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Design Education Globalization Innovation Reading Technology

Looking forward to reading

After reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything I have been following the Heath brothers and Don Tapscott’s work online and in the blogosphere.  Both have followup books to their initial bestsellers. Its going to be great reading.

reading

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Education

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

I consider Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics essential reading.  I just read his tweet that he and Anthony Williams are releasing MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World in late 2010.

I read his previous book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything back in 2007 (review here) and I think its just outstanding….minus the role of advanced networks like Internet2 or BoreasNet especially if you live in the Midwest.

Don’t get me wrong I strongly believe Tapscott hit the nail on the head about the future of collaboration in Wikinomics, but he could not realize how important BoreasNet is for the Midwest’s economic growth and green technology futures.  With Boreas now connected to the Northern Tier its making the internet as “flat” as Friedman described in his best selling book The World is Flat: a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.

Now add a really, really fast network research layer on top of Tapscott’s Ideagoras and the New Alexandrians and you really have something coming together – especially when you consider advanced, big science.

Okay, okay, okay I understand its not sexy to talk about massive data from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) traveling the Midwest via BoreasNet to university research facilities – but just give it another couple of years and the impact will be huge.

This book cannot arrive soon enough….like yesterday.

Tags: Wikinomics, Ideagoras, New Alexandrians, Boreas, Internet2, trends

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Education Globalization Network OpenSource Reading Technology

Latest read: Wikinomics

Want to learn where a faster, wireless internet and robust web technology is moving all of us? Read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything to get a real-world understanding of the impact of YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, Linux, SecondLife and InnoCentive.
wikinomicsThis is a true paradigm shift. Changes have occurred in business and society regarding mass collaboration and the internet. I know many people do not like change but we live in exciting new times.

How has technology transformed our world? Consider ABC Television has been around for almost 60 years. The first television broadcast was in 1948. If you total all the video (24/7) shown on ABC since 1948 — just over 500,000 hours. YouTube has produced more hours of content in just the past 6 months.

The colonial era approach to education will never should not be continued. When will our educational systems catch up with the world? The longer we stand on the sidelines and watch countries including India and China establish educational models around the internet-enabled world, the longer our students will not be able to compete when they enter the global marketplace.

Some states are making that change. Michigan’s virtual schools permit students to study the Chinese language via the internet. Their instructor lives in China. It started when choices for foreign language were no longer acceptable. What economic impact does French or German have in contrast to Chinese and Hindi for a student’s future? Its safe to say French economic power has been on the decline since World War I. Lets give our students the best opportunities to succeed in our country’s future.

In higher education there are examples of how ideas fall short. Teacher are often unaware of how to get their students to connect their idea/project with a engineer, on-demand book publisher or patent attorney in today’s global marketplace. Yes patent attorney. But it may be due to the colonial era approach to educational reform. Too often educators look inward (or to peer groups) and believe if they change internal measurements, students will benefit. Wikinomics proves this to be another colonial era step in the wrong direction.