July 22, 2006: The Classroom of the Future

Things have been quiet here because this past week I had the opportunity to sit in on a workshop being conducted for the benefit of about half a dozen principals from the California public education system. The purpose of the workshop was basically to let them know what was out there on the "bleeding edge" of new technologies, particularly information technologies, as a way of getting them to offer their own visions of the classroom of the future. Listening to their presentations on the final day, I was struck by a distinction that I first raised in discussing the opposition of lexis and praxis: While most technical presentations I attend are heavily noun-based (usually concentrating on features and their attributes), the grammatical foundations of all the presentations the principals gave were heavily (and refreshingly) rooted in verbs. Given my preoccupation with this need to give "equal time" to both nouns and verbs, I was very glad to see that attention reflected in the way in which these representatives of the educational community expressed themselves.

However, following the presentations, the discussion took a twist that was also very interesting. Whenever the conversation turns to any form of change management in an educational system, whether or not it involves new technology, the question that always arises involves what it will take to make the change happen in a setting that is painfully strapped for resources and always seems to be the victim of prevailing political trends. One suggestion that was raised was that we could not count on change management coming from the government; so it would have to come from the commercial sector, which, after all had the most to gain (or lose) from the quality (or lack thereof) of public education. At this point I realized that one of the principals had invoked the language of scientific management on one of his slides, although, to his benefit, he realized that one had to think beyond questions of "productivity" to questions of "customer satisfaction." Nevertheless, it made me think about the cultural context in which we think of the stakeholders in our educational system as "customers."

This then reminded me of a book that I read with great relish at the beginning of this year: Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that have Shaped the Administration of Public Schools, by Raymond E. Callahan. Never mind that this book was published in 1962; the extent that it was still relevant today was, to say the least, chilling. In a nutshell this book provided an excellent review of the principles of "scientific management," which basically originated from the work of Charles Taylor, and then discussed the ways in which public school systems tried to embrace those principles to the general detriment of the quality of education. Callahan recognized that the overall goal of scientific management is efficiency of production and that this goal is, at the very least, at cross-purposes (if not fundamentally opposed) to goals of education, which, to invoke terminology I raised on June 13, have more to do with effectiveness than efficiency. Then I realized that, for all the lip service that has been paid to getting beyond the narrow view of scientific management in the enterprise, whether it involves "total quality," "knowledge management," or rhetoric about "customer relationships," most enterprises are still locked into that goal of efficiency of production, even if, in the Brave New World of services and globalization, they do not always have a clear idea of what it is they actually produce! Consequently, it may be a vain hope to expect that change in the educational establishment will come from a private sector that may be willing to talk about the value of effectiveness "in theory" but, when it comes to practice, it still locked into thinking about efficiency of production.

July 06, 2006: An Observation by Isaiah Berlin

I want to continue the theme of efficiency and effectiveness by citing a passage from Isaiah Berlin's essay on "Political Judgement:"

Bismarck understood something which let us say, Darwin or James Clerk Maxwell did not need to understand, something about the public medium in which he acted, and he understood it as sculptors understand stone or clay; understood, that is, in this particular case, the potential reactions of relevant bodies of Germans or Frenchmen or Italians or Russians, and understood this without, so far as we know, any conscious inference or careful regard to the laws of history, or laws of any kind, and without recourse to any other specific key or nostrum – not those recommended by Maistre, or Hegel or Nietzsche or Bergson or some of their modern irrationalist successors, any more than those of their enemies, the friends of science. He was successful because he had the particular gift of using his experience and observation to guess successfully how things would turn out.

June 14, 2006: CRM and the End of Civil Society as we Know it?

Yesterday, E-Commerce Times ran a story from the Sacramento Bee by Anita Creamer about the "user-hostile" customer service she received in conjunction with an airline reservation she had made. I decided to provide a talkback comment that built on yesterday's theme of the loss of effectiveness in the name of efficiency. My bottom line was that a call center based on CRM software may be more to blame than the airline industry, since that software is really not designed to support engagement with the customer. Nevertheless, the software may be a symptom of the general decline of civil discourse in society today, not just in the workplace but also in leisure activities.

June 13, 2006: Control and Consequences

I want to get back on the theme of the "half life of technical education" and why I am concerned about it. I suppose it all has to do with why I am trying to tilt at the windmills of technical education (and probably just about any other form of specialized education) in the first place. My concern is basically one of objectives, because it seems to me that the focus of such educational programs always comes down to some approach to controlling the world. Now that seems like a perfectly reasonable way to go, particularly in the mind-set of post-Enlightenment Western civilization; but, as we need to become more aware of our role in the world at large, we must not fool ourselves into believing that it is the only way to go or that "control solves everything." What is often overlooked when we focus to intently on control is that the world is a complex case; and, whatever control we may have, it will never be a handle on all that complexity. Thus, at the very least, we need to live by the motto that control has consequences.

This is particularly important when we try to reduce everything we do to making decisions and acting on the results of those decisions. In this regard I need to draw attention to (and recommend) the book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, by Richard Neustadt and Ernest May. This book is basically a series of case studies, each of which involves an act of presidential decision making in a time of crisis. The theme behind the entire book involves the way in which Neustadt and May characterize what they mean by "thinking in time." Basically, it involves asking two fundamental questions:

1. How did we get into this situation?
2. Given a course of action to consider, what will be the consequences of following that course?

In other words "thinking in time" involves more than analyzing a "state" in isolation: You have to understand that path through past states that led up to the present state; and, on the basis of your understanding that (and other) paths, you need to make a well-informed guess as to where the path out of that state (determined by the course of action) will lead (and, to invoke chess language, you have to look ahead more than a single move).

This also brings in an important reflection of decision support technology that goes all the way back to the pioneers of that technology: Peter Keen and Michael Scott Morton. Their first book on the subject, Decision Support Systems, begins by drawing the distinction between efficient and effective decision making. The punch line, of course, is that it is always necessary to strive for the latter, rather than the former. I believe that one of the hazards of the way in which specialized education is taught (if not of the subject-matter itself) is that efficiency tends to get the upper hand over effectiveness, simply because it is easier to evaluate efficiency, while evaluating effectiveness demands all the subtleties of "thinking in time." (We are back in the world of looking for your keys where the light is better, even if you know you did not lose them there.)

So perhaps there should be some corner of our educational process that makes sure we do not forget that it can be all right to just live in the world, without necessarily controlling (or feeling you can control) it. I do not mean this as a granola-based go-with-the-flow philosophy. Rather, to reflect on the quote in my Blast, you should be able to live in the world without "fear, superstition and pettiness," because the world throws so much at that stuff in our path that we should delude ourselves into believing the the only way to deal with it is to control it!