Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
I've been hearing about disruptive technologies for a few years now, and I've even used the term myself in various presentations. I probably started using it before I knew its origin, that is, Clayton Christensen's 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. Now with Christensen's newest book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation ...
Posted in General | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
I'll try not to be too nostalgic here, but I can't help mentioning that my first PC, a 12-MHz 286 I bought in college, was equipped with a spacious 32-MB hard drive. I could fill that drive today with just a few photos from my Canon G9. In contrast, the ...
Posted in General | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
Government agencies don't generally have an innovative reputation. But NASA? Come one. If any government entity would be likely to embrace innovation and creative problem solving, certainly the organization that said this (prepare your J.F.K. impersonation) would encourage critical thinking.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go ...
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Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Bill Buxton's recent BusinessWeek article How To Keep Innovating got me thinking again about art. More about that later. Buxton recommends worrying a lot less about mastering a particular skill and instead embracing your passions. Specifically, he recommends:
Always be bad at something that you are passionate about.
You can be everything ...
Posted in General | 8 Comments »
Monday, March 9th, 2009
This isn't one of those "I know I haven't been blogging much lately, but I promise to do better from now on" kinds of posts, even though I haven't been blogging much lately and I promise to do better from now on. Frankly, I'm not sure what this post is ...
Posted in General | 6 Comments »
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
I was sitting in one of Ewan McIntosh's sessions at BLC08 and couldn't help noticing how much delight he took in disputing the digital native/digital immigrant distinction. The native/immigrant comparison may not be accurate (so Ewan says), but it sure is useful. I've used those terms many times since reading ...
Posted in General | 22 Comments »
Monday, May 12th, 2008
At the most recent meeting of the Minnesota Education Media Organization Technology Special Interest Division (I couldn't resist writing that out) I learned about a cool professional development opportunity called 23 Things On a Stick. Curious about the name? If you've visited the Minnesota State Fair you'd know how we ...
Posted in General | 12 Comments »
Monday, May 5th, 2008
Here's a little tweak that should make Twitterator just a bit more useful. You can now pass the URL for the list of people to follow in the link to Twitterator itself. For example, let's say you've collected a list of Twitter usernames in a text file at http://mytwitternames.com/lsdf28sdf. A ...
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Sunday, May 4th, 2008
The Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon was my first try at the 13.1-mile distance, and I was bound and determined not to repeat the rookie mistakes I've made in previous races. In last year's Run For Oromia 10k and Twin Cities Marathon, I felt good at the beginning and started way ...
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Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
Big news in my world this week. Starting on July 1st I will be changing school districts to become the Chief Technology Officer in the Osseo Area Schools. It's a really exciting opportunity to work in a large metro district (22,000 students in 31 schools) with a great leadership team ...
Posted in General | 16 Comments »
Saturday, April 19th, 2008
I've made a few tweaks to Twitterator over the last couple days, the most significant of which is a measure of compatibility with DabbleDB. If you create a basic DabbleDB database with a single column of twitter usernames, you can specify the URL to the .txt or .csv versions of ...
Posted in General | 4 Comments »
Monday, April 14th, 2008
I may attract the trademark police for this, but so be it.
It seemed like an innocent enough question at the time, but when Steve Dembo (teach42) posted a tweet last week looking for a way to import a list of Twitter names to follow I decided to run with it. ...
Posted in General | 7 Comments »
