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 Classroom 2.0, Don Tapscott invites you to share your ideas and help make education engaging, inspiring and relevant.
The federal government’s plan to promote expansion of the country’s high-speed Internet network has been swamped with applications totaling nearly $28 billion - seven times the $4 billion allocated to the program’s first round of spending.
Applications came in from a diverse range of parties including state, local, and tribal governments; nonprofits; industry; anchor institutions, such as libraries, universities, community colleges, and hospitals; public safety organizations; and other entities in rural, suburban, and urban areas. The wide array of applicants illustrates how greater bandwidth benefits virtually every aspect of society.
The urgency of bulking up the nation’s Internet infrastructure was underscored by a report released last week by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). It revealed that the United States ranks 28th in the world in average Internet connection speed and is not making significant progress in building a faster network.
The report said the average download speed in South…
My good friend and mentee Michael Furdyk has just posted an excellent brief video on the Globe and Mail website discussing how companies can reach out to the Net Generation.
I’ve worked with Michael for more than a dozen years. Our first project was the design and construction of my GrowingUpDigital.com website. Michael was the project manager, and he was 13 at the time. Michael would quickly become a star in his own right. When he was in Grade 9, he and a couple of friends launched an on-line magazine about computers called MyDesktop.com. In May 1999, when Furdyk was in Grade 11, they sold it for an undisclosed 7 or 8 figure sum.
In October of 1999, during a reunion of the Growing Up Digital contributors, Michael and colleague Jennifer Corriero envisioned an online space where kids to work together with other kids around the world to do something good….
I posted yesterday about the release of IBM’s Smarter Planet University Jam report. Because three-quarters of the Jam participants were students, and skills and education is something they can relate to, this topic proved to be the most active. The highlights from the report are reprinted below. Readers of Grown Up Digital will recognize many of the arguments from the book as to why today’s education system is failing and why it must be more student-focused.
1. Success in the services-based global economy requires academia, government and industry to work together to create “T-shaped” people. T-shaped people are those who have deep knowledge in one discipline and broader knowledge in others. These people were identified as possessing the types of skills industry will most likely employ. But the methods used to develop those skills in academia today lack the needed…
Tavia Grant wrote a good piece in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail about the growing practice of reverse mentoring. “Traditional mentoring usually involves an older employee helping to guide a junior colleague. Now, an accelerating trend is flipping that relationship. Reverse mentoring is a radical shift in power dynamics, a response to how fast technology is changing, and what a younger generation of workers has to offer.”
With reverse mentoring, the older employees turn to younger, tech-savvy employees for insights about new tools such as Facebook and YouTube, since invariably the younger employee is more comfortable with the technologies. The relationship also gives the older employee into the thoughts and values of today’s Net Generation.
In the article, Grant discusses the relationship between mentor Matthew Dobbin, 26, who is a consultant with Accenture Canada. The mentee is managing partner Rodney Bergman, age 43.
I like the electronics retailing juggernaut Best Buy, and have had a number of discussions with the company’s senior management on how it can tap the full potential of the Net Generation as employees and as customers.
Recently the company advertised for a Sr. Manager of Emerging Media Marketing. This person would be in charge of social media marketing. And according to Best Buy, the successful candidate would have at least one year of active blogging experience, a graduate degree, and more than 250 followers on Twitter.
The job qualifications caused a bit of a stir in the blogosphere. Some questioned the need for a graduate degree (in what?), or the idea that people with less than 250 Twitter followers need not apply.
The reason I think Best Buy is so great is illustrated by what happened next. Best Buy’s CMO Barry Judge…
The Globe and Mail and Microsoft are collaborating on a series of articles and videos looking at The Evolving Economy, and they asked me to contribute. My article and interview focused on the Net Generation:
Want to know what the most effective corporations of tomorrow will look like? Look at those that are most successful at attracting young workers today.
Even with the current economic downturn, we’re on the brink of a major war for talent, as many companies that rely on knowledge workers already know. The tables have turned. Today, there may be a surplus of labor, but not of talent.
