Why is most research on business issues so useless? Why doesn't it drive the results that businesses require? Organizations may have commissioned reports on new markets, or Second Life, or Web 2.0, or outsourcing or re-insourcing, but why don't the reports have a richer impact?

I have come to the fairly unambiguous conclusion: most business research sits unused on shelves. It is thus a valid question to ask, especially in tightening budgets, why is that so? Is that inevitable? And, to a lesser degree, who's fault is that?

The big problem is that most business research relies on the same faulty intellectual constructs as other forms of linear content - it relies on linear analysis, case studies, and inspirational examples. And like with movies and magazines, they impress us with their cleverness but don't actually enable effective action (or any action, except more presentations), because they ar not designed to. The reports focus on knowing, not doing. The people at the receiving end of such research seldom turn the concepts into productive actions, because the research does not help them enough in doing so. At best, most research I have studied only takes the reader on 20% of the journey.

it's about a rather surprising and to me quite worrying difference in how we teach adults about coping with it.

Anyway, this person during their nursing training had quite extensive training about how to cope with patients getting 'frisky' during treatment. He, being gay, found the compulsory training quite a giggle personally, although he did realise that it has the potential to be a real issue for some of the other people he was training with. The teacher training covers the potential issues in about 10 minutes, and basically says "don't do it" but doesn't offer any strategies for coping with it.

hat 10 minutes saying "Don't do it" is certainly excellent advice, is it really sufficient?

Free Digital Texts Begin to Challenge Costly College Textbooks in California Expect to see more of this. Not only the writing and releasing of free textbooks. But also the attempts by publishers to lure their authors back into the commercial fold. They'll have to change their price points, though. As Tom Hoffman says, "he point is that there are lots of actors other than publishers who can pay a professor to write a text and release it under a free license, and $100,000 is not a lot of money to a state, country, large university or foundation."

Many conversations around interactivity in formal learning programs rests on the tools. Does WebEx allow polling? Can you have threaded conversations in Second Life? What if you gave keypads to members of an audience? And those are all good questions. But at the same time, we need to nurture cultures around interactivity that are independent of any technology. We need vocabulary and expectations around interactivity itself.Here's a suggestion, hopefully useful in practice if not in theory:

Level 0: The instructor speaks regardless of audience.

Level 1: The instructor pauses and asks single answer questions of the students.

My session, which explored the meaning and significance of “digital humanities,” also featured rich, engaging presentations by Edward Vanhoutte on the history of humanities computing and John Walsh on comparing alchemy and digital humanities.

I wondered: What is digital scholarship, anyway?  What does it take to produce digital scholarship? What kind of digital resources and tools are available to support it? To what extent do these resources and tools enable us to do research more productively and creatively? What new questions do these tools and resources enable us to ask? What’s challenging about producing digital scholarship? What happens when scholars share research openly through blogs, institutional repositories, & other means?

I decided to investigate these questions by remixing my 2002 dissertation as a work of digital scholarship.  Now I’ll acknowledge that my study is not exactly scientific—there is a rather subjective sample of one.  However, I figured, somewhat pragmatically, that the best way for me to understand what digital scholars face was to do the work myself. 

is the description how often we are lead astray in our thinking by focusing on surface differences rather than searching for the significant similarities expressed in deep metaphors. Three Levels of Metaphors The Zaltmans describe three levels of metaphors, and use this example: Surface Metaphors Money runs through his fingers I am drowning in debt Don’t pour your money down the drain The bank froze his assets Metaphor Theme Money is like liquid Deep Metaphor Resource

Does the google generation learn the necessary skills to develop into the high-flying academics of tomorrow? Pretty much whatever topic you do at higher degree level you will study intensively and for long periods. Does the multi-media fast burst learning they use so well at lower levels convert in enough of them to give us our professors of two decades time (I'm using professor in the UK sense, the highest level of university academic is a professor). Will it give us our surgeons - can they learn to concentrate for hours in surgery? At the same time, if middle and higher management in business don't stop to think deeply and make fast decisions for the short term, are the google generation actually better equipped than I am?