12.20.07
What Does Worker 2.0 Look Like?
I read Kristin Hokanson’s post titled “Students Speak are you listening?” In it students share their perspective of what they think the “real world” will be like. Since I’ve actually been “out there” before coming to teaching, I can tell you that these students are pretty well on the mark.
This past Summer I attended training on web design – it wasn’t targeted to teachers but rather web admins (I maintain our school’s website). The content of the training is irrelevant – it was my observation of one of the company’s employees, a web programmer, that kept me watching each day of the three I was there for training.
It turns out that “just in case” the trainers needed support, they wanted the web programmers right there in the conference center (the company hosted the training at a hotel’s conference center). So the programmers packed up and plugged their laptops into the Raddison instead of the company LAN. Point one: work can happen anywhere. It just so happens that I was assigned a seat next to one of the programmers, a Chinese-American woman about 25 years old. What I watched as she worked was not short of incredible. This woman was working on a client’s website, tweaking CSS and PHP code. Her skills appeared to be very good, but what was most interesting was that she had no fewer than 4 Yahoo! Instant Messenger windows open. Of those four, only one was displaying the chat in English. The others were in Chinese symbols – I believe she was typing in Pinyin. The thing is, I’d watch her fiddle with code, then she’d IM a friend, then she’d copy/paste their reply into her code editor and viola! the code would work. It occurred to me (point two) this company hadn’t hired just her, they had hired her social network. This was really significant to me as I sat there – she was REALLY EFFICIENT. She’d jump from one project to another – applying what she had learned not just to the one case she had asked about, but to other websites she was working on. Point three: what some of us consider hyperactive she considered her forte. She naturally switched between applications and projects in a nonlinear fashion.
So now I reflect on traditional education as the students did in Kristin’s post. Working on multiple projects/subjects at once is rarely considered in school. Partly because it is really REALLY tough to manage a student who is working on multiple assignments, partly because not every student can do this. Perhaps courses on project management are as appropriate for K-12 than they are for Business majors in college.
In traditional education, social connections are not considered to be part of instruction – sure, maybe collaborative projects and “pods” are used, but what about extensions beyond the classroom walls? Are we teaching our students how to link to people outside their circle for help?
I don’t know whether the laggards of education will ever “get it” – and perhaps we don’t need to teach students how to form a social network, but perhaps we can guide them on selecting people based on their skillset – again “Business Major” topics.
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