Blog on the evolution of learning

Great blog on how learning has evolved by Howard Rheingold.

Learning Reimagined: Participatory, Peer, Global, Online

First, I have found that in both my traditional physical classrooms and online environments, the chances of successful outcomes are multiplied when every person in the group makes a commitment to active participation in helping others learn.

Read more at dmlcentral.net

Comments and thoughts are always welcome.

In search of – the meaning of a “hack”

I was reading reuters.com over the weekend (I really was, no gratuitous plug here). While in the technology section, I came across a blog titled “The real meaning of hack” by Adam Penenberg. Anyone who knows me would realize that a blog title like this is a great way to get my attention.

The first part of the article was all about Mr. Penenberg trying to convince us that he is an expert on hacking. All Mr. Penenberg convinced me is that he is a prolific writer and uses his interpretation of hack and hacker in his writings.

Mobility and the PC

The PC as we know it is dying. Not today or even in the near future but there’s no question that it has been on extended life support for sometime. The demise of the PC in its current form is being driven by an overwhelming desire of the marketplace to be mobile.

But is mobility something new or just an evolved form of traditional computing. I suppose most people have associated mobility with e-mail or perhaps some web surfing on their mobile device. But true mobility is all about computing on demand and having the same accessibility to content and applications anywhere and everywhere.

Germany and Nucelar Power

One of the things I love about social media is sharing information amongst the people in my network. Today I was sent a link to a news story that a couple of people thought would interest me. They were right, though I admit to being a bit embarrassed that the story came from Reuters and I failed to see it.

The story was about Germany’s decision to pull the plug on its nuclear industry in 2022. The viral nature of the Internet ensured that every detail of the Fukushima disaster unfolded in real-time. Given this and the overall political climate in Germany, one can’t be surprised at the motivation behind this decision.

Problem Management through Social Media

If you follow me via my blog or Twitter (@readyforthenet) you likely would have seen a flurry of tweets and posts around a failure event last week involving the Long Island Railroad (LIRR). Sure it was a bit frustrating for many people, including me; however it evolved into a case study in the use of Social Media to manage through consumer issues.

Now we are not talking about your average consumer, we are talking about some of the most demanding commuters in the country, commuters who pay substantial ticket fares to travel to very demanding jobs and receive a sub-optimal service.

The LIRR historically has its share of service outages, but what has caused the most pain for their customers has been their lack of clear communications during an outage. The LIRR has tried; they put an e-mail alerting system in place. When it works it is ok; however e-mail alerting is unreliable, not scalable and lacks persistency. Typical complaints are not receiving the alert, receiving the alert long after the event occurred or missing the e-mail in the normal sea of e-mails received daily.

Commuting and Social Media

Today at 7PM I received an alert from the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) about an issue that happened that would impact tomorrow’s morning commuter train commute. They said look for updates before heading for work.

This is not a first and brings up the question ‘Why are they always so reactive with so little process?’ Issues occur that can't be predicted in advance, but flexible response processes can be developed to limit the impact of an issue. This would be an ideal time for them to be proactive and implement a pre-planned reduced schedule. Then leverage social media to get the word out to as many people as possible.

While looking at their social media presence, I found out that they do not monitor their social media 24x7. Do they think that nothing is reported via social media? Or perhaps events, issues or any other news never happens outside of their 9-5 M-F monitoring window.