In a New York Times Op-Ed, David Brooks poses the ultimate higher-ed question: What is a university for?

Brooks separates knowledge into technical knowledge and practical knowledge.

Technical Knowledge enables us to understand a field. These are basics like statistics or fundamentals of biology. You can find it in books. The faculty teaches it. In many cases, a MOOC or a robot could teach it. It’s the mainstay on campus.

Practical Knowledge is about being rather than knowing. It can’t be taught in the classrooms or books. You learn it through experience. You absorb it from your environment. You can pick it up from your communities of practice.

Examples of Practice Knowledge abound in Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, “Lean In.” Says Brooks,

… tasks she describes as being important for anybody who wants to rise in this economy: the ability to be assertive in a meeting; to disagree pleasantly; to know when to interrupt and when not to; to understand the flow of discussion and how to change people’s minds; to attract mentors; to understand situations; to discern what can change and what can’t.

Brooks would have students master Practical Knowledge by leading the band or joining the debate club, something on campus. I think he’s off. Back to his “What is a university?” For most of us, the answer is “Not the best place to master Practical Knowledge for the workplace.”

What if we think of Technical Knowledge as explicit and Practical Knowledge as tacit?

• Technical Knowledge lays bare the intricacies of complicated concepts. It’s the facts. It’s clockwork models and the results they gin out time after time. Technical Knowledge deals with certainties and absolutes. In other words, it’s often theoretical and “not found in nature.”
• Practical Knowledge deals with complex, unpredictable, unruly patterns that emerge in real life. It is nature.

Caveat emptor. This next part is speculation on my part. I’m looking for corroboration.

The world is growing more complex. Outsourcing and automation have eliminated work that is merely complicated. The more interconnections in network, the greater the complexity, and the tendrils of networks everywhere are intertwining at a surreal pace.

Things kicked into high gear in the last twenty years of the twentieth century. Between 1980 and 2000, the value of the publicly traded companies flip-flopped from 80% tangible assets to 80% intangible assets.

This is an astounding change. Think about it. Most of a company’s worth had been in hard assets: plant, equipment, and cash. Two decades later, most of a company’s worth was in relationships, know-how, and secret sauce — things you can’t even see.

Many managers haven’t seen the light yet. Look at their allegiance to accounting measures that have less and less meaning in the real world. They righteously demand “hard numbers.” Those are the numbers that don’t mean to much any more.

As the world becomes more complex, are we not in the midst of another phase change? Might it be that the university heyday when explicit knowledge was king, is giving way to a new world where skills for navigating complexity rule?

If you can’t increase your social intelligence at college, isn’t it time to go somewhere else to get it?

The Times also reported that Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break. Seems that elite MOOC consortium EdX is experimenting with automated essay grading. Skeptics of course came out of the woodwork. Anant Agarwal, the EdX chief, points out that the grading software begins by learning how professors would grade; then it gives students instant grades and an opportunity to improve.

That latter bit — instant feedback and opportunity to resubmit a stronger essay — has lots of promise.

The skeptics are fighting a pitched battle. Traditional grades, having to do only with Technical Knowledge, are not correlated to any measure of success outside of schools. A system can’t do much worse than that.

There’s also the myth of the learnèd professor working away into the wee hours marking papers. I’m sure this happens some places but it wasn’t the way things worked at Harvard Business School when I went there. I have reason to know.

Several of my papers were rejected. These were WACs, Written Assessment of Cases. When I explained my logic to my professors, they said my arguments were brilliant and original. In fact, my ideas were so original that they didn’t appear on the grading checklists given to the Radcliffe students who actually graded the papers. I’m not saying every prof did this nor do I know how it works today, but an automated system might be an improvement. #justsayin

When people ask me what conferences they should attend, I tell them that small, intensive, participatory events work best for me. Most of these are invitation-only affairs. One exception, assuming you’re astute in talent management or corporate learning, is the annual Future of Talent Retreat.

This year will be the 8th Future of Talent Retreat. I’ve been to every one and will be attending this one in San Francisco, November 16-20.

We have few presentations. Instead we engage in conversations and collaborative activities that will give you practical information to take back and use in your organization. We have great food, drink wonderful wine, and make long lasting friends.

This is a highly interactive, hands-on event where participants contribute and learn from each other as well as the faculty.

Vernor Vinge, who came up with the concept of the singularity.

The Singularity Summit, open to the public, is the premier event on robotics, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfacing, and other emerging technologies including genomics and regenerative medicine. The event this October 13-14 will draw over 800 thought leaders to San Francisco for discussions on the most revolutionary technological advancements on the horizon.

Program | Reading list

It’s a weekend for learning. I’m paying $695 for enlightenment from these folks. I need their help sorting out my worldview.

I cannot imagine missing the Singularity Summit. It will take me 45 minutes to get there from my house (thanks to public trans).

October 13-14th, 2012 in San Francisco.

Put this in your stash — mp3s of brilliant people selling inspirational ideas. That’s a recording of every Singularity Summit from the beginning, in 2006. I remember sitting in the second row at that one. Frame-changing insights. Interspersed with a few odd balls.

Join me tomorrow, Friday, April 27, at 9:30 Pacific/12:30 Eastern in a Google+ Hangout to talk about the future of continuing education five to ten years out.

Let’s pretend we’ve just ridden our time machine to 2020. How will professionals keep up? Progress is zipping along faster than ever. The half-life of professional knowledge is measured in days. Most work that’s merely complicated has been automated; working means working with complexity. Software agents are doing our bidding. We’re connected to vast store of information in the cloud 24/7.

To stir the pot, consider these key trends in higher education from the 2011 Horizon Report:

• The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want.
• The world of work is increasingly collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured.
• The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.

These trends from the 2009 Horizon Report are still in play:

• Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
• The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision.
• Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce.
• Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive.
• As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.

Certification and compliance drive continuing education in IT, medicine, and other professions. How will those look in 2020?

Join the conversation tomorrow, Friday April 27, at 9:30 am Pacific on Google+. I’ll Tweet the URL @jaycross

Image credit: http://hollywoodlostandfound.net/props/timemachine.html