities today. They have a president whose job is to fund-raise and to deal with governments. His job is mainly a business role. He has to get the budget and make the money work. He has to compete for capital donors and he has to lobby government for more research and operating funds. He is supported by a staff that would not be out of place in any large commercial enterprise. But he has no power to tell the faculty what to do. The Product end of the university has not changed much since I was an undergraduate or indeed since the middle ages. The faculty is divided into separate disciplines who jealously guard their turf. Now usually unionized, my Tutor Charles Stuart must be turning in his grave, they hold back the online world as they know that this will destroy how they work. They do not want to teach because they move up the tenure track and in status by publishing. So they employ armies of servants, TA's to you and I, to teach and mark in their name. In my day all the dons in every discipline met every night over dinner in hall. Today they all go home to their SOS's and children. So the linkages between them are poor. All the fertile research ground has been tilled and new entrants scrap for weeds deep in the mud.of their field. There is little sense of collegiality.

They fear that the president will make their university into a BUSINESS - horror of horrors! They sense that undergraduates already pay too much but that is the President's problem. They sort of know that demography will send fewer young their way - but that is the president's problem. After all they don't want to teach them anyway. . They reject any idea of using technology to teach differently - they fear that their precious IP will be lost if they make what they do accessible. So reducing the cost of teaching is the-President's problem. They have their heads firmly in the sand but will not give an inch of thie power up to help.

Governments want every one to have access to university. They have set up a loan sharking business to facilitate this. The average debt for BA is about $30,000. The theory is that BA's get high paying jobs and will easily pay this off. Not so. Most are caught and flip hamburgers or some double up and go onto graduate work. Students will find new ways of getting what they want and will turn away from the traditional delivery and costs - they have no choice.

While the students are finding university too expensive. 50% of the faculty will be in the retirement zone in the next 10 years. Already a bidding war for the new talent is happening. In key areas, new hires are earning more than the old guard. resentment is building and costs are going up.A classic squeeze play is emerging. Costs are too high and rising. Each party balmes the other.

Universities have become huge. They now have armies of Administrators and Technicians who are still treated like servants by the faculty. They are unionized as well and have a deep sense of bitterness and entitlement.

So who would want to be a University President?

How can universities reduce this complexity. Maybe they can take a lead from our Provincial Politicians. They are recommending the formation of a council where the premiers meet as a matter of course with the Prime Minister. The underlying idea is that there is no process other than confrontation to meet the complex needs of a diverse set of groups who live under one hat, Canada. So maybe for universities. Currently each powerful group has to attack the others. The poor President is stuck in the middle.

Maybe this is true for all organizations? Management and the rest was OK for simpler times. The 3 body problem demands a more sophisticated process. It recognizes that once there are more than two parties, then using cause and effect as the metaphor leads to conflict and failure. Most organizations are more complex than two body systems now. Understanding complexity and chaos will become essential tools for managment. More later

Reading - Looking under the lamp for the lost keys - Time to look in the early years

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 17:37:37 GMT

All our research tells us that the reading battle is won or lost in the first 6 years of life - mainly in the first 3 years. This compelling graph that shows the complete lack of progress in the US in spite of massive investments in the formal school system have not moved the bar at all.

Follow the link for the results in the Early Years

We're From The Government. We're Here To Help.. Over the weekend I watched a little bit of a CSPAN program that had Bill O'Reilly, Molly Ivins, and Al Franken on a panel. It was a rerun of some political meeting. I don't remember what. At one point O'Reilly and Ivins were arguing about taxes, government programs, etc. Franken, that font of economic knowledge and all-around supporter of spending other people's money, made the statement, "The idea that government programs don't help anybody is just BS!" Of course, it's true. Government programs generally DO help someone, just usually not who they were designed to help, and not in the way they were supposed to help them. Here's a little graphic from the US Department of Education introduction to the "No Child Left Behind" program. Here's the roll-over text for the graphic:

"Chart shows that since 1965, when Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), through 2003, the federal government has spent more than $242 billion to help educate disadvantaged children. Yet, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the average reading score for 9-year-olds across the nation in 1975 is not significantly different from the 1999 score. During those years, the annual appropriation for ESEA increased six-fold -- from $2.3 billion in 1975 to $13.8 billion in 1999 -- while the average reading score for 9-year-olds was 210 in 1975 and 212 in 1999. ESEA appropriations for 1966-1974 and for 2000-03 are provided in the chart, but average reading scores for 9-year-olds are not shown because they are not available for all of those years. The president's 2004 budget request of $22.5 billion for ESEA is shown."

"No Child Left Behind" may be a terrible program. Testing students to see if they can actually *do* anything at certain points in school may be a terrible idea. But it's also pretty clear that pouring billions into federal education programs is about as helpful as tits on a bull. If I were the Dept. of Education this is not a graphic I would display proudly. It is an indictment of every tax dollar spent on federal education mandates since 1965. [b.cognosco]

Learning by Play - What kids look like when they are having fun

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 00:35:48 GMT

My daughter Hope is teaching a small class of kids how to cook this week in our cottage. Don't they look great!

