Grok Headline matches for Fear over poor UK language skills
Great Excuse for Poor Math Skills (Reuters)
Great Excuse for Poor Math Skills (Reuters)08/20/2004 08:07 AM Reuters - Some people have a great excuse for
being bad at math -- their language lacks the words for most
numbers, U.S.-based researchers reported on Thursday.
Fear of viruses and poor protection grows07/06/2004 01:28 PM Majority of European businesses are bracing themselves for a barrage
of viruses. Few believe they can weather the storm.
Skills White Paper: needs to have an impact in UK's ICT skills shortage
Geek Conferences: Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself02/16/2004 05:37 AM Is the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference elitist? This
question seems to be stirring up the blogosphere, and causing lots of
good people who I read and like to throw verbal bricks at each other.
I thought that as someone who is clearly not a member of the blogging
elite, I might have a useful perspective to offer. Is the conference
elitist? Of course it is - and no, it isn't. Both are true. It is
elitist in the sense that it requires interest, knowing that the
conference is going to happen, and being able to come up with the
large amounts of time and money to attend. This rules out a very large
proportion of the world. However, if someone is motivated and willing
to rough it, it is possible to attend the conference for a lot less
money than the standard cost of the conference and swanky hotel. In my
case I found cheap late night flights on Southwest, stayed in a very
cheap hostel (though not as cheap as the hacker loft crash pad), and
got a free pass to the conference by writing and asking Tim O'Reilly
nicely for one -- I saw other free passes being given away via the
Wiki. So the money doesn't have to be the huge barrier it seems like
at first, but attending does require a bit of luck and or chutzpah,
geographical proximity, and being willing to stay in considerably less
than stellar accommodations. The conference can also feel elitist
because so many of the people who attend know each other. Many of them
have long-standing professional, technical and personal ties (and
ongoing feuds). If, like me, you are somewhat reticent by nature, you
don't have ties to lots of people at the conference, and you don't
have any particular product or idea to promote, it can be easy to feel
intimidated or like an outsider surrounded by insiders. For instance,
one day of the conference I ran into Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Micah
Sifry and Scott Rosenberg at a cafe next door to the conference. I
read 3 out of 4 of them regularly, I respect their work a lot, and I
would have enjoyed sitting at their lunch table and listening to them
talk. Did they invite me to join them for lunch? Of course not, no
more than I would invite a random stranger I saw...
Libraries Have Nothing to Fear [about RSS] but Fear Itself
"However, whether or not to use RSS on your site should no longer
be an option. I believe it has become a necessity if you wish to
compete with others in your industry....
For many users today, bookmarks have become useless since we have
too many of them. Bookmarks allow for information overload just as
easily as RSS does, but the difference is that RSS allows updates
through all that information overload. A bookmark gets hidden, but if
you update your site then the RSS feed will reflect that and tell the
reader its time to view the content....
With the plethora of sites around fighting for the mindshare of
your readers becomes essential. Why lessen your chances by not
including a RSS feed? That opens the gates for everyone else to
increase their readership. RSS feeds create more opportunities and the
advantages outweigh the disadvantages." [BusinessLogs, via del.icio.us/tag/rss]
Microsoft Skills12/31/2004 06:31 AM William H. Gates III is chairman and chief software architect of
Microsoft Corp. He spoke with Fast Company about patience,
fast-following, and the innovation gap.
Bachelor Cooking Skills
Bachelor Cooking Skills03/06/2004 02:09 AM A good sized box of TastyBite food arrived today (it's heavier than I
expected), inspired by Michael Radwin's ode to TastyBite Indian Food a
few weeks ago. I ordered at least one of just about everything they
sell that does not contain any dairy product in it (since lactose and
I don't agree). It didn't occur to me when I ordered it, but the
timing couldn't be better. I'm moving into the new place on Friday, so
this will...
UK skills need boost, union says09/14/2004 01:24 AM UK companies need to boost the amount of training they give staff, or
it will become more difficult to fill vacancies, the Amicus trade
union said.
Improving undergraduate research skills01/22/2004 02:12 AM Much like students might, they became overwhelmed, turning to
databases they regularly use (and even, it can now be told, to Google)
for help. ...
