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06.04.09 Software Needs To Be Conducive To Learning  By Dan Morrill When you are looking at Knowledge Management, education, training, these all fit into knowledge management systems. It does not matter what system you are using, what matters is the environment you are creating to support internal and external goals for learning. If the systems, if the content, and if the presentation is not conducive to learning, it does not matter how well you create content. The learning opportunities from those systems are going to never going to be used. Some things to watch for, and most of these will be heresy for some, others will say "it is about time" is more of a reference from where someone is coming from. We have all suffered through poor courses, poor teachers, and poor learning environments. We have also for the most part if you ever went to college dealt with good and bad instructors, good and bad learning environments. As we develop a national plan for information security, as we watch our new cyber czar take their office, and we watch the changes to health care, the smart grid concept for critical services like water, power and sewer, and we look at the legal challenges to regulations like the challenges to SOX, and the recent challenge to PCI as to who is liable, information security, the alliance of government, industry and education needs to provide the environment to get people excited about the prospects of the whole idea of information security. That means we have to approach this on the education side from the base learning processes, in that many people all learn in many different ways. If we choose to develop courses that are one sided, do not inspire, do not develop creativity, and do not develop critical thinking skills, we will not have the people we need to run, manage and maintain the systems we are looking at developing. If we rather develop courses that are not made in conjunction with Business and Government, if we do not address the unique issues they deal with, if we do not teach them as educators, then what we teach is not developing people for the jobs of tomorrow. If education isolates itself from its partners chasing nothing but government grants for obscure siloed dollars, then we have ended up failing those people who are going through those programs. Education is about outreach and training, it is about inspiring as well as educating.
Business is about having the right people doing the right job at the right time and making a profit, from a little profit at not for profits or non-profits, to huge profits in the banking (not so much so though lately), technology, and government contracts. Business is influenced by the government and by the education of the people coming into their companies. Business is only as good as the regulations state they need to be, and as good as the people who fill positions that come out of college. The government is about making national level frameworks, what are the minimum things they need or they see as critical skills. Even if it is just for them, from the military on through the NSA and Department of Homeland Security, they all know what they need, they know what they want in the current and future generation of information security people, and often they are willing to give people money to develop those courses/systems to fill in those needs. Information Security education should be about inspiration, creativity, seeing the world as a hacker sees it with no boundaries. Some colleges do this, and do this quite well (if you are shopping for an information security degree at any level, there are some handy tips at the bottom of this entry), others well maybe not so much. We take money from government to build out programs that fit their needs, and we should be working with business to ensure that we are also working on their needs as well. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management. Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through his blog, Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community. |
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