Are we neanderthals? How can social software help?

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 16:12:24 GMT

I wonder - have we become trapped in a type of culture that has turned us into Neanderthals? What do I mean by this weird statement?

I wrote yesterday

"Remember that we think that complex language was an adaptation to hunting on the savannah and hence was our start as homo sapiens - the tool maker. Our new ability to learn across tribes and across time, rather than only directly face to face in present time, gave us the ability to adapt to changes in the environment by using culture not biology.

Neanderthal did not innovate. In 200,000 years his tools' set did not change much. He could not cope with the invasion of Homo sapiens and was extinct within 1,000 years of first contact. With no complex language he could not communicate ideas in the abstract. He therefore could not cross tribal barriers. With no complex language he could not recall the past nor imagine the future. He could only work in the context of the present.

We are like that today.

In the modern organization there is no allowance for cross tribal discussion. Instead of looking across, we look up and down. This is also true of our learning organizations such as Universities. University departments are trapped inside their disciplines and find cross disciplinary work very challenging. Yet we know that the breakout in human potential came as a result of using complex language to look across boundaries. Innovation seems to demand a diverse perspective. As one human tribe found a new way to make a tool - the horizontal links drove not only adoption but improvement. Recursive loops between tribes accelerated the improvements.

In the modern organization, and in political life, we live in a fixed present - the life cycle of a CEO or an administration. There is a denigration of the past. We puff up our selves by dismissing the work of the predecessors. Because we do not look to enough to the past, we fail to see the patterns available there that tell us why and how we are in the present. Consequently, we cannot see the systemic causes of current problems. So, instead, we look for simple cause and effect - a view of causality that does not exist in the natural world. We not only do not look at the context of the past, but we seem incapable of imagining the future. Our days and minds are filled with the crises of the present. So we, like Neanderthal, are trapped in the present unable to move .

We have been trapped by a cultural meme that has turned us into Neanderthals.

So what is the way out? I think that social software will be like complex language. It offers us the chance to cope with our challenges by once again opening up the context of the past so that we can see the patterns. It re-attaches us to the power of the future to pull us forward. How does it do this? By opening up the horizontal channels and by opening up time again.

Is blogging an evolutionary tool?

Not the software but the business model

Sat, 05 Jul 2003 10:39:02 GMT

Tim O'Reilly on generating value with commodity software.

Tim O'Reilly: "somebody gets a critical mass of customers and data and that becomes their source of value.

On that basis, I will predict that -- this is an outrageous prediction -- but eBay will buy Oracle someday. The value will have moved so much to people who are not now seen as software suppliers."

.... "Amazon is the furthest along this path, in a lot of ways. Amazon really understands that they are becoming a platform."

[Micah's Weblog]

Great article! I am convinced that we can now 'see" the new business model and it is made up of two components - build to order - the primary Dell focus and build community - the primary eBay focus. Amazon has both of these aspects in its model.

New entrants that pull this new model off well will destroy the traditional competition. Two areas that I think are most open to this attack are post secondary eductaion and chronic health care.

Why do I think this? More later

Regular Exercise - A Habit?

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 15:45:48 GMT

Why is it that I am 53 and have ignored well-intentioned and factual advice for 30 years to take regular exercise? I know that it will be good for me. I know that this is not baloney like many diets are. Taking more exercise is unquestionably good for me. For a while, I buckle under the social pressure and try it. I go to the gym, buy a rowing machine. If the barrier was only awareness, I should have taken it up years ago.

Why is this important? Because our health system will buckle soon if we don't find a way of living better. On PEI 59% of Islanders are overweight and the trend for children in particular is frightening. This is a health epidemic for the developing world. We are trying lots of things and making lots of excuses for why we are making no progress - the trend is getting worse at a non linear rate.

There are lots of theories for why we participate so poorly in taking exercise. The influence of TV as a passivity driver. The lack of organized sport at school. Busing at school. The lack of time in adult life because the demands at work are so great. The lack of coaching and facilities - if only we had a community pool, gym track etc. The diversion of sport money for the masses by a focus on elite sport etc. I wonder if the answer is both simpler and more complex than this?

I have been talking to my friend Brian Chambers and our bottom line as to why we have become the most slothful group in history is rooted in two questions. - Is taking regular exercise a habit? Is not taking regular exercise a habit?

Think a bit now. Is your day not right without exercise or is taking exercise an interruption to your day? Do you have withdrawal symptoms if you do not take exercise or do you feel worse if you do? These feelings are symptoms of habits. Habits are hard to change. You are a smoker and you know you should quit but cannot. You drink more than you should but you cannot stop. Merely having a lot of information is not enough to stop an ingrained habit. Acquiring a new habit is equally a challenge.

If taking/not taking regular exercise is a habit then much of how we have approached the issue of participation in regular exercise is probably not going to work. This is quite a statement - so let's do a bit more digging.

