What matters now

Here is an interesting use of Scribd by Seth Godin. "What Matters Now" presents a series of ideas using one page per idea.
What Matters Now

Training

Dilbert shows a lot of wisdom. It's a hard reality that tomorrow's workforce will demand fearless and independent learners. Self motivated people, who pick up new technologies, will have a definite advantage in the world job market. I constantly tell my students that they must be independent, self-motivated learners to survive. In fact, it's the main theme on my library web page. Some listen and some don't.

In a free market system, employers don't waste a lot of time with training. They just hire and keep those who know what they are doing, and like Dilbert's boss, they get rid of the rest. That's why the free market systems are still the only ones who succeed.

Government works in the opposite direction. How many government institutions and school districts spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on 'training'? When you analyze the new technology training, it has mostly been how to fill out forms on-line. I can't even sit through the classes any more. It's the bane of governments and organizations. I once sat through a mandatory two hour class on how to fill out on-line forms for inter-library loan. What's amazing is that the instructor and many of the students were actually excited about the class.

In the first Men in Black, there is a scene where Will Smith is applying to join the organization. The room is filled with super achievers from West Point, the Marines, NYPD, etc. When filling out the application, Smith is the only one with the common sense to use the coffee table in the center of the room as a writing table. Rip Torn then tells the other super achievers present: "Gentlemen, you are all we've come to expect from years of government training." Will Smith's only negative is his "conflict with authority." He is the epitome of a fearless, independent learner. He doesn't depend on 'training', he just jumps in.

Fearless, independent learners use coaches and instructors as needed, but they don't expect to be spoon fed. In fact, independent learners have a way of using an instructor to their maximum advantage. They quickly get to the heart of a question or issue.

My Argentine tango instructor, Walter Kane, is a fearless, independent learner. Our tango group recently set up a new web site using Google sites (Hudson Valley Tango). Walter has been able to pick up the on-line program with a minimum of instruction from me. In fact, he quickly grasped how to insert text and write in HTML (hypertext markup language) on the site. He lamented that it took him 3 and 1/2 hours to pick it up. It's that willingness to invest the time and effort on a task that separates the fearless, independent learner from the spoon feeder. A spoon feeder will sit through 3 hours of 'training' and come out with nothing. The Dilbert cartoon is right on target.

Web technology is about to change how we learn - Russell Moench, Venture Beat

Here is a post worth reading
Web technology is about to change how we learn - Russell Moench, Venture Beat

from Educational Technology by Ray
The education industry is on the cusp of being massively disrupted by innovation in Web technology. Like other industries prior, it would like to pretend that it can weather the storm and continues business as usual, with only minor tweaking. We all know how that story ends. It won’t happen immediately, and the path won’t be a direct one. Marketing giants such foreign-language instructor Rosetta

From Daniel Pink

This is from Daniel Pink's blog
Factoid of the day: Revenge of the nonspecialist
Published October 5th, 2009

Yesterday afternoon, I was reading Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson’s smart new book, See New Now, and came across this stunner:
“A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place.”

#IranElection Crisis: A Social Media Timeline by Ben Parr

Ben Parr in "Mashable: The Social Media Guide" provides the most comprehensive history of the interaction of social media on the Iran election crisis: #IranElection Crisis: A Social Media Timeline. If it had not been for Twitter, YouTube and Flicker, we would have never known of the events in Iran. Certainly the mainstream media did not cover it.

Web 2.0 and the Iran Election

From Ben Parr's blog "Mashable: The Social Media Guide" we have these amazing statistics on the #Iranelection:
Twitter: 221,744 “Iran” Tweets in One Hour
The Blogosphere: 2,250,000 Blog Posts in 24 hours
YouTube: 184,500 Videos on Iran, 3000 in One Day
The photo below is from one of these blogs: "tehran 24: Daily Photos from Iran."http://tehranlive.org/2009/06/17/demonstration-and-protests-to-election-results-the-5th-day/

Iranian Revolution on Twitter

If you aren't following the Iranian revolution on Twitter, your missing out on one of the most important events of your lifetime. Here's a piece by Clay Shirkey on TED: