AIM Program "A 21st Century Learning Organization"

The Knowledge Building Paradigm: A Model of Learning for Net Generation Students
by Donald Philip

As noted by a number of contributors to the previous issue of this publication (e.g., Barnes, Marateo, and Ferris 2007; van 't Hooft 2007; Thompson 2007), the Net Generation expects that technology will be an important part of their education. This is nicely illustrated by Chen (2002) in his description of an encounter with a young Net Generation student:

Recently, I met some middle school students who carry laptops in their backpacks. One boy told me how technology should not be a machine you go to, but a machine that goes with you. He said, somewhat impatiently, "It's part of my brain. Why would I want to leave it behind in a computer lab?" (xxii)

The statement that the computer is "part of my brain" should resonate with everyone involved in education today. Computers and the attendant technology can no longer be considered desirable adjuncts to education. Instead, they have to be regarded as essential—as thinking prosthetics (Johnson 2001) or mind tools (Jonassen 1996). But, like any other tool, thinking prosthetics must be used properly to be effective. In this article we briefly address the shift in learning styles associated with Net Generation students; we then introduce the Knowledge Building paradigm, a learning model particularly suited for a social environment in which cognitive prosthetics have become indispensable, as well as for the professional settings these students can expect to confront in their future careers. In doing so, we also point to corresponding transformations in business and education that will determine the future of the Net Generation learner and worker.

The Net Generation

The Net Generation (N-Gen) is defined as the population of about 90 million young people who have grown up or are growing up in constant contact with digital media (Tapscott 1998). Tapscott has, through extensive interviews, identified a number of changes in the way these students work and think, the key characteristic of which is interactivity (129–132). Tapscott has identified eight shifts caused by interactivity learning:

• from linear to hypermedia learning,
• from instruction to construction and discovery,
• from teacher-centered to learner-centered education,
• from absorbing material to learning how to navigate and how to learn,
• from schooling to lifelong learning,
• from one-size-fits-all to customized learning,
• from learning as torture to learning as fun, and
• from the teacher as transmitter to the teacher as facilitator. (142)

These developments have the potential to create a tremendous change in how schools operate. As N-Gen students' exposure to interactive media changes their perception of how education should proceed, schools will need to move from the former model of classrooms that are analogs of broadcast media to a more interactive model of learning. But what does this kind of learning look like in practice?

The Knowledge Building Paradigm: Guiding Principles

One answer is the Knowledge Building paradigm promulgated by Scardamalia and Bereiter (2003). This paradigm, which is based on the manner in which research communities work, takes a sociocultural perspective on human-computer interactions, seeks to virtualize the process of education in keeping with new trends in the technological circulation of knowledge, and privileges a less hierarchical model of learning based on flexible organizations of small teams. Each of these guiding principles is elaborated below, followed by a consideration of the practical applications of this model.

The Sociocultural Perspective

The sociocultural perspective focuses on the manner in which human intelligence is augmented by artifacts designed to facilitate cognition. Our intelligence is distributed over the tools we use (diSessa 2000; Hutchins 1995). The old saying, "To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" is very true. As Hutchins (1995) notes, "It is a truism that we cannot know what the task is until we know what the tools are" (114). Computers are a particular sort of tool known as cognitive prosthetics; they augment human intelligence, freeing humans to do what humans do well. Johnson's (2001) comments about StarLogo can be paraphrased to say that computers should do the work our perceptual and cognitive faculties cannot do on their own. Such tools often become invisible as we come to accept that they are part of our normal environment. As a result, we tend to see any intelligence in them as part of the person, not the object (Pea 1993). However, human cognition is mediated by the symbolic forms and tools we use, and the computer, a kind of omnitool, is rapidly becoming our principle cognitive mediation tool. The Net Generation is growing up in a tool-rich environment and this needs to be taken into account in designing pedagogical systems.

Virtuality

Pierre Lévy (1998) notes that one of the principal characteristics of the knowledge age, in which the Net Generation is growing up, is virtualization, a process in which "[an] event is detached from a specific time and place, becomes public, undergoes heterogenesis" (74). He outlines five characteristics of virtualization:

• deterritorialization (the prying loose of an object or event from a physical place and moving it to a non-territorial space, essentially to cyberspace);
• detachment (the prying loose of objects and events from their original context);
• sharing (the distribution of conceptual artifacts among communities interested in them);
• elevation to a problematic (the arguments, or ideas, and the problems that arise from the consideration of the logical relations among them); and
• heterogenesis (the change that occurs as one shifts from traditional media to digital media, and the personal changes that occur to individuals as their thinking is increasingly shaped by digital media). (74-75).

Much of the education of the Net Generation (formal and informal) is becoming virtualized—a profound change from traditional educational forms, a change which both promotes the use of thinking prosthetics and continues to transform student expectations of their learning environments.