Why is it that we see only a few of us - we used to call them Fitness Freaks or Nuts - come rain or shine pounding the roads? Why do some some middle-aged men still get out every week in the season and play hockey while most of us only watch it?. Why do some women have to go to the gym every day and others not? Brian and I believe that those who take regular exercise have a habit. They have a need to take exercise every day. It is part of their whole life - they cannot imagine not taking exercise. Regular exercise defines them - it is part of their identity - it is who they are.

I bet that the opposite is true. Some people cannot "see" themselves taking exercise. Let's look at me and see how hard it is for me to take up this new habit and to break my lifetime habit of not taking exercise.

I have never taken to the habit of regular exercise. I think I have to go back to my early days to find out why. My parents did not take it seriously. They in fact sneered at it. Any prowess in this regard was ignored at home. In my home the habit was to use the mind. This is where the family reward system kicked in. "Sport" at home was winning the argument, breaking into the conversation or being seen as amusing. Secondly I had low conventional physical skills. In particular I have very poor hand ball foot coordination. I had to play "sport sport" at school but for me with no natural aptitude, "sport sport" was for me an exercise in humiliation. In primary school the team would groan when I was picked usually - last. At Harrow, I was the star of the 5th 11 in cricket. I dreaded Sports Day at my prep school where the only event I could be in was the 200 metres where they put all the slobs. Sport was defined in my youth as a team sport that usually involved skill with a ball of some sort. I can't do this. Now if I had been introduced to yoga, tai chi or rowing I might have found a mind/body sport that fitted me - but that was not the culture of sport then nor is it now at schools.

I never developed the habit of exercise as a boy. In fact I developed another habit - a lifelong dislike of using an awkward body and a lifelong love of the world of the mind. I have instead the habit of reading - in a poor week only one book. In a good week maybe 7 books. (This has been a good week) Many of my athletic friends tell me that they do not have the time to read. I sense that we are at two ends of a polarity.

There are the habits of the mind and the habits of the body. There appear to be extreme positions for each habit. If you are extreme at one end it may preclude you having time to indulge in the other. Some manage both but I sense that there is only so much time. Then there seems to be a huge group in the middle of people who neither read nor take exercise.

Habits can be formed and broken. At the right time habits are easy to form. All established habits are very difficult to break or change. It is important to consider this if we want to find a way of increasing the overall participation of people in regular exercise.

When are many of our habits formed? I suggest to you that regular reading and regular exercise are both habits that are mainly set when we are very young? Homes with no books rarely produce compulsive readers. Homes with no trophies rarely produce folks who define themselves through the use of their bodies. I am sure there are exceptions but this is my observed experience. I point out the home because we currently look to school and to the workplace as the frontier for improving participation. I am not saying don't try there. I am suggesting that we look earlier as well.

Breaking habits is so difficult. If not taking exercise is a habit then exhortation and more information will not get us to change. How easy is it to acquire the habit of literacy as an adult? How easy to give up drink or to give up smoking? Breaking bad habits is very hard. It took my father's death to give us as a family the motive to pull back on our drinking.

Some questions for you:

Do you take regular exercise? If the answer is yes or no - Did you have a role model/support at home? Did you have a natural aptitude for ball and team sports?
Do you have a habit such as smoking or weight or drink. - Can you give this up? Has it been easy to give this up? Could you do this without a support group? What type of support group might you need - of peers or experts?
Are you a team sport person? If you are when did this begin and why
Do you like individual activities? If yes when did this begin and what influenced you?
Are you a big fan of professional sports? If so, did elite sport get you involved in taking exercise yourself ? If yes - what age were you when you gave it up and what do you do now?
Did you play pavement hockey or some kid organized sport when you were young (skateboarding?) If yes, what do you think of adult organized sport?

Please help Brian and I with these questions and with our main thesis that regular exercise is a habit. Brian is the Chairman of Sport PEI and is tasked with the challenge of finding a way to take Canada's most inactive and fattest province and making it the opposite - no small thing. We are convinced that doing what we have been doing but harder will not work. So we are going outside of the box and asking ourselves the odd question - why if we know that exercise is good for us are we not taking this advice.

If we are right and the core issue is habit, then we will have to develop strategies to encourage the formation of the habit. This implies working with the families of very young children before they get to school. It implies finding out how to motivate parents to behave differently. What would be a motivation that would work?

We know that many kids will self organize. Ball hockey and skateboarding are being surppressed in the guise of safety and order. Should we not look at the effectiveness of kid organized sport?.

It implies developing strategies to do the really hard stuff of helping people like me to change a habit of no exercise. How could we do this? What are the lessons of smoking and drinking that may help? What is it about schools and the workplace that are barriers and what can we do there to help?

What are the convenience issues? Where are all the places and where is the time? Why do so many schools close their doors and hence gyms and pools after 3pm? Whose school is it anyway? What is the reality of our climate for taking regular exercise where we have 6 months of winter? Can we take back the time between 2.30 when school finishes and say 5.30 when 80 % of parents return home and fill this with a fun time for exercise? Can we fill the 6 weeks of summer vacation when parents are working with a fun time when kids take exercise. Can we make it convenient to nip out for lunch at work and take exercise?