WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange: newyorker.com
This is an informative and thoughtful article on Assange, even more important now that he is under arrest and there seems to be a concerted effort to 'get Assange' and to marginalize or even close down WikiLeaks.
Tuesday, 7 December 2010
Monday, 22 November 2010
Arrived back late yesterday morning after very comfortable last sector -- Dubai-LHR -- in top deck of A380, which certainly redefines the way to fly. Emirates have quite a fleet of them, all kitted out in Emirates corporate style, much given to moulded plastic faux wood (yew?) right down to the loo seats! Business class passengers inhabit what could be a smart bit of kitchen furniture, inserting oneself into a kind of cupboard with reclining seat and lots of cubbies for shoes (that must be a first) and shelves, and, a feature of which Emirates is very proud, their 'award winning' ICE system (basically entertainment).
They are also proud of their catering, and yesterday one of the charming flight attendants (seemingly another Emirates speciality), while serving breakfast (which I didn't need, having broken my fast on a the previous Emirates flight) agreed to provide me with an early lunch, which she did about half an hour later, having meantime delivered a starter course of 'Arab style Mezze'. And very good it all was, in line with all of the catering on every Emirates flight on this UK-Oz return journey.
At the aft of the A380 cabin is a 'lounge' with banquette type seating and an on-duty bar man. Yesterday there was a unique combination to be observed, with a man using an airline blanket as improvised rug, praying to Mecca in a corner of the lounge, while several passengers were standing around the bar with alcoholic drinks in hand. Neither party seemed to be mindful of the presence or activities of the other.
They are also proud of their catering, and yesterday one of the charming flight attendants (seemingly another Emirates speciality), while serving breakfast (which I didn't need, having broken my fast on a the previous Emirates flight) agreed to provide me with an early lunch, which she did about half an hour later, having meantime delivered a starter course of 'Arab style Mezze'. And very good it all was, in line with all of the catering on every Emirates flight on this UK-Oz return journey.
At the aft of the A380 cabin is a 'lounge' with banquette type seating and an on-duty bar man. Yesterday there was a unique combination to be observed, with a man using an airline blanket as improvised rug, praying to Mecca in a corner of the lounge, while several passengers were standing around the bar with alcoholic drinks in hand. Neither party seemed to be mindful of the presence or activities of the other.
Friday, 13 August 2010
Unhappy landing in the customer journey
Reflecting on the recent high profile turbulence at the end of a JetBlue flight to New York, Colin Horgan in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/aug/12/steven-slater-rebel-dehumanising-service-society
observes that the ‘confrontation is symptomatic of a culture hooked into a service society where we all take part, acting out a kind of institutionalised intimacy where real relationships don't exist’.
Drawing on the work of the cultural theorist, JeanBaudrillard, Horgan points out that ‘The faux hospitality that we receive in a number of places every day is itself a system of production’, and, quoting Baudrillard, ‘’”as a system of production, it cannot but obey the same laws as those of the mode of production of material goods." Consequently, the human interactions which are part of this process of production and consumption ‘become just another throwaway item in a long line of consumer detritus. In effect, we are dehumanised while fulfilling a role that purports to enhance a personal experience’ Unfortunately, when this system of faux relationships breaks down, there is room for anger, which is what certainly happened in the moment of truth between Steven Slater, the service provider, and the passenger.
Horgan points out that the notion – or myth? – of consumer supremacy (‘The Customer is Always Right’) can only work if the customer is an active part of the process, i.e. there has to be a modicum of collaboration on the part of the consumer. This is, of course, essential in the kind of service relationship in an language teaching organization (LTO) , not least in the classroom.
If the customer’s ego isn't being stroked, if they aren’t the centre of attention, then the customer can feel rejected by the very social structure which has up till then supported the faux relationship between provider and consumer. So, says Horgan, ‘Effectively, Slater's angry JetBlue passenger was suddenly aware that the customer is not always right, and that she wasn't getting everything she thought she'd paid for: the consumer industry's ultimate insult’.
