IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

142 Chapter 7
but the way they operate is often innovative and state of the art. Many corporate
university staff don’t do much formal teaching, for example, but
spend most of their time in needs analysis, curriculum design, and selecting
and managing relationships with outside suppliers. One leading player,
Sun Microsystems, has implemented an online learning management system
for every employee that is based on the latest thinking about ‘‘digital
portfolios’’ and self-assessment. Sun’s system supports a customized training
schedule for each employee that is based on past experience, current
role, and future aspirations. Employees at Unisys, too, sign up for courses
through an online career portfolio and evaluate their skills and performance
online. 26
Companies have adapted more rapidly than most colleges to the changing
demographics and expectations of learners. Nearly half of all entrants
to higher education in the United States are now over twenty-five years
old, for example, and a growing proportion of these learners are working
professionals, ranging from accountants to zoologists, for whom continuing
education is a professional obligation. Take doctors: A majority of U.S.
states now require doctors to complete a designated number of hours of
continuing education each year in order to renew their licenses to practice.
Continuous updating of professional knowledge has become a cost of doing
business for millions of people—but this is hard to sustain. The need
to sell our time competes with the time we need to spend keeping our
knowledge up to date.
The learning load on most technical professionals today is awesome. A
typical network administrator or systems operator (SysOp), for example,
has twelve feet of hefty manuals on the shelf behind her desk, each containing
hundreds of dense typeset pages. 27 A new manual, in paper or digital
form, accompanies each device and software package that enters the
environment. Most of these have a short life expectancy—a couple of years
at most—so new editions and new manuals arrive in a constant stream. I
once described this alarming information burden to the head teacher
of my daughter’s junior school in London. The head laughed and took me
into her office where, behind her desk, was a shelf filled with a row of fat
ring-bound manuals, all in a row. These manuals contained the latest version
of the national curriculum that every school in England is compelled
by the central government to teach. On the floor, half-opened, was a box
containing another six of these fat binders—updates, recently arrived from