eLearning, Captivate 4, Cubicles, Stress Image Generators, & Peter Principle

Close down the schools! - Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog

The headline on Steve Lohr's Bits post sounds pretty definitive: "Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom." And the quote that Lohr gets from the study's lead author, Barbara Means, sounds equally definitive: "The study's major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing - it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction."

But the study itself, which was conducted by SRI International for the US Department of Education, is considerably less definitive than the coverage would have you believe. Before school boards start firing teachers and shuttering classrooms, they might want to read the actual report.

Adobe Captivate 4: Project Templates... A Strong Foundation For New Projects - I came, I saw, I learned...

If you want to take the best components of any Captivate project and use them over and over, you can save any of your existing Captivate projects as a project template. The next time you create a Captivate project, you can use the project template and quickly produce a new project that contains those "best in class" components from the template.

Also see Design Templates.

Bulldoze Your Cubicles for Better Collaboration - HBR

Companies are finally realizing what their employees have known for ages: Cubicle cultures just don't work. With concerns about knowledge-sharing among older and younger generations of employees skyrocketing, organizations are concluding that impersonal "cube farms" discourage collaboration, stifle employee engagement and, as a result, strangle innovation at the exact time when it's desperately needed.

Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop - New York Times

According to Bruce S. McEwen, head of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at Rockefeller University, the new findings offer a particularly elegant demonstration of a principle that researchers have just begun to grasp. "The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ," he said. "Dendrites and synapses retract and reform, and reversible remodeling can occur throughout life."

13 Fantastic and Fun Image Generators - Mashable

The tools on this list help you generate respectable graphics in a jiffy - design talent optional!

The Peter Principle Lives - BusinessWeek

The cure for our malady? We should return to what Dr. Peter wanted: rewarding ordinary competence and being wary of feats that come too easily. Perhaps the late Ray Kroc is the right role model here. One of his first steps in building the McDonald's empire was to run his own outlet - he cooked, cleaned bathrooms, picked up the trash. The focus on doing ordinary things well was, he believed, key to McDonald's success.