The Cognitive Age
Saturday May 03, 2008
An insightful opinion in the New York Times today talks about how we're entering the Cognitive Age. In the Cognitive Age, your ability to adapt to learning new skills and applying creative ways to put those skills to work solving real problems is paramount to your career success. Although the article is pointedly political, the main thrust of it is easily observable in the job marketplace.
It seems easy to blame globalization for the loss of jobs, or for the current economic woes, however, most companies are not shipping jobs overseas just for cheap labor. Globalization is really about localization in many ways. Companies are building manufacturing plants in many areas around the world to create and/or build up local business models.
The new challenge for us as corporate educators is to build learning experiences that enable complexity to become simpler. The information available to consumers now is much more diverse than just 5-10 years ago, and it's fueling a need for ease of use, consistency, and powerful user-generated manipulation. I think we need to radically reinvent the job descriptions of teachers and educators so that we can better prepare ourselves to be able to architect more meaningful, contextual learning applications.
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Interesting. We discussed fluid vs. crystall...