Category: economics
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Time to motivate tomorrow’s aerospace engineers is today
The May 14, 2007 edition of our local Edmond Sun newspaper carried an article on page 2 titled, “Aerospace fueling economy.” (I can’t find a link to the actual article online, unfortunately.) Several things from the article stood out for me. Aerospace engineering jobs are very important in Oklahoma. According to the article: The aerospace…
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Podcast152: Thrive in 2065: Reinventing Schools for the 21st Century
The world is changing fast, and schools need to change appropriately to prepare learners for successful integration into our 21st century economy and society. This podcast is a recording of a presentation I shared on May 9, 2007 for the Rotary Club in Duncan, Oklahoma. I focused on key themes in recent books by Tom…
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Collaboration in schools: More reasons we need it
Not everyone is going to be lucky enough to work for an innovative and wildly successful (at least in financial terms) company like Google. Despite that fact, Google’s success and the managerial philosophy of its leaders provide worthwhile object lessons to which more people in business as well as education should pay attention. The May…
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Rethinking WalMart Patronage
I watched the 2005 documentary “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” last night, and want to share some reflections on the movie from the perspectives of a digital storyteller, concerned citizen/consumer, and educator. The video highlights multiple problems/challenges which are not unique to WalMart but are perhaps amplified because of the corporation’s size and…
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Obscure movies face a great future
Bryan Reesman may not have heard about NetFlix, iTunes, Amazon, eBay, U-verse and The Long Tail— or at least considered how they relate to the present and future of home movie entertainment. If he has, for some reason he didn’t mention any of these online digital outlets or concepts in his article “For Obscure DVDs,…
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Nuggets about the 21st century workforce
These are some thoughts I’ve collected this week that relate to 21st century workforce skills and our network economy. Communication devices like cell phones, laptops, and iPods increasingly enable LIFE. Reactive responses are generally inferior to proactive responses which are based on listening, planning, relationships and collaboration. There are unprecedented opportunities today for people to…
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Forward Thinking
These are my notes from a presentation by Stephen Harvill of Creative Ventures, titled “Forward Thinking: The Art of Peak Performance” from today. There is a big difference between the way fishermen and surfers think – fishermen always talk about the fish they CAUGHT – surfers are only thinking and caring about the NEXT WAVE…
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Visualizing census data, patterns and trends
Social Explorer is a powerful, web-based tool for displaying geographic U.S. census data that can be used for student research projects and presentations. A wealth of data is available in the free version, but even more is available if you or your institution subscribes. This page displays the census data by year that is available…
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Oil, Corruption, Development, Violence and Hope
I have just finished reading an eye-opening and extremely depressing article in National Geographic’s February 2007 issue, “Curse of the Black Gold: Hope and Betrayal in the Niger Delta.” Generally I don’t have a problem choosing some words to start with when composing a blog post, but I am actually not sure where to begin…
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Synthesizing the pieces
David Truss has posted a nice synthesis of several of my recent posts relating to educational reform and learning, and even created a graphic that refers to podcast #79 titled, ‘Reject Rigor: Embrace Differentiation, Flexibility, and High Expectations’. In his post, David hits on an “elephant in the room” of educational reform debates: the wide…