Evolution: personal choices in a networked society

I suggested earlier that I would come back and devote more space to some of the all-important new skills that individuals - such as you and I - will need to exploit, and even to survive, the developments resulting from the e-Revolution. For just one example, if you are one of the teleworkers we have been looking at, the skills of self-management - in effect of managing your own small business - become much more important. These are very different skills to the ones people normally expect that they will need. Currently many employees scheme to avoid what their boss wants to impose on them. Soon, as self-managed teleworkers, in effect they will be that boss themselves! There will no longer be any way to avoid those things you hate to do.

MBA?

You might argue indeed that this demands the sort of skills we teach in management schools. You might equally argue that this is special pleading on my behalf - and my experience with our alumni does indicate that the moment they get their MBA they happily shed any pretence of following our hard taught theories! Accordingly, no doubt to the horror of my fellow academics, I myself would reckon that there is no general requirement to spend years earning an MBA just in order to run your own little business - and certainly not in order only to manage yourself.

Home Office Self-Discipline…but, that aside, teleworking does require a very different set of disciplines. Even if you have all the physical facilities I have described, especially an office large enough to work in and isolate yourself from interruptions, that seclusion can never be total. Someone is sure to break into it just as you reach a critical point in your work. In any case, you will want to relax from time to time - everyone does.

Now, though, it is not a matter of visiting the coffee machine in some dark corner of the office but of joining loved ones in the welcoming warmth of the kitchen. In one sense that represents a real benefit of teleworking, since it is a much more relaxing environment than that normally provided in the office. But how much more difficult does it then become to drag yourself back to that boring project you are working on? That really will demand a very considerable degree of self-discipline.

VITAL QUESTIONS

• Do you think you would have the self-discipline needed to work from home? Would you be able to manage yourself??

'Self-management'…covers many things which you might normally expect other people to do for you in the current office environment. You have, for instance, to schedule your own work. This means you can take the children out for the afternoon, but beware the backlog when you come home! You have to provide your own support services. You can't just ask someone else to do your photocopying, or type a letter, you have to do everything yourself. You really do have to become multi-skilled - even if some of those skills are rather lowly ones. Without your secretary, you will even have to learn how to make drinkable coffee!

Multi-Skilling…but moving away from teleworkers, who perhaps offer the extreme example of the changes with which we might be faced, all of us are going to have to become multi-skilled. The craftsman in olden days may have been proud of his many skills in metal-working, and he indeed was able to do all that was needed to produce a complete product - a genuinely rewarding form of multi-skilling. But this has long since been bastardised into the single skill needed on the assembly line demanded by O & M! Indeed, that craftsman also undertook many of the management tasks we now thing of as belonging to small businessmen. The variety of tasks, and their immersion in the whole 'product' - to see their creations emerge in their entirety, may be why it was then, and is still, seen to be such satisfying work. It is paradoxical that we have to go back in history, in this way, to find a model for our future! Something similar to that craftsman's experiences may be one of the great benefits of the new moves to multi-skilling.

Service Encounters

In particular, in the case of a service encounter where staff make up a great deal of the service offered to the customer, helping someone to choose the best insurance policy for instance, they may indeed cover a very considerable part of the whole 'production' process in our new ecommerce world. Indeed, their own efforts may form a great part of the resulting 'service product'; a fact that service providers are only now coming to terms with. It has long been a paradox, that many of the service industries - especially hotels and catering - which sell themselves on the level of their service actually treat their staff, who provide that service. with something approaching contempt! The one saving grace even now is that those who - despite everything that is done to them - work in the service and knowledge industries can enjoy a great deal of personal satisfaction from seeing the impact made by the full breadth of their work. They may even experience some of the fulfilment of being told by their customers that they are doing a great job - even if their own bosses still fail to recognise this!

But multi-skilling, which is already widespread and will become almost universal, means that you must have - by definition - many skills. Even if you are still on a 'production line' you may now need the skills to match a range of processes. This is very different to the de-skilling which lay at the heart of work-study (O & M). That started from the very dubious presumption that the worker was unintelligent and uneducated - something which is certainly not true of modern workers. In our experience at the Open University, most people are able to rise to challenges far above those that their managers - and they themselves - think them capable of. But others go even further. I recently had a fascinating conversation with the Chair of the Finnish Parliament's Education Committee. He was genuinely worried that they were having difficulty in boosting their take up of undergraduate education much beyond three quarters of school-levers. No wonder the Finns as a whole are fast becoming one of the richest peoples on earth!

Education for the Future…for the individual, multi-skilling doesn't just end at the group of skills that our employer currently demands of us; and sometimes even trains us for! It means going far beyond these, and developing the skills which we will be need in future jobs. Only then will we be equipped for them when they come along. As I have already said, and as we will see later in this chapter, the key to this must be education rather than training. To a degree it is a matter of semantics - of how you define the words - but the difference in philosophy is fundamental. Here, at the start of the chapter, it is worth emphasising that training is best seen as something very short-term; enabling you to develop the skill(s) necessary for your current job. Education, on the other hand, is much wider than this. It should prepare you for a wide range of jobs, even though it does not give you the specific skills for any one of them. It imparts the knowledge and learning skills which will offer the best intellectual frameworks within which you can later train for the new jobs.

