Recent News – Self-Directed Professional Development

A Spat With My Chatbot

I had a bit of a spat with m Chatbot this morning. I was reading a post by Doc Searles on his blog. Searles wrote about his experience trying to use to answer a question about theme song for a podcast. He is the co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, along with Rick Levine, Christopher Locke and David Weinberger. It was first posted to the web in 1999 as a set of ninety-five theses about the new realities of Web Marketing. (I’m a sucker for a good manifesto, so I’ve followed him ever since. I’m also fond of nailing theses to the door of the church.)

The blog post started with the usual protestations about being forced to use Microsoft products:

Bing search took me to a page of search results about the podcast itself, which didn’t help; but I saw a chat menu under its search bar. Clicking on that brought up a huge popover headlined, “Chat mode is only available when you have access to the new Bing.” For that I need to “unlock conversational search on Microsoft Edge.”

Which I already had, but had hardly used. So I went to Bing on Edge and clicked on the Chat link. Next, it wanted me to log into Microsoft itself. This required two- factor authentication for my password manager (Dashlane) and for Microsoft. Annoying, but we live in an annoying time.

I wanted to check and see if my experience with Bing was the same as Doc’s. (He got better results from a site called Perplexity.ai).

I used the same question Doc Searles had asked: “I’ve listened to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and I wanted to know who sang the theme song. I thought it was a song by the Boswell Sisters, a vocal trio from the 1930s who were pioneers of jazz and swing. I asked my chat-bot, Bing, to confirm my guess.

Bing said that the theme song was “Flying Home” by Lionel Hampton and His Orchestra, a jazz tune from 1942 that featured a famous sax solo by Illinois Jacquet. He said it was one of the earliest examples of rock and roll elements in music, such as the backbeat, the riff, and the honking saxophone. He even gave me a link to listen to the full song.

I was skeptical. Doc had posted a blog post by the podcast host, Andrew Hickey, where he said the theme song was “Rock and Roll” by the Boswell Sisters. He said it was the first song to use the phrase “rock and roll” in its lyrics, and that it was a precursor to rockabilly and rock and roll. I quoted the text to Bing and asked her to check her facts.

Bing was adamant. He said I was confusing the theme song with the background music. He said the background music was a selection of songs that were important for the history of rock music, and one of them was indeed “Rock and Roll” by the Boswell Sisters. But he said the theme song, which played at the start and end of every episode, was “Flying Home” by Lionel Hampton and His Orchestra. He gave me more links to verify his claim.

I was stubborn. I refused to believe him. I thought he was mistaken or malfunctioning. I decided to listen to an episode of the podcast myself and prove him wrong. I opened my podcast app and played the latest episode. It only runs a few seconds, but it sure sounds like a female vocal group to me.

I decided to quit then, and realized that I had just spend 20 minutes arguing with a machine over something trivial and lost. But, I couldn’t let it go.

I wrote: I’ve gone back and listened to the introductory music of the podcast and it still sounds like a female vocal group in the intro to the podcast. But I’m going to let it go at this point. We can just agree to disagree.

Bing wrote: I understand. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between similar songs. I respect your opinion and I appreciate your willingness to let it go. I hope you enjoy the podcast and I hope we can chat again soon.

I guess I’ll leave it at that.

Using Bing AI to Fact Check

I was able to use the Bing Chat this morning to fact check the lecture at the Chautauqua.

I’m trying to use Bing as my primary interface to generative AI as much as I can. It’s currently the best free version of Large Language Model, and I’m recommending for anyone who wants to learn more about the current state of generative AI.

Note: You’ll need to use the Microsoft Edge Browser and login to a Microsoft account to get the most out of the Bing Chat feature.

Mike Huckabee spoke this morning at Chautauqua as part of the weekly theme of “Infrastructure: Building and Maintaining the Physical, Social and Civic Underpinnings of Society”. Huckabee’s introduction portrayed him as much more accomplished than I had thought. The Institution has made a substantial effort to bring more conservative speakers to balance what some see as a progressive bias.

