Machine Processing and Basic Skills Strategy
Return to Accessibility General
Date: 20/11/2002
Article
- Many of the literacy and ICT skills which are classified as basic will continue to be valuable to people as citizens but they will be economically useless. humanITy sits at both ends of this spectrum as I work with socially excluded people but am also involved in the development of the Semantic Web (Resource Description Frameworks - RDF), natural language processing (for language simplification) and other process applications.
- What machines do best is repetitive, predictable, rules-based work which reflects the analogue process of the division of labour in manufacturing. This is, in effect, what we are still expecting our humans with basic skills to undertake. Machine processing is actually developing a lot faster than our capacity to develop learning materials and change course work.
- What we need to concentrate on in the next ten years are those areas where humans are likely to continue to out perform machines. This is mainly in procedures that are semi rules based or non-rules based, in content creation, complex processing and merging. These are all areas of added value.
- People with narrow skills bases will not be particularly good at adding value to content or creating it on their own but they may, I say may, be able to do this in a collaborative environment, in social firms, for example, either in a real environment, on the net, or a combination of the two. With cable free coms it is conceivable they will be able to do it in micro collectives, moving between houses according to child care needs, and receiving raw material and delivering content through broad band.
- This, of course, has massive implications for skills development:
- Collaboration. We need to move away from an almost obsessive concern with autonomous creativity (the novel) to collaborative creativity (the movie). This involves developing procedures and tools for asynchronous collaboration. It also means moving away from the examination hall as the icon of achievement. Here people are penalised for copying or consulting and they are not allowed to look up information; in real life the first thing we do when we get stuck is to consult or copy or search. Collaboration also needs an understanding of mutual dependencies. In summary, the education and work processes are moving further apart, partly as the result of senior management which can't stop thinking about what it learned and how some forty years ago.
- Education and Training. Education is broadly concerned with the development of the knowledge of process whereas training is broadly involved with producing an output. In our system the cleverer you are the more you get involved in the former and many of us leave university having only been involved in education and process. Where we decide to move people from one to the other we do this simultaneously for every branch of every subject; the worse somebody appears to be at process the earlier we move them to training. A simple example of what we need to look at is the calculator: many people can use this effectively for long multiplication and there is no particular reason why they should understand the process but few people know how to use a calculator for percentages because they don't understand the process and need to.
- Language Engineering. We also need to spend much less time on learning to process symbolic language (reading) as if it could not be accessed simultaneously with voice out; and we need to consider writing in the context of voice in. This is particularly true if we have abandoned education/process in favour of training/output. We also need to look carefully at the implications of language simplification in terms both of the need for syntactic and lexicographic understanding.
- Redundant Learning. It can be seen from all of this that we are still cluttering our not very bright people with a mass of stuff they don't necessarily need which deprives them of the time and opportunity to get what they do need:
- Defining Searches
- Searching
- Navigating
- Evaluating Results
- Collating
- Collaging
- Merging
- Creating
- Collaborating
- Exercising restraint
- Developing confidence
- Literacy’s. Traditionally we have emphasised autonomous, discrete literacy which says: the more complex the set of skills the fewer those who can perform them all. Inclusive, collaborative literacy says: the more complex the set of tasks the greater the number who can become involved. We need to think much more of the second and much less of the first.