March 2006

Most people are aware of the emergence of knowledge worker sector and its growth over the past 30 years.  What people are far less aware of is the dramatic shift in where some of these knowledge workers are actually located. First world countries late last century talked up the fact that a significant percentage of their population were indeed knowledge workers but unbeknownst to most, more and more of these knowledge workers were actually not located in first world countries but instead these services were being outsourced from Third World countries where pay rates were significantly lower while maintaining the same level of capability.

If you rang a help desk in the 1990s, more than likely you would have heard a voice similar to your own, and the person you were talking to would have been based in your country.  If you ring a help desk today it is far more likely that you will hear an accent you are unfamiliar with and the person you are speaking to be in either India, the Philippines, Southeast Asia etc. In an excellent book entitled “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink[1] the author provides some staggering statistics:

“Each year, India’s colleges and universities produce about 350,000 engineering graduates.  That’s one reason that more than half of the Fortune 500 companies now outsource software work to India.  For instance about 48 percent of GE’s software is developed in India.  The company employs a whopping 20,000 people where (and even posted signs in its Indian officers reading, “Trespassers will be recruited”). Hewlett-Packard employs several thousand software engineers in India.  Siemens employs 3000 computer programmers in India and is moving another 15,000 such jobs overseas.  Oracle is a 5000 person Indians to.  The largest Indian IT consultancy Wipro employs some 17,000 engineers who do work for Home Depot, Nokia and Sony.  And the list goes on.”[2]

Before we get too depressed about such statistics we should reflect on the fact that a far greater percentage of our primary industry employees have seen their jobs disappear overseas and yet the unemployment rate has not increased and has possibly even decreased, if anything. The shifting “sands of employment sector growth” simply continue unabated, but more sand is shifting far quicker as the winds of change blow with increasing power.

Not only are some of our knowledge workers finding their jobs moving overseas but increasingly other knowledge workers are finding their jobs shifting to automated responses via the Internet.  This applies to knowledge worker jobs ranging from lawyers to doctors to architects.

What is becoming apparent is that the term knowledge worker actually refers to a melding of two different aspects of thinking which are displayed in differing balances with each person. Firstly there are those knowledge workers whose logical, sequential and analytical capabilities allow them to systematically problem solve and resolve complex issues.  Secondly there are those knowledge workers who have the same capabilities to a greater or lesser degree, but also have a second set of capabilities based around being able to be creative, take risks and make unique and unusual combinations of ideas and to follow their intuition and their hunch that a particular idea might have greater potential and is worth investing more energy and effort into.

The first group of knowledge workers are finding their jobs at considerable risk but those who have a balance of capabilities across the creative and the systematic are finding a whole new set of opportunities. Frans Johansson authored a book entitled “The Medici Effect: Breakthroughs Insights at Intersections of Ideas, Concepts and Cultures”[3]. The thesis behind this book is that traditional academic disciplines are no longer where innovation and ingenuity are to be found. The most prolific source of new ideas and innovation is occurring at the intersection between academic disciplines where new ideas and innovative systems, products and environments are to be found. Frans goes on to explain that individuals with particular capabilities in a particular field often work within their field only, never looking beyond the “fence” to see what possibilities lie beyond the boundaries that field is contained within.

”The key difference between a field and an intersection of fields lies in our concepts within them are combined.  If you operate within a field, you are primarily able to combine concepts within that particular field, generating ideas that evolve along a particular direction – what I call correctional ideas.  When you step into the intersection you can combine concepts between multiple deals, generating ideas badly in new directions – what I call intersectional ideas.  The difference between these two types of ideas is significant.”[4]

Innovative ideas are increasingly arising from combinations of fields which have remained separated by academic disciplines. Early innovators that combined knowledge from a range of disciplines and created intersectional ideas include people such as Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other notable renaissance innovators.

