12.30.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/30/2006

Jerome Murat - Daily Motion
This has nothing to do with news, but sometimes you just gotta share. . .

Al Gore's Convenient Presentation - Business Week
In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore makes a persuasive case that the world must take dramatic steps to curtail carbon dioxide emissions in order to reduce global warming. The point is not to convince you the issue is as urgent as Gore argues. Rather, it's intended to help you improve the power of your communication skills by breaking down Gore's documentary, which is really a great slide presentation in film form.

The Third-Generation Web is Coming - Stephen's Wb
Web 3.0, expected to debut in 2007, will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents.

Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0 - Fastforward the Blog
These tools may well reduce management's ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company's leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.

KMPro Journal KMPro
KMPro has release their second edition of the 2006 KMPro Journal - Volume 3, Number 2 Winter 2006.

Goodbye, Production (and Maybe Innovation) - New York Times
"Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory," said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. "In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it - and we are losing that ability."

12.26.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/26/2006

A tale of two experts on m-Learning - The People's Guide to mLearning
I want to raise a flag here in regards to self-directed learning. We can't yet guarantee that we have such learners (to the contrary). So just providing access is not sufficient, we need to push support. I think we can do one more thing, and we should: help individuals learn to learn. Hence my involvement in the Meta-Learning Lab. That can be accomplished through a layer on top of our learning systems. Imagine, a learning system that not only meets your immediate needs, but develops you over time!

Welcome to 2007, the Year of Innovation - Seattle PI
The challenge is not that the U.S. is slipping in maintaining an innovation culture, but that the rest of the world is catching on and catching up. The competition is intensifying for ideas and talent. Innovation efficiency is a game of diminishing and finite returns. You can never do better than no cost, even if you were able to get materials and labor for free. In real-world terms, you cannot, no matter how energetically one slashes costs, cut them to the point of China, or after that Africa, or after that whatever the next low-cost emerging economy is. The alternative is, to borrow a fashionable term, top-line growth. That's where innovation -- coming up not just with more efficient ways to make products but new products -- can contribute.

Cycling to knowledge - Knowledge-at-work.
Enumerative description is an interesting way to capture local perceptions and experience of situations. Expert(s) gather to look for invariance across their domain and select the questions that best define the current situation.

E&P top 10's missing number 1 - Innovation in College Media
Those interested in journalism will want to read the Editor & Publisher story on the top newspaper stories of 2006: Strupp's Top 10 Newspaper Industry Stories of 2006. In it, Strupp tags "The Internet coming of age" as the top newspaper industry story -- yet, that is old news.

America's New Digital Divide - Micro Persuasion
In 2007 our challenge is to bridge the digital divide that exists between the technophiles and the technophobes. It's staring us right in the face wherever we go. Consider how many of your friends blog or post to Flickr or even know what the heck del.icio.us is.

12.23.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/23/2006

The Youngest Grocer In America YouTube
After the only grocery store in Truman, Minn., closed earlier this year, 17-year-old Nick Graham bought and re-opened it to help save the struggling community. Note: CBS News video.

The interaction between genes and environment - ADC
Many have alluded to the importance of the environment on the developing brain. As a neuroscientist, I root and endorse that view in the bump and grind of brain cells. You are born with most of the brain cells you will ever have. It is the growth of the connections between the brain cells that accounts for the growth of the brain after birth. What is exciting is that the environment will influence the configuration of those connections. So even if you are a clone—that is, an identical twin—you will have a unique pattern of brain cell connections. Also, see Taxi drivers' knowledge helps their brains grow.

Brain Gain: Mental Exercise Makes Elderly Minds More Fit - Scientific American
The research holds out hope that simple mental exercise may play a key role in staving off dementia and other cognitive declines that currently afflict at least 24 million people worldwide. But it is not as simple as continuing to do the crossword or sudoku puzzles that you love, the brain must be continually stretched and challenged. To drive this effect, you have to practice things that you don't like or things you don't regularly practice.

Another Guru Sharing the Same Old Myth - Will at Work Learning
And here's another example of a well-respected industry analyst lazily sharing the biggest myth in the learning field.

How does a brain do what it does? - Baltimore Sun
Like animals, Minsky observes, people exhibit instinctive reactions: They hear a sound and turn toward it. From parents (or other "imprimers") they learn to react as well, looking both ways before they cross the street. Deliberative thinking allows human beings to consider alternatives before making a decision. Reflective thinking permits an evaluation not only of external phenomena but of activities inside the brain. And self-reflection thinking makes it possible to consider a decision in light of a person's self-image. Confusion and conflict, Minsky maintains, force us to use some (cognitive) roads less traveled by. Positive reinforcement, by contrast, can lead to rigidity.

12.18.2006

knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/18/2006

The best pictures of the year - MSNBC
2006 Year in Pictures - slide show with audio.

Virtual experiences can cause embellished, false memories - Physorg.com
Although learning through interactive experiences with a product is vivid and can enhance knowledge, it can create an illusory sense of competence. While interactive experiences are generally better for helping people retain information, they often cause people to imagine features and functions that don't exist.

Understanding Mobile 2.0 - Read/Write Web
Mobile phones are cheaper than PCs, there are three times more of them, growing at twice the speed, and they increasingly have Internet access. What is more, the World Bank estimates that more than two-thirds of the world's population lives within range of a mobile phone network. Mobile is going to be the next big Internet phenomenon.

Gestures Offer Insight - Scientific American
According to McNeill's theory, the process of speech production and the process of gesture production have a common mental source in which a mixture of preverbal symbols and mental images form the point of origin for the thought that is to be expressed. This growth point, as McNeill calls it, represents a kind of seed out of which words and gestures develop.

Key Predictions for IT Organizations in 2007 and Beyond - Gartner
Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007.

12.17.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/17/2006

December 17, 2006

Person of the Year: You - Time Magazine
The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace.

Definitions of Informal Learning - Mohamed Amine Chatti's ongoing research on Technology Enhanced Learning
The notion of informal learning is becoming increasingly important. In a corporate context, learning is much more than formal training. And, our academic learning also comes from different informal channels; e.g. through games, simulations, experiments, story-telling, discovery.

Survey: Not All Workers Consider BlackBerry a Ball and Chain - eWeek
Even though workers acknowledge that their wireless devices are eroding the boundary between the office and their outside-work lives, the survey found them focusing more on the benefits than drawbacks.

