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"You can’t manage knowledge. Nobody can. What you can do is to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted and applied."
Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell, Learning to Fly
(via Sahana Chattopadhyay @sahana2082)
Dream Speakers
Today I asked my amazing twitter community whom they would love to learn from online or at an in-person event. I specifically sought the names of females, living today, although some people missed that caveat. All the responses were illuminating and so I’ve included them here.
If you’re curious, I asked because I was attempting to make a point in some other writing that today we can learn from our “dream speakers” online, through books, over the tube—whereby in the past, we might only have heard them teaching a class or at a conference.
Thank you to everyone who chimed in. My head is swimming with the prospects of how much we could each learn.
———
BeckyDMBR @marciamarcia Connie May Fowler, Connie Schultz.
britz @marciamarcia madeline albright
oline73 @marciamarcia also danah boyd, Mimi Ito
slewth @marciamarcia I’d ask for Louise Bourgeois.
oline73 @marciamarcia Dream keynotes? Howard Bloom, Clay Shirky, Elon Musk, Lee Kuan Yew, Rory Stewart, J.C. Watts
trib @marciamarcia best female speakers I’ve heard recently - Nina Jablonsky and Liz Coleman - compelling.
BeckyDMBR @marciamarcia Geneva Overholser, Barbara Ehrenreich.
TonyLoyd @marciamarcia Dream Speakers: Living Female: YOU, of course. Also @sarahstanley. Mission: inspire children to move.
StevenWalling @marciamarcia Marissa Mayer or (for non-tech) Vandana Shiva.
BeckyDMBR @marciamarcia Top of my list? Gro Harlem Brundtland.
susanmernit @marciamarcia: alive keynoters? Louise Erdich, Muriel Siebert, Ellen Hancock, Red Burns, Lisa Stone, Lucinda Williams
ITSinsider @marciamarcia first one that comes to mind is Anna Quindlin.
TonyLoyd @marciamarcia Dream Speakers: Dead Female: Eleanor Roosevelt - led the charge for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My hero.
Geotch @marciamarcia Oprah
JudithELS @marciamarcia There’s only one - Baroness Margaret Thatcher! susanmernit @marciamarcia: dream keynoters: Emma Goldman, Rimbaud, Ada Lovelace, Colette, Henry Miller, Madame CJ Walker, Chester Himes, Luther Burbank
JillElswick @marciamarcia Demosthenes.
lisasolod @marciamarcia I am partial to Margaret Atwood.
tericee @jstogdill @marciamarcia Hearing Grace Hopper speak like *would* be great!
gminks @marciamarcia Wilma Mankiller
jstogdill @marciamarcia I wish she was still alive so I could say Grace Hopper.BeckyDMBR @marciamarcia Just ONE woman? Seriously?
rwang0 RT @marciamarcia: What woman, living today anywhere on earth, would you most want to speak at a conference or even online?
"Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere."
A. A. Milne
Did You Know/Shift Happens (v 4.0)
For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com. Content by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, design and development by XPLANE.
Go. Now. Live.
Amid thousands of people in dark suits and Lotus swag at the Lotusphere conference this week in Orlando, I was introduced to this beautiful poem by Jeanette Leblanc via Lotus’ Bilal Jaffery, an IBM marketing manager specializes in social media. [I’m here because of the LotusKnows campaign. Perhaps #LotusKnows I appreciate things like this?]
It gets to the heart of why many of us believe in social media — because it doesn’t take us away from our interests, our passions, our work, our colleagues. It makes our ability to connect with them easier, wider, and faster.
Here is the text so you can enjoy every word.
Go now, and Live…
Experience. Dream. Risk. Close your eyes and jump. Enjoy the freefall. Choose exhilaration over comfort. Choose potential over safety. Wake up to the magic of everyday life. Make friends with your intuition. trust your gut. Discover the beauty of uncertainty. Know yourself fully before making promises to another. Make millions of mistakes so that you will know how to choose what you really need. Know when to hold on and when to let go. Love hard and often and without reservation. Seek knowledge. Open yourself to possibility. Keep your heart open, you head high, and your spirit free. Embrace your darkness along with your light. Be wrong every once in a while, and don’t be afraid to admit it. Awaken to the brilliance in ordinary moments. Tell the truth about yourself no matter what the cost. Own your reality without apology. See good ness in the world. Be Bold. Be Firece. Be Grateful. Be Wild, Crazy, and Gloriously Free. Be You…
Go now, and Live.
(c) Jeanette Leblanc, 2008
Tinkering is Back: WSJ
The American tradition of tinkering — the spark for inventions from the telephone to the Apple computer — is making a comeback, boosted by renewed interest in hands-on work amid the economic crisis and falling prices of high-tech tools and materials.