Ultimately, suggests Horgan, we need to remember where we fit into the scheme of synthetically produced relationships that are at the heart of service industries.
There’s quite a lot of food for thought here. What LTOs provide is a mix of education and service with a built in tension between the two, and in the quite different relationships involved in each. For instance, teachers occupy a gate keeping role to a student, which sits uncomfortably with the role of service provider role to a consumer. The ambiguity in these roles is potentially confusing to the student/consumer, particularly as the boundaries of each are likely to be ambiguous, and further confused by culturally based expectations.
Reflecting on the recent high profile turbulence at the end of a JetBlue flight to New York, Colin Horgan in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/aug/12/steven-slater-rebel-dehumanising-service-society
observes that the ‘confrontation is symptomatic of a culture hooked into a service society where we all take part, acting out a kind of institutionalised intimacy where real relationships don't exist’.
Drawing on the work of the cultural theorist, JeanBaudrillard, Horgan points out that ‘The faux hospitality that we receive in a number of places every day is itself a system of production’, and, quoting Baudrillard, ‘’”as a system of production, it cannot but obey the same laws as those of the mode of production of material goods." Consequently, the human interactions which are part of this process of production and consumption ‘become just another throwaway item in a long line of consumer detritus. In effect, we are dehumanised while fulfilling a role that purports to enhance a personal experience’ Unfortunately, when this system of faux relationships breaks down, there is room for anger, which is what certainly happened in the moment of truth between Steven Slater, the service provider, and the passenger.
Horgan points out that the notion – or myth? – of consumer supremacy (‘The Customer is Always Right’) can only work if the customer is an active part of the process, i.e. there has to be a modicum of collaboration on the part of the consumer. This is, of course, essential in the kind of service relationship in an language teaching organization (LTO) , not least in the classroom.
If the customer’s ego isn't being stroked, if they aren’t the centre of attention, then the customer can feel rejected by the very social structure which has up till then supported the faux relationship between provider and consumer. So, says Horgan, ‘Effectively, Slater's angry JetBlue passenger was suddenly aware that the customer is not always right, and that she wasn't getting everything she thought she'd paid for: the consumer industry's ultimate insult’.
Ultimately, suggests Horgan, we need to remember where we fit into the scheme of synthetically produced relationships that are at the heart of service industries.
There’s quite a lot of food for thought here. What LTOs provide is a mix of education and service with a built in tension between the two, and in the quite different relationships involved in each. For instance, teachers occupy a gate keeping role to a student, which sits uncomfortably with the role of service provider role to a consumer. The ambiguity in these roles is potentially confusing to the student/consumer, particularly as the boundaries of each are likely to be ambiguous, and further confused by culturally based expectations.
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
Customer Journey
The blog I just posted is called 'slacking on the customer journey'. Why the customer journey? Well, that's to be taken up in my next blog. Right now, it's time to think about logging off for the day.
Slacking on the customer journey
Recently, my wife and I watched a DVD of 'Julie and Julia' in which an aspiring young author in contemporary New York uses a blog on her year long attempt to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' as a form of therapy and self actualization. Initially, she is reluctant to start a blog, regarding them, as I largely still do, as a form of self indulgence. However, she persists, demonstrating considerable self discipline in not only cooking a dish a day (and some of the recipes are pretty time consuming) but also writing up a blog reporting and reflecting on her culinary efforts. Phew!
I see that it's a month since I posted my last blog on course development. Since then I've chatted with a teacher trainer and a former DOS on this topic, the gist of which is that the ideal approach to course development, rather like the ideal lesson plan, is not much witnessed in the real world of the language teaching organization (LTO). In fact, it's rare for totally new courses to be designed from scratch, repackaging existing courses being more common. The idea of tightly determining in fine detail the aims, content and session by session provision of a course is not one which, in the view of the teacher trainer, would be readily accepted by many teachers, as it would remove initiative and the use of their own judgment. However, the former DOS did say that teachers were required to maintain a record of the work they covered, which is essentially an after the event record. Ensuring that they did so was always a bit of an effort, and, of course, it is essential to have some such record so that other teachers who are teaching the same student group know what they have been taught, or when a teacher has to cover for an absent colleague.