Web 2.0 and the AJAX - Open Source Tecnnology Web 2.0 is a strange thing in that it doesn't really exist. You can't buy Web 2.0; you can't buy a Web 2.0 programming language, and you can't buy Web 2.0 hardware. In many ways, the phrase "Web 2.0" is a marketing phrase like "paradigm shift" or "the big picture".

Tech lessons learned from the wisdom of crowds - c/net n a 1945 paper, the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek described how prices set by a free market are really "a mechanism for communicating information" about the probability of future events.

12.13.2006

knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/13/2006

December 13, 2006

Assessment Mistakes by E-Learning Developers - Stephen's Web
Stephen Downes weighs in on Will Thalheimer's Assessment Mistakes by E-Learning Developers.

Knowing Knowledge - How to Save the World
George Siemens' online book Knowing Knowledge is fun to read: It's laid out like a Tom Peters book -- full of graphics and different type fonts, and some wonderful quotations1. It has a kind of stream-of-consciousness style that's a bit McLuhanesque.

New Cool Tool Rundown - e-Clippings (Learning As Art)
Including podcasting, 3D building and data comparison.

Widening Performance Gap in the Back Offices of Large Global Corporations - Garp
Achieving world-class performance in four core operational areas - information technology (IT), finance, human resources (HR) and procurement - companies can reduce annual SG&A costs by $60 million per billion in revenue. To achieve these gains, world-class performers demonstrate strength in five best practices categories: strategic alignment of business goals and operating procedures; complexity reduction; technology enablement; business processing sourcing; and cross-functional partnering.

Measuring the Value of HR - HR Magazine
In 2001, American Standard's Fred Poses (CEO) and Larry Costello (Senior VP for HR) were seeking substantive evidence on the actual impact of the company's major strategic initiative for managing its talent.

12.12.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/12/2006

Convergence Learning - The Learning Circuits Blog
The Convergence Learning Model is founded upon cognitive sciences and operates on three impetuses: the psychology of learning, pedagogical change, and technological advancement.

Transparent Design - Cole Camplese: Learning & Innovation
My wife was our Manager of Instructional Design back at the Solutions Institute and she had this crazy idea to release the entire CMS content basis as the learning environment, not just the polished html output of the course content. In other words, she wanted to let students and faculty to see not only the content, but all the instructional design and media notes that we managed along side the content in the repository.

Assessment Mistakes by E-Learning Developers - Will at Work Learning
Almost all of us---as far as I can tell---are just not getting valid feedback on our instructional-development efforts. Note that though 48% said they did Level 2 learning evaluation on their most recent project, probably most of those folks delivered the assessment in a way that biased those results. This leaves very few of us who are getting valid feedback on our designs.

Many companies still not ready to embrace Web 2.0 concepts - Business.ca
Employees are increasingly concerned about finding the information they require. As a result, some of the Web 2.0 types of approaches are quite popular. Things like blogs, for example, have a way of making sense of what's going on.

log(N) = 0.093 + 3.389 log(CR) (1) (r2=0.764, t34=10.35, p<0.001) - Cognitive Edge
Recognise it? Well of course, it's the best-fit reduced major axis regression equation between neocortex ratio and mean group size for the sample of 36 primate genera taken from Dunbar's 1992 paper which was popularised, and not unduly trivialised by Malcolm Gladwell into a natural limit on human group size of 150 (or 147.8 to be exact).

12.10.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/9/2006

Alvin Toffler: The Thought Leader Interview - Strategy + Business
Mr. Toffler wrote that the years to come would be marked by information overload, an acceleration of technological change, and a resultant social upheaval that he likened to mental illness: "Citizens of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon."

The Most Promising Web 2.0 Software of 2006 - SOA Web Services
New Web 2.0 software that was released or extensively overhauled since January 1st, 2006. For more on Web 2.0, see What is Web 2.0 ?

From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Internet Time blog
The Well was an amazing place to toy with ideas. The community included reporters, writers, journalists, inventors, astronauts, deadheads, scientists, rabble rowsers, radicals, hackers, and more. I remember staying up into the wee hours reading Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly (from Biosphere II!), futurist Tom Mandel, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Christopher Locke, and many, many others. Flamewars were commonplace. Dialog was continuous.

In Mobile Denial - Training Day
I keep hearing about the "mobile workforce," and keep seeing people picking out tomatoes in the grocery store with one hand while changing the dial (or whatever it is) on their iPods with the other. I've also heard "texting" people is big.

Media 2006: The Year in Traffic - eWeek
From video sites to social networking to social news, 2006 saw several power shifts in online traffic and influence. Netscape relaunched as a social news site, YouTube dominated the online video space, and Flickr continued to innovate.

12.07.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/7/2006

2006 Industry Report - Training Magazine
The year 2006 was one of growth for the training industry. Most organizations reported healthy increases in their training budgets, with an average budget increase of 7 percent over last year. Today, companies are spending $1,273 per learner on training, including staff salaries.

Why Workflow Sucks - ebiz
The problem stems from the fact that most Workflow products were flawed, and as a result, the problem in the gene pool has rippled through to the new BPM species. So what was wrong with workflow? It's quite simple when you think about it; most workflow products assumed that work moved from one resource to another. One user entered the loan details, another approved it. But business doesn't work like that.

M-Learning (mobile learning) - ELT Notes
Useful set of mLearning links.

Top 10 Freeware Apps for M-Learning - Mobile Learning
Ten of the most useful, free software applications you can use to design and deliver mobile learning.

101 BEST PRACTICES >> Connectivity - Campus Technology
Some of the best examples of how campus IT is meeting the connectivity challenge.

12.05.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/05/06

Tom Wujec: Using images to think and innovate - Business Inovation Insider
To demonstrate the power of using image visualization to convey ideas, Tom created visual representations of different sessions at the event.

How The Internet Saved Literacy - Forbes
The Internet has shortened the feedback loop on writing and has made readers more active participants, says Matt Kirschenbaum, an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland. "Reading is more intimately associated with writing," he says.

Learning During Sleep? - YubaNet Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have been investigating how memories might be consolidated. Their new study offers the hitherto strongest proof that new information is transferred between the hippocampus, the short term memory area, and the cerebral cortex during sleep.

Youth speak out on digital divide - BBC
As students from around the world gather in Hong Kong for the fifth annual International Telecommunication Union's Youth Forum, two young people talk to the BBC News website about telecoms and technology in their particular countries.

