You may need to buckle up first if you have not read Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Although its never too late to change…it is however, way too late to ignore. Implications for business, education and society? You decide!
Thanks Matt for launching this!
Tags: Did You Know 2.0, globalization, India, China, The World is Flat, learning, trends
A long and exciting summer with Maxwell has taken me away from my daily reading. But I have just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and learned its just as great as reviews have suggested.
Chapter 3 (The Stickiness Factor: Sesame Street, Blue’s Clues and the Educational Virus) is a really great read and made a real impact in approaching a thread that is currently underway on Internet2‘s Teaching and Learning listserv.
The discussion is about the impact of SecondLife in K12 education. There are real questions about the validity of SecondLife.
After the initial hype of SecondLife (for higher education) peaked, colleges now find themselves in the same rut about really embracing SecondLife when virtual visits never really materialized. A lost leader? Probably.
Many including Wired‘s Chris Anderson are openly debating the ‘stickiness’ of SecondLife. Does it provide solid learning outside the classroom or studio?
The emerging and cool method to order pizza is via SMS by Domino’s. After a successful test run early this summer.
Sound interesting? Big pizza lover? You will need to register and establish a preferred menu…but just text message “gametime” will have your favorite pizza at your door within 30 minutes.
And by gametime I mean football….well actually I mean soccer. Domino’s is making this available only in the United Kingdom.
Tags: pizza, Domino’s, SMS, United Kingdom, trends
MIT has posted a free online course on the engineering and design aspects for 2.993 Special Topics in Mechanical Engineering: The Art and Science of Boat Design, taught in January (IAP) 2007. This class seems like a great opportunity for MIAD students to engage in further learning. This course is another example of the OpenCourseWare movement available from colleges across the globe.
There is a small number of schools in the US that are participating in this Consortium. The mission is to share knowledge. There are 12 colleges in the USA while China has 30 colleges. It feels very much like Tom Friedman’s book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.
What can There are new opportunities for educators and students from around the world to freely participate in classes taught at MIT or Notre Dame, for example. And if you speak a foreign language…the world can really open your eyes. to new educational and cultural experiences.
Tags: OCW, OpenCourseWare, MIT, Design, innovation, trends
Intel received a lot of negative PR (rightfully so) when 60 minutes aired an interview with Nicholas Negroponte from MIT. He has worked to produce an affordable laptop for children living in third world countries. This project is called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and is a great example of people making the world a better place.
Following a lot of positive press on how he was helping change access to technology Intel announced they would begin selling an almost identical laptop to the same audience.
Bad move Intel.
As a very successful company Intel missed an initial opportunity to not only give away their chips to this project but “selling” a computer in this situation…very bad. And to a large extent the 60 minutes interview allowed Intel to reconsider.
As you may have learned, yesterday Intel buried the hatchet with Nicholas and has joined the OLPC program. At this point — its never too late — they are now helping OLPC make this world a better place. Nice ending.
Tags: OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, Nicholas Negroponte, Intel, Globalization, technology