The reason for the invitation was the fact that he was known as the “highway governor,” when he led the campaign for a 1999 bond issue to rehabilitate the state’s system of crumbling interstate highways. The bond issue was funded by increasing the gas tax by 4-5 cents a gallon.

He’s a fairly engaging speaker–he was a preacher after all. But the substance of the lecture was pretty much what I expected–including a long rant on an imaginary town called Huckville, where everyone lived according to the Golden Rule, businesses functioned with no regulations and a mythical flat tax provided all the money the society could need.

The biggest collective sigh from the audience came when he said that that that the science on climate change has not been established. To prove his point, he claimed that in the 1970’s the world was preparing for a new ice-age, which never never happened. If the scientists were wrong then, why should we believe them now?

I asked Bing for a response. Is it true that in the 1970’s scientists predicted a period of global cooling ending with a new ice age?

Bing responded.

There is a common misconception that scientists in the 1970s widely predicted a new ice age was coming. However, this is not true. According to a review of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979, only 7% of the papers suggested global cooling, while 44% suggested global warming and 49% had no explicit opinion 1. The majority of the papers that predicted cooling were based on the effects of aerosols or orbital forcing, which are natural factors that can temporarily lower the global temperature. However, these factors were outweighed by the effects of greenhouse gases, which cause long-term warming.

The idea of a new ice age was mostly propagated by the media, which often sensationalized or misinterpreted the scientific findings. For example, in 1974, Time magazine published an article titled “Another Ice Age?” that claimed “scientists have found new evidence that another ice age is on the way” 2. However, this article did not reflect the consensus of the scientific community at the time, and it was based on a few isolated studies that were later shown to be flawed or incomplete. In fact, Time magazine later corrected its mistake and published an article in 2006 titled “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.” that warned about the dangers of global warming 3.

Therefore, it is inaccurate to say that there was a period in the 1970s when scientists believed that we were entering a new ice age. The evidence for global warming was already stronger than the evidence for global cooling, and it has only become more conclusive since then.

I could have done much deeper research on this subject using more traditional search, but it would have taken a while to produce the clear text that Bing and the LLM produced in about a minute. It was worth a minute to fact check, but not much more.

References

1. [https://globalwarmingbasics.org/2016/07/02/an-ice-age-was-predicted-in-the-1970s/](https://globalwarmingbasics.org/2016/07/02/an-ice-age-was-predicted-in-the-1970s/)
2. [https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/the-1970s-ice-age-myth-and-time-magazine-covers-by-david-kirtley](https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/the-1970s-ice-age-myth-and-time-magazine-covers-by-david-kirtley)
3. [https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20060403,00.html](https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20060403,00.html)

Chautauqua Themes

– Week One (June 24–July 1): **On Friendship**
– Week Two (July 1–8): **Games: A Celebration of Our Most Human Pastimes**
– Week Three (July 8–15): **Can the Center Hold? — A Question for Our Moment**
– Week Four (July 15–22): **The State of Believing**
– Week Five (July 22–29): **Infrastructure: Building and Maintaining the Physical, Social and Civic Underpinnings of Society**
– Week Six (July 29–August 5): **A Life of Literature**
– Week Seven (August 5–12): **The National Parks: How America’s ‘Best Idea’ is Meeting 21st-Century Challenges**
– Week Eight (August 12–19): **Freedom of Expression, Imagination, and the Resilience of Democracy**
– Week Nine (August 19–27): **The Global South: Expanding the Scope of Geopolitical Understanding**

Avoiding Yak Shaving

What is Yak Shaving?

One of my focus areas for the new year (though definitely not a “resolution” in the classic sense) was to develop a new website focused on Life/Work design. There are multiple challenges to focus including being distracted by shiny objects and a passion for yak shaving. What, you might ask, is YAK shaving?