Learning Organizations

Traditional, industrial-model schools are designed around the ideas of hierarchies and top-down control of the learning process, just like industrial-age factories. However, many businesses are now finding that the pace of change demanded by the global economy and facilitated by various technologies is requiring them to rethink how they are organized. Many are restructuring themselves as learning organizations—organizations in which new learning and innovation are the engines that drive the company. These companies have flattened layers of management and tend to work in the manner suggested by Kelly (1994), Johnson (2001), and Gloor (2006): bottom-up, swarm-like organizations with fewer hierarchical barriers between ideas and decisions. In such organizations, goals are fluid, driven by new learning among the organization's members; goals are emergent properties of the system (Holland 1998), guided by general principles, and as such are unpredictable. In such companies, teams form around an interest in ideas for new products and services. Fisher and Fisher (1998) note, "These teams are difficult to describe to outsiders because their membership shifts from time to time, forming and reforming like rapidly splitting amoebas" (106). In this environment, Bennet (2003) notes the need for tools that support collaborative work to virtualize the knowledge of the team, distributing it onto the artifact and thus making it available to all team members.

It is worth noting that such companies really are learning organizations. A recent Time magazine article (Ignatius 2006) describes how Google expects its employees to work: "Innovation tends to bubble up from these bright young minds . . . . Every employee is meant to divide his or her time in three parts: 70% devoted to Google's core businesses, search and advertising; 20% on pursuits related to the core; and 10% on far-out ideas" (28). This means that approximately 30% of an employee's time will be spent on pursuing new learning and developing innovative ideas. In fact, Ignatius notes that co-founder Larry Page explicitly modeled Google after Stanford University (27). Google is a leader, but many organizations are undertaking similar shifts.

The educational system will have to produce individuals who can work in such organizations and who understand the processes of innovation and creativity. N-Gen students are initially prepared for this by the very process of "growing up digital" (Bereiter 2002, 220). As noted in the introduction, N-Gen students already regard computers as part of their brain; they are accustomed to distributing their knowledge across its various functions and collaborating virtually via e-mail, instant messaging, and any other available tool. In other words, N-Genners are used to working as part of a heterogeneous, distributed system. These are the same skills that learning organizations expect workers to deploy.

The Knowledge Building Classroom

Arguably the best way to develop these skills is to create a learning community in which students can practice the essential skills required by learning organizations. By an odd confluence of events, educational researchers have already been studying the construction of classes with exactly these characteristics. For over 20 years, Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter have been leading the Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology (IKIT), a team of researchers working on knowledge-building theory, a pedagogical approach in which students work in a computer-mediated environment in the manner of a research community (Scardamalia and Bereiter 1992; Scardamalia 2004). As Bereiter (2004) notes,

Sustained innovation, progressive research, and idea-centered education are all basically the same knowledge building process, carried out in different contexts. Thus the skills and habits of mind acquired through classroom knowledge building are essentially the same skills and habits of mind that figure in workplace contexts of creative knowledge work. (3)

In this approach the computer-mediated learning environment—formerly designated as the Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environment (CSILE) and currently called simply the Knowledge Forum—is designed to make advanced knowledge processes accessible to all participants, including children; to foster the creation and continual improvement of public artifacts or community knowledge; and to provide a community space for carrying out this knowledge building work collaboratively (Scardamalia 2004, 2002). In a knowledge-building classroom, learning is a by-product of the creation of new knowledge, but the focus of classroom work is the continual improvement of ideas.

How does it work? In practice, the teacher presents students with a problem of understanding relevant to the real world. It could be a question such as What is the nature of light? or What makes a society a civilization? The focus here is to make student ideas, rather than predetermined activities or units of knowledge, the center of the classroom work. The next step is to get the students to generate ideas about the topic and write notes about their ideas in the Knowledge Forum (KF) database, an online environment with metacognitive enhancements to support the growth of the knowledge-building process. In generating these ideas, the students form work groups around similar interests and topics they wish to explore. These groups are self-organized and dynamic; the teacher does not select the members, and members can join or leave as they choose. Idea generation can take place during these group sessions, during which all students are given the chance to express their ideas, or in individual notes posted directly to the KF database. While in a typical classroom setting ideas or comments generated in discussion are usually lost, the KF database preserves these ephemeral resources so that students can return to them for comment and reflection. Students are then encouraged to read the notes of other students and soon find that there are differing schools of opinion about the problem. The teacher's job is to ensure that students remain on task and work towards the solution of the problem under study by reading each other's notes and contributing new information or theories to the database.

For example, in one IKIT class project, students in a Gr. 5/6 split class studied ancient civilizations. The unit began with a visit to a local museum, during which the students were exposed to a number of characteristics that researchers use to classify a society as a civilization. Their subsequent inquiry centered around what makes a society a civilization and what characteristics are important in determining the concept of civilization. In doing so, the students did not accept the museum presentation as the final word, but treated it as a conceptual object capable of improvement and open to critique (Exhibit 1). After the museum visit, the teacher allotted two 90-minute periods each week for twelve weeks, during which time the students engaged in knowledge-building talk sessions and used laptop computers and the Knowledge Forum software to explore their ideas regarding ancient civilizations. The students, rather than the teacher, chose the civilizations to be studied and, facilitated by the online environment, the students organized themselves into groups around the civilizations that interested them. The inquiry ranged from commonly studied civilizations such as Rome and Egypt to the Vikings and even to the skeletal 'hobbit-like' hominids discovered on Flores island. In each case, students explored whether these societies were civilizations and why. Students classified their contributions to the database using built-in metacognitive scaffolds (cognitive labels) such as "new information," "my theory," "this theory cannot explain," "I need to understand," and "putting our ideas together," and they made extensive use of both the reading and responding functions.