The modern milling machine, able to shape metal with hairbreadth precision, revolutionized industry. Blake Sessions has one in his dorm room, tucked under the shelf with the peanut butter on it. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology junior has been using the mill to make prototypes for a bicycle-sprocket business he’s planning. He bolts down a piece of aluminum plate, steps to his desk and, from his computer, sets the machine in motion.
“It’s kind of a ridiculous thing to have,” says Mr. Sessions, 20 years old. But “in today’s marketplace you can’t only offer a technical aptitude. You have to be able to provide something more.”
Read the full story by Justin Lahart on the Wall Street Journal website.
As you can probably tell, I’m going through a tinkering phase. - M
Learning to Tinker
By Patty Fisher, Mercury News 11/30/2009
The Wall Street Journal recently declared that we are in the midst of a renaissance in tinkering. Across the country, more folks are building stuff in the basement, fixing things they would have thrown away before.
Maybe it’s the economy. Or the recycle/reuse mantra of the environmental movement. Whatever the reason, tinkering is back. And that’s good, because today’s tinkerers are tomorrow’s inventors.
That’s the idea behind the new interactive “Tinkering” exhibit for kids at the Coyote Point Museum for Environmental Education in San Mateo. The exhibit was designed to help children understand how things work in the natural and the man-made worlds. It also encourages imagination, teamwork and problem-solving, and shows kids how much fun they can have with simple tools like gears, magnets and PVC pipe.
Last week the exhibit hall was a busy place. In one corner, a 2-year-old girl was busy stringing together colorful cables that had magnets at both ends so they stuck to each other or to metal plates. In another, a 4-year-old boy was figuring out by trial and error how to arrange plastic gears so they would all turn at once.
In the center of the room, kids were having a ball — with a ball. They were gathered around a giant Rube Goldberg-type maze circumnavigated by wooden balls that traveled up elevators, down chutes and through tubes and revolving doors. At several stations around the maze, a child had to use a Advertisement crank or a wheel to move the balls along.
In an impressive show of teamwork, 4-year-old Thomas Salas figured out that if he turned a crank that ran a belt drive, he could send the ball on to Luke Danzig, 5, who had to fiddle with another gizmo to send the ball up an elevator and on to Ariel Spivack, 6, who moved it along to Raquel Weinstein, who is almost 7.
“They’ve been here forever,” said Liana Abascal, who had brought Ariel and Raquel. “They don’t want to leave.”
Children love to take things apart and figure out how they work. But that behavior may be seen as dangerous. Better to play with a nice hermetically sealed toy with no small pieces to lose or swallow. If it breaks, just get a new one.
“When I was a kid, my dad had a basement workshop and I spent every summer down there, making a huge mess,” said Eric Maschwitz, the exhibits director at Coyote Point.
He spent months fiddling with concepts for this exhibit so it would let kids exercise imagination while learning how things work.
It also had to be safe and relatively indestructible.
“It took a lot of tinkering to make the Tinkering exhibit,” he joked.
This is the second major interactive exhibit launched at the museum since Rachel Meyer took over as executive director in 2007.
Meyer, who got her start at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and reinvigorated the Palo Alto Junior Museum during her stint there, took over Coyote Point when it was in crisis.
The beloved 50-year-old Peninsula institution nearly closed in 2006 because of mounting deficits, but it was rescued by volunteers who secured more than $1 million in pledges and grants.
I last visited when the museum was on the verge of closing.
I described the static science exhibits as having the well-worn look of a favorite toy. I was being kind. The place was drab and lifeless.
These days, there’s new life at Coyote Point. Meyer has revamped the exhibits and has renovation plans. Last year attendance was up 10 percent and membership was up 20 percent.
A successful exhibit, Meyer says, lets kids experience the forces of science and nature, whether it’s fog or wave action or the colors of the spectrum, and take that experience into the world with them.
“So many things we get in our world are packaged or virtual,” she said.
“People say you need to put bells and whistles on things to hook kids in because they don’t have an attention span, but I beg to differ,” she said, gesturing to the kids who had been turning cranks on the Rube Goldberg machine for 20 minutes.
They may not all grow up to be famous inventors, but I hope they will like to tinker.
Tinkering Exhibit The Coyote Point Museum for Environmental Education, in Coyote Point Park off Highway 101 in San Mateo, is open Tuesdays through Sundays. For directions, hours and admission prices, go to www.coyoteptmuseum.org or call 650-342-7755.
"Your job is to let information free, not to hoard it, your job is to UNshackle your employees not to shackle them, you should be concerned about obscurity instead of security, you should be breaking the rules instead of enforcing them, you should be busy building communities of practice instead of Berlin Walls. If you don’t stand up for the new generation of workers who will insist on learning from their peers, who will?"
How do you steer this thing? (Posted to Twitpic from the Smithsonian)
