Business Becomes More Personal as Education Becomes Less So

I found it ironically interesting to read "The Science of Serendipity in the Workplace" in the Wall Street Journal this morning; it recounts how high tech companies like Google and Salesforce are working hard to engineer more incidental personal encounters between employees. They're redesigning buildings, rooms, and floor plans.

Why?

Because remarkably innovative developments result from these chance encounters. Like Gmail and Streetview on Google Maps. "'The most productive relationships are difficult to engineer,' says Jason Owen-Smith, a University of Michigan sociologist who studies employee collaboration."

Why is it ironic? While these tech leaders, whose employees are connected six ways to Monday via electronic tools and the Internet, are carefully engineering in-person interactions, education is moving faster and faster towards online learning and classes.

I don't want to downplay the extraordinary educational value to be had from the Internet and technological tools - the sheer amount of information and skill instruction available is mind-boggling. Here's a link to 700 free courses online!

But maybe one of the reasons education is moving more and more online is that in-person instruction is often so dismal. Many classes don't involve real interactions, as students sit and listen to lectures or professors explaining stuff. Are students getting the benefit of learning from other people? Of learning to work with others?

It's something to wonder about.

How to Get More Out of Google

Here's a great website, Infographic from "Hack College," that teaches students - and anyone else - how to do better, more efficient and successful searches on Google. It details how to use the Boolean search terms - "operators" - more successfully to find exactly what you need.

Hattip Rachel Davison.

Students Don't Know How to Think About Google

Lead research anthropologist for the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries Andrew Ascher found that students are highlyunskilled in performing searches.

“Student overuse of simple search leads to problems of having too much information or not enough information … both stemming from a lack of sufficient conceptual understanding of how information is organized,” he said. Even computer science students!

Read about his study of their use of Google and other tools in this Inside Higher Ed article.

"“they’re not getting adequate training as they’re going through the curriculum,” he said.

"Asher moved swiftly through a few slides featuring excerpts from interviews with students, each eliciting both chuckles and gasps from the audience of librarians and technologists. “I’m just trusting Google to know what are the good resources,” responded one sophomore biology student."

This alarming result--even among students who are academic achievers is what you get when education focuses on information and testing at the expense of cognitive development and independent thinking.

Another researcher suggested they get instruction on how to do searches. But the real problem lies in the fact that their minds are not conceptually organized--they don't know what is relevant or connected to a topic or idea and what is not. This is the serious deficit of education.