Dick Sblog

The August issue of the CIPD’s quarterly update on policy and research contained an article saying that ‘the much heraled revolution in homeworking is yet to take off, although a quarter of employers say that homeworking will increase in their organisation in the next year’.

On September 9th, the Guardian ran a piece entitled, ‘Rapid rise in flexible working’, quoting a CBI study suggesting that the number of flexible workers in the UK has jumped sharply over the past 4 years. Of the CBI’s sample set, almost half of the employers said they offered teleworking from home to staff, up from 14% two years ago and only 11% in 2004.

There seems to be some slight disagreement here,  in the headlines. Despite this, it’s clear that home and flexible working are here to stay – driven increasingly by the mayhem that is the British transport system (or, rather, lack of system) and the need to reduce cost and carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, over on the continent, under Geneva, one of the most exciting experiments in human history is taking place. Leaving aside the tabloid nonsense about black-holes destroying the planet (I think we are doing a good-enough job anyway, just by burning petro-chemicals), this is a stunning example of scientific research across distributed networks – data from the LHC will be processed on computer grids and scientists in hundreds of different locations will be working on the results.

So, given that distributed working is obviously on the agenda for businesses and researchers (to say nothing about kids collaborating across chat networks etc in the evenings) shouldn’t we be using more of it in education? By the time current business technologies become mainstream in schooling, we may well have been swallowed by a black hole – after all, the cosmos operates on timescales of millenia, a bit like UK education.