InsightNG

Every day, I'm amazed at the amount of information I consume; I listen to the news on my morning run, scan the papers while I'm eating breakfast, check my social media accounts throughout the day, and watch some TV before I go to bed, all while getting constant updates via email and Twitter. That's pretty overwhelming on its own, but things get really interesting when some of that information is biased, inaccurate, or just plain made up. It makes it hard to know what to believe. But even with all the competing sources and opinions out there, getting the truth - or at least close to it - matters. What you believe affects what you buy, what you do, who you vote for, and even how you feel. In other words, it virtually dictates how you live your life.

Just because a product has the largest market share doesn't mean it is the best one for your organizational needs.

"When adding game elements to your site or business, be sure to incorporate a way for current customers to recruit new ones, says gamification expert Gabe Zichermann. Unlike loyalty programs, which can reinforce behaviors of existing customers, the "viral nature" of gamification can help attract new customers to your business. "At the very heart of what you're trying to do with gamification is to get people to come in, keep coming in and bring their friends to create a cycle in which your products, services and egagement drive customer adoption," Zichermann says."

"Lee Rainie will present a keynote discussion on networked learning at the The Free Learning 2.0 Conference on August 22. The conference is "a unique chance to participate in a global conversation on rethinking teaching and learning in the age of the Internet.""

"Story telling such as of brand is analogous to chemical reactions. The presentation covers five lessons from this analogy"

"In the "e-learning era" the focus of training moved to designing and developing sophisticated, self-paced, online course content, and then managing access to it in a LMS. With the emergence of the "networked learning era" training departments have begun to think about how they can add "social" into the mix."

Wikipedia defines a learning management system (LMS) as: "A software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, and reporting of training programs, classroom and online events, e-learning programs, and training content." What that means is that the right learning management system can help you better reach your training/education goals whether they are focused on continuing education, eLearning availability, synchronous or asynchronous learning, mobile learning, certification programs, or even eCommerce and more, learning management systems are designed to provide the features you need to make sure your unique learning goals are met and a positive ROI is achieved. An LMS is a branded, secure extension of your organization's training/education effort to deliver content and materials in an easy, professional, managed and accessible manner - for users and administrators. 

Learning can be fun when you make a game out of it. That premise underlies the decision of an online learning platform to use game mechanics to engage college students. It works by motivating students to join, participate, contribute and share their successes.

For me my tweets and emails are streaming in. This causes several problems. 1. It gets harder to discern what actually is important. 2. It adds stress to your life. You feel like a rat that always needs to push the button for another pellet. 3. It makes it harder to deal with people around you like family and friends. After all, there's another tweet to read, another email to answer, another Quora question to ponder. 4. It makes taking the time to really ponder questions like these more difficult. 5. Sleep often is lost due to always trying to "keep up." 6. Health suffers because you aren't paying attention to that, or exercising, instead you are paying attention to the stream of info aimed at you.

Game-Based Learning, and particularly serious games that teach content, are fast becoming utilized in the classroom. Frequent success stories are appearing, from Minecraft in the elementary classroom to games that teach civics. There is curriculum that pairs World of Warcraft with language arts standards, and many other variations where the gaming focus is on content. What about 21st century skills? Yes, games can be used to teach and assess 21st century skills! As the conversation in education reform moves forward, and educators are increasingly leveraging 21st century skills, we need to consider how to couple games with reform. Let's take a look at what many consider the top three 21st century skills and how games can teach and assess them.

Since the dawn of companies like Twitter, one question has baffled marketers: How do we demonstrate ROI in our social media strategy? For example, we know that Facebook "likes" don't equal sales. So what's the alternative? Enter the interest graph, which offers a new way to develop connections based on what people like, not who they know. The interest graph also gives marketers the chance to demonstrably generate revenue. Here's how other companies are experimenting in this space and the results.

Gamify Your Marketing Strategy and Reward Social Influencers" by Mara Lewis, Co-founder and CEO, Stopped.at Leveraging gamification principles as part of the user experience and value proposition magnifies the effects of recognition and subsequently, the engagement of all users, power or casual. These principles help to package and promote recognition across the site so users interact and respond to it more often and to a greater extent.

In the Double Freytag model of narrative decision-making, analysis-paralysis corresponds to getting stuck in the sense-making phase. Why does this happen? The problem has to do with the nature of the insight (or cheap trick) that triggers a gear shift from exploration to sense-making.  If it is an appreciative insight, it will help you make sense of what's going on in the situation without necessarily creating the focal point for action. But on the other hand, it is not a purely manipulative insight either (i.e., it is more than a mindless hack).  I covered appreciative versus manipulative knowledge in the last post.

The more we win, the more we want to play. Human beings are competitive animals, even when we claim not to be, and rare is the individual who doesn't take pleasure in winning. Gamblers understood this long before Bugsy Siegel broke ground in the Nevada desert. Both Las Vegas and the minds behind rewards and fidelity programs have spent decades capitalizing on the human need to win. The video game industry would vanish if it didn't continue to exploit our thirst for competition-and victory-with its aggressive approach to keeping games fresh, challenging, and in many cases, incredibly addictive. Along the same lines, social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn have employed "gamification" to engage their constituencies, keep them coming back for more, and perpetuate their business models with new users. As these tactics are proving to be invaluable in consumer-facing applications, companies are beginning to adopt gamification strategies for nongaming business activities like employee engagement, sales force motivation, and relationship building with partners. Far from being just another entry in the buzzword lexicon, gamification is changing the way companies do business.

The majority of business people know about the importance of critical thinking because they have an intuitive sense for it - they know it when they see it. What exactly constitutes critical thinking? What elements do we need to cultivate in order to develop our critical thinking abilities in business?

t is true that learning through "theory + doing + debriefing" changes behavior.  It works. It increases capacity.  And it also true that learning, if not used, goes away.

"Non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught." At first blush, a book titled How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (public library) sounds at once sacrilegious in its proposition and wildly meta-ironic. Then again, it gets to the heart of a painfully familiar literary bind - that book about a fascinating sliver of science, written by a breathlessly boring academic; the fetishized Ulysseses of the world, reluctantly half-read and promptly forgotten; the Gladwellian tome that could've been, should've been, and likely at some point was a magazine article. Must we read those from cover to cover in order to be complete, cultured individuals?

We are swamped with data - even our movements are tracked by mobile networks, and stored. Our web tracks are everywhere and our purchasing habits both online and offline are fully traceable. Businesses and security agencies are swamped with data, and yet there is widespread dissatisfaction about query tools and data analytics. Ask the right questions and you will get the right answers. That's all well and good with SQL, but it has failed us. Knowledgebase tools have failed us too.

Jonah Lehrer in his book "Imagine" introduced me to an interesting study by Beeman and Kounios. They showed, in brief, by using fMRI imaging and EEG measurements of brain activity, that we possess two different modes of problem solving: One dominated by the left half of the brain, and one dominated by the right half of the brain.

What is critical thinking? According to my favorite critical thinking text, it is disciplined thinking that is governed by clear intellectual standards. This involves identifying and analyzing arguments and truth claims, discovering and overcoming prejudices and biases, developing your own reasons and arguments in favor of what you believe, considering objections to your beliefs, and making rational choices about what to do based on your beliefs.