b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Teaching Entrepreneurial Skills
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Friday, April 15, 2005
Congratulations to Anne Davis and JH House Elementary!
This is so cool. My neighbor Anne Davis runs a fantastic weblog program for elementary kids at nearby J.H. House Elementary in Conyers, GA. Her program is getting lots of recognition. Anne is the quintessential tech educator, making the technology transparent while teaching the kids important stuff like how to think, write, and communicate. Way to go, Anne! Thanks to Will Richardson for the tip.
Anne's J.H. House Blog is Site of the Month
Did I know this? Technology and Learning's School Site of the Month for March is Anne's "Write Weblog". Well deserved.It can't be said enough...Anne does such great work with blogs and elementary school kids, and she's really giving them a passion for writing. I can think of few better models for the technology. She works hard to highlight their best work, to celebrate their successes, and to capitalize on the teachable moments. It's inspiring!
Monday, April 4, 2005
Teaching Entrepreneurial Skills
Earlier today I wrote about Dave Pollards essay on complexity and corporate dysfunction. I closed with the observation that while we need to find ways to sustain ourselves, entrepreneurial skills do not exist widely in our society partly the result of apathy and partly the result of 100 years of The Organization Man. Shortly thereafter Pollards latest essay on teaching entrepreneurial skills came through my aggregator:
Meeting the Acute Need for Entrepreneurial Skills
The Idea: The New Economy will have an explosive need for critical entrepreneurial skills. Universities are not equipped or inclined to provide them. You can't learn them just by reading a book. We need to create a whole new 'channel' for entrepreneurial education. Here's how it might work.
[ ] Here's the process I have suggested to several universities.
- Each 'session' would have as its theme one of the critical entrepreneurial skills in the mindmap above.
- Students would be given a set of pre-reading consisting of both theory and stories about great entrepreneurial successes and failures in applying this critical skill.
- Each session would be held, live, at the premises of a different entrepreneurial business, one with exemplary success at applying this critical skill.
- There would be no lecture. The session would consist of (a) a tour of the premises, (b) a brief story told by the CEO of the history of the company and how they'd learned to apply the critical skill, and (c) a Q&A session where the students would ask questions of the CEO. The course facilitator would jump in with answers and clarifications based on what other entrepreneurs had done. No 'large corporation' examples would be used.
- There would be no examination. At 'mid-term', the entrepreneurs who host the sessions would collectively grade the Business Plans prepared and presented by the students in one long Saturday session. The 'final' pass or fail would be based solely on whether the businesses proposed in the students' Business Plans had been successfully launched or not.
- Students would have access to 'coaches' on an ongoing basis. These could include existing entrepreneurs, course facilitators, legitimate entrepreneurial consultants [ ]
Dave goes on to highlight critical issues and barriers to success (an important one being the complete disinterest of the existing education bureaucracy), and issues a call to action to his readers to help flesh out a business model.
Id love to see this work. I think its desperately needed. Id volunteer as a beta customer. But Im already entrepreneurial, and while people like me can certainly benefit from such a program I think it really needs to focus on those who think they cant, or who never even consider they could, be entrepreneurs. There are countless thousands of people with useful, valuable skills that would love to make a living they enjoy but feel utterly overwhelmed at the prospect of going it alone. To them, entrepreneurship might as well be quantum physics.
Dave suggests getting to kids at the Jr. High/middle school level to get them used to the idea. Young people are far more risk tolerant than we older folks, and getting them connected to a strong entrepreneurial community early on is critical. Today most education systems still dont teach basic checkbook balancing. And how can they? Kids dont have any connection to a checkbook. They have no reality that says balancing a checkbook matters. Can we hook them into a system that engages, entertains, and educates at the same time? And if we can, can we do it in a way that starts them out creating a service or product that genuinely benefits their community?
Im not talking about some charity event like selling cookies to fund a gym set, but something real, on-going, and meaningful.We need a program that engages boys and girls in equal numbers, builds something that, by the time they graduate high school, they can carry with them into the greater society. In the process maybe a lot of them will find they really like math or engineering or science or something and go onto university to specialize. But the rest would be useful and capable of something more than McJobs.
Adults are a different matter. The barriers here are apathy, fear, and risk aversion. Women are especially at risk of this once theyve taken the family track. So I see a real need to get people excited about the possibilities, convinced they can do something more than mope around about their poor circumstances, and motivated enough to get up and try. To do that we need to take a lesson from the infomercial scam artists and find the catch phrase, the tag line, the simplistic metaphor that resonates with the fearful and makes them stand up from the sofa and say, Yes! I can do that too! But we cant be too evangelical or well be tagged with the same smarmy visage as televangelists. Cant have that.
My point is that before we get to Daves vision of teaching we have to find a way to reach and excite all the potential students who really need it. Any ideas?
Terry Frazier at 7:31 PM
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Monday, March 14, 2005
Gladwell at SXSW
Yesterday was much better at SXSW (Saturday just seemed slow, disorganized, and rambling.) The best session of the day, by far, was Malcolm Galdwell's keynote. He's quite engaging - funny, personable, and has some interesting insights into how we make decisions. And guess what - NO powerpoint!
I'm bordering on pedantry here, but I've really started to notice how speakers that don't use powerpoint do a much better job (generally speaking) than those who do - they know their material, engage the audience instead of looking at a laptop or projector screen, and generally exhibit greater signs of life than the powerpoint crowd. (Sorry MacOS geeks - the same goes for Keynote users.) There are valid uses for these programs, of course, and I saw some pretty good sessions that did include slides - where they were used to present data on a particular point, show examples, code snippets, etc.
It's just that powerpoint (and its equivalents) will make us lazy if we're not careful. I know I'm guilty of that, and I see more and more just how bad that can look to the audience.
I also had a chance to meet Kevin Smokler, the proprietor of the Virtual Book Tour. What Kevin is doing to connect the world of traditional book publishing to the greater wired world is very cool. I think there are opportunities to broaden that connection in the other direction -- giving the wired world and the blogosphere greater access to the traditional book world. I"ll be looking at some of those in the future.
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