As the 21st century progresses, we are grappling with far more challenging business and social problems than ever before. Solving them will require a new approach that might be found in the most unlikely of places: design. Tim Brown shows how we can take the principles of design beyond the studio to apply them to many of the most urgent challenges facing business, society, and government today from streamlining healthcare to innovating breakthrough customer solutions, and from saving energy to ending poverty and obesity. In his talk, Brown will explain that there has never been a more important time for us all to start thinking like designers: to spot patterns in complexity, to synthesize new ideas from fragmented parts; to empathize with people different from ourselves and translate observations into breakthroughs.

Tim Brown is CEO and president of IDEO, one of the world's ten most innovative companies according to Fast Company, with clients including Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Pepsi, and Procter & Gamble. He advises senior executives and boards of Fortune 100 companies, has written for Harvard Business Review, has spoken at the World Economic Forum and the TED Conference, and his designs have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Axis Gallery in Tokyo, and the Design Museum in London.

Mr Brown, Where are your slides?

10 Power Tools for Lifelong Learners

Every now and then, we like to remind readers of the audio/video resources that Open Culture makes available to lifelong learners. These collections are all free, and can be downloaded to your computers and mp3 players. When you add it all together, you will find thousands of hours of free educational content here from quality sources.

• Free Audio Books:  This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including many classic works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Jane Austen, Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Kafka, Shakespeare, Orwell and much more. You can download them all straight to your computer or mp3 player, then listen any time. (On a related note, you might want to see our list of Life-Changing Books, according to our readers.)
• Free Courses from Major Universities: This list brings together over 250 free courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. Theses full-fledged courses range across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, including computer science. The page is a gold mine for lifelong learners.
• Free Foreign Language Lessons: Centralized in one place are free lessons that will teach you 37 languages. Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Japanese, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish and Esperanto — they’re all free and portable.
• Ideas & Culture Programs/Podcasts:  In this one collection, we have gathered together some of the most intellectually stimulating programs available via podcast. The programs will keep you thinking and culturally up-to-date, as will our collection of science podcasts. All can be downloaded straight to your mp3 player.
• The Best Intelligent Video Sites: Where can you go to find intelligent video? We have listed 46 web sites that feature a steady stream of intelligent content: documentaries, lectures, educational programming and much more.
• Smart YouTube Collections: It’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff on YouTube. But we have done it. Here you will find upwards of 100 YouTube channels that regularly serve up smart video content.
• Our YouTube Picks: Over the past few years, we have featured several hundred YouTube videos on Open Culture. And some of the best ones we have brought together in our own YouTube channel. You can subscribe to this collection and watch new videos as we add them.
• Great Classic Movies: Our new movie collection features landmark films for the student of cinema. Here, you’ll find numerous Chaplin films from the silent era, 12 Alfred Hitchcock films, and many other great works from the 1920s, 30, 40s and 50s. You’ll even find some great contemporary films as well. Many of the great American directors are represented here.
• Classical Music and Jazz: This collection features free music by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Yo Yo Ma and more. And if you care to scroll down, you will also find a plentiful list of jazz podcasts.
• Open Culture iPhone App: A little something special for iPhone users. When you download our free iPhone app, you can take with you, wherever you go, many of the items listed above. Free Audio Books, Free University Courses, Free Language Lessons, Music and Science Podcasts, etc. Give it a try and tell a friend. Note, that per Apple’s requirements, you will need access to Wi-Fi.

The new children's book Lu and the Earth Bug Crew Zap the Energy Spikes is making its way into hearts, homes and retail stores across the nation. Written by Derek Sabori and illustrated by Steven Riley and Mark Adams, the books about Lu and his friends are intended to reel kids into an active and healthy lifestyle that focuses on conservation, environmentalism, being a good friend and having fun doing it all!

Σκηνές από μια πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα ταινία για το μέλλον της εκπαίδευσης στην Μεγάλη Βρετανία.

We know that there is a lot of nonsense online. There are also gems of revelation. In recognising the consequences of these two statements, our task in universities is clear. At every opportunity, we should embed media literacy theory into our curriculum. We have a chance and responsibility to teach generations of students the skills to sort and sift online data into a workable shape for analysis and evaluation.

It is also our responsibility to improve the calibre of online information. One strategy to enact this goal is to add a step to the dissemination of research. In the analogue age, a refereed article and a couple of conference appearances satisfied funding agencies and research managers. Now we have an opportunity and imperative to repurpose our scholarship for audiences who would never read an academic article or an annual review of university research. Creating effective video is more difficult than producing strong audio content. Innovative attempts that trial new modes of dissemination should be acknowledged, beyond recording or videoing lectures or conference presentations.

A key moment of revelation for those working with the online environment is when we realise that simply because a new technology, platform or portal is invented, this does not mean that it will be used well. For more than a decade, many have been swept away with – or seriously burnt by – managerial decisions that have equated new technology with effective teaching and learning. “New” and “effective” are different words. They are not synonymous or causally linked.

Richard Harrington and Mark Weiser stated that: “Consumer-controlled video is the future.” They may be right. However, academics and students have a key role in such an environment: to increase the quality of media, information and debate. YouTube has suffered through the reputation of featuring too many videos of cats/children/brides jumping/dancing/falling awkwardly. It is used for – and has the potential to offer – much more than footage of a tipsy wedding party behaving badly. It may transform from “consumer-controlled video” to a new opportunity for learning.

References :

Tara Brabazon is professor of media studies, University of Brighton.

Contemporary Literacy — Don’t think about how technology has advanced.  We might get further by thinking about how information has changed: what it looks like, what we look at to view it, how we find it, where we find it, what we can do with it, and how we communicate it.

Contemporary Literacy & Teaching — What does the new information landscape mean to us in our jobs, and how might we use it to improve and grow in jobs?  How do I utilize my own new literacies to create and maintain my own ongoing professional development, to cultivate my own personal learning network?

Cracking the ‘Native’ Information Experience • Hacking the ‘Native’ Information Experience — What are the qualities of our students outside-the-classroom information experiences?  How do they use information to work, play, converse, and learn?  What do those actions look like outside the classroom, and what might they look like inside?