As the work progresses, new knowledge (at least, new to the class) and new understandings emerge, change, and grow. Students are encouraged to research their ideas by accessing a variety of authoritative sources, or by designing experiments, or by any other means that is practical and safe. They bring the fruits of their research back to the class in the form of more notes in the KF database, either supporting or invalidating their positions. Typically, one inquiry runs into another in a flow dictated by the output of the previous research, not by direction from the teacher. This process continues until the topic has been exhausted or time for study of that unit runs out. During the process, the students often far exceed curriculum expectations and develop a deep understanding of the topic under study.

Studies bear out the value of this practical scheme. Using social network analysis, Philip (2005) found flexible work groups spontaneously forming and breaking up in the live-class setting; in an analysis of note-reading patterns in the database, Zhang, Scardamalia, and Reeve (2006) found a highly complex clique structure with a large degree of overlap among cliques. Philip (2005) also found a high density of note reading (92%)—a strong indicator of teamwork in the class, and generally consistent with the extensive patterns of collaborative communication otherwise observed among students (Exhibit 2). Further observation of these sessions yielded additional information regarding the relative degree of focus and digression on the part of students as well as the need for resilient moderation skills on the part of teachers; moreover, the communal process of note reading among students suggested that actual levels of database access may be substantially higher than the levels recorded by the system itself (Exhibit 3). While the high levels of free exploration afforded by this pedagogy may require a greater degree of monitoring and discretion on behalf of teachers, the approach allows students to adopt strategies of small-team collaboration that will suit them well in their future professional careers.

Knowledge Forum is, of course, not the only online learning environment available. Others of note include FirstClass, WebCT, and Blackboard. Palloff and Pratt (2001) note that, whatever online environment is used, "attention needs to be paid to developing a sense of community in the group of participants in order for the learning process to be successful" (20). In other words, a knowledge-building community must be allowed to develop in order for the learning to succeed. For further illustration of this approach, the IKIT Web site provides virtual tours of the knowledge building process. Specifically, one set of tours contains video of a teacher talking about how he runs his knowledge-building class and video of a student talking about how collaborative science is done in a knowledge building class.

Linking this type of environment to Tapscott's (1998) ideas, the Knowledge Building approach, through its idea-centric focus, shifts the locus of classroom control from the teacher to the students, with the teacher acting as a facilitator. In this shift, the students become the directors of their own learning, catalyzing the transformation from one-size-fits-all to individualized learning; from instruction to building new knowledge; from learning as drudgery to learning as fun; and towards learning how to learn in a non-linear way geared to produce the innovative ideas our society will need in order to solve the problems of the future (Homer-Dixon 2001).

Conclusion

Industrial schools were patterned on industrial-era factories; as businesses restructure themselves as learning organizations that work like knowledge-building research groups, the next generation of education will have to help students deploy appropriate skills. N-Gen students, having grown up in the presence of interactive media that have changed both their thought patterns and their expectations, already have some of these skills. They are accustomed to distributed cognition and virtualization, which demand a new way of approaching work and learning and open new possibilities for innovative work. Online learning environments such as Knowledge Forum, which helps students create new knowledge and new understanding in a collaborative manner and through diverse media, can prepare them to work in the distributed, virtual workplaces of the future.

References

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Zhang, J., M. Scardamalia, and R. Reeve. 2006. Designs for collective cognitive responsibility in knowledge building communities. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, April.

Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Philip, D. 2007. The Knowledge Building paradigm: A model of learning for Net Generation students. Innovate 3 (5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=368 (accessed June 4, 2007). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

Published by Nova Southeastern University

WISDOM! (Submitted by: Leo Tomkow)

The Ignorance of Crowds
by Nicholas G. Carr

5/31/07
The open source model can play an important role in innovation, but know its limitations.

Ten years ago, on May 22, 1997, a little-known software programmer from Pennsylvania named Eric Raymond presented a paper at a technology conference in Würzburg, Germany. Titled “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” the paper caused an immediate stir, and its renown has only grown in the years since. It is now widely considered one of the seminal documents in the history of the software industry.

Raymond’s subject was the open source software movement, as exemplified by what was then — and still is — its most famous product, the Linux operating system. Open source projects, he pointed out, represented a radically new method of software development. Traditionally, sophisticated programs had always been “built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation.” An open source project, in contrast, was the product of a large and informal community of volunteers who in aggregate “seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches.” What was amazing, Raymond wrote, was that “the Linux world not only didn’t fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.”

The bazaar model of “peer production” was unthinkable before the Internet came along. It was only when software programmers around the world gained access to a cheap, high-speed communication network that they could start sharing their code in a speedy and efficient manner. As Raymond observed, it was probably not a coincidence “that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993–1994 that saw [an] explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet.” The Net formed the thoroughfare of the bazaar.

