Between a Practical and an Enriching Education

November 24, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The cultivation of your mind & spirit and your preparation for a job are always in tension in higher education.

With a crippling recession and the rising cost of a college degree, there seems to be a higher emphasis than ever on vocational training. But even with more internships and technical apptitude, the last half-decade of graduates are still struggling to break into the job market. Indeed, liberal arts champions are noting that narrow training for specialized jobs is leaving those students who don’t manage to land one largely unqualified to do anything else.

Broad. Specific. Enriching. Practical. Critical thinking. Hands-on learning. The best education is equal parts creativity and application, learning how to identify a problem and then trying to solve it, discovering unexpected abilities at school while refining developing ones on the job.

It is unusual for one educator to draw so much of his energy from these tensions, but that’s what Sebastian Thrun seems to be doing.

Thrun is the co-founder of Udacity, one of the young companies that is beginning to turn the bricks & mortar approach to higher education on its head. Massive open on-line courses (or MOOCs) are the vehicle. In a post a few weeks back, I discussed one of the recent directions they have taken: a collaboration between national employers like UPS and companies like Thrun’s to jointly develop “niche certification programs” that will give students an affordable shot at an available job and employers a qualified applicant pool for unfilled positions.

This could be just another way for enterprising employers to cultivate a roster of applicants for cherry picking. But from another perspective, it could be more of a win-win. As observers like Andrew Kelly have noted, most of those taking MOOCs today are either in traditional degree programs or have gotten their degrees already. Because these certificate programs are building on the broad base of a more traditional education, the too-narrowly-focused student becomes less of a concern.

For his part, Thrun seems to be motivated instead of discouraged by the vocational detour MOOC providers like his are taking.

His vision, and that of other innovators in on-line education, was to bring practical as well as enriching learning opportunities to everyone who was too poor or too busy working to pursue a traditional degree—a potentially transformative global vision. Unfortunately, very few of those sigining up for a MOOC actually complete the course today, even with “really good” teachers, regular mentoring and the promise of low-cost college credit. But the apparent fact that the market for the first wave of MOOCs is smaller than Thrun (and others) expected is only causing him to double down on his efforts to meet the broader need that’s out there.

Why is that? I think it’s because the animating principle is Thrun’s own curiosity, his own appetite for learning.

We pursue most vigorously what we embody, or as Thrun prefers to describe it, what he wants for his son.

I hope he can hit the workforce relatively early and engage in lifelong education.

Instead of four years in college, what Thrun envisions is an on-going shuttle between theory and practice, discovery and pursuit, critical detachment and engagement—exactly what he is doing to unlock the full potential of MOOCs.

It is an education that is supple enough to nurture your basic qualities of mind while also helping you to develop skills that will help you keep up with the accelerating pace of workforce change (what fellow entrepreneur and Linked-in founder Reed Hoffman calls “the continuous start-up of you”).

Watching Sebastian Thrun as a teacher, an innovator and a father is to catch a glimpse of what this vision of lifelong learning could look like for you and me.

Thinking With Your Hands

November 10, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Drawing reduces what you’re seeing to its essentials.

It can be what you’re looking at, or what your mind’s eye is trying to visualize. Putting what you’re seeing down on the page may be like photography (aiming at accuracy) or like poetry (capturing the feeling of the moment).

Drawing has a different objective when you’re trying to “think though” a problem. Then it can be a tool for arriving at place that’s totally new.

Drawing is essentially shorthand. It has been described as low vs. high definition. Drawing generalizes and leaves the specifics until later, that is, until you’ve gotten the basics right—which is usually the hard part of creative thinking.

To draw is often a solitary act, between your thoughts, your eyes, and your hands, holding the paper while you’re making marks on it. Drawing yields its best rewards when it’s like this, a low instead of high tech endeavor. A screen or tablet introduces complexity, requiring the manipulation of software, a mouse or stylus. Hand drawing is at its simplest & more direct when it’s just you, a pencil and a piece of paper.

(Of course, this kind of drawing also gives you the singular satisfaction of crumpling up your mistakes, and hurling them away before starting over again. Nothing you can do on a screen lets you start over with that kind of flourish!)

