Hybridizing Knowledge Workers--Not Advised

Continuing the conversation about MS Office, Knowledge workers, and collegiate education, V. Yonders wrote in her blog:

However, I think this is true of any generation and technology. My generation embraced the PC because it was new and we were learning how to use it in school, whereas my father embraced it after other workers started to use it and demonstrated how it could impact the organization. I am sure the same happened when the xerox machine and telephone was introduced.

In other words, new technology allowed “older” workers to perform the “same old work” faster or easier. But in an earlier post, CIO Insight observed that tech natives change their thinking because of technology—they mold their “work” to fit available technologies.

As I see it, the real problem is that our educational system is still set in traditional structures (due in part to businesses wanting more "content" which will be a product for them to sell in the future). The true gap, therefore, is between those educated in a traditional way and the new "skills" needed to work in a module setting (able to move people, companies, offices, departments around without losing knowledge or the knowledge product) communicating through a network (rather than the old vertical structures) with critical thinking and problem solving skills that allow workers to react to the environment as it changes and create new knowledge (or knowledge products) in a short period of time.

Looking at work literacy from this viewpoint, technology is only a tool with which these knowledge workers will be able to draw on. If students coming out of high schools and college are ill prepared for these new structures, then the workplace will need to start training new workers in terms of critical thinking and problem solving skills, new communication skills (including how to interact without "authority" figures and initiate communication), team and group work skills (as module structures require participation in groups), and metacognitive skills (in order to be aware of what is going on in the work environment and retooling as appropriate).

The orchard doesn't bear fruit immediately upon planting new trees--while most of learned our “times tables” in 3rd grade, knowing WHEN to multiply didn’t completely “gel” until later. The challenge is that many times college freshmen have no “real world” experience from which to draw, so teaching such skills as goal-seeking in Excel or using OLE to embed an automatically-updating spreadsheet into a MS Word document must be skill-based.

In training non-IT majors in MS Office and other “technology” skills, admittedly I’m limited; I cannot know the myriad usages my students may find for a particular skill. There are some “building block” skills that defy “critical thinking” –they are only building blocks from which thinking can proceed.

While I’m not complaining (as doing so fills my classes), it IS a shame that we need to continue to teach these skills at the collegiate level. In reality, we are teaching these skills multiple times (late elementary for the most basic of word processing, high school for basic academic writing, and then in college for discipline-specific uses).

Perhaps the challenge is NOT that today’s “tech native” knows how to use the technology, it’s that after using the technology for personal/pleasure uses, making the transition to “work” uses (and the limiting parameters associated with such use) fails to engender the respect for the technology that us older folks feel.

And teaching respect, even for one's tools, isn't something easily accomplished. It comes with maturation; so while colleges can and should teach skills, industry should not lay all the blame for ill-prepared workers upon academia.

Plant. Water. Prune as necessary. Wait. . . . Then Harvest.