Abundance, the mother of purchase orders

Good friend of the Advisory Bored blog, Paul over at Last Great Road Trip, is at it again. He's been busy playing around with the technology. When Paul isn't giving some one's data center an extreme makeover, he's either roaming the trails in a Toyota FJ or blogging about roaming the trails in a Toyota FJ.

In a recent post, Paul decided to build himself a good old fashion mobile GPS command center out of inexpensive or free parts.  A second-hand laptop, some open source software and an inexpensive GPS receiver makeup his system (I'm guessing the nice vehicle mount for the laptop described in a subsequent post cost more than the rest of the system put together).

All of which reminds me that resource constraints aren't always a bad thing. Sometimes we forget that a little tinkering, some kludging, a roll of duct tape and a bit of ingenuity can lead to some pretty interesting outcomes and some really powerful learning (which is, after all, the only outcome of any real importance). More money doesn't necessarily improve learning.

Certainly you can plop 30 students down in a lab, each with a copy of "Google Maps for Dummies", but does that really make for more compelling resume entry than the experience of "building a mobile GPS command center, including configuration of the hardware, operating system, mapping software and integration with freely available online map information for under $75.00"? Do you really think the former learned more than the latter?

Remember, necessity is the mother of invention. Abundance is the mother of purchase orders.

If it ain't broke, re-envision it

I've been reconsidering my If I had a hammer post this week because of some discussions I've been having about the redesign of our "broken" web site.  I've tried to steer folks away from terms like "broken" and "fix" when dealing with changing requirements, but the average person isn't so concerned about the semantical differences. I found myself having to be much clearer in my reasoning than I was in the blog post.

Now I don't really care to engage in pointless arguments over semantics if I don't have to, but our words do matter a great deal.  The language we use drives our thinking and, consequently, drives our behavior.  When you say something is broken, you are inherently saying that the system in question - whether a simple appliance or a large social institution - is fundamentally sound and still capable of producing the outcome you desire, if you can fix the one malfunctioning part.

Saying that a system is broken puts you into troubleshooting mode. Think about troubleshooting for a moment. If a user says "my computer won't work", what's the first thing that comes to mind?  Does it involve the electrical outlet or perhaps you want clarification on the current status.  Either way, in troubleshooting mode you immediately move to the beginning of the process and work forward asking a series of yes/no questions looking for components that aren't functioning or are not functioning to standard.  That's how we are trained.

What if, instead, that user said "I have all these new job tasks and I can't find the tools to help me get them done. This computer won't work for me."? Your attention is immediately focused toward the end of the process and the outcomes. Your questions are open-ended and probing for understanding. You are in requirements mode. Imagine the look you would get if your first response to this second question was "Is the computer plugged in?".

In a recent post, "Who's Asking", Will Richardson advises leaders in educational reform that they must some how satisfy the complaints of the school-is-broken crowd without losing sight of real need, which is a re-envisioned education system focused on 21st century outcomes.  In my mind, however, there is only so much that reformers can do until the question is rephrased from "what's wrong" to "what should we do". This is pretty much the same thing I said in this rant 2 years ago in response to a Scott McLeod post about building community backing for 21st century skills.

I think IT leadership is (still) uniquely positioned to help educational reformers, but not until we are clear in our own minds that we must first redefine the goals of education before we change the structure and funding of education. Let me recommend this post on Redesigning Education in Fast Company Design as a starting point.

Tag, you're it

This week I was investigating QR Codes and Microsoft Tags when I came across this article from EDUCAUSE . As a quick background, QR Codes and Tags are types of matrix or 2 dimensional barcodes that contain information that a reader on a smartphone (using the built in camera) can use to route users to a website, add contact information to an address book or make a phone call.

For instance, the image you see here is a Microsoft Tag with the web address of the Advisory Bored blog embedded. If you had a smartphone with the free tag reader you could point your smartphone camera at the image and it would launch the browser and navigate to the Advisory Bored blog. Now imagine if the image were on a business card, placed in a newspaper ad or printed on the side of a bus. (I was researching the idea of printing a Tag on those big white land use signs that go up whenever there is a new building development or a zoning code change.)

It was not, however, the use of QR Codes in particular that most interested me in the EDUCAUSE article; it was the cross-discipline student project highlighted on the first page.  The project has at least four major aspects.  First, there is the biology, compiling the information about the plants.  Second, the team members had to deal with technological issues like information access and user education/training. Third, there was the information management challenge to make sure the content presentation was sensitive to different technologies (phones vs PCs).  Finally, there was a myriad of logistical issues from coordinating with the docents to printing the QR Codes to staffing the guest booth.