I experienced a bit of both during the midst of the pandemic when Apple finally released a new iMac with faster processors and a much improved camera for the proliferation of Microsoft Teams meetings and Zoom calls. The computer arrived and even though I had some important work scheduled, I couldn’t keep myself from starting to set it up.

I’d set up enough new computers in my life to know better, but I thought to myself how much better it would be to type my daily on that beautiful new screen rather than on a ratty old laptop. After all, it’s a Mac–how hard can it be? All I really need was one little keyboard extension cable and all that upgraded goodness could be mine!

Hours later. Multiple trips to two Best Buy stores–curb side pickup; face mask, hand sanitizer. I’m typing this on the ratty old laptop–surrounded by Yak hair. Seth Godin explained Yak Shaving in his blog in 2005:.

Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occurs when you find something you need to do. “I want to wax the car today.”

“Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”

“But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.”
“But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor’s EZPass…”

“Bob won’t lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.
“And we haven’t returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.”
And the next thing you know, you’re at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.
So, what to do?
Don’t go to Home Depot for the hose.
The minute you start walking down a path toward a yak shaving party, it’s worth making a compromise. Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later.
https://seths.blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that/

The only way to win the Yak shaving game is not to play.

Links

Seth’s Blog https://seths.blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that

Merlin Mann on Yak Shaving http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/29/mental-dialogues-yak-shaving-the-triumph-of-the-mini-review

Wictionary on Yak Shaving https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:yak_shaving#Etymology

Joi Ito on Yak Shaving https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2005/03/05/yak-shaving.html#trackbacks

[Original Link](http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gsb2000-02-11)

Photo Credit: Alexandr frolov, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Not Nearly the Threat I Thought I’d Be

One of the last presentations that I did before I finished at William and Mary was to Mark Hofer’s doctoral class on student engagement. The topic was engaging adult learners, and it gave me the opportunity to look back over my time at William and Mary and to think about how it was shaped to a small set of core values about the way adults learn. These values are based on my belief that higher education would be more effective if we saw our core mission as helping our students become more effective and confident lifelong learners rather than as experts “delivering instruction.”

For me, the prime directive for understanding adult learning is:

Adult education is concerned not with preparing people for life, but rather with helping people to live more successfully [right now]. Thus if there is to be an overarching function of the adult education enterprise, it is to assist adults to increase competence, or negotiate transitions, in their social roles (worker, parent, retiree etc.), to help them gain greater fulfillment in their personal lives, and to assist them in solving personal, [professional] and community problems[1].

Within that prime directive, I’ve tried to stay true to several principles:

Every learner is unique—as is every faculty member. Technology has given us extraordinary tools (bags of gold) to dig as deeply as we want to into areas of personal interest—and to help students learn to do the same. Our course designs should nurture that uniqueness.
Learners are whole human beings. Thoughtful course design allows faculty members to be extremely creative in helping persons develop an integrated view of themselves as lifelong learners.
The most effective classes are inquiry communities where participants work support each other in building new knowledge based on their individual backgrounds and experience. Engaging course designs allocate time to helping participants articulate and plan their own learning projects and to identifying ways they can help others accomplish their goals.
Adults tend to organize their learning around solving problems rather than around “covering the material”. The simple shift to having students think about problems that they want to solve rather than assignments that they have to complete changes the dynamic of the class.

Through my discussion with the students in Mark’s class, it became clear that these core concepts are still seen as pretty radical, both by my colleagues and by many students. I feel a bit like folksinger Arlo Guthrie, who says that he still received a fair amount of attention from the TSA when traveling by plane. He acknowledges that most of the TSA officials have never heard of him, and he feels that he should let them know that “I’m nowhere near as big a threat as I had hoped to become”. When I finished my doctorate in Adult Education at Syracuse, I never thought these ideas would still be on the fringe of higher education practice 30 years later.