Web 2.0: Is it changing the world? - The Pacer
If one stops to think about how Web 2.0 drastically impact college and high school students alone through Myspace and Facebook it becomes obvious that we of the future generations of the work force and leadership of the world are becoming increasingly connected to people outside our normal circles of influence and in time can become truly global.

12.02.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/02/2006

A Wider World: Youth, Privacy, and Social Networking Technologies - Educause
Lawrence Lessig's four factors of the Internet-technology, the market, the law, and social norms-offer a means to analyze this medium.

Business Intelligence: Training That Sticks - Manage Smater
It's important to train at the level of the action, not the abstraction. Business is fundamentally about actions and behaviors.

Mobile Learning Redefined - Ubiquitous Thoughts
It's not about the new technologies... It's making use of what they [students] already have in their pockets.

Is Microsoft driving innovation? - Don Dodge
The Wall Street Journal asks "Is Microsoft Driving Innovation or Playing Catch-up with Rivals?" People tend to confuse invention with innovation, as the WSJ has here. They use the words interchangeably, but they are very different.

Study: 1 in 5 parents say kids online too much - CNN
About 80 percent of the children say the Internet is important for schoolwork, although three-quarters of the parents say grades have not gone up or down since they got Internet access.

11.29.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/29/2006

Earning A Seat At The Table - Training Day
If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone from the training sector complain that senior management doesn't get it or doesn't support training, I would be a rich man.

Design Models As Emergent Features: An Empirical Study In Communication And Shared Mental Models In Instructional Distance-Educator.com
The design and development model actually informs the activities of the group, but that it is interpreted and adapted by the team for the specific project. Thus, the actual practice model of each team can be regarded as an emergent feature.

2006: The Year of Living Globally - eWeek
Although international commerce has been going on since the beginning of civilization, what's different now is instant communication between scattered locations that makes an office on the other side of the world look like it is next door.

US Mobile Learning Market Reaches $460 Million in 2006 - PR Web
The market for Mobile Learning products and services across all the buyer segments is growing by 27.2% and will exceed $1.5 billion by 2011.

Should the CLO Focus on Talent Management Education? - CLO
Some organizations only think of talent development in terms of who are the future leaders of the organization, and really it’s much, much broader and deeper than that.

11.27.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/27/2006

Knowledge Solves Manufacturing's Rubik's Cube - Desktop Engineering
Product development is like Rubik's cube. Each face representing IP, product, or process knowledge. All of which must come together in the right series of steps to develop a manufacturable product.

Shoveling on Digg - Business Week
As much as I like the idea of Digg--a site where a community chooses the most interesting or relevant news--I must confess that I just don't use it that much.

Putting the pod in podcast - The News-Gazette
Instead of simply recording lectures and making them available to students to download, D'Arcy and Eastburn have chosen to assemble weekly podcasts, each about five to seven minutes long. In each, they summarize the week's lesson, address common points of confusion and pose critical questions.

Business Intelligence: Are You in Training or Talent - Manage Smarter
"The training department is a gray elephant," he says. "They focus on classes and students, and their metrics are how many people are in there, and that's it."

Is Web 2.0 Darth Vader? - ZD Net
Bill Thompson's essay on The Register warns that "Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable."

11.25.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/25/2006

Web 2.0 happened while we were waiting for the Semantic Web - ZDNet
Web 3.0 is another name for the Semantic Web, which has been anticipated for some time now. We are entering an era when communities of end users not only build content, but also can quickly and easily assemble their own applications to leverage the content in new and innovative ways.

What Matters in Student Learning? - Innovation Online
Results reveal that student performance is significantly influenced by community attributes, but not school attributes. Of the things that did matter: household income, parent education, among other community variables. And the things that didn't matter: teacher certification, teacher experience, spending per pupil, and school size (though teacher certification showed some promise).

Interested in learning how to develop mashups? - ZDNet
There are a lot of different definitions of what a software mashup is (there are also other types of mashups, like music). But I stick to the one where the final piece of software is derived from the functionality and/or data of two or more disparate sources that have been woven together

Why does the fashion industry thrive in spite of rampant IP "piracy"? - ars technica
The fashion industry has what they term a "low-IP equilibrium," in which clothing designs enjoy almost no copy protection and designers frequently turn large profits by copying each others' work. In spite of the lack of IP protection, the fashion industry remains vibrant and profitable, mostly through the effects of Induced obsolescence and Anchoring.

The problem with innovation... - CIR
There are all sorts of barriers thrown up against taking the innovative steps needed to meet challenges facing us, for example, staving off competition from lower cost economies. However, many organisations fail to grasp how vitally important the role of innovation is today. Worse still, they realise how important it is, but for whatever reason, their inventions often fail to be implemented.

11.24.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/24/2006

A portrait of the internet's new storytellers - Pew Internet
A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. PDF File.

Debunking three lies about social software - Using Wiki in Education
Three lies about social software is a great piece in which JP Rangaswami examines three lies about social software that need to be debunked. To the idea that social software causes groupthink, Rangaswami counters that social software actually relies on the aggregation of ideas from people with common interests, but not necessarily common views. He says, "Much of what I learn from comments on my blog is from the extensions, the qualifiers, the provisos, even the complete disagreements. This is not groupthink, it's anything but."

Web 2.0: What's Hot and What's Not - Seeking Alpha
Representative examples of the fastest growing websites in each category:

  • 1. Media Sharing: youtube.com, flickr.com
  • 2. Search: google.com, baidu.com, google.com.br, live.com
  • 3. Blog: blogger.com
  • 4. Utility: megaupload.com, rapidshare.de
  • 5. Social Networking: myspace.com, orkut.com
  • 6. Informational: wikipedia.org, digg.com
  • 7. Software: sourceforge.net
  • 8. Portal: qq.com, yahoo.com.cn
  • 9. Commerce: craigslist.com
You Tube vs. Boob Tube - Wired
Until about five minutes ago, remember, almost all video-entertainment content was produced and distributed by Hollywood. Period. That time is over. There was a time when advertisers could count on mass audiences for what Hollywood thought we should be watching on TV. That time is all but over.

Wikis Are Alive and Kicking in the Enterprise - eWeek
Proliferating virally, wiki usage has grown exponentially in recent months, along with other consumer-centric technologies - including blogs, podcasts and RSS - that have made their way into the workplace thanks in part to the influx of the tech-savvy entry-level employees of so-called Generation Y.

11.23.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/23/2006

Top 10 Learning Ideas to Try with Mobile Devices Mobile Learning
A personal list of the most powerful and innovative learning approaches that can be achieved using digital mobile technologies.