Of course, that thoroughfare wasn’t open only to software engineers. It was open to every person and to every company. The Net brought the bazaar, and its peer production model, right up to the doors of every business in the world. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that Raymond’s metaphor soon came to be applied far more broadly than he originally intended. Connected to the global masses through the Internet, companies no longer had to pursue innovation in splendid isolation. They had the option of replacing the traditional, closed cathedral model with the new, open bazaar model. Michael Schrage noted the importance of this phenomenon in the pages of this magazine back in 2000 (See “Open for Business,” s+b, Fourth Quarter 2000). Open source, he wrote, is “transforming how organizations of all kinds seek to create and manage value. [It] will be central to capturing more profits from innovation.” In their recent book Wikinomics (Portfolio, 2006), Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams similarly argued that peer production can help businesses “take innovation and wealth creation to new levels.”

But even as the corporate world has begun to embrace the idea of the bazaar as a forum for innovation, software programmers have continued to debate the strengths and weaknesses of peer production. The open source model has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful way to refine programs that already exist — Linux, for instance, is an elaboration of the venerable Unix operating system, and the open source Firefox browser builds on Netscape’s old Navigator — but it has proven less successful at creating exciting new programs from scratch. That fact has led some to conclude that peer production is best viewed as a means for refining the old rather than inventing the new; that it’s an optimization model more than an invention model.

Now that we’ve arrived at the 10th anniversary of the first appearance of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” it seems like an opportune moment to take a closer look at both the benefits and the limitations of peer production as a means of business innovation. What’s the bazaar good for, and what isn’t it good for?

Limits of Linus’s Law
In his paper, Raymond highlighted the greatest advantage of the open source model for software development: It dramatically increases the speed with which problems, or bugs, are uncovered and fixed. When only a relatively small number of programmers work on a complex program, debugging consumes huge amounts of time and causes lots of delays — and many bugs still manage to sneak through. When you mobilize hundreds or thousands of people, however, they find and fix bugs much more quickly and thoroughly. It’s not all that different from, say, an Easter egg hunt. If you hide 100 eggs and have two children search for them, you’ll wait a long time for them to finish, and a lot of the eggs will likely remain undiscovered. If you put two dozen kids to work, however, they’ll locate all the eggs in no time. Raymond condensed this simple idea into an aphorism that would become his paper’s most famous line: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” He called it Linus’s Law, after Linus Torvalds, Linux’s founder and presiding genius.

The power that a crowd of contributors has to solve problems derives not just from its sheer size, although that is important, but from its diversity. It’s only because the members of the crowd have, as Raymond put it, “differing agendas and approaches” that they’re so effective at finding so many bugs (or so many Easter eggs) so quickly. If the participants shared similar outlooks, they’d all end up looking for the same things in the same places. What an unorganized, fairly random group of people provides is not just a lot of eyeballs but a lot of different ways of seeing. As University of Michigan professor Scott Page writes in his new book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Society (Princeton University Press, 2007), “When solving problems, diversity may matter as much as, or even more than, individual ability.”

Raymond also made another, very important observation. What makes the open source model so well suited to finding and fixing software flaws is that debugging is a task that requires little coordination among workers. Debuggers are able to sift through chunks of code in isolation — whether “splendid” or not — without knowing or caring what their fellow bug finders are doing. “Debugging,” as Raymond puts it, “is parallelizable.” All the debuggers have to do is communicate their findings and fixes to some central authority, like Linus Torvalds. The central authority takes care of synthesizing the work of the crowd, choosing the best contributions, melding them together into a coherent product, and then redistributing the work to the crowd for the next go-round.

But in Raymond’s observation, we also begin to see some of the limitations of the bazaar. First, peer production works best with routine or narrowly defined tasks that can be pursued simultaneously by a big crowd of people. It is not well suited to a job that requires a lot of coordination among the participants. If members of a large, informal group had to coordinate their efforts closely, their work would quickly bog down in complexity. The crowd’s size and diversity would turn from a strength to a weakness, and the speed advantage would be lost. Second, because it requires so many “eyeballs,” open source works best when the labor is donated or partially subsidized. If Linus Torvalds had had to compensate all his “eyeballs,” he would have gone broke long ago.

Third, and most important, the open source model — when it works effectively — is not as egalitarian or democratic as it is often made out to be. Linux has been successful not just because so many people have been involved, but because the crowd’s work has been filtered through a central authority who holds supreme power as a synthesizer and decision maker. As the Linux project has grown, Torvalds has gathered a hierarchy of talented software programmers around him to help manage the crowd and its contributions. It’s not a stretch to say that the Linux bureaucracy forms a cathedral that coordinates the work of the bazaar and molds it into a unified product.

If Raymond made a mistake in his paper, it was in drawing too sharp a distinction between the cathedral and the bazaar. They’re not two different and incompatible approaches to innovation. Their relationship is symbiotic. Without the bazaar, the cathedral model moves too slowly. Without the cathedral, the bazaar model lacks focus and discipline.

The People’s Encyclopedia
Outside the realm of software, the best-known example of a work created through peer production is Wikipedia, the giant online encyclopedia that is being written by many thousands of volunteers. The creation of Wikipedia, and its predecessor, Nupedia, was directly inspired by the open source movement. In fact, Jimmy Wales, a cofounder of the encyclopedia, has said that Eric Raymond’s essay “opened my eyes to the possibility of mass collaboration.”

