XplanaZine

While I was growing up, my father was moving up. Born to poor share croppers in Central Texas, and with nothing more than a high school education, my father became a bookkeeper, accountant, and then executive for a large home building company. The fact is, if you live in or around Austin, Texas, chances are my father was involved, in at least some form, in the land purchase, development, or construction of your home. I guarantee you he say the land and thought about what it might look like as a developed housing area before you even knew it existed.

Now my father is semi-retired. After my mother passed away, he decided to combat loneliness by returning to work as a real estate agent. It was a long way from the heady days as Executive Vice President of a development empire, but it suited his needs. The people taking him on were happy to have a new agent with a license and who evidently knew the territory pretty well.

What has amazed me is that the company my father works for has never found, or tried to find a way to collect and use the almost priceless information that exists in my father’s head. History about the city, lore about neighborhoods, anecdotal research about growth patterns and buying trends. He has skills, insights and information that could make his company more successful but they have no desire or, for that matter, ability to access that information.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking of someone you know who, like my father, has valuable information to offer a/your company but no one seems to have any idea how that could happen. Luckily, the problem is big enough (i.e. there could be substantial money attached to it) that a number of software developers have begun making tools that extract knowledge from individual employees and make it available to the rest of the corporation. opencola, Kubi Software, and Tacit’s Activenet are all designed to help discover what one employee knows and make it available to others desiring that precise information.

These software products are constructed on the assumption that company employees operate in an environment in which information sharing is good and encouraged. The problem is that software, in itself, cannot cure an organizational malaise that has existed within a company for decades. In other words, information will only be shared, ultimately, if there is a culture of sharing, regardless of what software is being employed.

And that brings us to the world of education. Currently, course management systems mirror the educational; institutions and companies that they are designed to serve. Thus, they are centralized and non-collaborative constructs that in no way encourage information sharing among students. They treat students (and teachers) as separated entities working in isolation.

And, while it appears that technology changes could be on the horizon with new blogging technologies and collaborative products like Groove, there will have to be real cultural adjustments in education before collaborative environment catch on. We will have to decide that sharing information (as opposed to hoarding it) is good. We will have to determine that any person in the community is capable of contributing valuable information. And we will have to accept that the community of learners can have as much to offer as the teacher.

Fortunately, at least in this case, technology is not the problem. We can collect, organize and distribute the valuable information in our students’ heads anytime we like. But first, we will have to decide that it is an important and worthwhile thing to do.