Requiem for a Dead Blog

When I met our new president for the first time. “Oh, you’re Gene Roche”, she said. “I looked at your web site.” That probably wasn’t a positive comment…

The site hadn’t been updated in a year. It was a WordPress blog with a theme that had been pretty outdated when I installed it in 2016 and certainly hadn’t got any fresher over time. The posts were generally long, images were few, the language was probably overly academic, and what structure was there didn’t really reflect my interests now. The site that had once been the center of my internet presence had become an embarrassment.

Long ago, I joined a small group of evangelists centered at the University of Mary Washington to promote the notion that everyone needed their little piece of the web that they controlled and that presented them to the world in the way they wanted to be seen. (The notion hasn’t gone away. Canadian Researcher Harold Jarche just posted an article

I challenged the students in my educational technology to Google themselves and to see if they liked what came up. I asked them to imagine that they were applying for a job and the chair of the search committee did a Google search–which, of course, every search committee chair did.

Quite a few of them started to do something about it. They registered a domain of their own, bought some space on a hosting service, studied search engine optimization, and started trying to manage their digital identity. I suspect that most of those sites are dead now, replaced by Facebook, Instagram, Youtube channels, and Tic Tock.

When I look back, building and maintaining that site was one of the more creative activities of my career even with all its warts. I enjoyed the technical challenges managing PHP and MYSQL and a host of other arcane sequences of all capital letters. In spite of some dry spells, I posted a couple of hundred mini-essays that gave me the opportunity to think a bit about some interesting things that I was encountering. I wonder if 100 days ¹ of attention, of tweaking, of showing up could breathe some life into this and become an outlet for my creativity again.

The 100 days comes from a workshop that I’m participating in. I’m sure I’ll provide more context and detail as we to down this path. ↩︎

Writing my way to a retirement plan.

Yesterday, I posted an overview of a process that I had recommended to one of my former colleagues to help get started on the process of finding a possible focus for her retirement. She’s an extremely accomplished woman, with deep expertise in her field, a long record of achievement, and plenty of energy to invest in activities that are personally meaningful to her.

The recommendation was based on the belief that I had for more than a decade that every professional needs a digital home base—that you own—where you can store and share the results of your work with others who share your interests. In many of the courses that I taught over the last 10 years, I’ve encouraged students to use some of the time and energy they are investing in taking a course in establishing their digital identities in ways that will live after them. (For an early discussion of this see this post from 10 years ago.)

I also believe that it’s important that those of us who freely give advice understand the implications when someone actually takes it. In the following section, I’m going to comment on some ways that I hope to follow my own advice in creating my retirement plan.

Buy a copy of What Color is Your Parachute, and do the exercises. (This still is the best resource, to my mind, for anyone who wants to engage in systematic career change at any life stage.) ($16 for the paperback.)

I’ve done the exercises in Parachute multiple times including two trips to Bend for Dick Bolle’s two-week workshop. I’ll be using the Kindle version of What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement, Second Edition: Planning a Prosperous, Healthy, and Happy Future. Amazon Link

Get a domain name and a web hosting service. ($15 for the domain and $12 for a month’s hosting service.)

I already have a couple of domain names (generoche.net and generoche.com.) I use hover.com as my registrar and highly recommend them. From many years I used BlueHost.com as my hosting service, but bailed on them when I got tired of upgrading plugins and trying to figure out what sql call was triggering the throttle for my account. I’ve cut back my hosting to a single WordPress instance on wordpress.com. Every year I look at possibly moving to squarespace.com, and if I were starting from scratch, I’d look at it as a real possibility.

Start a WordPress blog. Pick a theme that you can live with for a month, and don’t get bogged down in tinkering with fonts, themes or color palettes. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.

I have a blog with several hundred posts on it that I can use for this project. It really needs updating, and it will be hard for me to keep from tinkering with the appearance to concentrate on the writing. This is a perfect example of the “easier said than done” fallacy of advice-giving.