It is these intellectual frameworks that will provide the answer to your long-term career needs - even when you don't know exactly what the future holds. With technology - and industry structures - changing so rapidly, it is often near impossible to decide in advance what your next job move is likely be, let alone the one beyond that and the training needs for either of them. On the other hand, if you already have the correct - educational - framework in place, then you should be able to learn those skills - whatever they may be - that much faster and put them into the correct context even faster still. In particular you should be able to integrate them into a much richer package than your 'competitors' - so that you should always be best-equipped to get the best job.

VITAL QUESTIONS

• How well has you existing education prepared you for future challenges? What new education do you need to fill the gaps?

• Do you have an 'education plan', albeit an informal one just lying around somewhere in your head, outlining what, how and when further education you will undertake? Why not - have you never given serious consideration to this?

Personal Change Management

You may also be able to indulge in a bit of what is now called 'change management'. This is a term which is typically applied to organisations, but - I believe - may increasingly apply just as much to individuals who are managing the rapid changes in their own lives. What it essentially means is that you must understand the changes taking place around you and their consequent impacts on your life. With this understanding, you will then be able to plan the changes needed to 'manage' those impacts; to take advantage of them - or at least survive them!

You will have seen, in the earlier chapter, that the organisational environment is becoming somewhat chaotic, even anarchic. Until people take it upon themselves to - organically - co-ordinate the new groupings (cells) of individuals which are emerging from this chaos, you will be almost certain to live in 'interesting times' - as the oriental curse demands! Choosing to lead one of the cells in which you find yourself is a very positive way of becoming one of the new breed of managers. So, once you realise that this is likely to happen at sometime in the future, you can start on your education - and subsequently the training - to prepare you for this, confident that few others will! At a lower level, maybe you will just develop the 'mindset' necessary to handle the new developments, or read a few books which give you some of the background and perhaps a little (basic) understanding. The point, whichever route you choose, is that you are preparing for the future rather than just existing in the present; and, as is too often the case, relying on the past.

VITAL QUESTIONS

• Do you have a 'change management' plan, albeit once more at the back of your mind, suggesting how you are going to cope with the main changes which are likely to face you? Why not? Again why haven't you considered your future?

The Friendly PC

It is a cliché to say that the e-Revolution is changing all our lives. Of course it is, and you will already have seen that, in dozens of different ways. There are very few of us now who can avoid the baleful - even perhaps malevolent - stare of the personal computer sitting on our desk. Yet that PC is potentially the best friend you have in the workplace. Of course, it can turn work into a chore - forever filling out the forms it presents to you. But it can also deliver skills we never previously thought possible. Indeed, the personal computer will become the great leveller of our age. Increasingly the crucial skills you need - and maybe some of the education - will be provided by your PC; simply by pressing a few keys. Certainly most of the knowledge you need will be delivered in this way.

VITAL QUESTIONS

• How do you see your PC? Is it an annoying taskmaster? Or has it opened up your horizons?

Professional Redundancies…a hidden result of this will be that many of the professions, which used to rely on their monopoly of certain parts of society's knowledge, will find life a lot less lucrative. Why pay for an expensive lawyer to give you an opinion, when your PC will do it at the press of a key? The difference, which is why those professions will continue to dominate their field - and will surely heave a collective sigh of relief at this point, is that you will still need the intellectual frameworks which they also possess; to be able to handle the information coming in. Indeed, these framework skills will become even more important when there is so much knowledge flooding in!

Without these frameworks, detailed knowledge is almost useless - and you will soon get hopelessly bogged down. With them, anyone - you or I - will soon be able to have almost instantaneous access to all the public knowledge the world holds and that is an awful lot of information. Despite my caveats, these developments will do some of the professions out of lucrative parts of their business. Those bits which have required little real (framework) skill, but which they have often been charged out at the same rate as everything else, are most at risk. Even the simplest form of (computer) artificial intelligence may be able to handle conveyancing now! If you are a professional, a lawyer or accountant or consultant say, then have a quick look to see whether your business is about to be handed over to a computer - which may no longer be your particular friend, but your competitor!

Your Best Friend…so a computer on your desk is - the above cases apart - your best friend. It will allow you to be much more efficient at the job you do. Learning how it can do this, and developing those information frameworks which relate to your job, offers great benefits. But another boon is that it can at the same time expand your horizons - using those frameworks to take in other areas of knowledge - and in so doing enriching your job, and your performance in it, by improving your effectiveness. And, the computer is not just a knowledge machine. Increasingly it is a communications device with which you can greatly expand your small world, by communicating effectively with an even wider group of contacts - globally if you need to.

