Reuters asked me to write a column tied to President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office. My response:
When President Obama announced last month that he’ll ask ordinary Americans to help him change America, it didn’t take long for the influencers inside the Washington beltway to ring the alarm: What happens if ordinary Americans actually come up with some new ideas to run government? Will things get out of control? Will they become bullies who will force Obama and Congressional lawmakers to bend to their will?To me, they sound a lot like the traditional marketers who are worried that they’re losing control over their brand. Both marketers and lawmakers are struggling to adjust to a digital world where consumers and voters now have powerful tools to talk back, and even influence the brand or the policy. So let me give the Washington lawmakers the same message I have delivered to the marketers: Let go. You can’t control everything. The genie has slipped out of the bottle and she’s not coming back. And I think this is a really good thing…
Read the full post here and then join the discussion.
As I discussed two weeks ago, the U.S. ranks 19th in the world when it comes to Internet download speed. The fastest country is South Korea. We need to do better. The Obama administration’s applaudable goal is to have broadband in every home, school and workplace. So last month the Federal Communications Commission raised an interesting point by asking: Just what is “broadband?”
As reported on ArsTechnica.com, the computer gaming industry is not pleased with the response that AT&T filed with the FCC. It suggested that online games should be relegated to the category of being nice but not essential. “For Americans who today have no terrestrial broadband service at all,” AT&T wrote the Commission, “the pressing concern is not the ability to engage in real-time, two-way gaming, but obtaining meaningful access to the Internet’s resources and to reliable email communications and other basic tools that most of…
In Grown Up Digital I discussed the phenomenon of “helicopter parents” — parents who are involved closely with all aspects of their grownup children’s lives. TheOnion.com, one of the world’s funniest web sites, has a great takeoff on a digitally savvy mom showing how she uses Facebook and Twitter to keep a close eye on her son at university. Watch the video here.
Wikipedia now tells us there are specialized kinds of helicopter parents:
Helicopter parent is a colloquial, early 21st-century term for a parent who pays extremely close attention to his or her child’s or children’s experiences and problems, particularly at educational institutions. These parents rush to prevent any harm or failure from befalling them and will not let them learn from their own mistakes, sometimes even contrary to the children’s wishes. They are so named because, like helicopters, they hover closely overhead, rarely out of reach,…
The Boy Scouts have released a new version of their famous 475-page Boy Scout Handbook that still includes tips on how to build a campfire but adds new material on how to surf safely when out in the World Wide Web. For the first time the handbook is now also available online, and an iPhone application for the handbook is coming soon.
“We are talking to boys where boys want to be talked to, which is on the Web,” Tico Perez, the national commissioner of the Scouts who oversaw production of the handbook, said in an interview with Associated Press.
As a former scout, I recall well striving to fulfill our famous motto of “be prepared.” Only today that will include keeping an eye out for the closest Wi-Fi hotspot.
The online version includes links to videos that show Scouts exactly how…
According to a new report from the always informative Pew Internet & American Life Project, the audience for online video sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video continues to grow swiftly across all demographic groups, far outpacing the adoption rates of many other internet activities. Biggest users: Young adults. Their use is near universal and much higher than older age groups; nine in ten (89%) internet users ages 18-29 now say they watch content on video sharing sites, and 36% do so on a typical day. (see chart) Fully 62% of adult internet users have watched a video on these sites, up from just 33% who reported this in December 2006.
The use of video sharing sites currently outranks many other headline-snatching internet pastimes among American adults. Watching online videos on sites like YouTube is more prevalent than the…
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…
A new report released yesterday shows that eight of 10 students around the world want universities to revamp traditional learning environments while over 90 percent want to join or start a Green Advocacy group at their campus. 64 percent of students believe that the world has a chance to reverse carbon emissions by 2025, and 60 percent believe that education and efficient transportation offer the best hope for sustainability of our cities.
These are just a few of the findings of a remarkable crowdsourcing process held earlier this year by IBM called the Smarter Planet University Jam. Nearly 2,000 students, faculty, IBM business leaders, technologists, governmental officials, and industry partners from 40 countries around the globe took part in the Jam and demonstrated both enthusiasm and optimism about opportunities to work together.
A team of Jam hosts, facilitators, and subject matter…
In the wake of Walter Cronkite’s death, time.com asked readers to vote for today’s most trusted newscaster. The decisive winner, with 44 percent of the vote, was Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s pull-no-punches “The Daily Show.” This was well ahead of the 29 per cent for NBC anchor Brian Williams, 19 per cent for ABC’s Charles Gibson and 7 per cent for CBS’s Katie Couric. (See map for state-by-state results.)
