Knowledge and Learning In The News - 4/28/2005

Podcasting: Making Waves Just when we grasped what blogging was all about, along came podcasting, which in some ways is even more disruptive and exciting than blogging. Training is priceless, and firms are investing A survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting says 49 percent of companies expect to increase their training budgets this year, while just 2 percent plan to spend less. Arranging Change There's an interesting blog discussion going on between Frank Patrick's Focused Performance and Gaping Void about what drives change -- new tools, or new processes and relationships among peers. Youth abandoning old media A new US report reveals that less that a fifth of 18-34 year olds rank newspapers as their primary source of news, while 44% check out internet portals such as Google and Yahoo for updated information. Watching TV Makes You Smarter With Dallas, the modern viewer doesn't have to think to make sense of what's going on, and not having to think is boring. Many recent hit shows -- 24, Survivor, The Sopranos, Alias, Lost, The Simpsons, E.R. -- take the opposite approach, layering each scene with a thick network of affiliations. You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you're exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads.