James Drogan

Periodically I google "james drogan" (quotes included) to more or less keep up with what's "out there" with my name on it.

A few moments ago up pops

Hhhhhmmmm, I wonder what this is?

It turns out that "Since 2003, UKEssays.com has been the leading provider of custom written essays, dissertations and coursework."

You can, by the way, order the essay in which I am cited.  I presume that you will get a discount based on the quality of this sentence: "Prof. James Drogan (n.d.) pointed out that distance learning and classroom learning has the same teaching objectives and subject matter."

This affirms the Ninth Law: Once it's out there, it's out there.

Incredible Things That Happen on the Intenet Every 60 Seconds

The Gleick to which I refer is Gleick, J. (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. (Kindle.). Pantheon.

See Who Will Fix the US Economy?  The remaining question is what should be done about the politicl misfts?

In How Do You Talk to Big Data? I take up matters of big data and analytics (BDA), ideas behind IBM's Deep Quesion Answering concepts (Deep QA), and their potential impact on what and how we teach.  On page 7 of that note I begin the description of a business problem that would seem to lend itself well to these two techniques.

The image to the left is from the front page of the December 15 Financial Times and represents a real problem.

If I were anywhere in the associated, complex, far flung supply chain I would want to know how these actions by China are likely to impact my business and what would be the alternative response I might be able to make to minimize the impact.

Of course, it would have been even better if I had prior information such that I could have more proactive in my response.

Resolving an issue of this nature is extremely complex requiring the availability of a diverse set of interrelating information and a symbiotic decision support system (man and machine) to provide assistance.  The key to this, I believe, is human capacity and capability.  Building that, of course, is what education is all about.

Hence, the First Law: Know what you know, know what you don't know, and know who knows what you don't know.

The title of this post comes from the Comment section of the November 30 Financial Times.  I urge a reading of the commentary in its entirety.

I've long remarked that the best job is one where you are doing something you love, that is useful to others as well as yourself, and where you can make money.

I have also wondered at some length, here and elsewhere, about the changing nature of work within a complex, rapidly changing global context, and whether, as a teacher, I am properly preparing my students for "out there where the cold wind blows."

This preamble leads me to Jobs in the Age of Watson, a very provocative post by one of my favorite thinkers and bloggers, Irving Wladawsky-Berger.  Wladawsky-Berger brings to our minds the challenges of finding that best job, on the one hand, and properly preparing for it, on the other.  Addressing these challenges requires our very best in imagining, and perhaps even making real, a set of possible futures and congruent commitment to an education that maximizes our opportunities to participate in these futures in meaningful ways.

It seems to me that to do this requires a different social and economic construct, comprising values and regimes, than we have in place at the moment.  Energies spent on ideologically-based turf wars and extension of the status quo are wasted energies.  The world will move on and a risk is run that many will be left behind.