In my mind, the results are completely predictable. Personally I trust Jon Stewart more than anyone else to probe issues of actual importance. Most network news is sensationalist, and typically irrelevant blather, one step up from man bites dog. There are real problems in the world today. Young people know this. Increasingly they don’t accept the existing paradigms of what constitutes public discourse.
A group of more than 100 universities, professional associations, and student groups joined the Breakthrough Institute yesterday in submitting a letter urging the U.S. Senate to fully support the Obama administration’s national energy education initiative. The initiative, named “RE-ENERGYSE” (REgaining our ENERGY Science and Engineering Edge), would produce thousands of highly-skilled U.S. energy workers and develop new energy education programs at American universities and K-12 schools.
The Senate is poised to reject the proposal in its FY2010 Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill by cutting the RE-ENERGYSE program’s funding to $0 from the $115 million requested in President Obama’s FY2010 budget. Obama announced the initiative in a speech to the National Academy of Sciences in April, stating, “The nation that leads the world in 21st century clean energy will be the nation that leads in the 21st century global economy……
I’m of mixed emotions when I read about the commotion prompted by Morgan Stanley’s release of a research note in the UK about young people’s media habits that was written by Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old intern at the investment bank.
The report, which dismissed Twitter and described online advertising as pointless, proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen - so we published it,” said Edward Hill-Wood, executive director of Morgan Stanley’s European media team, in an article published in the Guardian.
“We’ve had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day.” He said the note had generated five or six times more responses than the team’s usual research. In his report, Robson had little comfort for struggling print publishers, saying no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and…
This week at the National Educational Computing Conference, the Consortium for School Networking (or CoSN) and nGenera Corporation, led by Don Tapscott - chairman of its nGenera Insight thought leadership group and best-selling author - announced a partnership between their organizations, based on common interests in aligning the power of Web 2.0 with the enterprise needs of school districts and their communities. Through the partnership, CoSN and its members will participate in thought leadership webinars, join original research projects, and receive Web 2.0 and collaborative advisory services from nGenera. For its part, nGenera will participate in CoSN conferences, CTO Clinics, and Forums; join key CoSN leadership initiatives; and contribute to CoSN professional development resources such as its EdTechNext mini-reports series.
“We are thrilled to have Don Tapscott and nGenera join CoSN as a major sponsor through this partnership,” said Keith Krueger, CEO of CoSN. “Our mission is to empower K-12 school…
As you may be aware, Toy Story 3 will be in theatres by this time next year, more than 10 years since the release of its popular prequel, Toy Story 2. Here’s a preview.
Now you may wonder how a computer animated Disney film is relevant to your enterprise?More than you think.
Pixar studios may as well be the poster child for internal collaboration. Over the years, its community of artists have collectively generated a series of stories, plots, and unforgettable characters. Do you remember watching Finding Nemo, Monster Inc, or A Bug’s Life? What about Wall-E and more recently, Up? these titles must ring a bell. Most of the studio’s releases have grossed well over $200 Million at the box office and have become household names launching a new revenue stream composed of franchised toys and goods.In an Interview conducted last year, John Lassetter, Chief Creative Officer, emphasized that “talent in…
We’ve already seen a twitter version “Dad dead. Mom slut. Uncle sux. Talking emo 2 self: 2B? Not? Revenge? GF all wet. Her dad a rat” and Facebook version of Hamlet.
The alienated teenager has lost much of his novelty, said Ariel Levenson, an English teacher at the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Holden’s home turf. She added that even the students who liked the book tend to find the language — “phony,” “her hands were lousy with rocks,” the relentless “goddams” — grating and dated.
“Holden Caulfield is supposed to be this paradigmatic teenager we can all relate to, but we don’t really speak this way or talk about these things,” Ms. Levenson said, summarizing a typical…
On Thursday of this week I’ll be hosting the book launch for Yes We Did - Rahaf Harfoush’s story of the role of the new media in the Barack Obama campaign and its implications for business.
The deft use of digital technologies by Obama’s team during the primaries and the election itself is already the stuff of political legend. Obama strategists promised that a President Obama would continue to use the Internet and social media to open up the government to greater scrutiny and give Americans a stronger voice in how the government is managed.
Recently, Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media at the White House, released a video [see above] on the White House blog that highlights the new media channels that the Administration has created to help fulfill its campaign pledge of more open government.
The well-known Toronto band Men in Suits will be profiled this evening on the Global TV 6:00 pm news. Band members Don Tapscott, Gerry Throop, Jim Hardy, Vince Mazza and Stewart Borden have given charitable concerts for many years in Toronto, and have had a long relationship with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health with their annual popular “Rock for the Brain” concerts. The Centre is Canada’s leading addiction and mental health teaching hospital, and proceeds from this year’s Rock for the Brain event went to fund research in the area of Eating Disorders.