Why is the intersection of disciplines or cultures such a vibrant place for creativity?  We discussed one reason in the last two chapters: It increases the chances the idea will be good because it brings together very different concepts from very different fields . . . . . . but there is another, stronger, reason for its power.  When you connect to separate fields, it also set off an exponential increase in the of unique concept combination, a veritable explosion of ideas. Or, to put it succinctly, if being productive is the best strategy to innovate then the Intersection is the best place to innovate.”[5]

There is no doubt that many of the innovations that we see today are being developed at the Intersection of seemingly disconnected fields. One of the key thinking principles is that you can never be innovative and ingenious unless you understand the concepts which underpin what you are trying to be innovative and ingenious about[6]. This principle means that we urgently need to:

1. shift the end point of teaching and learning from simply knowing about topics and ideas to one of developing conceptual frameworks of understanding about knowledge and ideas.

2. Empowering learners with the capability of being independent lifelong learners so that they can develop new understanding of ideas that are not within their current knowledge framework.

Innovators do not just require knowledge bases and understanding but they also require a raft of processes for continually building new understanding as new knowledge becomes available. In order to be a successful 21^st-century learner students need a familiarity with appropriate technologies but also be able to apply sifting, sorting and scanning skills to the vast information resources that they are confronted with, as well as the ability to work well together, both in a face-to-face and a virtual environment.

Creating knowledge is about synthesising a wide range of information from numerous different resources and sources with each of these elements represented by different media. The meaning of knowledge is clearly changing and in the excellent book “Catching the Knowledge Wave?”  Jane Gilbert provides this observation:

In the world outside education, knowledge’s meaning is changing.  Here, people are increasingly thinking of knowledge not as a thing, developed and shared in people, but as a kind of energy, something that does things. They are using the word knowledge as a verb, not a noun, as a process rather than a product. Knowing, learning, and doing things with knowledge are now more important than knowledge itself.”[7]

There is a new balance emerging between knowing, understanding and also having the capability of engaging in the wide range of different processes which underpin the concept of lifelong learning. This will put added pressure on the amount of “content” which can be “delivered” by schools.  The notion of delivering education via the school system is very much a book-based education paradigm concept and schools increasingly need to discard this teaching and learning concept and urgently adopt a more facilitatory role in the classroom.

Increasingly we will need to engage our young people in activities that combine wide-ranging skills and competencies, integrating ideas from across the different disciplines, encouraging them to make new connections, applying creativity in entirely new ways. Once again, these learning ideals are time-consuming and require rich Personal Learning Environments within which learners can live and work.

There are five key capabilities which stand out as being essential in order to be a worker in the creative sector.

·  The capability to communicate and express new ideas via strong narratives which make use of rich language, and rich multimedia presentation tools.

·  Almost all new ideas are developed and refined in a social context when the idea is described to another person.  A person’s “nodal network” needs to be enhanced by significant social contact and interaction.

·  Almost all significant innovations now have a “social creativity” factor.  This means that the creator needs to be aware of social fashions and trends and understand the nature of being human.  Being only technically correct is no longer sufficient.

·  The capacity to synthesise different ideas in different contexts into a single understanding and be able to “interrogate” the new understanding to look for new possibilities, provides a powerful gateway for creativity.

·  The capacity to deconstruct other people’s ideas and then apply new understanding or ideas to the reconstruction process allows the possibility of new creative opportunities.

The sub-title to the book by Daniel Pink “A Whole New Mind” is “Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age” and there is considerable significance in the sub-title. Within education we have moved from an end-point focus on knowing to a focussing the end-point on understanding and then we have added the corollary to this that understanding must be overlayed with capability; the capability to apply that understanding in unique and creative ways.

As we increasingly move down this continuum we find ourselves challenged by the changes in teaching practices required and the significant reduction in the amount of time available to facilitate the building of the core knowledge bases that are also necessary. The necessity to audit what knowledge we should be prioritizing and removing from the curriculum traditional knowledge bases which are becoming redundant takes time; time that may educators will find hard to come by.

Comments and suggestions to

Mark Treadwell

Teachers@work.co.nz

home | newsletter & sites | top 1000 sites | surfing the web
online virtual library | internet policies | consultancy | lecture notes
teacher's toolkit | server hardware / software | connecting to the internet
publishing a web site | network architecture | international vacancies