The directness & simplicity of sketching out your ideas has additional power as a vehicle for collaboration. Its shorthand often suggests different ways of completing what you’ve jotted down. Your specifics don’t get in the way, inviting other people into your thought process to modify the essentials.

Drawing your ideas on a whiteboard (instead of a piece of paper) may be the optimal way to invite others into the creative process. In fact, as a tool for innovation the whiteboard is hard to beat. One technology reporter, Farhad Manjoo, has noted their ubiquity in our so-called “cradle of innovation,” Silicon Valley.

Whiteboards reward bigness: Because you’ve got to draw objects large enough for everyone to see, and because dry-erase markers are too fat to allow you to write too much text, the whiteboard encourages thinking about the highest levels of an idea, and it discourages getting lost in details.

In a recent video interview, Manjoo elaborates on the role that the whiteboard plays, even at companies whose business is preserving your handwritten notes and drawings on-line, such as Evernote.

Some of our earliest tool-based memories are often of drawing with crayons in a coloring book or with a piece of chalk on a blackboard. These competencies, repeated over & over again as children, created neural pathways (see Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code) as we first learned how to visualize our thoughts. When you pick up a pencil or marker and start to draw out your thoughts, you are tapping into a basic aptitude that is, in a sense, “hardwired” into almost all of us.

I was reminded of the power that drawing can unleash in all creative activities while reading a recent post by Laura Busche. Wanting to know why the act of sketching her ideas has such a powerful impact on her design work, Busche reviewed the work of neuroscientists, psychologists and others who have explored the possible connections. A couple of these findings bear repeating for those of us—everyone really—who struggles to “open up” their thinking and unlock their imaginations every day.

It may seem obvious, but incorporating drawing early on in your problem solving will have the greatest impact. When you’re inviting others to think through the problem you’ve drawn, creative beginnings may be enhanced even further when key limitations (like a product’s dimensions, or a service’s current cost) are specified. Then, like a thought balloon, the visualizations you’re sketching out are tethered to earth by one or two basic presumptions.

Another key take-away is that drawing your way to new possibilities improves with practice. Busche is particularly eloquent on this point.

What happens when you continually draw and connect symbols as you sketch? What happens when your brain tries to recall shapes that are appropriate to the idea you are trying to externalize? It isn’t hard to see that the better you become at translating imagery from your mind to paper, the more visual resources you will have to draw on and the easier it will be to retrieve them in the future. . . Hand-sketching forces you to access and cultivate a unique visual library in your mind.

Modern life is increasingly automated. Aside from dexterity on a keyboard or touchpad, our cultivation of manual skills (beyond eating, cleaning, driving and maybe playing a sport) is limited. We look at things or listen to them, often passively, instead of changing them or making them.

Our hands can help us to transform old thoughts into new ones. We know how to use them. They’re right in front of you, waiting to be used.

It may be time to start drawing again.

Edifice Complex

October 9, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

With more of us being priced out of higher education, there’s a startling divergence in how the folks who control the entry ramps are responding. But one of their responses could actually be quite good for you.

Most colleges and universities are bulking up to do more of what they’ve done for the past half century: running increasingly ambitious fund raising campaigns to support increasingly expensive buildings, administrations & faculties. A few other schools, along with a disruptive cohort of education-oriented companies, are moving in the opposite direction: de-emphasizing the traditional overhead in favor of providing as many students as possible with practical and affordable alternatives.

In this later category, there are some new and exciting options that are highly tailored to your needs if you see additional education as your way of getting either a first job, or a new & better job. At the same time these alternatives are becoming available however, the traditional college experience is getting farther from reach for nearly everyone who is neither rich nor “obviously brilliant” enough to be subsidized by someone who is.

The future of higher education could be a relatively small number of wealthy schools catering to the lucky few, with highly affordable, skill-based alternatives available to everyone else.

Inputs from a couple of different directions tend to support the truth of this forecast.

In his new book, Average is Over, economist Tyler Cowen argues that the US is well on its way to even greater income polarization than we’ve already seen, with all but about 15% of our citizens living not “in the middle” but “on the margins.” Among other things, he envisions American cities looking more like Rio de Janiero, with massive favelas ringing small but wealthy enclaves.

