James Drogan

I've long remarked that the best job is one where you are doing something you love, that is useful to others as well as yourself, and where you can make money.

I have also wondered at some length, here and elsewhere, about the changing nature of work within a complex, rapidly changing global context, and whether, as a teacher, I am properly preparing my students for "out there where the cold wind blows."

This preamble leads me to Jobs in the Age of Watson, a very provocative post by one of my favorite thinkers and bloggers, Irving Wladawsky-Berger.  Wladawsky-Berger brings to our minds the challenges of finding that best job, on the one hand, and properly preparing for it, on the other.  Addressing these challenges requires our very best in imagining, and perhaps even making real, a set of possible futures and congruent commitment to an education that maximizes our opportunities to participate in these futures in meaningful ways.

It seems to me that to do this requires a different social and economic construct, comprising values and regimes, than we have in place at the moment.  Energies spent on ideologically-based turf wars and extension of the status quo are wasted energies.  The world will move on and a risk is run that many will be left behind.