The teacher trainer noted that a course outline was very useful for inexperienced teachers who need and often welcome such guidance. However, the course outline should avoid being too detailed and prescriptive and the trainer was critical of course outlines which advised the teacher to cover specific pages in the course book, to skip specific exercises or activities, and, in short, held the teacher's hand so as to remove any initiative.
A curriculum and course outlines are requirements of most accreditation schemes, so DOSs will ensure that such documentation exists when an inspection is imminent. Likewise, teachers will produce lesson plans and schemes of work. Once the inspection is over, old habits reassert themselves.
What isn't absolutely clear is what these old habits actually are. So, what I want to do is to find out what academic managers and teachers actually do in practice when it comes to developing courses and writing course outlines. I believe it's always best to start with actual practice rather than simply impose an ideal scheme, since people usually ignore or at best modify any such scheme to match their own requirements -- or to use a term that is now being bandied about regarding the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, 'conditions on the ground'.
So, what are the conditions on the ground which influence the way course development (and delivery) is actually carried out in the LTO?
I see that it's a month since I posted my last blog on course development. Since then I've chatted with a teacher trainer and a former DOS on this topic, the gist of which is that the ideal approach to course development, rather like the ideal lesson plan, is not much witnessed in the real world of the language teaching organization (LTO). In fact, it's rare for totally new courses to be designed from scratch, repackaging existing courses being more common. The idea of tightly determining in fine detail the aims, content and session by session provision of a course is not one which, in the view of the teacher trainer, would be readily accepted by many teachers, as it would remove initiative and the use of their own judgment. However, the former DOS did say that teachers were required to maintain a record of the work they covered, which is essentially an after the event record. Ensuring that they did so was always a bit of an effort, and, of course, it is essential to have some such record so that other teachers who are teaching the same student group know what they have been taught, or when a teacher has to cover for an absent colleague.
The teacher trainer noted that a course outline was very useful for inexperienced teachers who need and often welcome such guidance. However, the course outline should avoid being too detailed and prescriptive and the trainer was critical of course outlines which advised the teacher to cover specific pages in the course book, to skip specific exercises or activities, and, in short, held the teacher's hand so as to remove any initiative.
A curriculum and course outlines are requirements of most accreditation schemes, so DOSs will ensure that such documentation exists when an inspection is imminent. Likewise, teachers will produce lesson plans and schemes of work. Once the inspection is over, old habits reassert themselves.
What isn't absolutely clear is what these old habits actually are. So, what I want to do is to find out what academic managers and teachers actually do in practice when it comes to developing courses and writing course outlines. I believe it's always best to start with actual practice rather than simply impose an ideal scheme, since people usually ignore or at best modify any such scheme to match their own requirements -- or to use a term that is now being bandied about regarding the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, 'conditions on the ground'.
So, what are the conditions on the ground which influence the way course development (and delivery) is actually carried out in the LTO?
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
Course Design & Schemes of Work
When thinking about doing a blog, I tend to get hung up on the idea that a blog is for ‘publication’, and since the writing I've done for publication goes through quite a few stages before being published, posting a blog which resembles a draft seems to be risky and a bit of an imposition (why should readers be given early thoughts?) Well, I guess that in fact blogs are really work in progress, so this blog represents some early thoughts and really is work in progress.
The topic is designing courses – ELT courses, that is. And the stimulus for thinking about this came from some feedback from an IDLTM alumnus who felt that, although specified in the course outline, not enough attention had been given to curriculum. In fact, curriculum as such isn't a significant item in the course description, although ‘Course planning, preparation, provision & follow up (including evaluation/feedback cycle’ is.
