I just read a really positive article on Flux about Intel, Microsoft and Cisco getting together and to call for a change in the way we “do” education called Time for a change? Largely I agreed with it. Certainly, we need a change, we need our education to reflect the way we do business…. wait wait wait. Zip it right there. I think we need education to reflect the way we’d like to do business.
The flux article states the trio’s position as being:
“They argue that in contemporary business people work in teams across disciplinary boundaries and use a variety of social, digital and physical resources informed but unconstrained by disciplinary to solve complex ill structured problems”
I think this is an idealised perception about what happens in the business world, either that or I’m just too young to remember a time when things were worse. What I generally observe is a younger generation who have been educated slightly differently and had different life experiences wanting change (impetuously and vehemently demanding change in some cases) managed by an older generation who tend to sway more towards the opinion that knowledge is power, technology isn’t entirely trustworthy, and flying people in for big meetings is the way to go.
Before you think I’m doing a bit of management beating here, let me explain. I’m trying to show the other side of things as I all too often read about this rosy and positive view, but I don’t see it and hear about it in the real world. I think that the kinds of people who contribute online largely already have the said mentality to some point, as sharing something online is a movement toward collaboration and knowledge sharing. If we want to see more of the changes that are so enthusiastically heralded, we need to start spreading our attitudes we show in the online world to the workplace at the management level.
Education doesn’t just need to reflect what we do in the workplace, it needs to reflect the way we’d like things to be. Our future managers need to be educated in a manner that reflects how we’d like to do business, not how we actually do business now.
Filed under: education | Tagged: change, cisco, collaboration, education, flux, intel, management, microsoft