The Hoarding/Sharing Instinct - CommuNitelligence
When it comes to knowledge, which survival strategy (hoarding or sharing) is more likely to be effective in today's fast-paced, information-intensive world?

Plan to Learn: case studies in e-learning project management - CeLEA
22 case studies by authors in eight countries, drawn from both the corporate and educational sectors. PDF file. Via Harold Jarche.

Connections: Social and mobile tools for enhancing learning - The Knowledge Tree
A learner who is connected to other learners, experts and information services can tap into a widened pool of resources that can vastly enhance their capabilities and understanding. The use of social software (Web 2.0) and digital mobile tools are two of the latest trends in new teaching and learning practice that enable this connectedness and have demonstrably positive effects on learning. Includes podcast and PDF.

Informal Learning - Training Day
Steps to provide more structure to informal learning.

11.19.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/19/2006

Adding Meaning & Value to Information - how to save the world
Dave Snowden's famous comment about knowledge is that "we know more than we can say, and we can say more than we can write down". In his case it has taken him four years to write the book on complex adaptive systems that he teaches in a three day course, and in neither the book nor the course could he hope to explain more than a fraction of all that he has learned on the subject.

Connectivism: Learning Theory or Past Time for the Self-Amused - Stephen's Web
Asked to review George Siemens's paper on Conectivism, Bijdrage van Plon Verhagen from the University of Twente treats readers to a detailed criticism of the paper. Siemen's Response is posted here.

"Blink" methods now being applied in the classroom - Cognitive Daily
oHw the methods pioneered by Ambady and Rosenthal are being applied in real high school classrooms. Rather than 30 seconds, principals take 3 minutes to assess each teacher's performance, to catch problems early and intervene before they adversely affect the classroom.

The Acid Test for e-Learning - e-Learning Now
For the e-learning market to have any hope of a long term future, we need to find sustainable business models that do not rely on a section of stakeholders subsiding the remainder. We're not clear which model will become the dominant one in the future (bespoke software providers charging licence fees, open source providers supplying additional services costed on top, or development being done in house), but looking at the recent results of the market consolidation activity, we do have to ask if what the "big boys" are chasing is sustainable in the longer term.

The State of the Internet - Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley
Interesting slide show on the state of the internet.

11.15.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/15/2006

NLP - training's shameful, fraudulent cult - Donald Clark Plan B
This self-fulfilling faith has propelled itself into the heart of the training world. NLP Neuro-Linguistic Programming has little to do with serious neuroscience and linguistics but it is certainly a programme.
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24/7 Innovation - Creating an Infectious Culture of Innovation - Dan Keldsen
The basis of all of my creative thinking work is about how to get people to get new dots, get new experiences, look at problems through a different lens rather than the way they've always solved it in the past. (reposted -- link correction)
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Nottr and Helipad
Two different programs for taking and sharing notes on the web.
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Web 2.0 isn't dead, but Web 3.0 is bubbling up - ZDNet
There will be a web3.0 and it has been associated at this point with concepts of the semantic Web, derived from the primordial soup of Web technologies. It's been a focus of attention for Tim Berners-Lee, who cooked up much of what the Internet is today, for a nearly a decade.
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How Doctors Use Google - Clinical Cases and Images
Patients trust Google almost as much as their physician, not surprisingly, they too, find the search giant results very useful. Also see Doctors use Google to diagnose disease
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What price innovation? Not that much - The Age
Companies that spend more on innovation do not generate more sales, bigger profits or better shareholder returns.
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11.12.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/12/2006

Growing Popularity of E-Learning - Inside Higher Ed
More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren't warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the countrys' largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education.
The evidence: Problem areas identified in previous years are still seen as areas of concern among academic leaders.
  • Only 4.6 percent of Chief Academic Officers agreed that there are no significant barriers to widespread adoption of online learning.
  • Nearly two-thirds of the academic leaders cite the need for more discipline on the part of online students as a critical barrier.
  • Faculty issues, both acceptance of online and the need for greater time and effort to teach online, are also important barriers.
  • Neither a perceived lack of demand on the part of potential students nor the acceptance of an online degree by potential employers was seen as a critical barrier.
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SMH - Youtube in Melbourne School - Stephen Hutcheon counters Catherine Munro - Learn Online
Youtube is a class act - a refreshing look at the positive adaptation of undeniably popular communication into some Australian school curriculum. Supporting Article
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Social sites becoming too much of a good thing - San Francisco Chronicle
Social networking sites have steadily attracted more people this year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. But between August and September, traffic to almost all popular social networking sites fell.
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Add graphics to your blog, book, or presentation - Creating Passionate Users
People pay attention to graphics. They respond to graphics. They learn from graphics. If you want your readers/learners/audience to "get" something as quickly and clearly as possible, use visuals. Note: for another view on graphics.
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The Red Balloon (1956) - Le Ballon Rouge - The World of Kane -
A masterpiece in short film making. A red balloon follows a little boy around the streets of Paris. Directed by Albert Lamorisse, who also created the popular board game Risk.
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Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/10/2006

November 10, 2006

24/7 Innovation - Creating an Infectious Culture of Innovation - Dan Keldsen
The basis of all of my creative thinking work is about how to get people to get new dots, get new experiences, look at problems through a different lens rather than the way they've always solved it in the past.
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Jim Carroll: How to put a ripple in a flat world - Innovation Insider
"Folks who have "gone flat" or who "get flat" seem quite dispirited: they have been relentlessly focused on cost, yet there is so much more to the future than becoming a low cost operator. Yet that's what innovation is all about: doing much more than simply "surviving" into a world that has gone flat, into a world in which you are thriving through innovation.
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The Influence of Interactive Video on Learning outcomes and Learner Satisfaction - The Boggs e-Learning Chronicle
Results of the experiment showed that the value of video for learning effectiveness was contingent upon the provision of interactivity. Students in the e-learning environment that provided interactive video achieved significantly better learning performance and a higher level of learner satisfaction than those in other settings.
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Response Cards to Facilitate Active Learning in Lectures - Will at Work Learning
Lectures can be modified in different ways to increase the amount of active learning---to ensure that learners are more fully engaged, have a more robust understanding of the learning material, are more likely to remember what they learned, are more likely to utilize the information at a later time.
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An innovation process and software framework - Innovate on Purpose
Increasingly, firms value consistent, collaborative information that enables a business process. This means that the existing software applications that support "innovation" will have to consolidate and support the entire process in one component framework or integrated solution.
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11.07.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/7/2006

Buzztracker
The world news mapped. Via The Open Learner.

