Becoming a more global player 9

For those with the right opportunity, learning to speak another language well can be a great way to get a more global view of the world and of your own culture. I just ran across Benny Lewis' blog today, and it gives away the secret I stumbled onto years ago: don't speak your native language!

For a significant period, I lived and worked in a small town where not even the second language was English. One might argue the first language was Alemannisch, the second German, and the third French. I was stubborn, and I forced myself to speak the local language. I seem to recall almost six months of headaches and tiredness in the evenings after struggling to be productive in a different language. Then one morning I woke up realizing I had just dreamed my first dream in German. From then on, I thought in German. What I learned from then on, I learned in German, and I eventually had to translate some of those concepts to English. I still think in German from time to time. Benny Lewis' experience mirrors mine precisely, except that I think I took a bit longer. As a practicing engineer at the time, a significant part of my day was spent in design and calculation, so I may not have had as much opportunity to converse as he.

So, if you get a chance to live in a different country, I strongly encourage you to try this approach. It will be hard—very hard—at first, but the payoff is great.

You might also like his How to speak a language pretty well, starting from scratch, in just two months. You might also be interested in the previous posts in my series.

Is education always behind the times?

When I was at the university, I majored in electrical engineering and math. Encouraged by Michael Morrison, my physics major roommate at the time, I took an excellent English course taught by Dr. David Minter that was intended for English majors. Normally I would have been leary of my chances at a decent grade, but this was the start of pass-fail options at my school.

We read and wrote a report on a major novel a week, as I recall. One of those was The Education of Henry Adams. Recently, I picked it off the shelf and re-read it. It's amazing how much more sense it made, now that I have a few more life experiences. I was glad to have read it at the time; I was glad to read it again this time.

Within the last few months, I watched L'armée des ombres (Army of Shadows). One of the lessons I drew from both of these is that our educations don't prepare us well for the world in which we find ourselves. The Resistance fighters had to kill a traitor, their very first person to kill. Adams, prepared mentally and culturally for the eighteenth century, had to prepare himself for the beginnings of the twentieth.

Perhaps the lesson is that our educations, as important as they are, always teach us about the problems of the last generation. Our challenge is to apply those and more insights and wisdom to the needs of today. Our challenge is to learn from our education how to learn ourselves, how to complete our education, how to rise to the challenges we face. Taken at face value, my education prepared me for a world that's no longer visible. Perhaps the key thread that ran through my education (and perhaps yours) was the concept that education was not about learning something. Education was about learning how to learn what you needed to learn for the future.

For us, I suspect the needs of the day include figuring out how to live together on a planet that seems increasingly small and learning how to live in an age that is facing climate change, the end of oil, and a transition to equilibrium (or so we can hope).

What is the education of me? What is the education of you? Can we help each other in this cause?

A systems take on math and science education?

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University, recently posted an article describing how US colleges and universities are gradually coming to the view that they can't simply blame US secondary schools for the quality of math and science education incoming college students have, for the teachers and administrators of those secondary schools are themselves almost all products of the US college and university system.

This seems like closed-loop (feedback) thinking in action. Check out his Mobilization for Math/Science Education - Role of Higher Education.

The metric system and math skills

I once suggested that eliminating the use of the customary system of units in this country would help us learn and compete. Now Richard Slettvet, a local teacher, has made the same point in A logical way to improve math scores.

Is it time to act? Who will you engage?

Feel free to tell others about this post.

The Creative Value Network

Ralph Windle has started a new blog. I'd like to welcome him and to feature his work, because I think he's focused on an important area: creating dialog, innovation, and progress at the intersection of the realms of science and the arts. Both groups (and more; the world doesn't lend itself to being divided into only two such groups, as classic as that grouping is) have much to offer the vital and urgent challenges we face, and the synergy of the two mindsets and the two sets of approaches could be vital for a number of reasons.

In times such as this, we have to work together to figure out our values and our priorities and to work together on the tough problems we face. I learned that over many years of work: you need to know your objectives, your goals, in order to make good decisions, and you need to involve all the people in the system if you want both a robust decision and a decision people will support. Robert Dugger made that same claim yesterday in a panel discussion called the "Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget Forum on Consequences of Federal Intervention in U.S. Markets" as presented on C-SPAN.

How does Ralph Windle figure into this? He and his Creative Value Network are focused on creating dialog among those in the sciences and the arts to foster innovation and creativity. Check it out, and join in the dialog; perhaps together you and the others can be part of making the world a bit (or maybe even a lot) better.