Thus, your computer now enables you to talk to almost anyone in the world. It can as easily take you to the US president - or at least to his aides - as to the guy next door. For those of you who already 'surf the net' this is a reality. The rest of you will just have to take my word for it, until you try it yourself - and you must try it!. It really is not as difficult as you might think. I always reckoned, and still do, that I could get the answer to almost any question by no more than six telephone calls, because the experts who I would talk to at each stage would direct me to another level of expert - each time getting nearer to the one expert (perhaps the only one in the world) who could provide the answer. I doubt that you will want to know the answers to some of the esoteric questions I was then posing, so you should be able to find your own answers even more quickly. My intention here is just to indicate how easy it now is to use the world-wide resources at your disposal.

It also hints at one reality the media don't tell you about. The way to navigate this endless maze of data is to talk to people, not to use the much publicised 'search engines'. Using these I can't even find my own web-site! In fact, when I mentioned the telephone earlier this was not just about returning to more primitive times, it was a recognition that this is in many ways still the model for such communications. Pick up the handset, dial the correct number, and you are in vocal contact. The PC offers more in some areas; in searching the phone directories in much more sophisticated ways; in sending written and graphical data; in sending messages which will be there when the other person is available (some time later) to pick them up. But the principle is exactly the same, and the etiquette is also much the same. So don't be afraid of using the net - unless you are an out and out technophobe and even fear the telephone!

Database Libraries

There are now a large number of 'databases' of information available. The effect of these, though, is no different to that of the books and directories you are used to finding at your local reference library. So, in theory at least, you need no more skill than you did there. But, there you had the friendly librarian to help you sort through the catalogue of the hundreds of books on its shelves. Unfortunately, on the Internet you have nobody, and there are lots of catalogues - listing millions of 'books' - all of which now seem to be selling you something rather than helping you find what you want. None of this seems to be anything like the friendly librarian. As yet, the computers themselves do not help, they are only able to answer the question if it is (exactly) correctly put. That will change in the future and your friendly librarian will surface in a new (computerised) guise. But, in the meantime, your best bet is once more to start making those phone calls (or emails) to the experts. Not least, they will alone will be able to answer open-ended questions - even ones which are badly defined and hazy. Most days I get a couple of such requests myself. I guess the first stage is recognising that the problems lie with the search engines not yourself, and having the confidence to bypass them.

VITAL QUESTIONS

• How good are you at finding your way around the Web? How useful do you find the search engines?

• Do you use personal contacts to help you find the really important information you need?

Communications Skills

In this way, perhaps the skill which is now most important for everyone is that of communicating. I mentioned earlier that this is greatly neglected by the formal education systems, and by the commercial ones which follow later in life. Our existing skill, such as it is, is typically learned from experience - and, for many people, maybe it is no worse for that. But it is so important that we should never leave this skill to pure luck. After all it is what most of us now spend most of our time doing. So, in the absence of anyone specifically teaching you, you must learn well from experience and learn the skills you need in the specific environment in which you operate. Maybe you will sit in an office, where your prime form of communication will be through your computer, and there are many commercial courses (albeit often of dubious value) which will claim to make you expert in this field. Maybe you will be on the sales-floor, communicating verbally (and through body language) with your customers and there are just as many commercial organisations (albeit very often of even more dubious value) who will promise to make you the most successful sales-person ever! Somewhere in between these two extremes are the spectrum of options which will suit the rest of us.

Listening…surprisingly perhaps, in all these situations the key to success is listening rather than - as most people think - talking. And underpinning this is the skill of effective questioning. In practice, the most powerful questions are the simplest - especially 'why' and 'how'. Little children are very good questioners. You may hate them after a while, when they keep repeating 'Why, why, why…', yet they learn at an incredible speed by doing just this - by asking such simple, open-ended, questions! You too can learn a lot by simply asking 'why' in many situations - though you had better realise that people are a lot less tolerant of adults if they repeat this too often!

Indeed, most people are not very effective at asking questions. They typically ask very specific questions ('closed' questions in the terminology of selling) which tend to narrow discussion; and, in particular, tend to confine the discussion to the areas set by the questioner's personal preferences or prejudices. In our modern society, this tendency is reinforced by the fact that the PC, and especially the Web search engines, thrive on closed questions; and are very bad at answering open-ended ones! Unfortunately, in wider usage, 'open' questions are much more useful since they allow the person being questioned to adopt a wider viewpoint.

Open Questions…of which the simplest - Why? How? What? - are the most powerful, encourage the speaker to say what he or she considers is most important about the topic. (Examples are: What did you do? Why did you choose that equipment?) The listener can then gain the most benefit from the speakers knowledge and expertise. Later in the conversation 'directive' and then 'closed' questions can be used to steer the conversation to the topics of greatest interest to the listener. Even so, the most important, and productive, questions, at least in the first instance, are the 'open' ones; which allow the person being questioned to ramble on. They also seem to be the most difficult to ask; perhaps because they are not so obviously leading directly to the answer that is wanted, or maybe because the questioner feels less in control. But they are the key to unlocking the tongue of the person facing you. If the conversation proceeds with very short replies (and particularly just 'yes' or 'no'), it is likely that you are not using enough open questions; and may be missing the real answers.