Wikipedia has been a roaring success by many measures. Its original English-language version contains well over a million articles, covering everything from Aachen to ZZ Top, and it has become one of the most visited sites on the Web, attracting more than 150 million people a month. Its achievement underscores the power of peer production to dramatically accelerate narrowly defined tasks that require little coordination — in this case, finding and paraphrasing descriptions of many different subjects — and reinforces the important role that diversity plays in such efforts. In contributing to the encyclopedia, each Wikipedia volunteer naturally focuses on those subjects that interest him or her, and it’s the wide range of those interests that has enabled the encyclopedia to get so big so fast.

But for all its breadth and popularity, Wikipedia is a deeply flawed product. Individual articles are often poorly written and badly organized, and the encyclopedia as a whole is unbalanced, skewed toward popular culture and fads. It’s hardly elitist to point out that something’s wrong with an encyclopedia when its entry on the Flintstones is twice as long as its entry on Homer. Eric Raymond himself has become one of Wikipedia’s harshest critics. “The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better [Encyclopaedia] Britannica looks,” he told the New Yorker in 2006. If Wikipedia weren’t free, it is unlikely its readers would be so forgiving of its failings.

The Linux operating system, in contrast, is renowned for its high quality. It routinely runs for months on end without crashing. What explains the difference? Wikipedia’s problems seem to stem from the fact that the encyclopedia lacks the kind of strong central authority that exerts quality control over the work of the Linux crowd. The contributions of Wikipedia’s volunteers go directly into the product without passing through any editorial filter. The process is more democratic, but the quality of the product suffers.

Aware of Wikipedia’s flaws, Wales and other contributors have been trying hard to improve the quality of the site’s content. A management team has slowly been taking shape, and it is establishing editorial policies and policing contributions. But even though this nascent hierarchy has already become much more bureaucratic than Linux’s lean managerial structure, it hasn’t yet been able to substantially improve Wikipedia. The failure appears to stem from the makeup of the supervisory group. Whereas the Linux team is a strict meritocracy, Wikipedia’s administrators represent a broader mix of contributors. They’re often chosen on the basis of how much they’ve contributed or how long they’ve contributed rather than on the quality of their contributions or their editorial skill. It seems fair to say that although the bazaar should be defined by diversity, the cathedral should be defined by talent. When you move from the bazaar to the cathedral, it’s best to leave your democratic ideals behind.

Peer Production’s Place
Peer production is still a new phenomenon and will continue to evolve. Nevertheless, its most prominent examples are now mature enough that we can begin to draw from them some practical lessons for executives and entrepreneurs looking to the open source model as a means of strengthening the innovativeness of their organizations.

The bottom line is that peer production has valuable but limited applications. It can be a powerful tool, but it is no panacea. It’s a great way to find and fix problems, to collect and categorize information, or to perform any other time-consuming task that can be sped up by having lots of people with diverse perspectives working in parallel. It can also have the important added benefit of engaging customers in your innovation process, which not only allows their insights to be harnessed but also may increase their loyalty to your company.

But if peer production is a good way to mine the raw material for innovation, it doesn’t seem well suited to shaping that material into a final product. That’s a task that is still best done in the closed quarters of a cathedral, where a relatively small and formally organized group of talented professionals can collaborate closely in perfecting the fit and finish of a product. Involving a crowd in this work won’t speed it up; it will just bring delays and confusion.

The open source model is also unlikely to produce the original ideas that inspire and guide the greatest innovation efforts. That remains the realm of the individual. Raymond was clear on that point when, toward the end of his paper, he examined some of the “necessary preconditions” for the bazaar model of production. “It’s fairly clear,” he wrote, “that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode.” In a recent e-mail to me, he was even blunter. “The individual wizard,” he wrote, “is where successful bazaar projects generally start.”

Matt Asay, a software executive with long experience in the open source movement, agrees. “All open source projects — without exception — are started by one or two people and…have a core development group of fewer than 15 developers,” he says. “The most you can hope for [from the broader set of contributors] is bug fixes.” Asay warns that trying to expand the core decision-making group to include more of the “community” can backfire, as the resulting decision-by-committee approach tends to produce “stale, conservative code.” In other words, keep the bazaar out of the cathedral.

So if you’re looking to bolster your company’s creativity, you should by all means look for opportunities to harness the power of the crowd. Just don’t expect the masses to take the place of the lone wizard or the band of mages. The greatest breakthroughs will always begin, to quote Eric Raymond once more, with “one good idea in one person’s head,” and the greatest products will always reach perfection through the concerted efforts of a highly skilled team.

ARE WE Having and FUN Yet and WHY It Is So IMPORTANT?

Submitted by: Leo Tomkow

The Beatles Principles
by Andrew Sobel

Lessons about teamwork and creativity from the most successful band in history.

Illustration by Lars Leetaru

Entrepreneur Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group, is known for building creative, motivated teams. He insists on “fun” as a key element of any new enterprise. When I mentioned this to a senior executive at a large investment bank, he shook his head and told me, with a mixture of remorse and bravado, that his company had once been fun, too: “We’re a bit more like the military now, and too big for that stuff. We marshal the people and grind out the deals pretty mechanically.” He glanced at his beeping BlackBerry, mumbled an apology, and shot off somewhere, leaving behind a last remark: “There’s not a lot of fun left.”

Too many people in business feel that way. And the more they lose sight of the fun and camaraderie in their business, the harder it is to deliver performance.