The online book: team authors, and it's never finished - The Christian Science Monitor
"Collaboration is increasingly a part of our everyday lives, and rarely do we work on something in a vacuum," says Jen Mazzon, a senior product marketing manager with Google. "Because [Google Docs] makes collaboration easier, people might be more likely to share things and to get input from person x, y, z who they frankly before may not have bothered with."
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What is the worth of words? - MSNBC
It's time to acknowledge that in a truly multimedia environment of 2025, most Americans don't need to understand more than a hundred or so words at a time, and certainly will never read anything approaching the length of an old-fashioned book. We need a frank reassessment of where long-form literacy itself lies in the spectrum of skills that a modern nation requires of its workers.
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Best Inventions of 2006 - YouTube - Time Magazine
They thought they'd built a useful tool for people to share their travel videos. They thought people might use it to pitch auction items on eBay. They had no idea. They had opened a portal into another dimension. The minute people saw YouTube they did its creators a huge favor: they hijacked it.
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US Self-paced eLearning Market to Top $10 Billion in 2006 - The Industry Analyst reporter
The market for eLearning will grow by 30.8% over the next five years.
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11.02.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/2/2006

Managing Those Creative Types - Gallup
But it can be hard to evaluate creativity. What tends to happen is that companies give the toughest problems to the best people, but then they can't evaluate who's best because the best people -- the most productive people, the brightest people -- have the toughest problems to solve. That makes it hard to compare because people are working on different kinds of problems.
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The Tao of Holding Space - Parking Lot
"The Tao of Holding Space" - a collection of interpretations of the 81 short chapters of the Chinese classic Tao te Ching as they apply to my experience of holding space.
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The Fundamentals of Performance Management - Gallup
Three keys to creating a system that eliminates costly variation in employee performance. Engaged employees stay on the job longer, and they are safer, more productive, and more profitable.
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Microsoft to give students a hand at math, science - Seattle PI
The major goal is to get kids excited about math, and help their parents realize how important it is for their children to do well in the subject. One idea being floated is to have Microsoft employees volunteer to meet with kids to explain how they use math on the job, such as in developing the Xbox videogame player. If kids can see real-world applications for the advanced math skills they'll learn in school, it can get them more enthused about the subject.
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U.S. Adds Wiki to Spy Arsenal - Wired
The wiki could lead to more accurate intelligence reports because the system allows a wider range of officials to scrutinize material and keeps a complete, permanent record of individual contributions, including dissenting points of view. That might help avoid errors of the kind that led to the widely criticized 2002 national intelligence estimate that said Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
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11.01.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/1/2006

Realizing the High-Performance Enterprise - CRM Daily
P&G holds two- to three-day leadership council meetings every quarter where each and every top development employee is evaluated. Lafley, who personally tracks 500 employees, likens the process to the depth chart used by a World Cup soccer team.
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Five Questions... for Lance Dublin - eLearn Magazine
Lance Dublin was founder of Antioch University/West, one of the first accredited online universities. He later created consultancy The Dublin Group, and currently works as an independent management consultant.
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Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization - User Interface Engineering
Art vs. engineering. Aesthetics vs. usability. Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus. The debate between design (of the visual sort) and design (of the technical sort) remains ongoing. A website, however, can't take sides: it needs both to be successful.
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Computing, 2016: What Won't Be Possible - New York Times
Social networks, noted Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell, are pre-technological creations that sociologists have been analyzing for decades. A classic example, he noted, was the work of Stanley Milgram of Harvard, who in the 1960's asked each of several volunteers in the Midwest to get a letter to a stranger in Boston. But the path was not direct: under the rules of the experiment, participants could send a letter only to someone they knew. The median number of intermediaries was six - hence, the term "six degrees of separation."
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ABC News courting next generation on Internet - Yahoo
The webcast is similar to the broadcast in some ways. Gibson sits in the same studio; the control room is the same. It's treated as a full-on broadcast, though it's much leaner personnel-wise, with senior producer Tom Johnson and another producer assembling and writing the newscast with help from others as time permits.
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iPods cast a wide net for learning - The Age, Australia
In one podcast pilot at Deakin, only 25 per cent of on-campus students are now attending lectures. Might podcasting promote absenteeism? Professor Farley believes not. "The average student needs to work 15 hours a week to survive and that's got to eat into their lecture time. Then you have the graduate students sent off to places with their work . . . the distinction between on-campus and off-campus students is one we're moving towards dropping."
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10.31.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/31/2006

The Perfect Thing? - Internet Time Blog
The iPod came at exactly the right time, the convergence of storage, DRM, battery life, and media. More than that, the shuffle metaphor is right for our time.
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What type of minds to nurture? - BBC
According to Howard Gardner of Harvard University, there are at least five kinds of minds that we should be developing: : disciplined, synthesising, creating, respectful, and ethical.
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There is nothing like data...... - Gene Expression
...to ruin a perfectly good theory. So says Beth Visser and colleagues in the latest edition of Intelligence. She tested Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), gasp!, empirically. Also see Gardner's response.
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Wiki's world - Wiki's World
In August, Jimmy Wales, the founder and chairman of Wikipedia, sent out a message to the huge, anonymous army, tens of thousands strong, who regularly contribute to the English-language version of the free online encyclopaedia. His message was crisp and to the point: We don't want necessarily more, we want better.
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Why Wikis Are Conquering The Enterprise - Internet News
Unlikely as it may seem, wikis are now being adopted by enterprises large and small more quickly than celebrities adopt African orphans.
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10.29.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/29/2006

Web 2.0lier than thou - Rough Type
The process of social enlightenment always begins with the reshaping of language. According to Lessig, Web 2.0 is not, as you might have assumed, a technological or a business term. It's an ethical term, a moral term. Differences "in business models," he writes, "should be a focus of those keen to push the values of Web 2.0."
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Business Intelligence: Get with the Process! - Manage Smater
Employees who know how to make the most of automated processes are assets, but what if getting them to use those systems presents yet another hurdle? It could be that your employees either don't find the systems easy to use or easy to integrate into their workflow.
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Outsourcing 'endangers HR' - CIPD
HR departments are being undermined by cost-driven recruitment outsourcing deals that do not take enough account of quality.
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Surviving In A 'Flat' World - Knowledge@Wharton
Economic theories describing how companies compete trace back to 1776 with the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Some two hundred years later, Michael Porter developed his famous value-chain analysis. Now, technological, cultural and other changes are challenging these traditional analytical frameworks.
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Is Second Life Converting Visitors into Residents? - Micro Persuasion
Hitwise has published some interesting data that reveals that share of US Internet searches for Second Life are up 73%. Visits to the SL site are rising too. On a year-over-year basis, visits to SecondLife.com were up 219% from the week ending 10/22/05 compared to the week ending 10/21/06. Hitwise also notes that the virtual world skews under 45.
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10.26.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/26/2006

Gestures Offer Insight - Scientific American Mind
Our body movements always convey something about us to other people. The body "speaks" whether we are sitting or standing, talking or just listening.