Now They Tell Us: Calculators Bad For Kid's Math Skills
Now They Tell Us: Calculators Bad For Kid's Math Skills04/15/2004 03:41 AM There was a big controversy decades ago about whether or not
calculators should be allowed in the classroom (similar to the
"computers in the classroom" debate today). After a number of studies
showed that calculators actually helped the debate pretty much died
down. Now, however, years later, along comes another study saying
that
calculators may harm math skills. Of course, the study seems
quite narrow - looking at how well kids who normally used calculators
could subtract, multiply and divide showed they had a lot more trouble
doing those things without the calculator. I'm not sure how
surprising or enlightening this is. Since they don't get much
practice doing such simple calculations, it may not be the easiest
thing for them to do right away. That doesn't mean that their overall
math skills are necessarily worse. In fact, the point of earlier
studies was that the calculators let them do more advanced math
sooner, which meant they often enjoyed math a lot more. So, the
question is whether or not you need to master the basic math questions
when you can just use a calculator (or computer) to do that work for
you, so you can concentrate on more complicated ideas? I have mixed
opinions on this one. There is something about having an
understanding of the fundamentals that seems useful, because it helps
you solve unfamiliar problems by breaking it down. Still, if you're
always going to have access to a calculator, is it really as
necessary?
Microsoft recognizes on-the-job skills in IT certification
The Idea: The New
Economy will have an explosive need for critical entrepreneurial
skills. Universities are not equipped or inclined to provide them. You
can't learn them just by reading a book. We need to create a whole new
'channel' for entrepreneurial education. Here's how it might
work.
When I wrote Natural
Enterprise
my principal goal was to 'reinvent' entrepreneurship as a venture that
would allow people to make a living, easily, joyously, without
significant cost, risk or stress, with people they love. We can feel
it
in our bones, and in our three million year old DNA, that that is how
making a living should be. My
secondary purpose was to fill a gap in both high school and university
commerce/MBA programs -- teaching students how to start and run their
own business effectively. The professors and students I have spoken to
have confirmed the views of the readers of How to Save the World that there is an acute need for
this. Yet publishers tell me, and I respect their judgement, that
Natural Enterprise
is not sufficiently different from other books on entrepreneurship
already out there. I have concluded therefore that the problem isn't
in
the books on entrepreneurship, but rather on the way in which entrepreneurship is (and is not)
taught.
That's what I was getting at when I asked the question last week "How
could we effectively teach online
the critical skills that take a lot of practice and one-on-one
coaching?" Your answers suggest the issue of teaching online is just the tip of the
iceberg -- teaching these skills period is an enormous challenge, and good books and
software and online resources only get us part of the way there.
Almost all the successful entrepreneurs I know learned the essential
skills on the job. What are the essential entrepreneurial skills? In
my
experience they are the ones depicted on the mindmap above. So what
would be an effective process to impart those skills to the millions
of
people around the world who would be happier and more effective as
entrepreneurs than as cogs in a large corporate machine?
Here's the process I have suggested to several universities.
Each 'session' would have as its theme one of the
critical entrepreneurial skills in the mindmap above.
Students would be given a set of pre-reading
consisting of
both theory and stories about great entrepreneurial successes and
failures in applying this critical skill.
Each session would
be held, live, at the premises of a
different entrepreneurial business, one with exemplary success at
applying this critical skill.
There would be no lecture.
The session would consist of (a) a tour of the premises, (b) a brief
story told by the CEO of the history of the company and how they'd
learned to apply the critical skill, and (c) a Q&A session where
the students would ask questions of the CEO. The course facilitator
would jump in with answers and clarifications based on what other
entrepreneurs had done. No 'large corporation' examples would be
used.
There would be no examination. At 'mid-term', the
entrepreneurs who host the sessions would collectively grade the
Business Plans prepared and presented by the students in one long
Saturday session. The 'final' pass or fail would be based solely on
whether the businesses proposed in the students' Business Plans had
been successfully launched or not.
Students would have access
to 'coaches' on an ongoing
basis. These could include existing entrepreneurs, course
facilitators,
legitimate entrepreneurial consultants
It's at once a radical and a pragmatic approach, one that mimics as
much as possible the learning that entrepreneurs get on the job. While
the professors I have spoken to love it, the university executives
higher up shudder at the thought of a curriculum with no classroom, no
instructor and no lecturing. They find the concept threatening, and
say
it would be impossible to 'sell' to curriculum committees, which are,
they confess, in the business of filling seats in their expensive real
estate and defending the process of tenured experts lecturing as
somehow a better way of imparting knowledge than letting students find
things out for themselves. Rather than trying to change their minds, I
have concluded that, since they have nothing to offer those who need
entrepreneurial skills other than the 'brand' of the university, we're
better off finding a way to provide entrepreneurial education without
them.
So here's where you come in. Help me create a 'business model' for
entrepreneurial education that meets these very difficult
challenges:
We cannot expect much government money or support, since
we
are setting up an economy that will compete with and threaten the
large
corporations that currently have politicians in their back
pockets.