So, prompted by this point, I started thinking about course planning, etc., which I’ll refer to as course management or CM. First stop: a web search. Not a great deal turns up, and what does turn up tends to be rather more at the applied linguistics end of the spectrum than at the actual CM end. Furthermore, for the LTO manager, concerned with managing a range of courses of varying levels and lengths (all complicated by the continuous enrolment which is widespread in non state sector or private language teaching organizations (LTOs)), commonly for nationally diverse student groups, the kinds of discussion which goes on in the literature doesn't seem to make much connection with the realities of CM in the typical LTO. (This isn't to say that an academic manager shouldn't be familiar with this literature and the ideas and controversies which are part of this particular discourse arena. An MA in ELT seems to be the place for such study, however.)
So, back to CM. In FTOM (White, R., Hockley, A., van der Horst Jansen, J., & Laughner, M. 2008. From Teacher to Manager: Managing language teaching organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) I propose 3 levels, which are
1. Principles
2. Frameworks and guidelines
3. Specific products & services (i.e. courses)
Principles includes vision and mission, and could be linked to the top level of curriculum development which is that of the educational philosophy which motivates the curriculum. So, for the course manager, the first point of reference is that of the educational mission of the LTO, and the principles which motivate teaching. Such statements are, I suspect, quite rare, so the academic manager may have to start by involving colleagues in developing such a statement of principles. But that isn’t the message which an academic manager, such as the DOS or ADOS, wants to hear when they’ve got to get a course ready for next week!
The frameworks and guidelines are closer to operations level concerns and the manager may have access to such documentation, as in an examination handbook, or in the form of the Common European Framework (CEF). What, then, does the manager do with this documentation and planning the course? The choice of aims, objectives, content, teaching activities, and evaluation will depend on a number of factors:
1. Course participants: level, diversity, goals (broadly speaking, their needs, although a needs analysis of any sort is unlikely to be available, and needs analyses aren’t necessarily very helpful as they aren’t necessarily well designed or conducted.)
2. Course duration and organization. This, in my own experience , has always been critical because planning any course is highly determined by the amount of time available to reach whatever goals have been sest.
3. Course specification: thanks to the influence of the CEF, there is a move towards expressing these in terms of the levels and specifications used in the CEF, including the use of ‘can do’ statements (as is done in the FCE handbook, for instance).
4. Course outline: this is where, I think, there is a transition to a kind of documentation which is common in mainstream education: the Scheme of Work.
5. Lesson plans.
The key document here is the Scheme of Work, and I suspect that it is this which is what accreditation scheme inspectors seek to sight and which academic managers are really concerned with when thinking about CM and course design.
What is a scheme of work (SOW)? At the risk of confirming that blogs really are rough drafts, I’ll refer to the definition offered by Wikipedia:
In the UK, a scheme of work is a not statutory guideline that defines the structure and content of a course. It maps out clearly how resources (e.g. books, equipment, time) and class activities (e.g. teacher-talk, groupwork, practicals, discussions) and assessment strategies (e.g. tests, quizzes, Q&A, homework) will be used to ensure that the learning aims and objectives of the course are met successfully. It will normally include times and dates. The scheme of work is usually an interpretation of a specification or syllabus and can be used as a guide throughout the course to monitor progress against the original plan. Schemes of work can be shared with students so that they have an overview of their course.
The key parts of a "scheme of work" include:
• Content
• Objectives or Outcomes
• Methods of delivery (student and teacher activity)
• Assessment strategies
• Resources
• Other Remarks
A more extensive but accessible account of SOW can be found at
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/ferl.aclearn.resource.id5602
So, I’ll end this blog with a question: is the SOW what academic managers are thinking of when dealing with CM? Or is it something else?
The topic is designing courses – ELT courses, that is. And the stimulus for thinking about this came from some feedback from an IDLTM alumnus who felt that, although specified in the course outline, not enough attention had been given to curriculum. In fact, curriculum as such isn't a significant item in the course description, although ‘Course planning, preparation, provision & follow up (including evaluation/feedback cycle’ is.
