Eric Schmidt’s view on the future of business

An interesting interview with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt in the McKinsey Quarterly on the future of business. According to Eric Schmidt: 

Innovation always has been driven by a person or a small team that has the luxury of thinking of a new idea and pursuing it. There are no counter examples. It was true 100 years ago and it'll be true for the next 100 years. Innovation is something that comes when you're not under the gun ... The creative parts of one's mind are not on schedule.

That's also true in learning. Current learning models are innovation killers. They destroy the learner's capacity to reflect and innovate. There is an urgent need for new learning models that foster innovation. A fundamental shift is required toward a more personalized, open, dynamic, emergent and knowledge-pull model for learning, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all, centralized, static, top-down, and knowledge-push models of traditional learning models. 

First International Workshop on Building Sustainable Open Source (OSCOMM2009)

My dear friend Imed Hammouda, who's doing great research in the areas of software engineering, open source systems, and social software, is organizing the First International Workshop on Building Sustainable Open Source Communities (OSCOMM 2009). This workshop will be held in conjunction with the Fifth International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2009) in Skövde, Sweden, June 6, 2009. 

The goal of the workshop is to bring together interested academics, practitioners, and enthusiasts to discuss topics related to the area of open source communities. The workshop will offer an opportunity for the participants to share experiences and discuss challenges involved in building and maintaining open source communities. The workshop will also identify key research issues and challenges that lie ahead.

The call for papers is available here (.pdf). For more information, please visit the workshop website.

Please do consider submitting a paper to this very interesting workshop. 

Connectivism and the Networked Student

Via Shuchi Grover.

A nice video by Wendy Drexler, Alex Drexler, and a group of students,  in the 'Paperworks' style of the Common Craft videos, depicting the image of a 21st networked student. According to the authors, this video was inspired by the CCK08 course. I would like to take this opportunity to thank again Stephen and George for their great efforts to facilitate this course. In my eyes, CCK08 was a very successful networking event, that helped me extend my personal knowledge network with great stuff and smart people interested in the concepts of connectivim and connective knowledge. 

2009 Web Predictions

2009 Web Predictions by the ReadWriteWeb Team, mosly about big Web 2.0 companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo) and well-established Web 2.0 services (e.g. FriendFeed, Twitter, Digg).

Second World Summit on the Knowledge Society, WSKS 2009

The Open Research Society (ORS) is organizing the second World Summit on the Knowledge Society, 16-18 September 2009, Crete, Greece. It's a honor for me to be a member of the Program Committee.

The 2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS 2009), is an international scientific event devoted to promoting the dialogue on the main aspects of the Knowledge Society towards a BETTER WORLD for all. This annual Summit brings together key stakeholders of the Knowledge Society development worldwide, from Academia, Industry, Government, Policy Makers, and active citizens to look at the impact and prospects of the Information Technology, and the knowledge-based era it is creating, on key facets of living, working, learning, innovating and collaborating in today’s hyper-complex world.

For more information, you can visit the summit homepage here or contact Dr. Miltiadis Lytras.