I’m proud to say GrownUpDigital.com is helping Mercury Media gain as big an audience as possible for the ground-breaking documentary Us Now. At the top of this page you can watch the trailer for the documentary. Hopefully that will spark your interest and entice you to visit http://www.joiningthedocs.tv, to download a free version of the film in its entirety.
The documentary is about the power of mass collaboration, the internet and its potential impact on society. Directed by Ivo Gormley, the film explores how the web is changing the many ways in which we can organize ourselves. From a democratic football club where the fans pick the team to a lending service where everyone can be a bank manager, Us Now brings together the leading thinkers in the field of participation and web culture to describe how mass collaboration could change society. As the co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration…
McGraw Hill is running a new ad for Grown Up Digital in this week’s BusinessWeek featuring comments from high-profile business people and media outlets. We’re thinking of putting together another ad with comments from Net Generation readers, and we would like you to participate. Please send your one-sentence book review to me at gillies@gmail.com. Deadline: May 1st. One lucky contributor will receive a copy of the book autographed by Don. Good luck!
Even though Microsoft claimed Encarta was the world’s best-selling encyclopaedia software, the company announced this week that it would discontinue sales of the CD-ROM shrink-wrapped product in June and shut down the Encarta website in October.
Why abandon the world’s best-selling encyclopaedia software? Because, as we all know, in the world of encyclopaedias, best-selling is meaningless. Most popular is what counts, and by that definition Wikipedia crushes all competitors. The Wikopedia entry in Wikopedia tells us that the site offers 12 million articles in 262 languages, with 2.8 million English entries. Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day, with the English version accounting for slightly more than half.
The site was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and has since become the most populargeneral reference work on the Internet.…
President Barack Obama will hold his first online question and answer session with American citizens tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. Eastern. Obama will appear via live streamed video on WhiteHouse.gov, answering questions submitted online.
“We’re going to try something a little different. We are going to take advantage of the Internet to bring all of you to the White House to talk about the economy,” he says in an introductory video on the site.
More than 32,000 questions had been submitted by this afternoon. Americans can vote for their favorite questions, and Obama promises to answer the most popular. Americans may submit questions, and vote on others’ queries, until 9:30 a.m. ET Thursday.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Don Tapscott told CNN.com today. “It turns out that the Internet is a new medium of human communication that not only helps you get elected, it changes the way…
The Independent newspaper in the UK has just reviewed Grown Up Digital. The review’s author is Roger Trapp. After summarizing the book’s main themes, Trapp concludes:
Because of the economic crisis in which we now find ourselves, many in business and elsewhere will be tempted to ignore [Tapscott's advice] as the sort of fancy that can be indulged in when the going is good. With unemployment rising, many parents and other older people will encourage university graduates and others of their generation to knuckle down like they did. This might well be what employers are looking for.
But challenging times call for new approaches and just as Obama seems to be offering politics something new so these young people championed by Tapscott could offer businesses a way ahead. Among their ranks are bound to be many new entrepreneurs….
Today in the Financial Post newspaper in Canada, Amelia Young from the boutique consulting firm Upside Consulting writes that Grown Up Digital was one of two books that have favorably “changed my perspective on [the Net Generation] and the contribution they are making to the business world.”
In Grown Up Digital, Tapscott takes an outside-the-box look at how the Internet has affected the generation born between 1980 and 1998. Dubbing it the “Net Generation,” he makes the case that early exposure to the Internet has embedded connectedness and creativity into its DNA to an extent that is having a profound — and positive — impact on how it approaches the world. In contrast to the 22 hours of TV that the average Boomer and Gen Xer watched weekly, the downloading, chatting and gaming that occupies Net Geners have built an array of powerful skills. They are able to filter, evaluate and…
A crisis is emerging in our schools and universities.
Traditional, one-way broadcast models of education are out-dated. Schools have not evolved as quickly as other institutions, and students are becoming disengaged as a result. Why are connected students at home suddenly disconnected at school?
How can we reinvent education for relevance and effectiveness for the 21st century?
