Tag Archives: education

Cognitive Surplus

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From Amazon: “For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.”

A few of my highlighted excerpts from Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky (more after the jump).

“The postwar trends of emptying rural populations, urban growth, and increased suburban density, accompanied by rising educational attainment across almost all demographic groups, have marked a huge increase in the number of people paid to think or talk, rather than to produce or transport objects.” – page 4

“Someone born in 1960 has watched something like fifty thousand hours of TV already, and many watch another thirty thousand hours before she dies.” – page 6

“…in the whole of the developed world, the three most common activities are now work, sleep, and watching TV.” – page 6

“Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. … We spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials.” – page 10

“As long as the assumed purpose of media is to allow ordinary people to consume professionally created material, the proliferation of amateur-created stuff will seem incomprehensible.” – page 19

“Imagine that everything says 99 percent the same, that people continue to consume 99 percent of the television they used to, but 1 percent of that time gets carved out for producing and sharing. The connected population still watches well over a trillion hours of TV a year; 1 percent of that time is mor than one hundred Wikipedias’ worth of participation per year.” – page 23

“In 2010 the global internet-connected population will cross two billion people, and mobile hone accounts already number over three billion. Since there are something like 4.5 billion adults worldwide (roughly 30 percent of the global population is under fifteen), we live, for the first time in history, in a world where being part of a globally interconnected group is the normal case for most citizens.” – page 23

Continue reading →

Minnesota school replacing text books with iPads

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The Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop (Minnesota) School Board approved $265,000 to purchase 230 iPads for students, upgrade all school buildings with Wi-Fi and provide technical training for everyone starting next year.

Apple Computer is providing the school with some assistance. If this works out, the school in Winthrop could become a model for the nation. Bet this isn’t the last time we see this.

Think of the possibilities.

Tests are on PW protected website. Software could determine right/wrong answers on the T/F and multiple choice questions. Huge time saver for teachers. Parents could see student’s answers to help them.

“Information is not a scarcity”

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A few ideas from today’s post Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog:

“If you are selling a scarcity — an inventory — of any nonphysical goods today, stop, turn around, and start selling value — outcomes — instead. Or you’re screwed. Apply this rule to many enterprises: advertising, media, content, information, education, consultation, and to some extent, performance.”

“Relationships. That’s what the business of media must become. In our New Business Models for News, we began — just began — to project the value of the relationship a new media service can have in its community: creating events; educating; gathering and selling data; selling goods directly (as the Telegraph does, quite successfully); running networks to help others succeed; saving money by collaborating.”

“Information is not a scarcity, or at least it isn’t scarce for long. Yes, when I don’t know something, then the answer is scarce. But now it’s much easier to get that answer; Google will have it in .3 seconds and if it doesn’t and if enough of us ask it, then someone at Demand Media will write it for me and the rest of the world for $20. When news is new, its value is scarce (as Thomson Reuters Tom Glocer says, his information has its highest value in its first 3 milliseconds); but then that value deflates.”

Alrighty then.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

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Only a few chapters into Seth Godin’s new book (Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?) and my highlighter is running dry.

“Our world is filled with factories. Factories that make widgets and insurance and Web sites, factories that make movies and take care of sick people and answer the telephone. These factories need workers. If you learn how to be one of these workers, if you pay attention in school, follow instructions, show up on time, and try hard, we will take cre of you. You won’t have to be brilliant or creative or take big risks. We will pay you a lot of money, give you health insurance, and offer you job security. We will cherish you, or at the very least, take care of you.”

“It was always easier for management to replace labor than it was for labor to find a new factory. Today, the means of production = a laptop computer with Internet connectivity. Three thousand dollars buy a work an entire factory.”

If your job doesn’t feel safe to you… if you job isn’t satisfying and fulfilling… there’s a reason. Reasons, actually. Seth lays it out, pulling no punches. Continue reading →

“The Bad Managment Stimulus”

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The always brilliant Scott Adams on entrepreneurship:

“The Dilbert Principle observes that in the modern economy, the least capable people are promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work. It’s hard to design software, but relatively easy to run staff meetings. This creates a situation where you have more geniuses reporting to morons than at any time in history. In that sort of environment you’d expect the geniuses to be looking for a way out, even if Plan B has a low chance of success.

