Group items tagged

only 2 percent of students said they bought an e-textbook this past fall semester.

The City University of New York, for instance, is looking closely at encouraging e-textbooks as part of an effort to lower student costs. "At end of the day, it's how do you drive savings for our students, who are feeling a great economic impact," said Brian Cohen, CUNY's chief information officer.

If students do buy them and begin to carry them around campus, they could be a more powerful educational tool than laptop computers.

Jim Groom, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, expressed weariness with all the hype around the Apple announcement. He said he is concerned about Apple's policies of requiring all applications to be approved by the company before being allowed in its store, just as it does with the iPhone. And he said that Apple's strategy is to make the Web more commercial, rather than an open frontier. "It offers a real threat to the Web," he said.

He also pointed out that several PC manufacturers have sold tablet computers before, which have been tried enthusiastically in classrooms. Their promise is that they make it easy for professors to walk around classrooms while holding the computer, while allowing them to wirelessly project information to a screen at the front of the room. But despite initial hype, very few PC tablets are being used in college classrooms, he said. Now that Apple's long-awaited secret is out, the harder questions might be whether the iPad is the long-awaited education computer.

Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen. The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, "If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?" Three years later they look back at what they had written. They have now reached a point where 40 percent of their decisions work out.

what we have to learn to get the full benefit from our strengths, where our weaknesses lie, what our values are.

The productivity of teachers, for instance, has not improved, and may in fact have shrunk, in the past 70 years. (Of course teachers in the 1920s enjoyed the advantage of not having faculty meetings to attend.)

What are you being paid for, and how much time do you spend doing that? Typically, nurses say they are paid to provide patient care, or to keep the doctors happy. Both are good answers; the problem is that they have no time to do either job. One hospital more than doubled its nurses' productivity simply by asking them these two questions, and then hiring clerks to do the paperwork that prevented nurses from doing their real job.

Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people -- and allow people to place themselves -- according to their strengths.

Know people's strengths. Place them where they can make the greatest contributions. Treat them as associates. Expose them to challenges.

the United States is that it attracts top knowledge workers from around the world -- not just because they earn more money but because they are treated as colleagues, not as subordinates.

Organizations that understand this -- and strip away everything that gets in their knowledge workers' way -- will be able to attract, hold, and motivate the best performers.

I always get the message “Sorry, Machine is currently busy with killing someone else?”. What does this mean? Our server can only handle a certain amount of suicide scripts running at the same time. Please consider your suicide attempt at a later moment! We are very sorry for the inconvenience and working on expanding our resources. If I kill my online friends, does it mean they’re also dead in real life? No!    What do I need to commit suicide with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine? A standard webbrowser with Adobe flashplugin and javascript enabled. So, it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac with most of browsers available.    I can’t see my friends being killed, what happened? Probably your flash-plugin is older than version 10? But yikes – you cannot stop the process anymore! Once you entered the login details, the machine is running the suicide script.