The more open the question the better. The most powerful question is quite simply 'Why?', often closely followed by 'How?'. In practice, open questions come naturally if the questioner is genuinely interested in finding out what makes the other person tick.

Laddering…a particular technique, used for example by skilled researchers, is 'laddering'. In this case the question 'why?' is repeated until the respondent cannot explain any further. It is a powerful technique for finding the underlying motives. Unfortunately, in most normal discussions, it is a very aggressive technique and must accordingly be used with great care.

Rambling…a slightly less stressful and equally successful, if little reported, approach is 'rambling'. The best method for getting to know about the views of the person opposite you is to give him or her the time and space to 'ramble' around the subject. This can be an enormous strain on the listener, for it is difficult to concentrate and even more difficult not to interrupt.

Silence…even if people do ask the correct open questions, they often undermine the progress by stopping the answer in mid flow. The natural accompaniment to an open question is silence. Silence is probably one of the most underused of questioning devices. It is, though, a surprisingly aggressive technique, and you should not make it too obvious - it is best just to look very thoughtful. It requires a great deal of courage to use; but it is effective. The person you are questioning will eventually feel obliged to talk, and usually what he or she then says is especially enlightening (since he or she too will have had time to consider).

VITAL QUESTIONS

• Do you allow sufficient time for others to answer your questions?

• Do you ever force the issue by asking 'why' a number of times, or by remaining silent until you get an answer?

Closed Questions…typically require the answer 'yes' or 'no', have (justifiably) received a bad press. But it is still necessary to use them quite extensively to clarify points. The problem only comes when they are used instead of open questions.

Directive Questions…are a form of closed (or partially closed) question which is designed to steer the conversation in the direction you wish it to go. Typical examples are; 'If you could..', 'Do you..', 'Would you..'.

Agreement…in many situations by far the most important closed questions (and arguably the most important questions of all) are those where you check for agreement. As the discussion progresses, it is imperative that you establish whether or not you are taking the other person with you; or is he (or she), as is all too often the case, politely acting out the role of audience to your orator?

Listening and Analysis…as mentioned earlier, just as important a skill is listening. Many of us are too busy trying to put our own view across to hear what is being said in reply; and thus we miss much of the key data in our conversations. But listening implies far more than hearing. It also involves the process of analysing what is heard, to understand it; to make sense of it in general, and then to put it into the 'intellectual framework' of what is being discussed. Listening is a very active pursuit, not a passive one; or the listener will soon become a sleeper.

Understanding…but even listening, is not enough. The key is understanding. This is a process to which the main contribution must, of course, be made by what the person being questioned says; though it should be noted that this may include what he or she said in a number of previous meetings as well as in the current one. But it will also include all the other evidence you have unearthed. Put it all together and, hopefully, you will be able to complete the jigsaw.

Understanding is, therefore, a cumulative process; that may span several discussions.

• A useful approach to improving your questioning and listening skills requires that, over the next working week, you should make notes after every meeting, formal of informal:

• At the end of the week analyse the notes. Ask yourself what is your style in such meetings, and how effective is it, and how might it be improved?

Symbiosis with your Computer

This brings us through to the final part of this section on skills. In fact it is not really about a personal skill, it is about a form of symbiosis. It is the emerging symbiosis between you and the computer and thence with the world-wide computer networks. It is no longer enough to be just 'you', now you have to be both the physical 'you' and that other virtual part of you which resides on the computers.

Chips on the Brain…let me explain what I mean by this, by looking at the most extreme version of it - which is likely to come about two or three decades hence. Thus, it is now clear that, over that timescale, electronic chips are going to implanted in some people's brains - maybe in most of us - to allow them to communicate directly with computers. Parts of this technology are already available in the labs, so it is not a pipe-dream. It is one of those bits of known 'science' which is well down the path to technological implementation and some of the large telecommunications companies - such as BT - have already announced that they are developing the technology to take advantage of this.

I used to be somewhat sceptical in terms of the timescales - arguing that it would take much longer than a few decades before people would allow anyone to operate on their brains in this way. On the other hand, in one of our research sessions a participant simply noted that 'if the end result is so powerful [and it will be] then of course people will want the operation!' He then extended it to the analogy of a blind man; 'Wouldn't he accept the operation if it meant he could see?' I too am now convinced we will see such physical links, symbiosis, emerge sooner rather than later!

But, whatever the ultimate outcome, let us consider what happens if we - you and I say - have one of these chips in our brains. The point is that we will then be able to communicate with the computer networks directly from our brain; we won't need a keyboard, we won't even have to look at the screen anymore - everything will be delivered direct! We will come to exist in an almost hallucinogenic mixture of real and virtual environments. This means we will be able to directly share our thoughts and - for the first time - our feelings, something we have long had difficulty putting into words.

• How would you feel about having a computer chip (painlessly!) inserted into your brain? What if it made you twice as intelligent?

With this important exception, however, the advantages of such an advance may be much more limited than you might expect. Already the fastest route to our brain is through the optic nerve. So the simple screen we now use to feed this is unlikely to be replaced in the near future - at least not for the major part of our work. The feeds to brain-chips are unlikely to be faster. Maybe they could work faster in the other direction, the keyboard skills of most of us are above all noted for their slowness and inaccuracy. But we are now reaching the stage where spoken input is becoming possible, at least for normal business letters and documents. Indeed, I have even used it in 'writing' parts of this book. And, I guess that the speed of such spoken output is just about as comfortable as we can get - faster than that and we can't get our brain into gear and become tongue-tied. So strike out this need too.

Feeling Your Way Around

But for most of us the speed of communication will not be the important aspect. It will, instead, be the symbiosis I have already mentioned. Thus, we will start to 'feel' our way around the information we are working on - in dimensions beyond the three we now see in the world around us and the two dimensions on our screens. Not only that, but when we are communicating with the computer through it we will be able to understand other people's complex responses - not least their emotional ones - as well as the facts they state. At one extreme, this may be a problem when we are swamped by them. At the other, it may offer major new dimensions for love - unless you find out how much the object of your attention dislikes you! But, overall, it should immeasurably help our understanding of others. In any case, sooner or later we will be able to control these emotional outbursts as we currently do our tongues. Then we may be able to exchange our loving thoughts with the greatest lyricism that humanity has ever seen. Indeed, you will be able to share - or remember - every aspect of an event. All your physical senses, and emotional experiences, will be available in this way!

Symbiosis is Here Already…but let me go back to the idea that really, for many of the things we do in our work and in our life, implanted chips will not make a great difference. The information we need can be just as easily exchanged through the screen and keyboard. Why I am stressing this point is that having a chip in the brain - which obviously will change you, to create a new symbiosis with the computer which now shares your brain - is not fundamentally necessary to create a lesser form of this symbiosis. Even without these chips we are already well on the way to something approaching the same symbiosis. Indeed, we are already experiencing this in one form or another. It is just that this is hidden behind the crudity of the interfaces involved.

• What happens when your PC stops working? Does your life stop? Could you now cope without your PC? Have you already become addicted to it?

You have only to witness what happens when one of your fellow-workers' PCs goes down The result is typically that they run around like headless chickens, looking for somebody - anybody - to help. When that happens, you soon realise that you simply can't exist without your PC. Our interaction with our personal computers is becoming ever more complex, ever more sophisticated. To put it in simplistic terms, we are even now starting to merge with our computers - to share our lives with them. Already it is becoming difficult to see where we end and they start. Increasingly, we put our memories on the computer; first our business memories - I cannot write a document now without pasting in bits from my hard disc - and then our personal lives - as family photos now join the store of data.

PCs in Charge

I have previously talked about access to knowledge. Many of my generation spent years at university imbibing the knowledge that is now available to anyone at the touch of a button on a PC. So, laziness takes over. We no longer have any reason why we should fill our brains with such memories. Let the computer take the strain. Let it remember for all of us. After all, it is much better than us at doing so. Its memories are so much more accessible, and brilliantly vivid in their accuracy. But that means that many of the functions of our memory, of what we are, are being handed over to our PCs and the networks they feed. Increasingly, other bits of us will also be handed over in this way. We are going to pass over knowledge of our likes and dislikes - another mark of our individuality - so that the computer can cater for them. Even now that is happening with the purchase of some CDs, where clubs in the US are building profiles of you so that they can tell you which new releases you will, and I mean will, like! Alright, there is still some element of decision-making left, but a large part of the processes - of your critical faculties which are an especially important part of you as an individual - will soon have been subcontracted to the computer.

• Do you already use your PC to run your diary? Do you respect the tailored book suggestions Amazon offers you?

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this. Maybe the computer will even have better taste than you! But it brings us back again to the educational importance of intellectual frameworks. Your job will increasingly be to manage all these helpers, by understanding how their - and your - systems work, so that the combination - of you and your computer - is optimised, and is all that you would want it to be. Eventually, in this way, large parts of you will actually be in the computer. This once more will be fine, just as long as you remain in control of the symbiotic personality which results - and, of course, as long as you have access to that computer.

Immortality…it also offers, for the first time, the concept of genuine immortality. As more and more of you creeps into the computers, and especially as it is shared as a common group memory with others, the 'real you' will ultimately come to reside in the computer. Unless someone pulls the switch, you can stay there for ever - long after your physical body has been reduced to dust! That is quite a reassuring concept. Just make sure you pay the electricity bill!

• Do you want to be immortal, as a memory on the Web? Have you thought about how you can burnish that memory so that future generations will respect it?

