The pace with which the technological devices are put into market has taken a toll on private computing. However, it is hard to believe that the pace at which technology is changing is still manageable. Helpless organizations are now looking into cloud computing. Even some others are thinking of taking IT out of their books and make it as a consumption commodity like utilities. Higher end educational institutions are now at cross-roads to either fuel the confusion or bring order to the chaos. Why so?
It is important to understand the convergence and divergence in the chaos. It is invariable that the push from one side has to be complemented with a pull from the other side to make the situation less chaotic. In absence of this, chaos is going to get amplified. If you decode the past, you will surprised if I say that it is same as the present.
Whichever way they go, they will lose the battle with chaos unless they have a grounding in COL. The four laws of COL are going to help this grounding process. It is very obvious to that a strongly rooted tree survives the onslaught of mother nature – while the shallow one get either blown away or burnt up beyond the possibility of regrowth. However, this is not going to be obvious for those who were caught in the whirlwind of change. They will keep flying with it to either improve the conditions very slightly or fall apart in one big heap without knowing what hit them.
It is time now to grab those things floating in the air, like the thousands of satellite junk in the space, before the chaotic nature of change and growth catches us in the meaningless efforts of process improvements, redesign and re-engineering. One such chaotic process that is the nature of education becoming expensive no jobs out there are able to reward it. Am I saying that we are pouring our savings, efforts and life down the sinkhole? No, I am not. All I am saying is that we are caught in this chaotic change and would realize the extent of damage only after hitting the ground.
Take a look around you. What you possess is nothing but junk as soon as the most important piece of the device stops working. You will soon end up with multitude of wireless junk on the face of the earth, let alone in space if a tiny wireless transmitter or receiver stops working. The big, bulky, shiny microwave loaded with all sorts of feature is worthless if the microwave generator fails. As long as you know that the devices are dressed up around the main components that are few, you will begin to understand the nature of technological growth.
The same thing is happening with education. The process that started to create the curriculum with all the supporting materials is lagging far behind the technological growth to give a meaning to the education on a realistic basis. The cost of providing lectures, producing textbooks are not aligned with the need or consumption of the same. Wastage is high because of diversity and the diversity is killing the knowledge absorption. Even though the knowledge is one, the broken pieces over-specializing in their piece of contribution has made the whole knowledge acquisition pricey. The adaptation will take place, but the other forces acting upon education system will make it slower. It is an unfortunate and an unseen situation that we did not see coming – where some sectors lag behind others causing not only the chaos, but also the skills mis-alignment.
What is causing this? Do these activities improve the economy in some way? Do they sustain economic activity in a meaningful way? Just think about some of the devices regarding their main purpose – whether they are wireless, laptops, tablets, or e-readers. They help you to communicate to other worldly things by yet another device which has got more power to resolve the issues with the previous one or more performance because of other participating activities needing more power or more integrated yet cumbersome in their applicability. With more and more players entering the market with the unknown or little known and providing them to those who are less privileged to know the unknown because of 1) hype or 2) research time or 3) excess funds or 4) status-quo or so on so forth, we have produced the recipe for chaos. The chaos will not be evident for those who are in it, but for either a bystander or an outsider, it will be greatly visible.
That’s where the institutions providing higher education should get into action providing the continuous feedback to the industry that is consuming these resources produced by these institutions with a method or philosophy that is tuned to learning any subject under the sun in an accelerated fashion, unlearning any subject as quick as possible and re-learning any subject based on the solid foundation of learning. Without this, all education will be temporary in nature and become dead wood than becoming seedlings to new growth.
I am very thankful to the kind of learning I was exposed to. Without that, I could not have moved from mainframe technologies to and understanding of the new wave(?) of cloud computing. Without going too much into technology jargon, let me say that my post graduation study was at a cost that in today’s terms is practically zero.
If that is true, what has really gone wrong with the current system of providing education? I have one answer – over-specialization of pieces thus obscuring the fact that they all came from one knowledge. The other answer is that the businesses that consume the educated knowledge force are not investing back in the education system to make it affordable and make those roots stronger. Instead, it is being wasted in planting greenery that is eye-catching but fast-dying. Because these pieces cannot be put together, never again in their current form or shape, it is necessary to understand the core of these pieces to see how they fit one knowledge.
This is where Higher education systems need to work hard to provide this insight. Without that they have lost their grounds as institutions of higher education. Instead of standing there for us as strong rooted trees, they will be caught with the whirlwind of change causing more chaos. They need to start working toward providing real learning and stop the hype that is created to attract dollars, distract talent and blur learning.