More and more, work is characterized by this type of team project in which different people from different areas of the organization (and across organizations) must collaborate to accomplish a goal.  It is my sense, however, that educational assessment, particularly in secondary schools, is still focused on individual performance.  On more than one occasion I have heard from teachers that group projects present significant challenges for student assessment.  That's unfortunate, because those are precisely the skills the workforce of today and tomorrow need.  

An example that's a little closer to home is the Western Washington University V45 project team for the Progressive X Prize competition, a $10 million dollar challenge to build production-capable cars getting 100 MPGe.  Look down that participant list.  You've got business students, materials sciences students and vehicle design students all working toward that prize.  (The V45 was eventually eliminated, but did an outstanding job getting to the finals.)

So what's the take-away?  I'll toss out four, just to get us started:

1. project management and collaboration skills are essential and should be fostered even at the high school level
2. projects that cross areas of study and extend out beyond the campus are far more interesting and potentially more educational
3. teachers will need to develop curriculum that is team-based and be prepared to address all the issues that teams present (such as the ability for teams to "fire" members who aren't participating)
4. advisory boards need to be clear and indicate if they think a program should emphasize "team project work" or "individual project work"

If I had a hammer

Suppose I asked you to join two pieces of wood, two 2 by 4's, three feet long.  I need you to join the boards at each end and in the middle.  I give you a hammer and you walk to the right end of the boards where you find a nail already started.  Somewhat tentatively you take several swings before finally driving the nail in.

You take a step to the left and at the mid-point of the boards you find another nail.  More confidently, you take a couple of really good swings and drive the nail home. Finally, you take another step to the left and at the left end of the board you find ..... a screw.

My question to you is a simple one. Is the hammer broken?

The obvious answer is no and most people would be smart enough to either get a screwdriver or replace the screw with a nail. A few truly creative, out-of-the-box thinkers, such as myself, would simply pound in the screw with the hammer, although I don't recommend it for finish work.  (Oh please, that revelation didn't really surprise you, did it?)

Still, there are those that must bring work to a complete halt so they may blame the task master, the hammer, the screw or the over-reaching federal government seeking to nationalize the construction industry. 

It is this question, is the hammer broken, that I come back to again and again as the battle over educational reform rages on.  For far too many people, the current educational system can't merely be a tool that successfully met the challenges of the past, but is not design to meet our new requirements.  It must be broken and someone must be to blame.  However, as Gerry Weinberg reminds us in his wonderful book The Secrets of Consulting:

The chances of solving a problem decline the closer you get to finding out who was the cause of the problem.  (Spark's Law of Problem Solution)

The challenge then, is for us interested in the education of the IT professionals of the future to wade into the debate with our required outcomes in hand.  We must continue to press for a discussion of the what and why of education, while steadfastly refusing to be drawn into the debate of how and who.  Most of all, we must resist the temptation to play the blame game.

Time for an IT apprenticeship

A recent New York Times (NYT) article, Plan B: Skip College, examines whether a vocational alternative, like apprenticeships, needs to be offered to students for whom college is not a good fit. In it, author Jacques Steinberg says

A small but influential group of economists and educators is pushing another pathway: for some students, no college at all. It’s time, they say, to develop credible alternatives for students unlikely to be successful pursuing a higher degree, or who may not be ready to do so.

Regular readers of this blog know that I favor having many different paths to the skills, knowledge and competencies required of IT professionals (see 2+2+2 = Bachelor of Applied Science), so I won't bore you with my understanding of the article.  You can read it for yourself, along with some interesting commentary here.

Instead, I want to get a sense from local IT managers if there is a place for something like an apprenticeship for IT staff and if there are openings available to those with less than a bachelors degree.  Specifically, I am focusing on corporate/government IT, not high-tech companies of the Microsoft variety.  These are positions like help desk, email administrator and programmer at banks, retailers and insurance companies.  I ask, because I know a lot of the jobs out there seem to carry educational requirements that leave many capable people out of the running. There's not much value in an apprenticeship if you won't hire the participants after they complete the program.

So I have a few question for all you IT leaders out there:

1.  Do you have or would you be willing to add an entry level IT position in your organization whose educational requirements would be fulfilled by vocational education at the high school or community college level?  What types of position would that be (help desk, email administration, business analyst)?
2. Are there any IT certifications in particular that you would consider as replacing education requirements in your hiring consideration?
3. Would you be willing to be part of an apprenticeship program, some sort of public/private partnership to ensure training and work opportunities?