The web gives us a critical advantage over this virus

As we come to terms with the news that UK schools are about to close for what could be six months, I find myself reflecting on how lucky we are.
Imagine if this had happened before the mass adoption of the web?

When I was at school there was no internet. A pc was a rarity. Mobile phones unheard of.
I would not have been able to order what I needed online - and there certainly was no opportunity to experience e-learning, virtual classrooms or any of the other digital innovations education has been dancing with, but will now have to adopt on a mass and 'business-as-usual' scale. Imagine facing the next six months without any of that.

Of course, the same is true of business.

The web allows us to continue to trade, to continue to meet and do deals, to collaborate on ideas, concepts, prototypes, launch strategies and projects of all kinds.
We are exceptionally lucky that Covid19 comes at a time when we have the technology to physically self-isolate WHILE socially connecting. This is the only time in history that has been possible.
The web has given us a critical advantage vs this virus.
We can continue pretty much every aspect of trade and education. We can maintain our economic progress. We can do it while improving our relationship with our planet.

All  we have to do is get over the shock and get used to a few new tools.

We can do this.

Enabling achievement vs hitting your KPIs

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

GCSE exam results filled the UK media today, telling its once-a-year story of joy and heartbreak. The arguments over the KPIs have been more intense this year amid changes in the way exam results are calculated.
Which prompted
me to return to a regular question when faced with how to measure something.
I asked a teenager what she thought education was for?
'To help you pass exams,' she said.
But it's not, is it?
Education is a lifelong thing. We acquire new skills and capabilities to be able to achieve things. Education is to enable us to achieve the things we seek to achieve.
The exam result is not the thing we are seeking to achieve.
The same is true of so much poor wisdom applied to the selection of our business KPIs. Too often they provide a distraction from the thing we are seeking to achieve and become an end in themselves.
Next time you are tasked with designing or setting kpis, remember how exams can so easily fail the goals of education.

Clay Shirky on scoring collaboration in education

Another day, another part of my interview (the fourth) with Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody). And today's topic is education.

Clay rates the question (which came from Rebecca Caroe via twitter) as one of THE toughest and most important facing our generation.
It is "How do we examine and score collaboration in education?"

Clay is an educator himself - at NYU. He believes there is a collision between the internal message in colleges and universities, which values and encourages collaboration, and the external message - which is that the education system does quality control of individual minds. (image via flickr by kokeshi)

He has no quick fix, but instead believes finding the right solution will be "the work of a generation".

Watch the video below.
See him in person here. Buy his book, here.




I'm speaking at Widget Web Expo in London today. If you're there, come and say hi!