Shift to the Future

It is amazing what we don’t know.  We take for granted so many inventions.  It seems sometimes that we have become immune to innovation.  Often we see blog posts or tweets complaining about what some new product or service doesn’t have rather than sharing their awe at what it does have.  I too get caught up in “what’s missing” sometimes.  Well, in this post I share some amazing (my opinion) things researchers at IBM are doing. I had the pleasure of joining about 40 educators and IT directors at IBM Research Almaden in San Jose (Silicon Valley), California.  It is located on the outskirts of the city on a high hill in its own private wilderness of 690 acres.  Researchers (currently about 800 chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and physicists) at Almaden have invented a whole host of new processes and capabilities including: relational database architecture (crucial to databases that govern our livelihoods and lives) al...

A new year arrives and many of us are contemplating what the future will bring our way.  Some people make resolutions, often broken soon after.  Although I’m not into new years resolutions, I think it is good to think, plan, and engage in the future… today. “Some people make things happen, some watch things happen, while others wonder what has happened” Who do you want to become, what do you want to be different, better, and what are you going to do about it?  I encourage you to read this guest post over at George Couros’s blog The Principal of Change .  The author, Lesley Cameron , talks about trying new things, taking risks, with technology in her classroom.  She references a short clip “Two questions that can change your life” from Daniel Pink.  “What is your sentence?” is a powerful question to ask oneself.  Drive talks a lot about what motivates us and suggests that intrinsic (internal) motivation is a powerful force.  For me I think t...

I think that it is getting more complicated for school districts to decide what to buy or build and what to leverage for technology learning spaces.  The past few years have brought so many options, many for free, out on the public Internet.  Tech savvy teachers are taking their students to wiki, blog, google docs, social networking, social bookmarking, video sharing, and other spaces on the public Internet.  There are so many fantastic tools available for free. There are some challenges though with just using what’s out there on the Internet… privacy law issues, especially for Canadians, and more so for British Columbians (obligation to protect student identity) multiple digital identities to create and manage (this seems to be evolving though – often a user can login with their google, twitter, or facebook account) different tools have different setup and navigation details = complexity for less tech savvy teachers (kids care less about this though) c...