So, prompted by this point, I started thinking about course planning, etc., which I’ll refer to as course management or CM. First stop: a web search. Not a great deal turns up, and what does turn up tends to be rather more at the applied linguistics end of the spectrum than at the actual CM end. Furthermore, for the LTO manager, concerned with managing a range of courses of varying levels and lengths (all complicated by the continuous enrolment which is widespread in non state sector or private language teaching organizations (LTOs)), commonly for nationally diverse student groups, the kinds of discussion which goes on in the literature doesn't seem to make much connection with the realities of CM in the typical LTO. (This isn't to say that an academic manager shouldn't be familiar with this literature and the ideas and controversies which are part of this particular discourse arena. An MA in ELT seems to be the place for such study, however.)
So, back to CM. In FTOM (White, R., Hockley, A., van der Horst Jansen, J., & Laughner, M. 2008. From Teacher to Manager: Managing language teaching organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) I propose 3 levels, which are
1. Principles
2. Frameworks and guidelines
3. Specific products & services (i.e. courses)
Principles includes vision and mission, and could be linked to the top level of curriculum development which is that of the educational philosophy which motivates the curriculum. So, for the course manager, the first point of reference is that of the educational mission of the LTO, and the principles which motivate teaching. Such statements are, I suspect, quite rare, so the academic manager may have to start by involving colleagues in developing such a statement of principles. But that isn’t the message which an academic manager, such as the DOS or ADOS, wants to hear when they’ve got to get a course ready for next week!
The frameworks and guidelines are closer to operations level concerns and the manager may have access to such documentation, as in an examination handbook, or in the form of the Common European Framework (CEF). What, then, does the manager do with this documentation and planning the course? The choice of aims, objectives, content, teaching activities, and evaluation will depend on a number of factors:
1. Course participants: level, diversity, goals (broadly speaking, their needs, although a needs analysis of any sort is unlikely to be available, and needs analyses aren’t necessarily very helpful as they aren’t necessarily well designed or conducted.)
2. Course duration and organization. This, in my own experience , has always been critical because planning any course is highly determined by the amount of time available to reach whatever goals have been sest.
3. Course specification: thanks to the influence of the CEF, there is a move towards expressing these in terms of the levels and specifications used in the CEF, including the use of ‘can do’ statements (as is done in the FCE handbook, for instance).
4. Course outline: this is where, I think, there is a transition to a kind of documentation which is common in mainstream education: the Scheme of Work.
5. Lesson plans.
The key document here is the Scheme of Work, and I suspect that it is this which is what accreditation scheme inspectors seek to sight and which academic managers are really concerned with when thinking about CM and course design.
What is a scheme of work (SOW)? At the risk of confirming that blogs really are rough drafts, I’ll refer to the definition offered by Wikipedia:
In the UK, a scheme of work is a not statutory guideline that defines the structure and content of a course. It maps out clearly how resources (e.g. books, equipment, time) and class activities (e.g. teacher-talk, groupwork, practicals, discussions) and assessment strategies (e.g. tests, quizzes, Q&A, homework) will be used to ensure that the learning aims and objectives of the course are met successfully. It will normally include times and dates. The scheme of work is usually an interpretation of a specification or syllabus and can be used as a guide throughout the course to monitor progress against the original plan. Schemes of work can be shared with students so that they have an overview of their course.
The key parts of a "scheme of work" include:
• Content
• Objectives or Outcomes
• Methods of delivery (student and teacher activity)
• Assessment strategies
• Resources
• Other Remarks
A more extensive but accessible account of SOW can be found at
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/ferl.aclearn.resource.id5602
So, I’ll end this blog with a question: is the SOW what academic managers are thinking of when dealing with CM? Or is it something else?
