Learning Innovation

Good on Sam Sommers, Tufts University psychology professor and blogger for the Huffington Post and Psychology Today.

Just renewed my subscription to The Economist. Academic pricing is $77 a year - and you can sign-up for 2 years at a time. A $154 hit on the credit credit card. Who says that print is dead? Who says that nobody will pay for quality journalism? Who says that social media is replacing professional journalism? Who says that we need to be able to tweet or comment on or share everything that we read?

Jeremy Rifkin seems to be convinced that the world (at least the European world) is enamored with Jeremy Rifkin. Perhaps he is correct. Much of the The Third Industrial Revolution is spent recounting endless meetings with European Union technocrats.

The first thing that strikes me about the new iPad is the inclusion of 4G LTE cellular, in addition to 3G networks including HSPA, HSPA+, and DC-HSDPA. The assumption is that a combination of Wi-Fi and "two cellular antennas tuned to 12 different bands that access a larger frequency spectrum" will create constant web connectivity.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are getting lots of press. The 3/4/12 issue of the NYTimes declares that "Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls". 160,000 learners participate in Stanford's AI course, which begets a whole new crop of MOOCs in everything from natural language processing to game theory.

Today I attended my first unconference, a one-day event put on by NERCOMP on the learning management system (LMS).

I think that I'm ready to part with my most cherished physical books. Only a couple of years ago this thought would have been unimaginable. Books are the center of our culture, the core of my belief system, and the basis of my personal philosophy. I am a person of the book (literally).

Should every idea come with a funding source? Every new project with new dollars? An accounting of the opportunity costs for doing this project and not that? A list of what we will not do if we do something else?