Social discovery

Photo courtesy of ©iStockphoto.com/sjlocke

In a recent Economist, in the article on Facebook’s planned IPO, a quote caught my attention:

Some form of social-discovery feature in Facebook is inevitable [Joe Green, the boss of Causes.com, a web business that promotes activism and philanthropy]

This lead me to consider how we engage with new people, and how we are using the internet to engage in social discovery (meeting new people, and engaging in social dialogue, and possibly ‘learning’ from them).

Since starting this post, I’ve also become aware of an upcoming genre of apps which are designed to aid location-based social discovery (more on this below).

Future of work thread (via Work Talk Research)

I came across a tweet this evening from Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd), a blogger, and decided to share my own thoughts (a copy of which is set out further down this post), on the topic of:

What are the ten (or so) most important themes or trends in the future of work, today?

There’s a good discussion developing, and I’ll be interested to see where it ends up (Stowe Boyd is using his site to crowdsource some thoughts on the topic, and is planning to present an analysis in the next couple of weeks).

The Perfect Innovative Market

Photo courtesy of ©iStockphoto.com/fotosipsak

I’ve been contemplating a concept for a while, struggling to put it into words, and this evening it just dropped into place.

Just as there is a theoretical definition of a ‘Perfect capital market‘, there can be a theoretical definition of a ‘Perfect innovative market‘.  And just as how many capital markets are highly efficient, but perhaps not quite perfect, innovation has become highly efficient (albeit perhaps not quite perfect).

Expanding Codecademy’s future potential

I recently posted about Codecademy, and its Code Year’ initiative.

I’ve kept up with the courses so far (just four weeks so far).

There are however a number of ways that I would like to see Codecademy further develop.  Since they are still in a certain ‘honeymoon’ phase, with popular and mainstream press having taken notice of what they are doing, they should make the changes soon, and maintain momentum (to be clear, they have launched a number of new developments recently, so it appears they are following this approach, but there’s more potential still).

Autodidacticism and the future of the world

Photo courtesy of ©iStockphoto.com/arakonyunus

Why do so many people pay so much money for further education, and executive education? Indeed, why do we need a formal education ‘system’ – why don’t we just teach ourselves what we need to know, with the same books used in education establishments?

Higher education courses are often based on published texts and “blackboard” teaching (or other medium: whiteboard, projector, beamer, etc.). Yet most of this ‘knowledge’ is available to purchase directly (without much of the indirect overhead of education establishments), or even, in some cases, free online, including recorded videos of whole semesters of classes.

Why do we insist on engaging (and paying) others so much to help us learn? Are there other benefits that make it worthwhile?