Big companies with bad managers are the ideal breeding ground for entrepreneurs. Employees are exposed to a wide variety of business disciplines, and can avail themselves of excellent company-paid training and outside education. When you add broad skill development to the inevitability of eventually getting a moron for a boss, thanks to frequent internal reorganizations, it’s no wonder that big companies spray entrepreneurs into the environment like the fountains at Bellagio.”

Mr. Adams’ book, The Dilbert Principle is the last management book I read and gave me the courage to begin planning my escape from management.

Why there is no draft

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From a new report called Mission: Readiness, an organization of education and military leaders:

Lean, mean, fighting maching“An alarming 75 percent of Americans ages 17 to 24 would not qualify for military service today because they are physically unfit, failed to finish high school or have criminal records. So says a new report from an organization of education and military leaders calling for immediate action on the early-education front.”

“Military recruiters in Kansas City report turning away prospective recruits “in every office, every hour, every day” for reasons including girths too large and credit ratings too low.”

“Even after signing up, 7 to 15 percent of enlistees return home for not meeting all that basic training demands.”

Scariest quote is from retired Rear Adm. James Barnett:  “Our national security in the year 2030 is absolutely dependent on what’s going on in kindergarten today.”

What does it mean with the doctor tweets “oops?”

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I got a call this morning from Matt Kelley, a reporter for Radio Iowa (one of Learfield’s news networks). He was working on a story involving Twitter and he wanted to check a couple of terms. Here’s the story (minus the audio):

A Cedar Rapids medical center plans to use the social media tool Twitter to broadcast a surgery to the world next week. Doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital will perform a hysterectomy, and other procedures, as people who’re interested follow along via web browser or mobile device. Hospital spokeswoman Sarah Rainey (RAY-nee) says it’s an educational opportunity.

Rainey says, “We have marketing consultants who will be in the operating rooms with the surgeons as the surgery takes place and as the physician communicates exactly what he’s doing, we will have our consultants tweeting, or typing in conversation to bring it to the outside world.” She says two doctors will be performing the operation on a 70-year-old woman using robotic surgery techniques. The play-by-play will be sent out over the micro-blogging service in messages of 140 characters or less.

“He’ll be talking about how the anesthesiologist is now placing the patient under sedation and here’s my first step, so he will be talking as he goes through the procedure,” Rainey says. “You’ll hear him say, ‘Scalpel, please,’ or whatever he may need to instruct the O-R team to help him with.” She expects a wide host of Iowans — and people around the globe — to follow the surgery, starting at 10 AM next Monday.

She says they’re targeting people in the Twitter audience, roughly between the ages of 25 and 45. “We’re looking for people that just might want the opportunity to go into an O-R suite and see what happens without visually seeing all of the stuff that maybe they don’t care to see,” Rainey says. The hospital recently featured a “webcast” of the same type of surgery so anyone in the world could watch it live over their computers.

“With the webcast, you actually got to see everything that was going on in the O-R suite,” Rainey says. “It might be cutting open the patient, it might be a little blood, it might be the suction part, so for some people it might’ve been too much. Tweeting, on the other hand, is communicating through emails and tweets so it’s a little gentler on the eyes.” She says St. Luke’s will be the first Iowa hospital to “Twitter-cast” a surgery. To follow it, go to the hospital’s website “www.stlukescr.org” and click on the Twitter icon.

My friend David insists this is a “gimmick” and nothing more. That nobody would have the slightest interest in following this procedure on Twitter. I’m not as convinced.

Dim the lights, please. Today we’re going to have a film strip.

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Professor Kristin Cherry teaches a beginning Radio course at Central Methodist University in Fayette, MO, and was kind enough to invite me come talk about… radio. I didn’t know what to say about “radio” so I made a list (“10 Survival Tools for the Digital Age”) of things I was pretty sure they already knew about. They didn’t. [Just click a slide to see the next one] The photo below was taken just as my presentation peaked.

