Tim Sackett argues that adopting best practices from competitors, other industries, and from peers doesn’t make you better, it just makes you the same. Best practices, he says, “don’t make you a “leading organization”, they make you a “following” organization.”
Hold on there Tim. Innovation doesn’t always come out of the blue. Often, it comes from improving on the best ideas available. (RN)
It used to be that buying anything by IBM was a safe choice for business executives. It became a metaphor for not taking risks. No longer. The new IBM is listed by MIT’s Technology Reviewmagazine as one of the world’s 50 most innovative companies. The other companies listed in the Web category are:
Adobe
Akamai
Amazon.com
Google
Hulu
Obopay
StreamBase
Twitter
Ushahidi
Yelp
Zynga
But IBM? That’s shows how far a company image can change.
The other categories are Energy, Computing, Biomedicine, and Materials. (GW)
I received my first e-mail account somewhere about 1980 as a graduate student at the University of Toronto. There was no Worldwide Web, just text messages that were sent via slow networks – so slow that you could actually see the letters move across the screen as a message was sent or arrived. There was no Internet, just several different networks that worked in different ways, with a variety of protocols and addressing systems. In order to send a message to another network, you had to know its addressing system, and send your message to a “gateway” address in order to have it passed on to your intended recipient.
I remember how excited I was when I bought John Quarterman’s book in 1989. Entitled The Matrix: computer networks and conferencing systems worldwide, it was full of maps of the connections among nodes of all the known networks out there, and instructions on how to connect to them. It was the Internet in development. Three years later, in 1993, I saw my first photograph sent over the new Web. It was a black and white photo of a New York cab, and it took about a minute to render on the screen. But, I knew it was revolutionary…
Today, you can view a video that shows the astounding growth of the Internet over the past 30 years by giving us the current numbers. Here are just three:
90Trillion e-mails sent in 2009
1 billion YouTube videos are served up each day
81% of e-mails are SPAM…
Check out the video. Its an amazing thing that we have all built. (GW)
Ever since Jakob Nielsen suggested years ago that people don’t read on the Web, their eyes just skim the page , most of the content you encounter online comprises of short blocks of text, bullets, highlights, words set in bold, and other devices designed to catch the eye.
Leave it to The Onion, the best satirical news source on the Web, to poke fun at our inability to now focus on a large block of plain text long enough to capture its meaning.
“Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.
Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.”
About 6 months ago I thought I would start a wiki on comparing learning technologies across all the countries of the world. Once I realized what a time consuming and massive job it was, I moved on to easier things, like writing a book. Now a group of academics affiliated with Anadolu University in Turkey has produced a two-volume e-book that describes e-learning in 39 countries, those surrounding Western Europe. The countries included are: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Moldova, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, and Greece, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Iran, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Russia.
The book is called E-Learning Practices, and Volume 1, which covers the first 483 pages of this 1094 page work, is available to be read or downloaded from Scribd. You can have it as a PDF or as a text file, and there is even a mobile version. There is not a lot of comparative work in the field of e-learning, so this is a welcome addition. (GW)
Some university professors are banning laptop computers from their classroom and forcing students to take notes using (gasp) paper and pen. The laptops, say the professors, are distractions, not learning tools.
Wireless Internet connections tempt students away from note-typing to e-mail, blogs, YouTube videos, sports scores, even online gaming — all the diversions of a home [...]
In a post entitled Work Smart: Avoid Office Distractions with Time Blocking, Gina Trapani outlines the hazards and lost productivity of being distracted with too many tasks at the same time. She says, “The most important decision you’ll make today is about what to pay attention to and what to ignore.”
In an interruption-driven culture, it’s [...]
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and insight on workforce development and talent management technologies, trends
and issues.
Workplace Learning Today is a group effort by
senior Brandon Hall Research analysts Janet
Clarey, Richard Nantel,
Tom Werner, and Gary
Woodill to provide readers with a daily summary of news, events, commentary,
and research on all aspects of workplace learning. Continue>
If you haven’t used the Street View in Google Maps lately, it’s worth checking out Google’s new Street View of Hong Kong.
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