Digg This: Talking to Gen Y - Business Week
Today's demographic trend is impossible to ignore and has big implications for workplaces across America. Seventy million Americans who belong to Generation Y (born between 1977 to 2002) are entering the workforce in massive waves. Add Generation Xers, who are now in their 30s and early 40s, and you have millions of employees whose visions for their jobs differ from their parents' and most of their bosses' old command-and-control management theories.

Pop Art Recommended for Beginner to Intermediate Level Photoshop Users - melissaclifton.com
If you are a fan of pop art then you're probably already well acquainted with the work of Roy Lichtenstein, who became one of the leading pop artists of the sixties with his comic-strip paintings.

web 2.0 isn't a cure-all - eelearning Beta
There's been a bit of excitement about a new application called slideshare.

Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge (video - 53 min) - Connexions
The "open access movement" is based on a set of intuitions that are shared by a remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should receive credit and kudos for contributing to education and research; and that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not the simple linear forms that textbooks present. NOTE: downladable to Mac or PC.

10.22.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/22/2006

Colour guidelines - InfoVis
Cynthia Brewer in her page Color Use Guidelines for Mapping and Visualization proposes a set of recommendations for the use of colour in cartographic and visualisation applications that we intend to review here in summarised form as a complement of the previous article.

Learning Links - Elliott Masie
LearningLinks will be a peer rated, free, non-commercial site that will allow any learning professional around the globe to add, use, rate, and review learning links. Our goal is thousands of links submitted by our colleagues.

Free Your Mind; a Neuroscientist Claims He Can Unleash Creativity by Boosting Low-Frequency Brainwaves - Brain Connection
The aim is to push the brain into a state of near-sleep to produce the slow rhythms, known as theta waves, associated with this state. It's the kind of relaxed state in which ideas often come to you. It occurs naturally if, say, you are driving on a motorway and realise that you don't remember the previous few minutes.

Truly Authentic Leadership - U.S. News and World Report
The only valid test of a leader is his or her ability to bring people together to achieve sustainable results over time. There's no such thing as the "One-Minute Leader" because real leadership requires years of development and hard work.

Video of a Song Composed Entirely of 37 Cello Parts - Google Video
A video of Ethan Winer playing 37 separate cello parts to create one song. He even plays the percussion parts on his cello. It was recorded on 23 tracks using 37 plug-in effects. He spent hundreds of hours on this project so its worth a listen.

10.21.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/21/2006

Crowdsourcing Creativity - Micro Persuasion
Crowdsourcing was first coined by Wired Magazine earlier this year. It's a process where businesses faced with tough challenges don't try to come up with all of the answers themselves. They tap into the collective wisdom of millions of amateurs around the world to come up with a solution.

Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge - Stephen Downes
Stephen Downes has published a paper for the ITFORUM discussion group. He turned it into a wiki for all to read and edit.

Bramble Bushes in a Thicket - Cognitive Edge A book chapter on the relationship between narrative and learning networks.

Malcolm Gladwell on Neural Networks That 'Solve' Complex Problems - How to Save the World
Although neural networks (collectors of massive amounts of data that then seek 'meaningful' patterns in that data that can be used to infer causality or at least correlation) have been around for years, most students of complex adaptive systems believe that complex problems (like global poverty, global warming, or lack of innovation in big business) can never be 'solved' because there are simply too many variables (perhaps an infinite number) to allow any kind of exhaustive correlation or useful predictive models to be built.

Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth - Wired
In 2000, Steve Jobs' candy-colored iMac was leading the charge for Apple's comeback, but to further spur sales, the company started asking, "What can we do to make more people buy Macintoshes?"

10.16.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/15/2006

Multi-ontology sense making; a new simplicity in decision making - Dave Snowden
Ontology is derived from the Greek word for being and it is the branch of metaphysics which concerns itself with the nature of things. In this article it is used to identity different types of system, each of which requires a different approach to both diagnosis and intervention.

Conversation as a Core Business Process - Jay Cross
Consider for a moment that the most widespread and pervasive learning in your organization may not be happening in training rooms, conference rooms, or boardrooms, but in the cafeteria, the hallways, and the cafe across the street.

How Much Information? - SIMS
Around the world about 600 million people have access to the Internet, about 30% of them in North America. With the world's population at 6.3 Billion, that means about 9.5% have internet access. It seems the world is not so flat for a majority of the population.

Knowing Knowledge - George Siemens
George Siemens new book is available as a wiki. Knowing Knowledge is an exploration of knowledge - what it is, how it is changing, and what it means to our organizations and society.

The Rules of Distraction - Slate
Longer browsing sessions during class tend to lead to lower grades, but there's a hint that a greater number of browsing sessions during class may actually lead to higher grades.

Will the eBook finally replace paper? - The Hindu
Textbooks are seen as a major growth market. Only 900 of the 150,000 titles MBS Direct handles are eBooks at present, but McKiernan says there's a lot of interest, not least in the distance learning market. "Students are very mobile and it?s easier to store books on a laptop than carry them around." Most eBooks are the same price as the printed version or lower, in some cases 50% cheaper. Via Online Learning Update.

E-learning firm has retained losses of 27m pounds - The Post.IE
WBT Systems, the e-learning firm that was recently bought by Horizon Technology Group, had retained losses of 27.1 million pounds at the end of 2004.

10.15.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/15/2006

New Systems for Sharing Learning Goals - HeadspaceJ
I think the intersection between learning goals and social software is heating up. The popularity of 43 Things must be contributing to the interest.

Go and Learn - Fast Company
Although we might not ponder the educational value of these everyday appliances, the gear we use to communicate and play can also be used to learn; we just don't yet think of them as learning tools. Mobile learning is the great invisible elephant in the room, in our pockets, in our purses, and in our cars.

Distance learning booms - The Journal Gazette
In the past few years the number of students taking courses via the Internet or another distance-learning method has skyrocketed.

Free Hugs ReUpload - YouTube
The Tipping Point: A Visual Demonstration: A wonderfully-crafted and moving YouTube video about 'free hugs' shows how public sentiment reaches a tipping point and then shifts dramatically as a result of it. Via How To Save the World.

The Amazing YouTube Tools Collection - Quick Online Tips
A collection of several YouTube third party tools which enhance your YouTube experience.

Quote of the Week - Steven Pinker
"Another major discovery of cognitive psychology with implications for general education is that the untutored mind is prone to systematic fallacies and biases. Most physicians, for example, make whoppingly inaccurate estimates of the probability that a person has a disease given a positive test result and the disease's base rate. The mind seems to have trouble grasping basic statistical facts such as that a person with the typical signs of a rare condition probably does not have the condition, that exceptional cases will regress to the mean, or that relaxing the standards for reporting an uncertain event will increase both hits and false alarms."

10.12.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/12/2006

Media-Convert
Media-Convert is a free web application that allows you to rip a movie to your iPod: Mac or PC.

Can Internet communication sustain us? - CNN
Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts -- a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers.

Experiential Learning - You Tube
The Real Learning Company's unique approach to experiential learning.

Wanted: Authentic Leaders - Forbes
Authentic leadership--which includes judgment about pace, framing and what and how to disclose information--is a commitment to serve the growth and adaptability of those you lead.

What is the worth of words? -- Will it matter if people can't read in the future? - MSNBC
Perhaps, in that not-too-distant future, we might wake up one morning to read an editorial like this:
December 25, 2025 - Educational doomsayers are again up in arms at a new adult literacy study showing that less than 5 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it.

10.08.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/8/2006

Changing the Rules: Lessons from a Starfish World - Chang This
Such seemingly dissimilar groups as the Apache Indians, music swapping programs, Wikipedia, Alcoholics Anonymous and Al Queda have one thing in common: they are all starfish. Each of these resilient groups succeeds because they are absent any hierarchy (head) and conventional organizations (spiders) best watch their backs.

Go and Learn - Fast Company
Although we might not ponder the educational value of these everyday appliances, the gear we use to communicate and play can also be used to learn; we just don't yet think of them as learning tools. Mobile learning is the great invisible elephant in the room, in our pockets, in our purses, and in our cars.

E-learning comes of age - Computer Business Review Online
Research firm IDC forecasts that ongoing compliance-training efforts will spur 27% compound annual growth in the e-learning system market over the next four years, with e-learning product sales growing from $6.5bn in 2003 to more than $21bn by 2008.

Engage me or enrage me - Management-Issuers
More managers and leaders ask me "how to engage" and "how to innovate" than any other questions. And of course these are two sides of the same question - because innovation engages and engagement innovates.

eLearning Guide - US News and World Report
This Guide lays out detailed information gathered directly from more than 2,800 traditional colleges and virtual universities. Includes articles and top 20 lists.

10.07.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/7/2006

Generation Y Discusses the Baby Boom - Motley Fool
With nearly 78.2 million baby boomers driving our economy and 330 of them turning 60 each hour, there's clearly a transition on the horizon with fiscal implications all around.

Google Launches Universal Gadgets - Wired
Google Gadgets have gone universal. The search and services company announced today that anyone can put its Google-powered widgets on any site or blog.

YouTube for Grownups - Forbes
Patient surfers willing to wade through the often puerile contributions will be rewarded with hard to find screen gems, nostalgic news reels, instructional videos and even well-produced, albeit homemade, knee slappers.

The Best: Movies in the Public Domain - Wired
Need a movie for your training session? Many can be found on the archive.org.

Empathy pays off at work - Seattle PI
In this job market, it's not just who you know, or even what skills you've mastered. It's how well you understand other people that will get you ahead.

10.02.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 10/2/2006

Rise of the web's social network - BBC
While most social networking sites do not discriminate, and allow anybody to log on, a few sites have cropped up with a very particular sort of user in mind.

Is Gagne Relevant for eLearning Courseware Design? - eLearning Technology
As instructional designers, we need to use models like Gange, but we also need to be creative. It takes me five seconds to add a little extra cheese and garlic salt to my kids Kraft Mac-n-Cheese, but man does the extra stuff make all the difference in the experience.

Technophilia: Get a free college education online - Lifehacker
There's one important catch: Most of these courses cannot be taken for any type of degrees or credentials. But remember, Bill Gates was a Harvard dropout.

High-tech campus offers art, tech gear industry pros envy - San Diego Union Tribune
When Canyon Crest Academy opened, students were so eager to attend that they endured classes in trailers. Two years later, with the completion of the $103 million construction project, the cutting-edge, high-tech campus is providing students with art and technology equipment that industry professionals drool over.

Steve Wozniak on The Colbert Report - You Tube (video)
Podcasting, computers, books, and pranks.

9.30.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 9/30/2006

Most reliable search tool could be your librarian - ZD Net
Using the keywords "Martin Luther King," the first result on Google and AOL--whose search is powered by Google--and the second result on Microsoft Windows Live search is a Web site created by a white supremacists group that purports to provide "a true historical examination" of the civil rights leader.

Video Fixation - Forbes
YouTube is at the forefront of a new video revolution on the Net. The upstart's birth coincided with a magic moment in Internet history, when online video became cheap enough to give away. Broadcast television is over half a century old; cable TV is in its 30s. Now a new type of video network promises to radically change what we can watch, who can create it and who will profit.

The New Face of Learning - edutopia
What happens to traditional concepts of classrooms and teaching when we can now learn anything, anywhere, anytime? In this new interactive Web world, I have become a nomadic learner; I graze on knowledge. I find what I need when I need it. There is no linear curriculum to my learning, no formal structure other than the tools I use to connect to the people and sources that point me to what I need to know and learn, the same tools I use to then give back what I have discovered. via elearnspace

Knowledge-Based Systems Defined Insurance Networking News
The type of KBS that is often referred to as an "expert system" is technically known as a rule-based system. The expert systems moniker was attached to this technology because it was initially used to provide the same level (i.e., quality) of answers that a human expert would be expected to deliver for a given situation.

Despite inferiority, Zune likely to see modest success - Apple Insider
Although Microsoft Corp's forthcoming Zune digital media player is somewhat bulky and lacking appeal, its likely to see "some modest success" due to Microsoft's vast resources and the company's willingness take a loss with each unit it sells, one Wall Street analyst says.

