Ray Kurzweil:
Online education is where we were in ebooks 4 years ago – people saying they still want printed books, that the ebook reading experience isn’t very good… Well, today most books are ebooks. You see the same complaints about online education. Well, just wait. Four years from now, you’ll have everything online.
This is from Wired’s May edition (I’m reading the printed version though!)
Recently I’ve started running. (First proper exercise in about 20 years!) Its only every other day and I’m doing very simple and gentle stuff. It’s actually a lot easier than I thought and the recent good weather has definitely helped.
I started using Runkeeper to help me track progress – this has been really beneficial. I’ve loaded up a (gentle) training schedule and its made things much more fun because it adds variety in the types of run and I can track my progress.
An added, and unexpected benefit is that the running is making time for me to listen to podcasts. I’ve got a mix across business, productivity, and technical. Sources vary from TED, the Guardian, the BBC, Harvard Business Review, and some smaller startups. I’m fairly ruthless when it comes to tone – unsubscribing from those podcasts that feature too much informal chat and laughing at their own jokes.
So, perhaps as part of a series, I’m making a note of the podcasts that have a resonance. A colleague at work often talks of the ‘personal MBA’ and I think that the podcasts that chime are part of my own personal MBA.
To start the ball rolling, I enjoyed a podcast from the Harvard Business Review Ideacast series entitled ‘Building a Company Everybody Loves’.
http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2013/04/building-a-company-everyone-lo.html
At about 3 minutes in, the conversation turns to the gender issues at work, and describes a situation that I think is common – one in which men are playing a role at work rather than being themselves:
“…many men have said they role play their way through the week in the hope that they can rediscover their humanity at the weekend.
Well, guess what? You can’t rediscover your humanity in 48 hours at the weekend. Whether you like it or not, you will spend the bulk of your adult waking life at work. It better be a place where you can be yourself.”
A simple lesson; be yourself at work rather than pretending to be someone else…
Catalogue each day with an emoticon
I wonder whether this, or a version of this, could be used within projects in order to gauge the confidence of those involved in the project? Over time, the change in the smileys would be interesting to observe…
[Technical] Debts are often best tackled by paying off the principal lump sum. In the case of "technical debt", Mr Lesokhin believes this involves committing resources to work out which parts of banks' dormant code are most likely to turn zombie to avoid potentially calamitous consequences.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21280943
oops… forgot to thank https://twitter.com/markfendley for the source.
In Richard Sennett’s new book ’Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation‘, he explores the history of cooperation and posits that most tactics that we commonly use are actually making it harder to reach a position of real cooperation.
There are four key skills Professor Sennett believes we all need to get better at if we want to improve our ability to truly cooperate in difficult situations and with people we don’t get along with:
more details via » How to work with difficult people Firm Follows Form
Listening to https://soundcloud.com/tags/balearic – I wouldn’t suggest following my music taste, but do try SoundCloud if you’re open to eclectic and new sounds.
I was asked this week: “what’s a MOOC?” by someone who probably should have known by now what a MOOC is. As a professional, I refrained from this behaviour:
If you’re after a description, a look at this video (under 5 mins) gives an overview – albeit from 2010.
And more in-depth reading available from a post on the JISC site by Jeff Haywood from the University of Edinburgh on their decision to partner with Coursera
At a work meeting today we had an exciting chance to see the emerging ideas for our University’s new library extension. These were presented by the architects who did a great presentation – very refined and to the point, and without too much “architectese”.
They then turned the tables and set a workshop session for the aufience; asking us to consider what essential tips should be considered when creating a library space. What would be the essence of a library in ten to fifteen years?
Forecasting the future is difficult at the best of times, but right now this is very tricky given the changes being brought about within the HE landscape, which are happening at the same time as a digital sea-change (think tablets and ebooks).
Tonight I read a column in Wired by Claudia Hammond entitled ‘Your memories are made to be reliably unreliable‘. This suggests that memories are vital in allowing us to imagine the future – to time-travel mentally. It cites evidence suggesting that future thinking relies on our memories of the past.
If this is the case then it might explain why the task we were set today – imagine the library of the future – is quite hard for techies. If imagining the future relies on memories of the past, then we need to ask questions that can draw relevant experiences out of people. Techies might not be the world’s most frequent library visitors, but they do visit other places that are handling knowledge and information.
Today we were provided with mood sheets showing photos of existing modern libraries. Whilst these were good references, perhaps a session designed to get techies to draw on their non-library experiences might draw out some more imaginative responses that may provide a clue to what the future of a digitally relevant library should look like.
A quick note on e-textbooks following up on a tweet this morning.
Site: http://www.kno.com/home
Only available to students with a .edu account at the moment (I think that was how Facebook got started). A simple sell: lighter, cheaper, and even easier. Cheesy videos on their homepage…
More about them on this AllThingsD article: Kno Taking Electronic Textbooks to Web, Facebook – Ina Fried – Mobile – AllThingsD.
Other companies are entering this arena:
Also info at Hack Education from earlier this year.
Google are getting into selling music:
BBC News – Google unveils Android-based online music store,
which will presumably, over time, start to threaten the dominance of Apple and iTunes. It will be interesting to watch how this market develops… Arguably Apple’s renaissance owes much to the iPod, iTunes, and the associated stash of credit card details that Apple built up. The iPod led to the iPhone, and the rest is (recent) history. However, Apple’s head-start in the mobile market is beginning to be eroded by Google’s Android. And now in the latest episode, Google’s new music store will assist in the erosion.
The situation won’t change overnight, and clearly there are no guarantees for success. But this initiative got me thinking…
Google has such scale and digital dominance that it is able (and willing) to step into any market. So what happens when it decides that it can offer degree courses? It will be able to provide an online experience that melds Google Apps, Gmail, YouTube, Google+, video chat, and other elements into a comprehensive and potentially compelling offer. The service will be mobile-friendly, cheap, flexible and socially-enabled. Traditional universities will have much that is better and of higher quality, but will they be able to compete in the new commercial HE environment?
I’ve only just had this thought and it needs further development. Perhaps we’ll conclude that Google can’t really offer a compelling alternative and that the threat isn’t real. However, I would argue that the idea is still worth considering – a scenario in which Google are competitors to universities could be a worthwhile thought exercise which would catalyse internal debate and encourage innovative responses.
In the meantime, Computing Science students might be interested in: http://code.google.com/edu/courses.html
I think as more people enter the arena the experiences and authenticity will be enhanced. It will be scary at first , but in the long run awesome.
foo is discussing. 
I’d take the “at work” bit out of the last paragraph, personally