11. MORE EDUCATION

I have now spent some time examining the possible challenges facing us as individuals; at home and work. This chapter, on the other hand, is probably the most important part of the book - in terms of giving you the skills you will need to meet these challenges. For education is the most general, and most important, tool now available to you. So, let us now move on, to look at the 'purer' forms of education rather than those which overlap skills training. I have to declare my interest at this point, because I am an educator - a university teacher - and this must inevitably bias my viewpoint. Having said that, however, I will make no further apologies. It has become almost a cliché that education is the most important investment any of us - and our governments - can ever make. Perhaps not all of us recognise this fact, but many governments do. Remember Tony Blair's 1997 election slogan of 'education, education, education'. Of course, like many political statements made in sound-bites, the subsequent reality has been rather different. No government has yet taken action on the most important element typically promised, that of Life-Long-Learning (LLL); though community colleges in the US have quietly embraced parts of this!. But at least it is now generally recognised that education is very important.

Beyond the Blackboard…many of us, especially older members of the population, still tend to think of it as taking place in a classroom, dominated by a teacher aided only by a chalkboard; or, more recently, by the 'overheard projector'. No doubt this was the experience of many of you too when you were children. Well - despite some unpleasant memories - that may have been a very effective form of education. Indeed, communicating one-on-one, face-to-face, with a really good teacher can be one of the most productive experiences in life. But, faced with resourcing shortages which preclude such rich pupil-teacher relationships, it is already changing. Schools now expose their pupils to many other approaches - not least those aided by computers.

• How were you taught at school? What impact has this had on your willingness to continue education now?

Learning can take many other forms, and still be effective. It can be from books. Hopefully you will learn something from this one! In any case, many people learn vast amounts of information from books. Sometimes what they learn in this way changes their whole life. Indeed, in a more specialised form, that is how we, at the Open University, have managed to teach literally millions of students. We carefully encapsulate our ideas, as teachers of various topics, in written form. It is a more specialised form, since the books we produce are designed to be 'learning experiences' - with very specific objectives - rather than general texts about the subject. Thus, the material is very carefully structured, and is interspersed with exercises so the students can test their understanding. In this respect we try to work more like the classroom teacher rather than the typical author. As a result, we find that interaction with the computer, which is now penetrating our work ever more extensively as it is the teaching in other institutions, is just an extension of what we are already doing naturally. It simply offers a greater degree of interaction - moving our position closer to the teacher and away from the author, exactly as we would wish.

Ultimately, the computer itself may become the teacher, as it already does with CAI (Computer Aided Instruction) in some areas where procedural training is well understood - and easily transferred to the computer. Computer programming itself is one of these areas, since the rules of programming are very clear and easy to teach. I have even seen it applied equally well to wheel-tapping, for those railway workers who literally spend their lives tapping the wheels of trains to see if they are safe!

Experience…but then there is also a whole range of experiences you can learn from. If you can manage to look at the world through the enquiring eyes of a child for the whole of your life, you will be richly educated indeed. You will learn every day from every experience. The 'university of life' is usually given as an excuse by those who choose to remain ignorant, but for those who genuinely wish to learn it can be the richest source of all. In that practical context, the most important learning experiences, for most people, come from the box in the corner - from our ever-present television. If nothing else, in your adult lives you are likely to absorb literally thousands of times as much knowledge through this source than from any formal educational experiences. Even if you only watch soap-operas on television, you will still experience more in a month than your ancestors, just a century ago, experienced in their whole lives. Maybe, with luck, you will even absorb some of this knowledge and expand your repertoire of skills and even your use of language. If you do, as most people do, watch documentaries as well, then - whether you like it or not - you will gradually become ever better educated. From that much maligned box of modern communications technology, you will almost certainly learn more than from any formal source of education!

Educational Entertainment or Entertaining Education

Maybe I have just ruined your enjoyment of television programmes, and of documentaries in particular. You hadn't realised they were covertly educating you, where all you wanted was entertainment. But, you see, the best and most memorable education is also entertaining. It is so much fun that you scarcely realise it is happening. The more you are involved in the subject, albeit even as emotional involvement in light entertainment, the better the education works. I am certain you will clearly remember, from your schooldays, just how difficult it was to learn from a boring teacher. Pain is never as good for your soul as some claim, especially when the aim is to educate you. On the other hand, if you enjoy something so much that you get fascinated by the subject, you will never forget that learning.

I would, however, avoid the old cliché about the 'university of life'. There may have been an element of truth in this phrase generations ago, when personal experience represented even more of an individual's understanding of the world. But those times have long since gone and most our knowledge of a much wider world now comes through the eyes of others. This phrase is, today, clutched at only by those who are too lazy, or bigoted, to do anything about their ignorance. Experience now is only truly meaningful if it is set in the context of learning - ideally, perhaps, from a real university.

