How do you do homework?

There is a theme that comes up in the newspapers regularly and it relates to our education system. It tends to go something like this: “education is not relevant to work”; “young people not given the basic skills for work”. The basic premise being that education doesn’t prepare our young people for the real world.

It’s early evening now – I’m still working and will be for some while – again.

In his bedroom my son is also ‘working’ – I think (he was earlier anyway). They still call it homework but the Internet and IT in general has changed it to be something radically different to what I remember. At least it has for the privileged teenager in our house who has grown up regarding a whole set of technologies which I would have regarded as dreams as normal.

For the most part I did my homework in isolation. I lived a good bike ride from any of my school friends the need to collaborate wasn’t strong enough for me to be bothered. As we speak Jonathan is talking to two of his friends over Skype, they are using MSN for IM and file sharing. The barriers to collaboration are so much lower, in terms of effort, that they are choosing to collaborate. It’s part of their culture. It’s how they do it. They will be so disappointed if they start in employment and their employer doesn’t allow them to interact in this instant rich way.

The other day the three of them worked online and produced a flash animation on World War I as a response for a history question that they had been asked.

They regularly collaborate on a presentations and present them to the class.

So here is my question – are employers ready to release all of this fresh new employees into the rich collaboration experiences that they are used to? Are they going to provide them with the flexibility that goes with it? Or are they going to be subjected to the endless boredom of poorly structured meetings running at the pace of the slowest person with little or no value.