How much do I love Jacques Barzun? The exemplary historian and teacher, proponent of the Great Books tradition, Dean of Faculties and Provost at Columbia University for over a decade, who also graced the cover of Time magazine for a feature on American intellectuals, etc, etc, etc… wrote this about amateurs: A world of professionals [...]
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higher education,
history,
jacques barzun,
learning,
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professions,
universities
With so many people claiming to be social media experts we just as often hear “there are no social media experts.” There certainly are a lot of people who can generate a whole bunch of verbiage, but social media presents such an all-encompassing, massive and dynamic shift that the “social media expert” label makes about [...]
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careers,
discipline,
epistemology,
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knowledge,
professions,
social media,
society,
web
by Brian on 05-16-2009
in media
Above all the claims about the need to save journalism, about it being essential to our society, etc, this fact seems to be missed: the more essential journalism is supposed to be, the more continuously prevalent it should appear throughout history. How much historical continuity is there? Where did journalism really come from? What is [...]
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cultural evolution,
evolution,
history,
journalism,
media,
practices,
professions,
twitter
As pointed out in the last post, some members of the current generation of news brass aren’t managing to see the future of their business because their vision is obscured by the conventional newsroom lens. They only see the competition that’s closest to their own conventions, but the range of threats they need to recognize are much more diffuse. Here [...]
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blogging,
blogs,
creativity,
discipline,
media,
nascence,
news,
newspapers,
professions,
web
A recent discussion on David Armano’s blog, Logic + Emotion, has motivated me to clarify what I mean by “generalism.” The conversation was started by Dave Gray’s illustration of the “Generalist or Specialist” dichotomy, the key difference being that generalists “are best when defining the problem or goal” [I wouldn't change a word of that.] [...]
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creativity,
generalism,
personality,
professions