LLL

I will, instead, concentrate on the vexed problem of Life-Long-Learning (LLL). The main challenge here is, quite simply, that most educational systems still assume that learning is the exclusive province of the young. It finishes on the day when your last formal course finishes. Once you have reached the stage, when you are handed your final leaving certificate, you can put the whole painful process behind you. In this context, education can become almost like a prison sentence. One might almost expect to receive remission for good behaviour - and that too often is the model! But, as you might expect me to say, education should be more, much more, than that. Most important of all, it is definitely not just for the young. Whether we like it or not, we - even the most determinedly ignorant of us - keep learning throughout our lives. The difference is that for most of our lives we do this chaotically, by default, instead of in an organised fashion.

Learning…perhaps it is better, at this stage, to talk about it from the opposite - more fundamental - direction, in terms of 'learning'. Education can sometimes imply that we, the educators, are force-feeding our students - and that too often may also be the case. Learning, on the other hand, is what they receive and, hopefully, as well as being a staple of life it also becomes one of its great enjoyments. Indeed, my advice would be that, if you don't enjoy what you are learning, then find something else which you will enjoy.

Qualifications…on the other hand, one of the other problems of our educational systems is that they are still largely related to 'professional' qualifications. Even the first degree has now typically become a training for our first job. We are required to learn - often simply by rote - a vast array of increasingly irrelevant facts. We painfully force ourselves through this process, and through the exams which test us on those facts. For we need the bit of paper which shows that we are genuine professionals; graduates of the education machines. But that is probably the worst possible learning process that you could imagine. For the learning experience itself should, almost independently of the subjects you are learning, become an end in itself. Above all, it should be a rewarding process, which opens you up to the wonders of the world of learning. And there are great wonders there.

Indeed, far too many people, having got their 'leaving certificate' especially if this is a degree at the tender age of twenty years, consider that they have already done all that is necessary for a comfortable life thereafter. They are devastated when, in later decades, the world - changed and still changing - overtakes them. With Life-Long-Learning you move along with the rest of the world and are not flattened by it as if races past you. But, in any case, it should be great fun!

• How have you learned about your hobbies and interests? What was different about that learning? Why?

Libraries…at its simplest level, the world of on-going life-long learning may just revolve around what is available in your local library; still probably the best source of such material. If you have a good library near to hand, count yourself lucky. Through it you can explore the whole world and beyond. These days, of course, this is a process which has been opened up - and vastly extended - by the many new media available. The literally hundreds of digital cable channels which are becoming available don't just offer block-buster films, but give you access - if you hunt through them - to channels full of fascinating information. You will soon be able to view documentaries all day. You will even be able to share graduate education programmes, without having to take the exams which send fear into the hearts of most learners. My own Open University, at last truly living up to its name, is making many elements of its programmes available in this way.

Internet Education

More directly, you will eventually be able to use the Internet to tailor learning programmes to meet your specific needs. These may revolve around research in high-energy physics, which is already catered for, or leek-growing, which as yet probably is not but undoubtedly soon will be! The problem is that all of these are as yet in their infancy. But they will soon mature. It will take only a few years for them to be available to all of us - and in forms which we can use without any special preparation. It took centuries for the library books to be literally unchained from their shelves; but it may only take months for much the same to happen to educational programmes.

• Have you looked to see what learning programmes, in the subjects you want, are available over the Internet?

In the context of the e-Revolution, though, it has to be admitted that the current problems of learning through the Internet are - to educators at least - legendary. Not least, as I have already mentioned a number of times, just finding the information you want is a nightmare. There are literally billions of facts already there, but the information is of no use to you if you can't find it. To date the so-called 'search-engines' have so far proved to be very crude devices. I can't even find some of my own web-sites using them - so what chance has anybody else got!

Beyond that, there is no real independent validation of the accuracy - or usefulness - of the material you do find. Anyone, no matter how ignorant or deranged, can put material on the web and claim authenticity for it. The Web may represent a fundamental advance in democratic rights, when it judges us all equal and our ideas as equally valuable without recourse to our status. But this is no use if you are a learner who does not have the skills to judge between world-class and paranoid ideas. It is, thus, difficult to know exactly what trust to put in the material unfolding on your PC screen.

Above all, however, beware the pitfall, which many - including the experts - have fallen into: 'because it is on the computer it must be right'. No way! It is more likely to be wrong, and it is up to you to use your own judgement to determine whether or not it really is right.

Open Minds…so, Life-Long-Learning doesn't have to be like school. It can just be maintaining an open mind and constantly searching out truths; constantly raiding the shelves of the libraries - electronic or otherwise. This is not just a pious hope. Some of the most learned people I have met have never even been to university. But they have plagued their local librarians to get them books on every aspect of the human experience. Indeed, research has shown that, given the resources, often the best learners are the old and the unemployed; simply because they have the time available and little else to fill it!

Formal LLL

Let's now move on to the more formalised aspects of Life-Long-Learning; and the first thing which should be said is that, with few exceptions, this doesn't yet exist! Unfortunately, so far it only inhabits the minds, or at least the dreams, of governments and educationalists. The number of official reports - my own included - which talk about LLL, and eulogise about it, is legendary. The terrible thing is that, while those documents are correct in their conclusions - Life-Long-Learning really is essential if you are to continue to survive as a cultured and productive member of society - the resources to meet this demand are simply not being provided. When I have cornered the eminent authors of some of the most influential of these reports they have sheepishly confirmed this; offering the apology that their political masters in the establishment had steadfastly ignored their demands for suitable resourcing!