It’s already not so different in Philadelphia, so I couldn’t help but think about Cowen’s observation when I was on the University of Pennsylvania campus the other day, and took this picture of its magnificent new nanotechnology center.

THE $92M SINGH CENTER FOR NANOTECHNOLOGY

It is, as the local architecture critic described it, “easily the most impressive new design in the city since the Barnes Foundation opened last year.” But that’s not the whole story. Within a mile radius, I could easily draw lines from several dying outposts of Philadelphia’s public school system to Penn’s newest trophy classroom.

That these two tiers in education (and in American life) are increasingly a fact doesn’t make it ok. Indeed far from it. But in at least one way, some viable, alternative paths to productive life and work have started to open up for everyone who is rapidly being left behind.

I’ve talked about the value of a liberal arts education that is widely available on this page before. But there’s no disputing its staggering expense, the difficulty that many graduates have securing a paying job after making the investment, or many employers’ complaints that their jobs are going unfilled because their applicants lack the necessary skills.

You know what I’m talking about.

More than likely, either these frustrations are yours or are being experienced by someone close to you—which is what has made the rise of “massive, open, on-line courses” (or MOOCs) so promising. Now, it looks like the MOOC approach to higher education is starting to realize its promise by offering students the highly tailored course work they need for the jobs that employers have been unable to fill.

Much of the impetus is coming from the employers themselves.

MOOC provider Udacity has started to offer free “niche certification programs” with on-line courses in areas like computer science and supply chain management they’ve developed with input from Google, AT&T and others, in what they’re calling the Open Education Alliance. According to a recent news article, each company in the Alliance has:

committed to build at least one class at a cost of about $250,000. In return, [contributors] will receive access to a talent pool guaranteed to have studied the skills the employer wants. . . .

MIT and MOOC partner edX are offering a similar, low cost (up to $700 for a “verified certificate”) alternative in collaboration with employers like United Parcel Service, Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble. While we’re waiting to see which pay model works the best, the wolves in the ivory towers have already started to growl.

Is this a “vocational” approach to higher education? You bet it is. Is there a loss to students in receiving a “narrowly focused education” like this? No question about it. But it is also a loss to have philosophy majors working at McDonalds and downsized management employees cleaning toilets–when they can find gainful employment at all.

It’s also unfortunate that my old schools (like Penn), and others like them, are doing so little to fulfill the nation’s education needs, as opposed to the needs of an increasingly small minority of students.

Today, we are wasting many of America’s best minds because access to higher education has more to do with financial resources than individual promise. These new MOOC certificate programs are not The Answer to this wider problem, but they may well be part of our way out of the totally unacceptable place that we find ourselves in today.

It’s Time to Expand Your Range

August 28, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

You’ve got a “bad boy” side, even if you keep it buried in a hole somewhere in the backyard. Whether you’ve repressed a little or a lot, you’ve probably walked a pretty straight road since you shoved it all down. If you’re feeling stuck, maybe that’s why.

To tap into the mix of inspiration and passion that leads to fulfilling work, the time you spend completely ignoring the straight-and-narrow can easily be as important as the time spent on it. As I’ve noted before (and not entirely in jest), it may be why East Asian economies produce lots of hard workers but few innovators: nearly everyone there is intent on finding a figure-it-out-once-and-for-all approach to life & work.

Maybe you’ve been following their lead.

Maybe you’ve tried to identify the 5 or 10 factors that motivate you to do your best. You read about successful entrepreneurs, hoping to find a formula embedded in their stories that you can make use of. You poke around the wellsprings of innovation with the aim of capturing a secret sauce to take back to the office. But it’s likely that the recipe you’re after will only be discovered when you abandon the notion of a recipe altogether.

Of course, there’s paradox here, with a plan only becoming meaningful once you understand why all plans are useless.

But order depends on chaos.

Discipline learns the most from rule breaking.

So maybe at least some of what you’ve buried needs to be dug up.

William Blake, God Calibrates Chaos During Creation in “The Ancient of Days” — God Calibrates Chaos During Creation (William Blake)

To be happy-at-work doesn’t require you to start your own company. But if that’s your goal, you may need something that nearly all entrepreneurs have, namely, better hot wiring to your freer spirit. It’s why you’re never too old to find happiness at work; it’s not your youth (or even your energy level or health) but the range of your life that matters.