For five days each week for the next month, write a post. The goal is to find something from your work, reading, thinking, social media or other source that seems to you to be worth sharing in a form that is longer, more fleshed out and potentially more useful than a tweet, clicking “like” or adding a comment. For many folks, 350-500 words might be a reasonable target for a post, but adjust your targets as you learn more about your own habits and preferences.

When I was working on my dissertation, my advisor gave some really good advice: “When you’re promising me what you’re going to finish before the next meeting, cut the goal in half and double the time. You’ll come much close to delivering what you promise.” That was good advice then, and it’s just as good now. I’ll try to be more comfortable with shorter posts—hopefully not months (or years) apart.

Don’t worry about whether anyone reads your posts or not. If you decide that this is a practice you want to continue, you find lots of advice about how to build your audience.

This is tough. Producing a decent post is hard work, and it’s normal to want to get a visible return on the work you’ve invested. My goal this month is to use the blog to “find my own voice” in writing for a new audience about different topics.

At the end of a month, do a content analysis on your site. Who were you writing for? What kinds of posts did you think would help your audience members? What kinds of problems or opportunities did you posts address? What themes emerged that might be explored in more depth?

Richard Saul Wurman said: “My definition of learning is to remember what you are interested in. If you don’t remember something, you haven’t learned it, and you are never going to remember something unless you are interested in it. These words dance together. ‘Interest’ is another holy word and drives ‘memory’. Combine them and you have learning.” ~ Richard Saul Wurman. Post things that pique your interest so that you can remember them a month from now.

Don’t beat yourself if you didn’t keep up the discipline of writing every weekday for a month. Most people don’t, and you might be able to cross of one career possibility—being a professional blogger—off your list of potential ways to spend your valuable time during retirement.

If I actually hit the post button on this–never a sure thing–this will be the my second post in using this process in refining my own retirement goals.

Writing Your Way to a Meaningful Retirement

I’m in the midst of my third month of being “retired” from William and Mary and things are admittedly quite different than I had imagined.

In this series of posts, I’m going to share some ideas about how to move into a new life role as a “retired person” post pandemic. In July of 2019, the Chautauqua Institution collaborated with the The Stanford Center on Longevity to host a fascinating weeklong event, “The New Map of Life: How Longer Lives are Changing the World”. Clearly their vision of retirement went well beyond playing golf and complaining about the government full-time, which used to be the primary activities of a couple of my retired friends. The project asks us retired folks to consider what we want to learn and what we want contribute in the final 20-30 years of our lives. (Chautauqua is closed this summer, and we are grieving big-time.)

Stanford Center on Longevity’s New Map of Life™ initiative aims to envision a society that supports people to live secure and high-quality lives for a century or more. This new initiative will research and define new models for education and lifelong learning, redesign how we work, advise new policies for health care, housing, the environment and financial security, and promote more intergenerational partnerships. It will also advance a new narrative, which redefines what it means to be “old” and values people at different stages of life.

Choosing where we want to invest our time and energy isn’t simple. A few years ago, one of my colleagues (also a former student in one of my classes) asked if I had any ideas for how she might think about what she wanted to do next with her career now that she had completed her doctorate. This sounded like the perfect example of a self-directed learning project, and we worked through a process to some up with the following project.

We began with the assumptions that she’d be willing to invest an hour a day for a month and spend $100 cash to accomplish her learning.

