James Drogan

Dave lead me to two columns by Ben Stein; How to Succeed in Hollywood -- and Anywhere Else, and Wise Words for Getting Ahead in Your Career.  The articles will be going out to my students in the next few days and are worth a read by just about everyone.

I've just finished John Battelle's book subtitled How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. 

Of particular interest to me was the last chapter, Perfect Search, where Battelle outlines a view of the future.  The interest is in two contexts.

First, Battelle's words raise interesting questions of ethics, a topic that my students and I discuss at some length in my MIS class.

Second, as I have previously noted, I have a relationship with the Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College.  I have previously raised the issue of how the internet potentially affects communication.  Perfect Search underlines the issue as one of importance.

More from Boing Boing this morning.

 link

My current teaching assignment at SUNY Maritime College includes a graduate level course, Management Information Systems in Transportation (syllabi for this course may be found in What I am Teaching).  One of the issues we take up is the ethics of information technology.

Browsing Boing Boing this morning, I came across Ethical guidelines for a world of invisible, endless machines which, in turn, led me the last chapter of Adam Greenfield's book, Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing (New Riders Press, first edition, March 10, 2006).

Most of the discussions of the ethics of information technology seems to me to be, as might be the case in Greenfield's book, centered on the individual.  What we try do in my course is extend this notion of ethics to the enterprise and the manner in which it interrelates to other enterprises.  We've not come up with any good answers after two iterations of the course, but I think we're getting better at getting our minds around the issue.

Re Conversations with Dave

Here is an abstract view of a business system, say a logistics system.

 

My hypotheses:

1. Processes are turned into applications, information into databases, and people into users (I recognize there are other sorts of users of there) when one applies information technology to improve the performance of a business.
   
   
2. Processes, application, information, and data are widely known and shared across an industry. That is, there are few secrets in these areas.
   
   
3. People (integrity, intellect, energy, and imagination) are widely known, but not shared (i.e., there is only one of everyone) across an industry. People are the differentiator.
   
   
4. Tesco and Wal-Mart thrive because of the people they attract and retain. Imagine a three dimensional space: value enabled by technology investment, value enabled by people, and business results. I suspect that Tesco and Wal-Mart are somewhere towards the upper right back corner of the space.

Last night I attended an interesting talk at the Westport Public Library.  The subject was "Learning in a Digital Age" and the speaker was John Seely Brown.

As I heard it, Brown's thesis is that processes that combine imagination, intellect, and socialization and are enabled by technology can produce a higher quality learning experiences.  He particularly focused on "kids" and used the example of remix or mashups to illustrate his point.

By higher quality learning experience I take Brown to mean the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and experiences more directly relevant to the needs of the learner and presented in such a way that that the learner becomes passionately involved.  He made a very strong case for World of Warcraft as a mechanism for teaching leadership skills.

It seems to me that "directly relevant to the needs of the learner" has a different meaning to Brown.  I recall seeing something on his slides which I note as "pull education" or "education on demand."  This is in contrast to the typical "push" approach where the learner is subjected to that which the institution teaches.  This is related to the a June 19, 2005 entry in this blog where I note what I called The Gap Hypothesis.  In short, Brown argues that relevance is increasingly in the mind of the learner and that there are emerging channels for satisfying this need for relevance that may render traditional approachs to education untenable. 

A very provocative evening, somewhat typical of what happens at the Westport Public Library Technology Talk sessions.