Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

The Talent Divide

By

Thomas Friedman quotes John Hagel III in his column today, talking about the “Big Shift” that he wrote about with John Seely Brown in their book The Power of Pull. What resonates here is the idea that to be successful in the “flow of ideas” that we are now a part of, we need to be constantly growing our talents. (Read: Our kids need to be constantly growing their talents.) Here is the snip:

In their recent book, “The Power of Pull,” they suggest that we’re in the early stages of a “Big Shift,” precipitated by the merging of globalization and the Information Technology Revolution. In the early stages, we experience this Big Shift as mounting pressure, deteriorating performance and growing stress because we continue to operate with institutions and practices that are increasingly dysfunctional — so the eruption of protest movements is no surprise.

Yet, the Big Shift also unleashes a huge global flow of ideas, innovations, new collaborative possibilities and new market opportunities. This flow is constantly getting richer and faster. Today, they argue, tapping the global flow becomes the key to productivity, growth and prosperity. But to tap this flow effectively, every country, company and individual needs to be constantly growing their talents.

“We are living in a world where flow will prevail and topple any obstacles in its way,” says Hagel. “As flow gains momentum, it undermines the precious knowledge stocks that in the past gave us security and wealth. It calls on us to learn faster by working together and to pull out of ourselves more of our true potential, both individually and collectively. It excites us with the possibilities that can only be realized by participating in a broader range of flows. That is the essence of the Big Shift.”

How long it will take for the larger population to recognize the dysfunction of the institution of schooling remains to be seen. But this idea of constant upgrading resonates and begs the question (once again) how are we preparing our kids for this? How are we helping them learn faster and work with others to pull out their true potential? How are we acclimating them to a world where skills and dispositions are more important that carrying around “knowledge stocks” in their heads?

Unfortunately, right now the answer appears to be “not much." 

In all of this, I can’t help but think of Steve Jobs, who by any stretch was a visionary and in many ways an outlier. But he’s also a model for what Hagel and Brown are talking about. 

My Kids Need Some Creative Disobedience

By

Seems like I’m hitting a creativity theme here of late, but if you have 15 minutes to read this most excellent piece titled “The Educational Value of Creative Disobedience” by Andrea Kuszewski in Scientific American, you won’t regret it. It’s a research based look at why traditional teaching methods suck the creativity out of us and the hard work each of us needs to do to escape the effects as we grow into adulthood. The last paragraph captures the idea and the urgency:

What is supposed to be the most critical learning period for shaping children into the leaders of tomorrow has evolved over the years into a stifling of the creative instinct—wasting the age of imagination—which we then spend the rest of our lives trying to reconnect with. The time has never been more ready for systemic change than right now, and we’ve never had better tools to achieve this level of creative disobedience, to successfully prepare our children for the big challenges that lie ahead. It might be uncomfortable and take a bit of work, but our future depends on this radical change in order to survive.

Let me just add here the effects on creativity of the assessments we currently use are no less of a factor in this. They are what drive our teaching methods, and until we find a path to assessing something other than basic skills and content knowledge, we are assured of deepening the creativity crisis that is already here.

One more quick note of connection. I’m almost done with Eli Pariser’s great new book “The Filter Bubble,” and I hope to be blogging some thoughts on it shortly. But there is deep resonance between his thesis (watch his TED Talk to get the gist) that current search metrics are severely narrowing our access to the world of ideas and this quote from the Kuszewski article:

While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution…it seems that by directly instructing children—giving them the answers to problems, then testing them on memory—we are inhibiting creative problem solving, to quite a significant degree.

In a few words, we are killing creativity on all fronts. And we’re going to have to change the way we teach (as well as, to a large extent, what we teach) if we’re to resuscitate it in our kids.

And, in the end, it’s not just about our kids. We need creative, “problem-finding” teachers in our classrooms as well. How do we get there?

Software as Self-Expression

By

I love this perspective of software as “an individual’s expression of creativity, much like poetry or music.” The sooner we fully embrace programming as a completely creative act the better. 

Today’s students have grown-up tech savvy. They live in a world of exploring the Web and of personalizing their devices. Cyberspace is the anytime, anywhere laboratory where you can design and run your own experiments by writing just a little software. It’s affordable by anyone with access to the Internet. And each piece of software is an individual’s expression of creativity, much like poetry or music. Computer science can be fun and empowering.