Our 'customers', students and those disenchanted with
wage
slavery, don't have a lot of time or money to invest in such
education.
Those who have tried to offer such education in
past,
including various 'get a better job institutes' and many of the
consultants who 'serve' the entrepreneurial community, are
incompetent,
exploitative, or worse, and have made many people cynical about
entrepreneurial education.
Although the process I describe
above is an improvement, we
need some way for students to practice what they've learned, before
they launch their own business. We need a modern equivalent of the
'apprenticeship' program under which many craftsmen honed their skills
until they were ready to go out on their own. Ideally we'd like such
'practice' opportunities to be focused in the industries with the
greatest entrepreneurial opportunity, like health
care, education, recreation, community energy, food and biologicals
production, and the 'connections' industry (personal networking
and communications) -- industries driven more than anything else by
information and innovation.
We need a way to credentialize
entrepreneurial consultants
and coaches. None of the traditional credentializations for work with
large corporations -- MBA, CPA/CA, CFA, CMC etc -- are adequate or
appropriate for working with entrepreneurs. Legitimate consultants and
coaches to entrepreneurs need to have the critical skills above and
experience in an entrepreneurial environment.
We need a new type of network or channel that will
allow
all the 'players' in entrepreneurial education -- existing
entrepreneurs, students and aspiring entrepreneurs, facilitators,
legitimate consultants and coaches, to contract with and help each
other. It should be a robust, commercial network -- people's time is
valuable, and it is reasonable that they be compensated for
it.
We need to engage students early -- junior high is not too
early -- and start getting them acclimatized to the new economy and
the
entrepreneurial landscape, so that they have longer to acquire the
critical skills and don't get diverted into more traditional
educational paths that are now largely dead ends.
The business model needs to show (ideally graphically) how students
would enroll, how facilitators, consultants, coaches, and
entrepreneurs
would be brought together and compensated for their time, how the
educational curriculum and standards for programs, consultants and
coaches would be established and upheld, how we would promote the
programs and keep them affordable, how the outreach to high schools
would work, how we could establish facilities or programs where
students could 'practice' etc. Any ideas you have on any of these
issues would be very welcome. Another critical area where I could use
your advice is Where to
Start? We need to walk before we run. What would a pilot
program look like and who might sponsor it?
Entrepreneurs face a deck stacked against them by large corporations
with huge budgets, (in some industries) massive government subsidies,
and politicians in their debt and at their beck and call. Large
corporations buy cheap because they're considered low-risk and buy in
volume. They are often organized into oligopolies designed to raise
entrance barriers to their industries. They are patenting everything
in
sight, thanks to government collusion in broadening intellectual
property laws, and they have the resources to destroy entrepreneurs
who
even come close to patent infringement. The 'service' industries are
largely disinterested in them: Banks find them expensive accounts to
manage for the amounts involved, good consultants (not quite an
oxymoron) are far more interested in the big corporations that can
give
them 7-figure contracts than mean-and-lean entrepreneurs. Most of the
valuable help entrepreneurial CEOs get today comes from other
entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs need to improve their critical
entrepreneurial skills too, and would benefit as much from the
curriculum I describe above as students aspiring to entrepreneurship.
And, just to make matters worse, the global economy is teetering,
wildly overextended by reckless spending and debt at all levels of the
economy, with price bubbles everywhere, dependent on cheap foreign
sources of resource supply (natural and human), and utterly
unsustainable.
But while this may be enough to discourage most of us from becoming
entrepreneurs, and accepting a life of wage slavery instead, the truth
is that for almost everyone in the generations up and coming there will be no other choice.
Large corporations are shedding jobs, not adding them, even as their
profits grow. Governments are shedding jobs too. All of the net
private
sector employment growth of the past decade in North America has been
entrepreneurial. The alternative to biting the entrepreneurial bullet
-- facing the obstacles in the previous paragraph, acquiring the
critical entrepreneurial skills and making your own living -- is
unemployment.
As a result I think there will be a rapidly growing appetite for
quality, practical entrepreneurial education. There's a need here. Do
we have what it takes to fill it?
Drive to boost workers' skills03/22/2005 04:38 PM The government sets out how it will extend schemes aimed at raising
the skills of England's workforce.
variety.com wants an editor with bl0g skills04/20/2004 01:42 AM TypePad experience is helpful Grok Description matches for Fear over poor UK language skills GrokA matches for Fear over poor UK language skills
Fear over poor UK language skills
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
