In a follow-up to the blog post I wrote on A Vision of Students Today I came across this video on TED Talks.

Take twenty minutes to watch this video – you won’t be disappointed – you will be inspired!

I encourage you to share this video with others and talk about these ideas with your own kids, teachers, and educational leaders through out our global community.

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize — much less cultivate — the talents of many brilliant people. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online.

Last Thursday I gave a talk at the Ottawa Podcast Meet-Up on Podcasting and Mentoring.

I talk about how many organizations are still working as if we were living in the Industrial Revolution – where the knowledge gap between the leader and the worker forced the leader to tell the worker what to do and how to do it.

By comparison, the Information Age has created an environment where we know about a great deal, but I question how much we actually understand. The Internet has also created a scenario where in many cases the worker understands more than those in leadership roles; creating an opportunity to share more than we tell.

In my experience, Podcasting provides greater context to content. Put another way, it provides greater clarity to ideas and concepts that are written.

The following are links to the information I shared at the first Podcast Meet-Up for those looking at getting started with this medium.

Kevin Rose of Digg.com and Systm outline how to set up a Podcast
Open Source Sound Editing Tool – Audacity
Feed Burner – Universal RSS feed for Pod Catchers:

A big thank you to Mark Blevis for providing me the opportunity to share my ideas with the Ottawa Podcast community. I look forward to working with Mark in putting some of these ideas into motion.

988 exabytes (988 billion gigabytes) of content will be published by the global community by the year 2010. If there was ever a need to get organized, it’s now.

From the humble beginnings of index cards in libraries to find information, to the Wikipedia revolution, knowledge has become something that all have access too.

The fundamental problem still remains for most people and organizations: Can you find everything you need, whenever you need it?

The process of Information Architecture is what is critical today – the title one gives themselves, does not.

Peter Merholz sent this video around to members of the I.A. Institute yesterday. It was produced by Michael Wesch and the students of the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class of Spring 2007 at Kansas State University.

The video shows a time laps video of 200 students using Google Docs and Spreadsheets to make 367 edits in surveying themselves on what it means to be a student in North America today. This is followed by different students holding up signs that spell out the results. The following are a few of the statistics:

Average class size 115
18% of teachers know my name.
Only 26% of what I’m taught is relevant to real life
I will read 8 books this year – 2300 web pages and 1281 Facebook profiles
I spend 3.5 hours a day online
I buy hundred dollar text books that I never open
When I graduate I’ll be starting a job that doesn’t exist today

My favorite is when a young lady holds up the famous scantron “multiple guess” sheet that says, “filling this out won’t help me get there…or deal with (with arrows pointing at all of the details presented up to that point by others in the class). I never understood how circling one of five answers proves you understand the subject matter being taught.

I hated classes where you had to circle the “most correct” answer. Implying that all of the answers were right, but you had to literally guess what the professor thought was the most correct. And if you were wrong you’d actually have marks taken away from you! Are you kidding me?

Clearly the way the iGeneration is learning today is a complete shift in the way the baby boomers’ learned.

Acknowledge who your students are and teach to their capacity and passion.

If it sounds ridiculous to teach blogging 101 to a group of senior citizens who don’t know or care about technology, why are colleges and Universities still teaching as if it were 1945 to a generation who could care less about traditional methods of teaching?

This morning I had the opportunity to speak with Israels’ Tal Schwartz about the web analytics tool, ClickTale.

We discuss the various functionality found in the tool including heat maps, movie recordings, and the various businesses who have used ClickTale to improve User Experience.

We also discuss the idea of community and how as the world “grows smaller” it becomes critical to listen more than you tell when trying to build findable and user friendly websites.

In the introduction of the show I say that not everything has to happen “below” the fold of the page. What I meant, of course, was that not everything has to occur above the fold of the page based on this new data that has been gathered by ClickTale. Sorry about that, Tal – my mistake.

I talked also about the upcoming Podcast series with Boxes and Arrows. I spoke with India’s Afshan Kirmani and her article, Getting a Form’s Structure Right and will have that published in the next couple of weeks. I will be hosting shows with other authors in the coming weeks so be sure to check out the Podcast for Boxes and Arrows.