CPD…one form of LLL is provided, and that is Continuing Professional Development (CPD). In this way, some of the professions, at least, do maintain the process of education for their members. This is advisable for accountants and lawyers, who need to understand the latest developments in case-law. It is essential for our doctors, for who would want to be treated by someone who only knew the medicine of earlier decades. Surely, though, it should be just as necessary for the rest of us! On the other hand, CPD is still not education, it is training. For what they are doing is updating their current skills - which they use in their daily work. Whilst this may be, literally, a matter of life and death for some professionals, I am not convinced that it continues to develop the whole person as LLL should do.

• Have you, or any of your friends, had to undertake any CPD? How well did it work?

Commercial Offerings…elsewhere there are many courses run, at different levels, by commercial providers. These will teach you, for a fee - often an extortionate one - other aspects of professional development. In addition, those in the public sector, typically local colleges, will also teach you another whole range of subjects - from the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt to modern French cuisine - this time at much more affordable prices. I would argue that it is probably the latter group which will prove more useful to you. Indeed, the usefulness often seems to be in inverse proportion to the price! None of these, however, equate to anything approaching a public commitment to, and especially public access to, LLL for the majority of the us. This is a lamentable failing on behalf of governments who need to match their high-flown sound-bites about LLL with suitable resources.

Personal LLL

So, in the absence of provision by the state, how can you possibly continue your own Life-Long-Learning. As I have already indicated, if you do continue it will offer great benefits. Not least it will offer you significant advantages over your 'competitors' in the workplace, as well as enrich your private life and expand your horizons. So, how do you do this?

I have already indicated some approaches which are available to almost everyone. You can use libraries, or attend courses at your local colleges. But there are other ways. Not the least of these is simply taking quality newspapers and news-journals - along with their electronic equivalents - which analyse the subjects behind the news in considerable depth. Then there are all the other journals, covering all the topics known to civilisation - from art to zoo-keeping. These can, together, keep you abreast of developments in society and in the subjects which fascinate you. Above all, as I have already suggested, the greatest educator is going to remain - for the foreseeable future - television, especially as it adds on specialist channels by the hundred. You may view this statement with distaste, for was not television supposed to destroy our culture by lowering standards all round? But we don't all have to exist on a strict diet of soaps, game-shows and Oprah! We can all learn from the wider range of offerings - and even the questions on game-shows can sometimes teach us strange facts! At their best, television documentaries may be far better, in terms of education as well as entertainment, than many university offerings! The impact of their 'real-life' films can sometimes bring home important truths more effectively than a dozen earnest lectures.

• Have you ever considered planning your 'educational activities' - such as viewing television - to create your own LLL programme? Why not?

Active Learning…on all these fronts , the most important advice is to be an active learner; by reading books and even in choosing your television viewing. You must participate. You have to fully commit yourself to the necessary learning processes. This means understanding, as well as enjoying, the material which is put before you. But if you do that, the process alone will be enough to keep your learning experience alive. My mother, now well into her eighties, is still a cross-word addict. But this is not just as a peculiar form of intellectual perversion, but because it is her way of keeping her mind active. And it has, her mind is just as active as it ever has been.

Edutainment

Returning to education in general, I would now like to look at some of the developments which we, at the Open University, are forecasting. Perhaps the most important development we expect to happen is that of significantly increasing amounts of 'informal' education - much of it in the form we now call mass edutainment. As with most forecasts of the future, this development is not happening as fast as we expected it to. The nearest we get to it at the moment are the computer games which seem to take over the lives of our teenagers. The quality of presentation which is being achieved in these games, in terms of technical performance, indicates what might be to come.

What we expect to see eventually is the development of interactive computer programmes, with very high quality pictures, which go far beyond the documentary to 'personally' - interactively - teach you a subject. They will be electronic teachers, in the best sense. The point about such software is that it will require considerable capital investment. Indeed, the best current analogy is that of feature films. Thus, such edutainment programmes, to be really effective, will cost tens of millions of dollars but will sell for just a few tens of dollars a copy. Hence, these will have to sell by the millions - exactly as movies do - to make their money back. In addition, their production - focusing on video footage more than software - will largely take place on sound stages or on location, as do Hollywood blockbusters now! Of course, the enormous scale of investment needed means that they will be the province of large multinationals - Disney and Microsoft - not of local colleges, indeed not of any educational institutions, not even those as large as the Open University.

• If it looked interesting, would you 'rent' an interactive (computerised) education module instead of a videotape of the latest Hollywood blockbuster?

Education for the Masses…eventually, in this way, the most popular subjects, from accountancy to art, will be available in this form - pumped down the wire to your home. Because of their genuinely personal (computerised) tuition and their sheer convenience, they will become