But there is an example of a team that learned to deliver the highest level of performance while having fun on a legendary scale. Not coincidentally, it’s the most successful team of our time: the Beatles. Richard Branson has fun, but his outsized personality and high-stakes gambles make it hard to follow his example. The Beatles were great artists and entertainers, but in many respects they were four ordinary guys who, as a team, found a way to achieve extraordinary artistic and financial success and have a great time together while doing it. Every business team can learn from their story.

If we want to understand the Beatles’ relevance to management teams, the place to start is February 9, 1964. On that night, the group made its American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in front of what was then the largest television audience in history. The black-and-white clip of that performance is now a pop-culture classic. Before a theater full of screaming teenagers, the four young musicians — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr — are relaxed and confident as they kick into “All My Loving.” Ringo’s drum kit is elevated above the stage — then an unusual arrangement — so that he is as much the center of attention as the other three Beatles. It’s an ensemble of four equal players, not a flamboyant lead singer with his backing musicians. They’re all smiling. They’re having the time of their lives. If ever there was an antidote to the malaise of “grinding it out mechanically,” it was visible on the stage that night.

The Beatles are a noteworthy example because the whole of their accomplishment was so much greater than the sum of its parts. The reasons are evident in the way they worked together as a team; how they collaborated to write their songs; the techniques they used to enhance their innate creativity; and the approaches they used, for most of their time together, to defuse the inevitable tensions that arose among them.

The magic was far more than just the music. There are, in fact, specific strategies — I call them “the Beatles Principles” — that you can use to re-create a bit of the Fab Four’s juju. If you have to field teams of high-performing professionals, or if you’re trying to improve your organization’s teamwork, creativity, and capacity to connect with customers, here are four principles to work and play by.

“Eight Days a Week”
When the young Beatles first hit the top of the U.K. charts in 1963, with “Please Please Me,” they seemed like an overnight sensation, but they weren’t. Behind their seemingly effortless playing were thousands of hours logged performing together in the clubs of Liverpool and Hamburg. This face time forged the individual Beatles into a cohesive, tightly knit team that Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger called, enviously, “the four-headed hydra.”

Today, we have almost forgotten about the importance of face time in building familiarity and mutual trust — the requisites for teaming seamlessly under pressure. Some companies have gone so far as to promote the concept of “virtual teams,” whose members have never met one another, and never will. This approach can work for engineering and other technical projects, but if you have to perform for clients and customers, forget it. As the CFO of a Fortune 500 company told me recently, “All of the big banks and professional firms tell you they are ‘global.’ But most of them cannot field a team of people, drawn from these far-flung operations, who know and trust each other and who have worked together before. You really notice when the individuals on the team are relaxed, communicating, and having fun together — or, as the case may be, introducing themselves to each other for the first time outside your office door.”

That behavior is a tip-off, says the CFO: “I notice how they are getting on with each other because this tells me what a long-term relationship with me and my organization might look like.”

The Beatles demonstrated that true esprit de corps comes from intense, shared experiences.

Beatles Principle Number 1: Invest in and build face time between team members long before they are required to appear together.

“Getting Better”
Most rock groups produce essentially the same types of songs, over and over again. The Beatles’ secret to retaining and growing their audience over time was the breathtaking and continual evolution of their music, from album to album, along many dimensions. Their musical explorations took them into new and unfamiliar themes, musical styles, arrangements, instruments, and recording techniques. With songs as varied as “Yesterday” and “Revolution,” they sold more than 1 billion records in not much more than a decade.

Like many eclectic innovators, the Beatles borrowed extensively from other genres and combined these ideas into something new. Starting from a base of rock and roll, they added touches of Indian music, country and western, rhythm and blues, classical, music hall pop, acoustic folk, and jazz. They turned record covers into works of art (Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) and virtually created the rock video. The Beatles did not actually invent most of these musical ideas, but they reached out and dared to combine them in new ways that vastly expanded the vocabulary of rock and roll.

No subject was too mundane or outlandish. A newspaper article about the death of a Guinness brewing heir spurred John Lennon to compose “A Day in the Life.” A parking ticket became “Lovely Rita.” Paul McCartney’s sheepdog inspired “Martha My Dear,” and an offhand comment from an overworked chauffeur turned into “Eight Days a Week.” The Beatles had profound powers of observation. They absorbed the world around them, framed it musically, and gave it back to us.

Complacency — being content to sing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” over and over again — is the enemy of sustainable success. The way to keep clients and customers for life is to evolve your songs with them — to constantly expand your repertoire. Amazon has done this by slowly adding merchandise categories to its original core of books, Porsche through its successful Boxster sports car and Cayenne SUV lines, and Apple Computer with its popular lineup of iPod music players and related software.

Beatles Principle Number 2: Evolve your “songs” and bring the same level of ideas, new perspectives, excitement, and enthusiasm to your hundredth meeting with a client that you brought to the first.

“With a Little Help from My Friends”
The Beatles’ early success was driven mostly by Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting prowess, but the pair quickly had to accommodate what turned out to be four star personalities in their own right. The band used a number of strategies to manage these tensions. For example, drummers always feel underappreciated in rock groups, and Ringo Starr was no exception. So Lennon and McCartney would write a song for him to sing on almost every album (e.g., “With a Little Help from My Friends” on Sgt. Pepper), giving him a special platform with the public. As George Harrison’s compositional talents developed, the other members of the group began ceding song tracks to him. Famous Harrison songs include “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something” on the Abbey Road album.

