3 Things I Learned - Schnaider

I found it interesting that even though operating costs have increased in education due in large part to the cost of telecommunications, the results have remained the same. This has been accepted for a long time and as educational technologists, we should strive to change that and increase the level of learning through the use of technology.

The article also listed the reasons organizations are creating corporate universities are because of discontent with public education and for the need for specialized training. As an administrator of a corporate university, I hear these reasons all the time for creating new courses as part of our university. In the engineering firm I work for many of the managers require two years of training or mentoring for new graduates to gain the hands-on training that make them able to work successfully on a project. Even though they may have the correct Bachelors or Masters degree, they are not ready to work independently on an engineering project.

I also found it interesting that according to the article, technology has eliminated the traditional role of the middle manager, or "flattened" organizations. The ease of communication through technology has reduced the need for the middle managers who typically relayed information between upper management and frontline workers. I personally have been in the workplace since the advent of email and much of the technologies that are widely used today, so I do not have experience with this type of middle manager. The middle managers that I see in my organization are every bit required to produce a product as they are required to manage a small group of people. It is only the upper management who are released from production and focus solely on the management of the business and communication. Perhaps this is a result of the elimination of the purely communicator middle manager.