Buy a copy of What Color is Your Parachute, and do the exercises. (This still is the best resource, to my mind, for anyone who wants to engage in systematic career change at any life stage.) ($16 for the paperback.)
Get a domain name and a web hosting service. ($15 for the domain and $12 for a month’s hosting service.)
Start a WordPress blog. Pick a theme that you can live with for a month, and don’t get bogged down in tinkering with fonts, themes or color palettes. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.
For five days each week for the next month, write a post. The goal is to find something from your work, reading, thinking, social media or other source that seems to you to be worth sharing in a form that is longer, more fleshed out and maybe more useful than a tweet, like or comment. For many folks, 350-500 words might be a reasonable target for a post, but adjust your targets as you learn more about your own habits and preferences.
Don’t worry about whether anyone reads your posts or not. If you decide that this is a practice you want to continue, you find lots of advice about how to build your audience.
At the end of a month, do a content analysis on your site. Who were you writing for? What kinds of posts did you think would help your audience members? What kinds of problems or opportunities did you posts address? What themes emerged that might be explored in more depth?
Don’t beat yourself if you didn’t keep up the discipline of writing every weekday for a month. Most people don’t, and you might be able to cross of one career possibility—being a professional blogger—off your list of potential careers.

If this experiment works, you might have found a direction for some sustained, deliberate activities that will enrich your retirement. If not, you’ll probably be able to remove “becoming a professional blogger” from your list of possible retirement activities.

Owning Your Own Future

One of the last pieces that I read as I was leaving Williamsburg last summer was an column by Tom Friedman that captured many of the the central themes for our course this fall. The central idea of the article is certainly one that resonates with me: the increase in the power of computer technology generated by robotics, artificial intelligence and “the internet of things” has created a world where every decent job demands more skill AND a stronger commitment to self-directed, lifelong learning.

Friedman quotes the C.E.O of Intel in his belief that his grandchildren won’t drive their own cars. History has shown the danger of putting too much faith in the predictions by the managers of technology companies, but it certainly seems possible that we’ll see fleets of autonomous vehicles in the next couple of decades. Those fleets will create good jobs for some engineers but they’ll also drive massive disruptions for those who drive trucks or cabs, sell lability insurance or own downtown parking lots.

The main enabler for the move to autonomous vehicles is the exponential increase in power and decreasing cost of computer power. The next generation of computer chips will allow car manufacturers to shrink the brain of a self-driving car from “something that fills the whole trunk to a small box under the front seat”. The result, as Friedman notes, is “a world where we can analyze, prophesize and optimize with a precision unknown in human history”

That ability to analyze, predict and optimize will infuse most jobs in the developed world as computer power increases. (We need to constantly remind ourself that if combined computer capability doubles every year, we’re looking at increases of 100 times plus over the next eight years.) When many of us think of the oil industry, we think of roughnecks, roustabouts and riggers on drilling platforms in the Gulf. That’s only part of the story as Friedman reminds us in his description of the the control room of Devon Energy in Oklahoma City–a “half a floor of computer screens displaying the data coming out of every well Devon is drilling around the world…if you’re working on a Devon oil rig today, you’re hold a computer, not just an oily wrench.”

The underlying reality for oil workers is that that they will need be be able to use–the computer and the wrench and they’ll need to manage their learning to keep with the changes in the computing technology. The wrench may not change much, but it’s pretty certain that the computer will be telling workers what to loosen or tighten and when to do it.

Friedman also describes how a College Board study that showed how reshaping some of our most entrenched institutions can foster self-directed, lifelong learning.

“We analyzed 250,000 students from the high school graduating class of 2017 who took the new PSAT and then the new SAT,” College Board president David Coleman told me. “Students who took advantage of their PSAT results to launch **their own free personalized improvement practice** through Khan Academy advanced dramatically: 20 hours of practice was associated with an average 115-point increase from the PSAT to the SAT — double the average gain among students who did not…

Practice advances all students without respect to high school G.P.A., gender, race and ethnicity or parental education. And it’s free. Our aim is to transform the SAT into an invitation for students to own their future.”

As we’ve been moving forward with our course this fall, we’ve been looking at how the lessons of industries as diverse as oil drilling and long-haul trucking can shape our personal and professional approaches to learning. For me, Friedman gets it right when he notes that, “And that means: More is now on you. And that means self-motivation to learn and keep learning becomes the most important life skill.”