As the Beatles matured as a team, they worked even harder to recognize and embrace each player. It worked: The individual Beatles became brands within the brand.

Keeping stars together is not easy, and younger professionals, especially, often feel underappreciated on teams. It’s great to feel part of a whole, but in the end everyone needs a sense of personal importance as well. Why not give team members a project that makes them look good in their own right?

Beatles Principle Number 3: Help team members become brands-within-a-brand by giving them a song — an idea or proposal — that will help them to shine.

“I Need You”
Research shows that most managers hire individuals who are like themselves, in effect assembling homogeneous teams in their own image. The most successful songwriting duo in history, in contrast, was composed of two individuals — John Lennon and Paul McCartney — who were dissimilar in almost every respect. When they first met, in July 1957, Lennon was a cynical, angry, sarcastic young man of 16 who was constantly getting into trouble. Ultimately, he came to loathe the Beatles’ fame. McCartney, on the other hand, was optimistic and hardworking. He liked to please, and would later adore celebrity. Despite their differences, they were drawn together by a shared love of American rock and roll and their powerful musical ambitions.

As McCartney would sing, “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better,” Lennon would chime in with a dour counterpoint, “Can’t get much worse.” They complemented each other’s musical ideas, and pushed each other to come up with better songs. They balanced each other’s temperaments, and each curtailed the other’s excesses. Lennon’s lyrics made you think, while McCartney’s haunting melodies could send a tingle up your spine.

The Beatles showed that differences and friendly competition fuel team creativity. So does a blend of specialist and generalist abilities. McCartney and Lennon were the deep generalists of the band. Each had broad musical and artistic talents — both could play a range of instruments, compose music, and write varied lyrics — and this breadth fueled many of the Beatles’ innovations. George Harrison and Ringo Starr, in contrast, were the branded experts. Harrison played lead guitar and Starr played drums, and they stuck to their knitting. As a result, the lead guitar solos grew ever more inventive, melodic, and moving. Starr developed a highly idiosyncratic and recognizable drumming style.

The art of creating effective teams lies in how you blend together branded experts and deep generalists. Unfortunately, many corporate teams are overloaded with specialists who fail to put their products and services into the broader business context of their customer’s or client’s needs — they save the leg but let the patient die. The harder person to develop is the deep generalist. That takes a mix of careful hiring, creative career management, and broad-based skill development. Sprinkle your teams of branded experts with a few deep generalists, and the result will be powerful.

Beatles Principle Number 4: Put exceedingly diverse professionals on the same team, mix specialists with generalists, and foster friendly competition to produce the best ideas.

“And in the End”
The Beatles’ breakup in 1970 raises a big question: How do you keep a superstar team together after it has reached the top? How do you keep the creativity, drive, and motivation going once you’ve vanquished all enemies? Bill Gates, no doubt, has had a few sleepless nights thinking about that one.

At the core of the Beatles was their great music — but they had more than that. We cannot imitate the Beatles’ native genius as songwriters and musicians, but we can borrow from the other parts of their success and apply what we’ve learned. The Beatles remind us that the essence of any successful organization is small teams of individuals who do things they love, have fun together, and feel part of a greater whole while maintaining their individual identities.

The cure for “grinding it out” is available; the principles are there for the taking. Put on Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road, sit back, listen, and relax. Watch a few of those old clips of the Beatles’ raucous press conferences, or their exultant performances on The Ed Sullivan Show. I’m betting you’ll see what I mean.

HOLY Mackinac!

Overview

Report Card Home

The United States in the 21st century faces unprecedented economic and social challenges, ranging from the forces of global competition to the impending retirement of 77 million baby boomers. Succeeding in this new era will require our children to be prepared for the intellectual demands of the modern workplace and a far more complex society. Yet the evidence indicates that our country is not ready. Despite decades of reform efforts and many trillions of dollars in public investment, U.S. schools are not equipping our children with the skills and knowledge they-and the nation-so badly need.

It has been nearly a quarter century since the seminal report A Nation at Risk was issued in 1983. Since that time, a knowledge-based economy has emerged, the Internet has reshaped commerce and communication,

The measures of our educational shortcomings are stark indeed; most 4th and 8th graders are not proficient in either reading or mathematics.

exemplars of creative commerce like Microsoft, eBay, and Southwest Airlines have revolutionized the way we live, and the global economy has undergone wrenching change. Throughout that period, education spending has steadily increased and rafts of well-intentioned school reforms have come and gone. But student achievement has remained stagnant, and our K-12 schools have stayed remarkably unchanged-preserving, as if in amber, the routines, culture, and operations of an obsolete 1930s manufacturing plant.

The measures of our educational shortcomings are stark indeed; most 4th and 8th graders are not proficient in either reading or mathematics. Only about two-thirds of all 9th graders graduate from high school within four years. And those students who do receive diplomas are too often unprepared for college or the modern workplace.

Despite such grim data, for too long the business community has been willing to leave education to the politicians and the educators-standing aside and contenting itself with offers of money, support, and goodwill. But each passing year makes it clear that more, much more, is needed. America's dynamic, immensely productive private sector is the envy of the world. Are there ways in which business expertise, dynamism, accountability, and problem solving could improve our schools? What would a business plan for reform include?