Thursday, 17 June 2010
Entrepreneurship
One of the FT columnists I enjoy reading is Luke Johnson, who writes on entrepreneurship. It's an indication of my own ignorance of the world he inhabits that I know him mostly as an FT columnist and as one of the partners in Pizza Express and that he's chairman of Channel 4, one of the UK's independent TV channels. So, this morning I decided to Google him, and discovered on the Wikipedia site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Johnson_(businessman) that there is more to the history of this serial entrepreneur than I realized. Apparently, he took part in a BBC TV programme, 'Back to the Floor', in which executives go back to the shop floor to remind themselves of what it's like to work at operations level. Evidently, Johnson didn't distinguish himself in this role reversal, proving to be humourless, no good at any of the jobs (as waiter, receptionist, kitchen hand) and being pretty hopeless at listening to his staff's many problems.
Well, it could be argued (and no doubt Johnson would do so) that entrepreneurs don't need to have domain knowledge or be good at listening to staff or be skilled at operations management, since the role of and expertise required by an entrepreneur are of a different order. What, then, are the characteristics of an entrepreneur? Well, according to Johnson, they aren't those outlined by New Yorker magazine journalist, Malcolm Gladwell (he of The Tipping Point).
[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b1b8c3d8-1035-11df-841f-00144feab49a.html]
Counter intuitively, Gladwell asserts that entrepreneurs are risk averse. According to Johnson, this is rubbish. He points out that 'The launch of BSkyB, perhaps the most lucrative media project of our time, was fraught with danger and almost bankrupted News Corp. Similarly, the launches of the iPod and iPhone by Apple were both high-risk strategies and might have flopped.' And he goes on to say that 'We remember the winners but forget the hundreds of losers – they all appeared to be “sure things” at the time.'
Johnson especially takes to task Gladwell's touting of John Paulson as the archetypal entrepreneur who only bets when he can[t lose. (Paulson is the massively successful hedge fund manager who in essence shorted US housing mortgages.) However, Johnson points out that Paulson 's not an entrepreneur: ‘he is a Wall Street financier who takes short-term speculations, mainly, it seems, using derivatives – gambling with paper on paper'. Johnson goes on to make the point that 'Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, build real companies that employ people and generate value for an economy. They do not amass riches through the misery of others; they create wealth and jobs, and make the capitalist system work.' In fact, Johnson believes that the distinction between the kind of gambler represented by Paulson and the values represented by the entrepreneur is both a moral as well as a philosophical issue. 'To me, Mr Paulson and others like him are the opposite of heroic – they are in essence parasitical'.
It is difficult not to agree with this last point, particularly in the light of the 'business as usual' practices of the banks in the wake of the economic melt down and bail out by governments and, ultimately, the tax payer. The failure of the banks to mend their ways, and the 'poverty of action' to reform the banking system is the subject of a pretty swingeing article by Will Hutton in Sunday's 'Observer': [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/13/will-hutton-banks-crash-refuse-reform]
Basically, 'our banking system is as disconnected from real wealth generation as ever'.
Now, where does this connect with ELT? Firstly, I wonder how many real entrepreneurs there are in the sector. Historically, there are some, such as John Haycraft, who, with his wife, founded IH and who, importantly, recognized the need for initial teacher training. And there will be others -- Frank Bell comes to mind and his status as founder of the Bell Educational Trust is given prominence on their web site, in great contrast to Pilgrims and CfBT, who, in neither case, refer to the individuals instrumental in their foundation . In fact, it would be interesting to try to make a list of ELT entrepreneurs. I suspect that few contemporary ones will actually be found in ELT as such, but are more likely to be discovered in educational enterprises, such as Navitas, whose founders, Rod Jones and Peter Larsen, 'identified a need for a different kind of pathway into university in Australia', developing an educational business which, in 2009, had 'had over 30,000 students a year studying in its network of colleges and campuses across seven countries. It had cemented its place as Australia’s largest private education provider.' [ http://www.navitas.com/company_history.html]
Much of the management carried out in the typical LTO doesn't involve entrepreneurship, and it calls for a range of skills which don't appear to be part of the skill set of the entrepreneur. Even so, any sector needs its entrepreneurs if it is to develop and avoid becoming moribund. When one surveys what is on offer by the majority of Language Teaching Organizations (LTOs), there seems to be little indication of significant innovation or of significant entrepreneurship, both of which may be critical in the economically challenging times which now confront us. Or maybe I'm wrong?