With broader parameters, when you’ve identified a problem that needs solving in your marketplace, you don’t spend all your time with the conventional wisdom. When you’re confident taking risks and roaming widely in your personal life, you have no problem looking outside your business or even your commercial culture to find new ways of meeting your challenges. You’re not afraid of making mistakes or of defying the reigning masters.

You know it’s not just about sweat & ambition, and that insight in one area is more likely to come when you’re hard at work doing something else—or nothing at all. It’s why you stir replenishment (like smelling the clover) into your workday.

A study that tends to validate time spent off-road came out last month by economists Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein. They found statistically significant correlations between risky, even illicit behavior and wealth generation by individuals who went on to start their own companies (people they call the “incorporated self-employed”).

In addition to the most successful entrepreneurs being smart and coming from stable, well educated families, the authors found that as teens they were more likely to have broken the rules by drinking, smoking pot, dealing drugs, stealing, gambling, even being violent.

[A]s teenagers, people that incorporate [their own businesses] later in life tend to score higher on learning aptitude tests, exhibit greater self-esteem, indicate that they aspire to be managers/leaders later in life, and engage in more aggressive, illicit, and risky activities than other people. Moreover, it is a particular mixture of pre-labor market traits that is most powerfully associated with entrepreneurship. People who both engaged in illicit activities as teenagers and scored highly on learning aptitude tests have a much higher tendency to become entrepreneurs than others without this particular mixture of traits.

While entrepreneurial success later in life may correlate with a higher tolerance for risk acquired early on, I think it’s more than that. It’s having learned that you’ll not only survive but also thrive with less certainty & security that delivers the work/life pay-off.

If this is right, the answer isn’t upstanding citizen by day, criminal by night. For most of us, an ethical perspective evolves with maturity. Moreover, how we end up striking the balance between risks & rewards is too individual for a self-improvement formula, recipe or secret sauce.

Some of us extend youthful indiscretion into middle age before the pieces fall into place. Some spend 6 months “on the road” and 6 months off. Others of us allow for episodes of genuine chaos and total digression in our work before looping back. Or we have key people (“interrupters”) who regularly knock us out of our routines so that we return better, stronger.

It’s finding your own range—your rule-breaking margins whatever they are—so that whatever you’re doing everyday is feeding the force that enables you to come alive.

It Only Takes One to Take a Stand

August 17, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

There was a remarkable photograph in the papers on Thursday, taken as Egyptian troops were leveling the encampment of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Cairo. It depicted a solitary woman standing between a military bulldozer and a wounded man on the ground.

We’ve seen this all before, but it never gets old.

There was a similar confrontation in Tiananmen Square in 1989, with a lone protester blocking a column of Chinese tanks. That picture still speaks to the courage of saying: “Stop.” “No, you cannot do this any longer”—even when no one else is standing with you.

On its anniversary this year, China’s leaders continue to suppress any discussion of the uprising of the human spirit that took place 24 years ago. It is a continuing exercise in “thought control” aimed at ensuring that those who were alive then start to forget, and those who came after never manage to find out. But some of the power in pictures like this is that they won’t go away, and in their permanence will always call to those who can recognize a part of themselves there.

Indeed, I think we linger over images of solitary personal courage because we hope that someday we’ll be up to doing the same. We keep looking because the individuals depicted are standing in for the best part of each of us too. We wonder:

Will I have the courage to seek out the circumstances,

and when those circumstances require it, stand up for what I believe in,

even when there’s no one else is around?

The “thousand words” in these pictures speak about a life force that won’t be pushed down any longer. It caused a woman in Cairo and a man in Beijing to leave the relative safety of their homes behind so they could speak their particular truths to power. It’s what many children do with far greater ease than us grown-ups: the ones who know what’s important to them and don’t fear the consequences of putting themselves on the line.

Maybe we have such children, were such children.

However what experience has taught us over the years is how to protect ourselves from risks & confrontation, to sidestep & keep our heads down. Our experience teaches us almost nothing about taking a stand for what’s essential in our lives and work.

That’s some of what these pictures do.

They help us find the power of a child, when playing an adult’s game.