With these questions in mind, last year the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched an effort to dig deeper into the nation's educational effectiveness.

We decided on the following goal: to grade all 50 states and Washington, DC, on their K-12 school systems in order to identify both leaders and laggards in the tough business of school performance.

We began with the premise that national statistics, while important for sketching the challenges ahead, mask tremendous variations in educational outcomes and delivery from state to state. It is the states, after all, that are ultimately responsible-both constitutionally and practically-for the quality of schooling. We decided on the following goal: to grade all 50 states and Washington, DC, on their K-12 school systems in order to identify both leaders and laggards in the tough business of school performance.

Recognizing the complexity of this task, the Chamber assembled a team of national experts to aggregate and analyze existing state-by-state data and to use that data to construct innovative measures, including evaluating the relationship between spending and student achievement. Our principal partners were the Center for American Progress, a research and educational institute led by former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta; and Frederick M. Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. The Chamber and its partners did not set out to conduct new research; we organized and analyzed existing evidence to inform and promote reform efforts across the nation.

We also shared our data and methodology with an outside panel of academic experts: Dan Goldhaber, Research Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Washington; Richard Ingersoll, Professor of Education and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; and Susanna Loeb, Associate Professor of Education and Business at Stanford University.

The panel reviewed and provided helpful feedback on our methodology. However, the Chamber takes sole responsibility for the final determination of methodology and therefore the resulting state grades.

Our effort to evaluate the states is not the first such undertaking. In the past two decades, a range of groups have graded the states on education on numerous occasions. The most notable of these evaluations is perhaps the one issued by the newspaper Education Week in its annual Quality Counts report, with other evaluations that weigh various aspects of state systems issued by groups as diverse as the Education Commission of the States, the American Federation of Teachers, the Data Quality Campaign, the quarterly journal Education Next, the Education Trust, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

Only about two-thirds of all 9th graders graduate from high school within four years. And those students who do receive diplomas are too often unprepared for college or the modern workplace.

Where our project differs from previous efforts is its emphasis on coupling a focus on academic outcomes with attention to key business metrics: innovation, flexibility, management, and fiscal prudence.

The indicators used in this report, in other words, draw upon and reflect the business expertise of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its members. We focused on the performance measures vital to competently operating-and improving-complex organizations in any sector. To our knowledge, for example, this is the first national report that has examined each state's return on its educational investments. Where most previous report cards have focused primarily on inputs in terms of spending or regulations, this report card reflects our premise that American education should be accountable, rigorous, innovative-and focused on achievement.

The Chamber and its partners firmly believe that the traits that have long made the American private sector an engine of global prosperity-its dynamism, creativity, and relentless focus on efficiency and results-are essential to tapping the potential of our educators and schools. It is this understanding that informs and shapes this report.

Liberal, conservative groups agree: school reforms critical

Michgan's -- and America's -- schools need reform in improving management, collecting data, fostering innovation and improving teacher quality, according to a report from a liberal and business group working togehter.

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, and the United States Chamber of Commerce worked together on the presentation, "Non-traditional Approaches to Education Reform."

The stakes are high, according to Arthur J. Rothkopf, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber and head of its Institute for a Competitive Workforce.

"What's at stake is no less than the continued viability of the American economy and the American dream ... the gradual decline of America as an economic and technological superpower," he said.

Rothkopf said Michigan earned mostly C's among the states on nine criteria in the study's report card. Michigan got a C in the overall report, and in the sub-scores for performance of low-income and minority students, return on investment, truth in advertising on student proficiency, the rigor of its education standards and post-secondary and work force readiness.

It earned B's in having quality teachers and flexibility of school management, but a D in data quality in terms of what's available datawise to judge schools upon.

Podesta presented the four areas the two organizations are focusing on for improvements.

First, he said "much of what ails schools these days is a matter of management, organizational and communications discipline.

Michigan is doing some things well here," with principals having a lot of influence on school hiring, a strong charter school law and a virtual school, but could be doing better in giving principals more control over their local school budget. He also called Michgi's new graduation requirements "a great achievement for the state."

In terms of data, Podesta said Michigan's school achievement data is "alarmingly limited" except as regards individual students. "You're in business -- can you imagine running your business without key metrics of success?" Podesta asked the crowd. "Yet that's what's happening in schools today."

In terms of the third area, encouraing innovation and exprimentation, Podesta said Michgian needs to experiment more with apprenticeshps, smaller learning communities and increasing learning time -- though it's doing well in areas like the Freedom to Learn program and being the first state in the nation to require passing an online course for high school graduation.

The final area for improvement, teacher quality, is critical for Michigan, Podesta said. The negative impact of an inexperienced, out-of-subject teacher vs. a very good one can be a full year of achievement.

Overall, Podesta said, the reforms called for in his report "will require nothing less than recreating the apparatus of American education."

Both men said teacher unions also have to be drawn into the effort, despite initial suspicions and opposition. In Chicago, for example, teachers are helping design a pay-for-performance system, and there's also a federal bill with bipartisan support to break up the lockstep nature of teacher pay.

For the full report card, visit www.uschamber.com/reportcard.