This month’s Utne Reader has an article featuring yours truly; the subtitle includes a term that I used, somewhat spontaneously during an interview: “radical self-educators challenge the ‘tyranny of credentials.’” I’ll explain what I meant by “tyranny of credentials.” (Regular readers may remember the original article which appeared in full at Rabble.ca and TheTyee.ca, written [...]
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A recent tweet reminded me of Clay Shirky’s excellent observation: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Kevin Kelly called it The Shirky Principle, using the example of unions to illustrate: Unions were a brilliant solution to the problem of capital management which tended to exploit uncapitalized workers. But [...]
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Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration. A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which [...]
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Yesterday’s announcement of new copyright legislation in Canada was met with the expected array of complaints from complainers, aka bloggers, slackers, n’er-do-wells, social deviants, hipsters, and cultural parasites. They received the news as an affront to their supposed “freedom” to exchange intellectual and aesthetic work and reshape existing artifacts into new “creations.” The dispute comes [...]
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Eric Schmidt shared this video via Twitter, depicting the gist of Dan Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: I feel like it shouldn’t be such a big surprise. Maybe I’m an extreme case, but most rewards seem offensive to me — like bribes — or condescending: “Hey boy, go fetch!” They have [...]
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Ken Robinson’s 2010 TED talk is up titled, “Bring on the learning revolution!“ (via @hjarche) Of course it is full of moving sentiments and wonderful ideas, presented with great wit, and I’ll recommend it to everyone (not that I have to, as it recommends itself)… but I think it falls short on substance: Criticizing schools is [...]
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My book is finished and available for purchase, download, or reading online. Sorry if you don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, where I already mentioned it a few days ago. This is the formal “announcement.” Description: Truth, Will & Relevance outlines an innovative way to understand human nature and conduct — conceived specifically to address [...]
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The whole process relies on failure. People have to be willing to accept failure and admit to mistakes, or the process won’t work properly. If we artificially hide information to deny failures — whether it’s done in the name of positive thinking or is simply a manifestation of anti-social self-interest — then the process becomes [...]
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Steven Johnson has an excellent column in the New York Times, on the iPhone and the mixed merits of open and closed platforms. He begins with a reference to Jonathan Zittrain’s work on “generativity,” (familiar to readers of this blog) i.e. “the ability of a self-contained system to provide an independent ability to create, generate [...]
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Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward. Quote from Dan Ariely’s column in the Harvard Business Review, [...]
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