educators vs. enterprise and JISC

Having been to many enterprise, blogger and ideas conferences, now participating in a conference consisting of nothing (almost) but educators was a refreshing experience indeed.

As a sum-up let me list some superficial observations by a non-member of said profession:

Knowledge, learning and make meaning

"Make meaning" was a term I heard a lot. And it makes sense. Duh. Captures so much more than the usual "semantic", "knowledge" or even "search" that we usually engage in.

It could be seen as the core of what we all seek (finding the right stuff at the right time), here from an education - i.e. learning - viewpoint where it would be a core issue.

The enterprise world is slightly more skewed towards the squirrel approach to knowledge; gather and store. (Just chew on the term "knowledge management" a bit...)

A most refreshing reminder this "make meaning": Just "having" is not enough, "being" as in "assimilating it" is even more important. This I will keep close to my heart for my next enterprise knowledge management discussions! Make meaning of what we find... or make clear what we're looking for.

Best practices and business rules

Hmm, did not hear much of that. Nuff said...

Bottom up "admin" issues

Education being much less top-to-bottom run as organisations I saw a clear bottom-up need to ease everyday tasks and issues, and a willingness to try new solutions seldom seen in the enterprise world of central buying decisions and strict policies.

The need is felt everywhere, nobody likes the admin chores (who does in the enterprise world by the way?) - more time for research, teaching, mentoring and further development of pedagogic methods are where these folks wants to spend their time. Admin is hygienic and not a purpose.

I can see the wisdom in having a JISC that supports conferences like this; let the users find out and suggest, then support with funds and more. Directly.

Technology and pragmatism

Although much of the conference was highly technical, the session on Semantic Web was more technical and enlightening on the core technical and philosophical issues than anything else I ever heard. And the crowd enjoyed it and participated with gusto, perhaps slightly skewed to the philosophical side - an approach I fully support. If the underlying thinking is wrong, perfect coding and exact modelling will be moot anyway.

Still all were highly aware, and said so in comments, that although theoretical discussions are enjoyable and important, finding practical solutions that are easy to implement and allows for practical testing had to be the immediate purpose.

Typically, Scott leading the Business Process session, started out with four quadrants along the Hard-to-change/Easy-to-change x High impact/Low impact axes - pointing to the lower left quadrant - High impact + Easy-to-change as the sessions target area:
Find some processes, their drivers and impacts, that belongs in that quadrant and take it from there. And lo and behold, at the and of much fun bantering and some extremely messy sheets of notes produces by the participants he ended up with no less than 13 processes to start with. Not a bad result! Have to admit, that suits me enormously having a system with quick prototyping as a built in core feature ;)

Comments

[Balaji Sowmyanarayan]

Education is one area where 'one size fits all' does not cut the ice. And a wonderful place to apply thingamy's capture value-add as it happens paradigm. Where the flexibility and precision be handy.

And it will make a good case study/use case to cross market to the enterprise.

Much of the present day grading and assessment is about standard skills. The assembly line grind. But one important purpose of education is to spot and nurture the uniqueness of individuals. How can Thingamy's 'Barely repeatable processes' features help capture the (student's)uniqueness. And pass it it on to different players and phases through out the life cycle of a student passing through the (education)system?

And an aside, the role you play, the lingo you use, the tools you are familiar with in many ways limits one's perspective! Hat tip to you for breaking free from some of them be it trying out a new( getting lost) sport or hanging out with bunch of educators.

[sig]

Balaji,

thanks! And yes, I think we're in a perfect spot for this area - bottom up IT implementation is where I think we could shine while prototyping on the fly, sparking ideas for further tweaks... weekend planned for some extreme prototyping now ;)