Minds on Fire - Learning to Be

From John Seely Brown ( co-chairman of the New Deloitte Research Center at USC) and Richard Adler of the Institute for the Future comes this timely article on the importance of conversations in stimulating learning in communities of practice. The primary audience for the article is academics in higher ed, but the message is useful for any learning practice.

John's whimsical cartoons like the ones shown below make the article much more entertaining and understandable.


Here is the link:


http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823

wikinomics presentation by Don Tapscott

This will take you to the eLarning site where you can download and listen/view Don Tapscott's presentation of Wikinomics. I was in Mexico when Tapscott presented on the Cisco campus so I am grateful to John Maloney of Colabria and eLearning for the fully documented archive of Tapscott's talk. eLF vPortal I now will take up Tapcott's challenge in the Wikinomics Playbook to attempt to add value to his work.

This is a powerful example of the emerging concept of the networked book.Thoughts Illustrated: WIKINOMICS-another "Networked" book example

Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped--Now!

Here's a clip from a recent interview with Alan Kay - one of the Titans of the personal computer evolution. The article is short and worth reading. In it Alan pays tribute to the founding role Doug Engelbart played as the original catalyst of the PC. The images are taken from a Siggraph poster produced 1997.

"Basically, the reason I work with children and not adults is because adults are famously difficult to change in any significant way. They've made a commitment to the norms of the world they live in. Children are born not knowing what culture they've been born into, how the culture thinks, and what that culture thinks is important. Yet they are born with some built-in patterns of thinking that are universal. Since the late sixties, I've been interested in the extent to which you could cultivate the kind of thinking skills that only a few people use in the world today, by getting children to learn much more widely and much more fluently than most adults have. If you want to make a change, get the children to think differently."
Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped--Now:

To see the original siggraph poster :http://san-diego.siggraph.org/sigkids/Influences.html