I don’t have the opportunity to spend a lot of time around young people but I’ve come to believe they are no more web savvy than the population at large. They’re great at texting and know the ends and outs of Facebook… but very few are creating media or exploring.

In my group of about 25 students, only one had uploaded a video to YouTube and that was for a class assignment. Twitter, UStream, flickr? Never heard of them.

I tried to convey the idea that these –and similar tools– will be useful no matter what they do after college. What I forgot (it was a very long time ago) was that they had very little interest in next semester, let alone The Rest of Their Lives.

The instructors (and the administration!) were incredibly gracious hosts and the campus is really pretty. As always, I got much more out of this experience than the students. More on that in a future post. [Wikipedia entry for “film strip”]

J. Michael Spooner – Visual Development Design Consultant

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Michael Spooner has worked in the animation industry for twenty-five years with such notable studios as Walt Disney, Warner Brothers and DreamWorks.

Michael’s professional career in art began in 1976, when he was invited to join the faculty at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, after graduating with distinction. He taught for twelve years, simultaneously working as a freelance illustrator for clients that included the Public Broadcasting System, Zondervan Publishing House, Masda Motors, the National Football League, NBC Television, Paramount Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox.

Michael ventured into animation as a Layout Artist with Ralph Bakshi’s feature production of Tolkien’s, Lord of the Rings. Shortly after he worked with Filmation Studios on He-Man, Bravestar and Fat Albert and on the Bagdasarian feature, The Chipmunk Adventure.

Joining the Walt Disney Television Animation team in 1988 as a Visual Development Artist and Production Designer, Michael set the style for such episodic shows as, Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers, Talespin, Goof Troop, The Little Mermaid, New Bonkers and Aladdin. He also worked on the direct-to-video production of Aladdin and the King of Thieves.

In 1994, Michael and his family moved to Paris, France, where he headed up the Production Layout team for Disney’s feature film, A Goofy Movie.

Returning to Los Angeles in 1995, Michael Co-Art Directed Warner Brothers first full-length animated feature, Quest for Camelot. Following that he worked independently as a Visual Development Designer Consultant on Disney’s Dinosaurs, The Emperor’s New Groove, Treasure Planet and Lilo and Stitch. Michael also assisted on early development design of Dreamworks,’ Shrek.

Michael moved to the Chicago area in 1999 to become Vice President of Visual Development and Artist Education with Big Idea Productions, home of the popular 3D animated video series, Veggie Tales. There he developed and headed up the Visual Development process in Story, Concept Design, Modeling and Layout. He also served as Art Director on various productions and as an Art Direction Consultant on Big Idea’s first feature animated film, Jonah.

Today, Michael owns Spoonerville Animation Design, an independent visual development studio, providing both traditional and CGI design concepts for clients such as Big Idea, Inc., Star Farm Productions, ReelFX Creative Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios.

He lives in the western suburbs of Chicago with his writer-wife Beverly, and son Philip.

Michael is a visiting artist and lecturer, presenting in universities, art schools and animation studios throughout the United States.

You may reach him at: spoonerville1@sbcglobal.net or 630 301-0895

Novel only missed by eight years

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I’m reading (for the 4th or 5th time) The War in 2020 by Ralph Peters. One of the minor characters in the novel, written in 1991, is Johathan Water, the black president of the United States. Here are a couple of paragraphs from page 120:

“President Waters had been elected in 2016, on a platform that focused on domestic renewal and on bridging the gap between the increasingly polarized elements in American society.

The candidacy of Jonathan Water succeeded on the premise that all Americans could live together. He promised education, urban renewal, and opportunity, and he was a handsome, magnetic man, who spoke in the rhetoric of Yale rather than the Baptist Church. A campaign-season joke called him the white-man’s black and the black-man’s white… and he felt like the right man for the times to a bare majority of the citizens of his country. He defeated an opponent who was a foreign policy expert, but who had few domestic solutions with which to inspire a troubled nation.”