Inspired by the work of Don Tapscott and Grown Up Digital, the Net Gen Education Challenge offers everyone an outlet through which to express their ideas and opinions about their ideal model of education. The challenge community will connect engaged participants all around the world, bringing educators, students, parents and professionals together in a global dialogue on learning. In partnership with the CBC, Flat Classroom Project, the Discovery Channel’s Educator Network and
Jeff Jarvis blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism. He is consulting editor of Daylife, a news startup, and he writes a new media column for The Guardian.
Jeff recently posted that:
As I was writing my first book, What Would Google Do?, I thought I knew what my second would be - about the profound changes in culture, worldview, attitude, aptitude, impact of young people today, a group I believe will prove to be an extraordinary generation - Generation G, I call them in the book. But almost as soon as I thought that, ambitious and important books on the topic came out from people I respect. So I’ll recommend them instead.
Don Tapscott, coauthor of Wikinomics, wrote Grown Up Digital,which I believe will be…
The Times has posted its review of Grown Up Digital. The review’s author, Harry Hurt III, begins with: As the father of an 11-year-old son, I often wonder what’s wrong with kids today. With my child as an exception, of course, they do not seem very bright. They appear to be shamelessly narcissistic, apathetic and lacking in social skills.
Skip to next paragraph
And even the best are hopelessly addicted to video games. How can an otherwise healthy boy like mine spend a sunny day playing World of Warcraft for five consecutive hours instead of playing soccer or baseball outdoors?
In Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (McGraw-Hill), Don Tapscott tries to shatter the negative stereotypes of the so-called Net Geners, who currently range in age from 11 to 31. His book gives parents from the…
Had a great conversation with Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur of the net@night program on www.TWiT.TV. TWiT is short for This Week in Tech. You’ll find over a dozen different shows at the site, all covering some aspect of technology. Leo hosts and produces most of the shows, and he, Amber and I discussed the Net Generation for close to an hour. The topics included President-Elect Barack Obama, Facebook at work, the Blue Shirt Nation at Best Buy and Leo’s daughter going to France. I love extended interviews such as this because there is time to really explore the topics being discussed. You can download the show as an MP3. As always, if you have any comments on the interview, please post them here.
Marcus Borba blogs about everything related with Business Intelligence, Performance Management and Business Strategy. I enjoy his summaries of books, news, articles, and posts. Marcus gave a great summary of a post by Guy Kawasaki on how to use Twitter in a commercial manner. Says Guy: “I may get more value out of Twitter than anyone else on the planet because I use Twitter as a powerful marketing tool for my websiteAlltop and my book, Reality Check.” Guy offers creative ways to maximize your Twitter investment, and below is Marcus’ summary.
- Forget the “influentials.” You must buy into the theory that products and services reach critical mass because mere mortals spread the word for you. This defies the common wisdom that a handful of “influentials” shape what the rest of us try and what we adopt.
- Defocus your efforts. The goal is…
I am delighted that the Economist has chosen Grown Up Digital as one of the best economics and business books of 2008. I worked very hard on this book and it is gratifying to see that it is meeting with critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The Economist summed up the book thusly: “A management guru explains why the net generation, who grew up playing video games and spending time on the internet, are not all messed up, as many people suspect, but have actually been improved by the experience.” Exactly. This generation is under attack on many fronts, and almost all of this hostility is without cause. I hope the Economist’s recommendation will prompt many skeptics to take the time and read why I think today’s youth are poised for such great achievements.
Has the Internet turned youth into a generation of simple students, unproductive employees, violent video-game addicts and ignorant citizens? Increasingly, people are arguing yes. In his book The Dumbest Generation, Professor Mark Bauerlein says that the Internet “stupefies youth.” The BBC World Tonight program asked Bauerlein and me to debate the impact of the Internet on today’s students. Click below to listen.
Had the pleasure and honor of being interviewed by Rocketboom.com. See it below. Rocketboom is one of the original video blogs, and is a great example of Net Generation initiative with digital technologies. Andrew Baron (blog here) started the show in 2004 with a camera from Best Buy, and shot the show in front of a map. Ever since he has leveraged the most cutting edge social platforms to promote the site. Earlier this year Rocketboom inked a distribution and advertising deal with Sony Pictures Television for a seven-figure guarantee plus a share of future revenues generated by the show.