Twenty years ago, when college grads poured into the work force, companies had their pick of the best and the brightest. Employers had the power to choose; employees were grateful to get a job and did what they could to keep it, and the last thing on their mind would be…
Today’s Toronto Star offers some practical advice for young job applicants that may have littered cyberspace with festive photos of their marathon kegger parties.
1) Delete what you can: Start with your old blogs, purge any for sale advertisements for the unwanted items of your past, any want ads, personal…
Just watched a great 4 minute video on YouTube highlighting Best Buy’s use of Web 2.0 tools to help retail employees to brainstorm ideas and deliver better service to customers. I have a lot of respect for Best Buy and have worked with them in the past.
Best Buy management understand that the nature of work is changing. It has become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time-pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile and less dependent on geography. A growing number of firms are decentralizing decision-making functions, communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion, and embracing new technologies which empower employees to communicate easily and openly with people inside and outside the firm. In doing so, they are creating new corporate meritocracy that is sweeping away the hierarchical silos in its path and connecting internal teams to…
Social media addicts rejoice. This morning FriendFeed rolled out a new beta version with some innovative new features, albeit features that PC Magazine said “might make you throw up your hands and run back to Facebook.”
FriendFeed is a social media aggregator, pulling together and publishing updates from several online accounts–Twitter, Yelp, Netflix, Blogger, Flickr, etc–forming a feed of your online activity, and showing you the feeds of all the Friendfeed users you follow.
The new FriendFeed beta makes some pioneering moves in the search and the feed departments. For one, you now have more powerful search abilities that let you narrow your keyword searches to just your friends’ feeds or to everyone’s feeds. You can also set filters that will highlight posts from specific friends or about specific topics.
The ability to slice and dice the search data in a social network like FriendFeed, Twitter,…
Taking a short break at the office to surf the Internet for relaxation increases our concentration levels and helps make a more productive workforce, according to a new University of Melbourne study.
Dr Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing, says that workers who engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t. “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” he says.
“Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case.”
Kudos to Coker. Companies that ban sites such as Facebook undermine the morale of…
Good piece in today’s New York Times about a major milestone Facebook will reach this week: 200 million users. As the Times notes: The sites’s staggering growth rate - doubling in size in just eight…
Shel Holtz has an excellent post today about why Twitter can be such a useful tool. Here are excerpts:
Everything you read about Twitter—and it’s a lot these days, between blog posts like this and a sudden infatuation by mainstream media—mentions the brevity thing. And I think it’s a load of crap.
Yes, the messages are short. But many tweets are just part of some greater content. Tweets direct you to blog posts, breaking news, videos, photos, just about anything you can find on the Net. Remarking on the brevity of these tweets is like pointing out the terseness of tables of contents. In a sense, a lot of tweets are like the listings in a table of contents, signposts to more information, more content.
Someone…compared it to seeing a billboard for a McDonald’s hamburger. If it looks good, you don’t drive to the billboard and hope to be served a meal….
Finally someone has spoken to Connor Riley about her dustup with Cisco via Twitter.
Riley gained fame when she tweeted last week that: “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”
The tweet caught the attention of Tim Levad, a Cisco channel partner advocate. He replied: “Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”
Ouch! Riley had failed to configure Twitter so that her tweets were for her followers only. (Even if she had, it was a dumb thing to say online.)
According to the blogosphere, Cisco pulled the job offer, but Riley now says that was not the case. She told news site CP24.com yesterday that she declined the job before posting the…
Michelle McGiboney from Nielsen Online has posted the latest numbers on Twitter’s remarkable growth in both the consumer and corporate worlds. No longer just a platform for friends to stay connected in real time, it has become an important component of brand marketing. Unique visitors to Twitter increased 1,382 percent year-over-year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009, making it the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for the month. Zimbio and Facebook followed, growing 240 percent and 228 percent, respectively.
Other interesting numbers are Twitter’s demographics and non-PC Web access:
Twitterers (a.k.a. Tweeters) are not primarily teens or college students as you might expect. In fact, in February the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience. We found that the majority of people visit Twitter.com while at work,…
Don was in Austin March 11th to speak at the Consortium for School Networking’s annual conference. While there Don was interviewed by the local NPR affiliate KUT, and you can can listen to the eight-minute interview here.