Well, it could be argued (and no doubt Johnson would do so) that entrepreneurs don't need to have domain knowledge or be good at listening to staff or be skilled at operations management, since the role of and expertise required by an entrepreneur are of a different order. What, then, are the characteristics of an entrepreneur? Well, according to Johnson, they aren't those outlined by New Yorker magazine journalist, Malcolm Gladwell (he of The Tipping Point).
[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b1b8c3d8-1035-11df-841f-00144feab49a.html]
Counter intuitively, Gladwell asserts that entrepreneurs are risk averse. According to Johnson, this is rubbish. He points out that 'The launch of BSkyB, perhaps the most lucrative media project of our time, was fraught with danger and almost bankrupted News Corp. Similarly, the launches of the iPod and iPhone by Apple were both high-risk strategies and might have flopped.' And he goes on to say that 'We remember the winners but forget the hundreds of losers – they all appeared to be “sure things” at the time.'
Johnson especially takes to task Gladwell's touting of John Paulson as the archetypal entrepreneur who only bets when he can[t lose. (Paulson is the massively successful hedge fund manager who in essence shorted US housing mortgages.) However, Johnson points out that Paulson 's not an entrepreneur: ‘he is a Wall Street financier who takes short-term speculations, mainly, it seems, using derivatives – gambling with paper on paper'. Johnson goes on to make the point that 'Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, build real companies that employ people and generate value for an economy. They do not amass riches through the misery of others; they create wealth and jobs, and make the capitalist system work.' In fact, Johnson believes that the distinction between the kind of gambler represented by Paulson and the values represented by the entrepreneur is both a moral as well as a philosophical issue. 'To me, Mr Paulson and others like him are the opposite of heroic – they are in essence parasitical'.
It is difficult not to agree with this last point, particularly in the light of the 'business as usual' practices of the banks in the wake of the economic melt down and bail out by governments and, ultimately, the tax payer. The failure of the banks to mend their ways, and the 'poverty of action' to reform the banking system is the subject of a pretty swingeing article by Will Hutton in Sunday's 'Observer': [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/13/will-hutton-banks-crash-refuse-reform]
Basically, 'our banking system is as disconnected from real wealth generation as ever'.
Now, where does this connect with ELT? Firstly, I wonder how many real entrepreneurs there are in the sector. Historically, there are some, such as John Haycraft, who, with his wife, founded IH and who, importantly, recognized the need for initial teacher training. And there will be others -- Frank Bell comes to mind and his status as founder of the Bell Educational Trust is given prominence on their web site, in great contrast to Pilgrims and CfBT, who, in neither case, refer to the individuals instrumental in their foundation . In fact, it would be interesting to try to make a list of ELT entrepreneurs. I suspect that few contemporary ones will actually be found in ELT as such, but are more likely to be discovered in educational enterprises, such as Navitas, whose founders, Rod Jones and Peter Larsen, 'identified a need for a different kind of pathway into university in Australia', developing an educational business which, in 2009, had 'had over 30,000 students a year studying in its network of colleges and campuses across seven countries. It had cemented its place as Australia’s largest private education provider.' [ http://www.navitas.com/company_history.html]
Much of the management carried out in the typical LTO doesn't involve entrepreneurship, and it calls for a range of skills which don't appear to be part of the skill set of the entrepreneur. Even so, any sector needs its entrepreneurs if it is to develop and avoid becoming moribund. When one surveys what is on offer by the majority of Language Teaching Organizations (LTOs), there seems to be little indication of significant innovation or of significant entrepreneurship, both of which may be critical in the economically challenging times which now confront us. Or maybe I'm wrong?
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