Saturday, September 28, 2013

Some versus All

Every semester when I begin the first day of my class, I like to tell my students that before the term is over I’m going to learn things from them, and I will do my best to teach them at least as many things. This is actually the case for any teacher, given that it’s not possible to teach anyone anything without learning more about the subject yourself in the process, but it’s probably even more correct in the case of business teachers. As I like to point out, I probably know more about business, or at least management, than any one member of the class – I’ve had twenty years of experience and two Master’s degrees; I would hope I know a few things about my subject. But there is no way I know more about business than the entire class put together; even allowing for just a few years of work and consumer experience for each person, the 40 of them have several times more years of business experience than I’ve been alive…

This makes cases where the people who run school systems assume that they are smarter, cleverer and more knowledgeable than all of their students combined seem all the more preposterous. Collectively, your students possess an amazing amount of knowledge, and a frightening mutual ability to solve problems, work out puzzles and generally outthink you. In the case of a security protocol or a lockout code, you are essentially betting that you (or whoever wrote the code) are smarter than the collective intelligence of hundreds or thousands of bright, curious, imaginative people – and that’s just counting the smart kids. Which makes the fact that students in Los Angeles required only a matter of days to hack the iPads they were issued by the school district an event so obvious it’s hard to imagine why nobody saw it coming from the beginning…

You can read the NPR story about it here if you want to, but the facts seem clear enough. The Los Angeles Unified School District signed a $30 million deal with Apple to provide iPads to all of their students for use in a variety of digital and distance learning applications, and then equipped the devices with software to both allow the schools to track the location of each iPad and also to restrict what web sites each unit could access. Less than a week later over 200 units had been “hacked” to get around the restrictions, and unless the software patches introduced this week are better than the original programming, there is reason to believe that all of the rest of them will be before much longer. As a teacher myself, I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how obvious these events are. A much better question, at least from a management standpoint, is what are we going to do about it?

Keeping our students off of restricted web sites isn’t really possible. If the government would allow us to jam all wireless transmissions into and out of the classroom we might be able to keep our students from updating their Facebook page while we’re actually talking to them, but the FCC won’t even consider such an action, and just asking nicely (or threatening to lower grades) does not appear to be of much use. And, as the linked story makes very clear, if we take away the official iPads our students will just turn to smart phones, tablets and other devices they already have. It’s possible that if the District were to invest enough money in encryption software they might be able to make the restriction stick, but I can’t help thinking that’s just throwing good money after bad…

In a broader context, of course, this whole situation mirrors the conflict between all managers (who want to see more work getting done) and all workers (who want to get paid as much money for as little work as possible). The District can’t compel the students to spend all of their time, or even the time they are supposed to be spending, in approved fashion, any more than a manager can. What they can do is borrow the same standard most line managers use, which is simply that if you work is completed (correctly) in the time required, then I don’t care what else you’re doing or how you are spending your remaining time. It may not be the authoritarian method of which the District seems so fond, and it certainly won’t help them to establish or maintain discipline. But it’s probably more effective in the long run than just giving all of the pads back to Apple…

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