Guess what you should never say out loud during a trade war?
We are Thinking Cap, and we are Canadian.
That matters in ways that might not be obvious if you aren’t Canadian, so let me tell you a little about the country we come from.
Canada is bigger than you imagine.
Americans have this wonderful mythology about Montana. From The Hunt for Red October to Yellowstone, Montana is where you go when you want to disappear. Big Sky Country. Mountains. Wilderness. The last lonely place.
To a Canadian, it’s the Bronx Zoo.
Whenever an American waxes poetic about remoteness, I ask one question: are you from Alaska?
If the answer is yes, I shut up. They know.
Otherwise, we need to talk about Montana.
Imagine the greatest distance you can imagine walking before encountering another human being. Double it. Then double it again. You have still missed the mark spectacularly.
Canada is also, in a very real sense, a country of second sons.
We came from places where the good land, the good jobs and the good futures already belonged to somebody else. So we crossed an ocean and tried again. That selects for a certain kind of person. You don’t arrive in a country this big, this cold and this empty because you’re particularly attached to the way things have always been done. You arrive because you think you can figure out another way.
And then Canada starts presenting you with problems.
Education was one of them.
Teaching seven grades in a one-room schoolhouse might warm the cockles of hearts in Vermont. Canada has harsher stories. We are the land of Robert Service, ice-worm cocktails and The Shooting of Dan McGrew.
Distance isn’t something Canadians discovered when someone coined the term distance education. Distance has been one of the central problems of being Canadian from the beginning.
So, unsurprisingly, we became rather good at railways.
Good enough that eventually the railway presented us with a data problem.
Every town keeping its own local solar time works perfectly well until you try to run a railway through all of them. Once those towns become nodes in a network, local time becomes a coordination problem.
So Canadian railway engineer Sir Sandford Fleming proposed a worldwide system of standard time.
You’re welcome.
If the Americans had done it, they’d probably want a toll.
We’ll just apologize.
But the railway did something more important than make us agree on what time it was. Once you had infrastructure crossing a country of this size, you had a path along which more than people and freight could travel.
Communications followed.
And Canadians have always taken communications seriously. In Toronto we eventually built what was, for decades, the tallest freestanding structure in the world.
Why?
So we could talk to each other.
The CN Tower wasn’t originally conceived as a tourist attraction or somewhere to have dinner while slowly rotating above the city. Toronto’s growing forest of skyscrapers was interfering with radio and television signals, so we built a 553-metre communications tower tall enough to get above them.
Of course we did.
In a country where geography is constantly trying to prevent one Canadian from talking to another Canadian, communications infrastructure isn’t decoration. It’s survival equipment.
And once Canadians could communicate across enormous distances, one of the things we rather predictably started doing was teaching across them.
We used the post. We used radio. We used television, telecommunications and satellites. Eventually we used the Internet.
Before the rest of the world got excited about “e-learning,” we had a much less glamorous name for it.
Distance education.
I think the distinction matters.
The technology was never the point. Somebody somewhere knew something, and somebody somewhere else needed to know it. In Canada, “somewhere else” could be very somewhere else indeed.
It could be Kugaaruk.
So instead of always moving the learner to the institution, we became rather good at moving education to the learner.
And perhaps that explains why I have spent most of my professional life thinking about courseware as rolling stock.
Not entirely fondly.
In fact, it points directly at my greatest professional grievance and the thing I mourn most about spending more than twenty years in educational technology.
Nobody ever asked me why the train was running.
They handed me the boxcars.
Put this course here. Deliver that one there. Make sure these people get it and those people don’t. Enrol them. Remind them. Record when they started. Record when they stopped. Tell us whether they passed. Give us a receipt proving the package arrived.
And Thinking Cap became very, very good at it.
I too have written boxcars boxcars boxcars.
I’ve spent twenty years watching the network run all day, every day, and I can tell you that it is an astonishing piece of machinery.
I can also tell you that it’s remarkably inefficient.
And worse, remarkably often, it isn’t getting the job done.
If you tell me you need three hundred cattle moved from point A to point B, I can build you a magnificent cattle-delivery system. I can schedule the cattle, secure the cattle, track the cattle and report on the cattle. I can tell you precisely which cattle arrived and produce impeccable evidence that they did.
But imagine instead that you told me why the cattle were taking the trip.
Now I might have something useful to contribute.
That’s the part of educational technology that has bothered me for years. We have spent decades getting better and better at moving learning objects around while remaining remarkably incurious about the human aspiration that caused somebody to put them on the train in the first place.
Why is this person here?
What are they trying to become?
What can they not do today that they want to be able to do tomorrow?
What does their employer need to become possible? What does their profession need? What opportunity exists in their community or their economy that they cannot yet reach?
Those are much more interesting questions than where you want me to put the SCORM package.
And now AI has arrived.
People understandably want to talk about what AI can generate. Courses, tests, videos, simulations, documents, translations, summaries. All useful things.
But that isn’t the part that excites me most.
The plumbing is opening up.
Moving information, transforming it, translating it, finding it, generating it, personalizing it and delivering it are rapidly becoming things almost anybody can do.
Wonderful.
I have no particular desire to spend the next twenty years defending the plumbing.
For the first time in my career, I think we have the opportunity to begin at the other end of the conversation.
Don’t tell me which course you want delivered.
Tell me what somebody is trying to accomplish.
Maybe the answer is a course. Maybe it’s a document. Maybe it’s practice. Maybe it’s a conversation. Maybe they need an expert. Maybe they need to demonstrate something. Maybe the useful piece of knowledge exists in Thailand and the person who needs it is in Kugaaruk.
Maybe the thing worth moving isn’t a course at all.
Once you know the aspiration, we can work backwards and decide what needs to happen.
Which makes AI feel both revolutionary and strangely familiar to a Canadian distance-education company.
Everything old is new again.
The tools are astonishingly new. The problems underneath them aren’t.
Distance. Access. Communication. Knowledge. How you get something worth knowing from the person who knows it to the person who needs it. And, more importantly, how you work out what they actually need in the first place.
Canada has spent a couple of centuries finding ways to make enormous distances smaller.
Luckily, we’ve got some Canadians on the job.