Teaching Center Links

## Teaching Centers

Syracuse University School of Information Science

CNDLS: Georgetown Georgetown

http://kaneb.nd.edu Notre Dame

Center for Teaching and Learning University of Chicago

Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning

University of Washington Teaching and Learning Center

The Center for Teaching Excellence, Cornell University

Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University

MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, University of Michigan

Center for Teaching and LearningUniversity of Minnesota

Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Pennsylvania

The McGraw Center, Princeton University

Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning, Stanford University

http://ctl.yale.edu Yale University

Center for Teaching Vanderbilt University

USC Center for Excellence in Teaching University of Southern California

Searle Center for Teaching Excellence Northwestern

Center for Instructional Development and Educational Research (CIDER) Virginia Tech

University of Virginia Teaching Resource Center UVA

http://cfe.unc.edu University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Innovation in Teaching and Learning at Duke University

Enhancing Education at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University

Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching Tufts

The Teaching and Learning Center Wake Forest University

Teaching and Learning Elon University

The Futures Initiative at CUNY

Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning

Cornell Center for Innovation in Teaching

Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Emory University

Clemson University Center for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching

Tulane Center for Engaged Learning

UCONN Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

More on Learning, Platforms and the Gig Economy

In this interview with Cathy Engelbert, CEO of Deloitte US, Tom Friedman expands on some of the central themes of this course, which I’ve written about earlier. (The Deloitte Center for the Edge is home one of my favorite education writers, John Seely Brown.) These documents provide a good starting place for considering the interactions between technology, work and education.

For me, one of the most striking claims in this article was the statistic showing that 94% of new employment between 2005 and 2015 came from alternative work arrangements–such as the gig, or freelance, and off-balance-sheet kinds of work (1). Our students will be living in a world where work is being disconnected from traditional jobs and more and more jobs are being disconnected from companies. The companies of the past are becoming the “platforms” of the future.

The idea of companies becoming platforms certainly sounds like Silicon Valley technobabble, but if most of the new jobs in the future really will be “alternative work arrangements,” we need a new way of being “college and career ready.” And not just for our students. Our own jobs are just as likely to be disrupted by these types of innovations as any other industry.

A company becomes a platform when it no longer controls either the jobs or the assets needed to perform a job. For example, Marriott is a traditional employer–owning hotels and hiring people to staff them, but AirBB is a platform that owns no properties and hires no staff. Moreover, Uber is a platform in that owns no cars and hires no drivers. Facebook is a media platform with no writers and Google makes billions searching web sites that others create.(2)

In a world where livelihoods depend on workers connecting directly with customers, via highly competitive platforms, workers will need very different skills than they would to fill traditional jobs. Regardless of the “product” they offer, successful individuals in the gig economy will need to be marketers, bookkeepers, and customer service specialists; these are roles that employees who worked for companies never had to worry about in the past. There were staff specialists who worried full-time those things.

Perhaps most importantly, people working in the gig economy will also have to be experts in managing their own ongoing education. Unlike “traditional” employers, platforms provide none of the support and structures typically provided by corporate training and development departments. When there is a need to learn something new, the onus will be entirely on you.

If it’s any consolation to those of you who find yourself thrust into the gig economy, many workers in traditional jobs are losing their support for training as well. As an article in the Harvard Business Review stated, credible data on what businesses spend on training are scarce, but clearly investments in training and development are the first to go corporations cut budgets.” (Friedman cites a company or two who provide support for lifelong learning. If you work for one that does, make sure that you grab every opportunity to learn that you can.)

As most graduate students can attest, when they begin thinking about dissertations, being a good student is not necessarily an indicator of being creative and self-directed.. Most of us need develop additional skills in learning to learn if we’re going to be successful at managing our own careers.

Bearing that in mind, the next posts will cover three essential tools of self-directed adult learning: the learning journal, the learning project and the learning contract.

Stay tuned for more information.

1 For more on the “gig economy” you might want to take a look at this report.
2 A more comprehensive analysis of the the role of platforms in the new economy is Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, both at MIT.