9.28.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 9/28/2006

The New Science of Change - CIO
Nothing is more frustrating than trying to get people to alter the way they do things. New research reveals why it's so hard and suggests strategies to make it easier.

The Principals of Play - Metropolis
"At the time I was working on issues of language and literacy in education, and also the learning of content like math and science, where things get pretty complicated," Gee says. "I was struck by the fact that games are very complex, and often long and difficult. I wondered why kids spend so much time on tasks in these problem-solving spaces yet we have so much trouble getting them to do the same thing at school."

Picture Books - Learning Circuits
If the visual carries the same narrative weight as the text itself, then it often becomes superfluous, and if it replaces the text, then it almost seems to become a shorthand for language itself.

Ethics and Mobile Learning: Should We Worry? - e-Learning Queen
As a student, instructor, or e-learning institution administrator, are there ethical issues in mobile learning? If so, are they the same as ones one might expect in e-learning?

The Mobile Phone is a Knowledge Retention Tool - Green Chameleon
Should KM look for ways to keep connections intact when people leave the organization so that the knowledge is still fairly accessible, rather than to collect it all when they are around?

Danah Boyd on social networks - ibiblio
Danah Boyd, in a video, gives an in-depth talk on social networks and why people are using them.

9.26.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 9/26/2006

Modelling Excellence - A Lesson For HR In China - Online Recruitment
The video takes an arrangement of Pachebel's Canon in D and really pushes it to the limit. Jimmy Hendrix he is not. He's actually better.

Q & A with an Innovative Operator - MS Executive Circle
When I worked at [American Airlines subsidiary] Sabre, I spent $1 million on a CD-ROM project that failed. I was sure I would be fired. Instead, my boss said 'what did you learn? Let's sit down and talk about how not to do it again.'

Thoughts on Leadership Development - Gautam Ghosh
Business Leadership can be developed along three axes: Business, Functional, and Technical.

The Neuroscience of Leadership and Brain Fitness - SharpBrains
Leaders would benefit from engaging others in ways based on innate brain predispositions.

Buzzwords say all the wrong things - Signal vs. Noise
Buzzwords are often a mask. People who use them are covering up their ideas - or the lack thereof. They are overcompensating. They don't have anything substantial to say so they try to use impressive sounding words instead.

9.25.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 9/25/2006

The Skinny On Web 2.0 - Infomation Week
Web 2.0 is all the Web sites out there that get their value from the actions of users.

Techies hot on concept of 'wisdom of crowds,' but it has some pitfalls - USA Today
Internet types love sweeping ideas that come in the form of book titles that morph into catchphrases that can be dropped like little bombs into conversations to show how smart they are.

5 (Really) Hard Things about Using the Internet in Higher Education - eLearn Magazine
Using the Internet as an educational tool can be really hard—and it is not clear that things will get much easier in the near term. This article identifies five particular things that have particularly vexed my colleagues and me when using the Internet in our undergraduate and graduate classes.

Preserving the print metaphor - Howard Owens
Newspaper Web sites should not think of themselves as newspaper Web sites. They should forget the print product even exists, and concentrate on constant and continuous, Web-first, written-for-the-Web stories.

15 World-Widening Years - Information Week
In just 15 years, the World Wide Web has gone through many iterations: document-sharing tool for researchers, key source of news and information, shopping mecca, multimedia playground, and incredibly popular means of socializing and self-expression. How did the Web get so far so fast?

9.16.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 9/16/2006

How We Understand: Adding Meaning and Value to Information - How to Save the World
The word 'understand', which does not appear to have a precise counterpart in any other language, literally means "comprehend (=grasp) and appreciate(=be able to evaluate) sufficiently to pass on to others".

CEO Guide to Technology - Business Week
Networking technology gives companies a new set of tools for recruiting and customer service—but privacy questions remain.

Knowing Knowledge - George Siemens
Knowledge is changing. It develops faster, it changes more quickly, and it is more central to organizational success than in any other time in history.

Whiteboards Done Right - Training Magazine
During a brainstorming session or a training course, you can draw on it, write on it, erase it, but whiteboards have come a long way since their dry-erase days.

Improve performance through feedback and reinforcement - Pahrump Valley Times
When speaking about his employees, Henry Ford said, "Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is a success."

9.13.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 9/13/2006

The 19 Best Elearning Blogs - Articulate
From learning theories to content design, metadata to LMSes, survey data to industry trends, these blogs have it all.

Is Wikipedia 'knowledge' merely third party hearsay? - ZD Net
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, is a master communicator and salesman. The quality of the product that he touts, however, does not match the quality of his orations.

Wikipedia: Maybe It's Democratic After All - Business Week Insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

E-learning gets legal lessons in battle over patents - The Colonist
Stephen Downes,"I would say it's the phenomenon of multiple simultaneous inventions. It occurs through thousands of people at the same time, and it's ludicrous to imagine a race to the finish line."

Digital Divide? It's Still There - Wired
Many more white children use the internet than do Hispanic and black students, a reminder that going online is hardly a way of life for everyone.

9.10.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 9/10/2006

Mobile Internet Population Grows - ClickZ
The mobile Internet is growing, with over 34.6 million mobile users in June. That's according to the "U.S. Device Census Report for Q2 2006" from Telephia.

Building Partnerships Inside and Outside the Organization - Leader Values
Why the leader of the future will need to be a builder of partnerships. Six different types of partnerships will be explored: three inside the organization (direct reports, co-workers and managers) and three outside the organization (customers, suppliers and competitors).

Writely or Wrongly, a Failing Grade, So Far, for a Promising Tool - Dave Pollard
The collective work-product of Writely, like that of most wiki tools, is truly ugly unless some uber-editor comes in and does clean-up work. Same is true in my experience with eRooms, Lotus TeamRooms, and Groove.

A world of knowledge - Edmonton Journal
The nature -- and depth -- of what encyclopedias offer has evolved in the computer age. While old encyclopedias gather dust, the digital side of worldly knowledge is going through changes, too.

If You Really Want the Job, Read This - Business Week
From the obvious to the subtle, here are some good pointers to give you a leg up in that next interview. Includes slideshow.

Who invented e-learning? A patent dispute shakes up academic computing - chron.com
Critics say the patent claims nothing less than Blackboard's ownership of the very idea of e-learning. If allowed to stand, they say, it could quash the cooperation between academia and the private sector that has characterized e-learning for years and explains why virtual classrooms are so much better than they used to be. For more info, see Stephen's Web.