Sneak peak: Information Dynamics I / II

If you are a current University of Washington graduate student or you live within commuting distance of the University of Washington and if you are interested in learning about system dynamics in an academic setting, put IMT 586 and IMT 587 on your calendar for the coming winter and spring quarters.

If you took IMT 586 last year or if you have a solid background in the material of the first half of John Sterman's Business Dynamics, put IMT 587 on your calendar for the coming spring quarter (yes, that's nine months away). We plan to offer it, assuming we have sufficient enrollment.

I'll make a fuller announcement as we get closer. Ask if you have questions, and let me know if you think you're interested: I'm curious and interested.

Making a big difference

Business Week just published John Hagel and John Seely Brown's Changing the World from the Edge describing how University of California, Berkeley students are making a real difference in the world, this time in issues such as "energy efficiency, Third World poverty and disease, and sustainable housing, among others." By the end, they summarize lessons those of us in business might find useful. I like all three of their three lessons, and I'm looking for ways to apply them, too. If you have suggestions, comment here, or get in touch.

That's related to my recent posting called It's a new world in business education. In all these cases, strong change leadership is again coming out of universities and focused on making the world a better place.

Thanks again to the TP! Wire service for the link.

It's a new world in business education

I began to notice that last winter, as I taught in the highly-rated Information School at the University of Washington, for they seemed very focused on the intersection of information, technology, and people issues, not just one or the other. I like that; it reminds us that people are closer to the goal than technology and that technology is (or should be) in service to people.

I'm noticing it even more this spring, as I co-teach at the also highly-rated Bainbridge Graduate Institute. BGI, too, is about intersection and synergy—in this case, the intersection of business and sustainability—as they integrate sustainability and business in every course they offer.

You can read more of the details on their Web site; I'll content myself to say it really seems true: people there have made and are making a difference both in business and in sustainability, they have a passion for what they do, and they like to have fun both as part of making a difference and as part of living. Associating with the faculty, the administration, and perhaps especially the students gives me hope for the future.

If you're interested in BGI, there are at least three ways that you can partake. They offer an MBA in Sustainable Business, which may fit some of you quite well. Others of you may find one of their two certificate programs to be more suitable.

This summer, they're starting a third option: a non-credit course called Sustainable Energy Solutions. In these times of seemingly never-ending increases in the price of petroleum and petroleum products, this course may be very timely for some of you.

How to get ahead

"I love a challenge!" Those are the words of a young boy quoted by Dr. Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, words typical of the mindset that, according to her research, helps people achieve more, a mindset, she claims, we can learn and we can teach.

I found Attribution theory and Shreddies today, that led me to Guy Kawasaki's "The Effort Effect", which led me to The Effort Effect and to an interview with Dweck at Tech Nation. A bit more Googling turned up How Not to Talk to Your Kids.

If you manage people, if you teach students, if you raise children, or if you have responsibility for your own contribution and results (there: that should cover everyone who reads this!), read and consider her ideas. If her research is good (and, while it seems to be, I do encourage skepticism as part of learning), consider how you can apply her ideas in your work and life.

Improving math education: a conjecture

When I lived and worked in Germany, I noticed to my surprise that my engineering colleagues couldn't do fractions. They had no concept of whether 9/16 was bigger or smaller than 35/64, and they couldn't easily solve "simple" problems such as

  3          5
  -  +  ------------
  4     4 +    2
             -----
             4 + 3

Of course, they could figure out that 9/16 is 0.5625, that 35/64 is 0.546875, and that the former is thus bigger than the latter, but they wouldn't immediately convert 9/16 to 36/64 and see it was bigger.

When I expressed my surprise, we discovered that they never studied fractions in school. We decided the only likely reason US students studied fractions in elementary school was to be able to deal with inches, gallons, and the like. From vague recollection, I must have spent the better part of a couple of years in elementary school arithmetic studying fractions plus memorizing how many feet in a mile, pints in a gallon, and teaspoons in a cup (not to mention conversion factors from those units to metric). By comparison, my European colleagues had to learn a set of metric prefixes, the names of basic units of measurement, and the universal conversion factor of 10 (just to show there's a Wikipedia page on almost anything!).

As it's often written that students in other countries are often, on average, well ahead of US students in math skills and that such a gap makes us less competitive in world markets, what if we switched to the metric system (or, more precisely, the International System of Units)? Would that make a year or two long hole in math education that could be filled in with more advanced topics? Would that help us in the USA catch up?

I don't know. I recognize that it's a challenging problem, and there is no silver bullet, not even in my idea. I would be curious to know if anyone has evaluated this approach.