An Educator: One of the topics I tend to worry about is education. I worry about it because our country is being very slow to change the way we educate our young people. We are not preparing them for the future. I’ve become a bit of an evangelist for this concern. Moreover, to educate myself on the topic, I’ve read …
Critical Thinking: I’m struggling a bit with my thoughts on how to prepare people, especially our young people, for the work world ahead of us. Indeed, some necessary skills will be required. But which ones? It is next to impossible to predict what “jobs” will exist, let alone what skills will be needed. Surely, we will be required to work …
Expert On Every Thing: There was a time, I’m told, when it was possible for one person to know just about everything about everything. Now to be sure, that so-called “knowledge” had to be incomplete and even incorrect in many cases. Nevertheless, one could be a “Renaissance Man” (a term which may refer to a Polymath, a person whose expertise …
Skills I found some interesting information from the US Census Bureau. It seems that, according to their 2015 data, about 88% of adults have at least a high school diploma. For the purposes of this report, the adult population comprises those 25 years old and older. “We have already eliminated all jobs several times in human history,” said Kurzweil, pointing …
My Enthusiasm Can Be a Bit Much! I get excited about things—perhaps you do too. I find, however, that my enthusiasm can sometimes be received by others as “preaching.” I truly don’t mean it to be that way, but, well, that’s how it is sometimes (often?) received. What to do? Aware It’s a tough cycle to break. I study a …
It is our responsibility as leaders to make sure our employees have the tools and training to accomplish the tasks we set for them. Sometimes, if we have come up through the ranks, we believe that it’s faster if we just “do it.” That’s a critical mistake. We quickly become the bottleneck in the organization and we develop followers instead …
According to Tyler Cowen, Land, Technology and Uneducated Kids provided the America of early days an incredible diet of “low hanging fruit.” In this excellent short book (fewer than 90 pages), Mr. Cowen shows how the manifestation of having eaten all the low-hanging fruit is that individual and family median incomes have all but stagnated with respect to the pace …
Sum etiamtum – I am still learning. That’s my theme for this New Year. As I think about the new year I can’t help but wonder a bit about what’s in store for us and marvel at how technology has accelerated (and will continue to accelerate) the pace of change with which we must contend. I don’t spend a lot …
Some time ago, I wrote about how I believe that the Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) are here. Others feel the same way. And the Online Schools Organization has been gathering information on what’s available. This is a great resource! Now your job (and mine) of finding more information for continuous learning just got a bit easier. A question still …
So, here we go. I was listening to one of my podcasts yesterday and the breathless announcer was peppering his guest with questions about the President’s directive to begin mapping the human brain. We don’t even know what that means, really, at this point, but we need to get started. And I couldn’t help wonder why the show’s host was so shocked …