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"Empirically, it's not just for other people that you need to start small. You need to for your own sake. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it's a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it's going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you'll get it wrong. I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward. The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one. "

Home Blogs Think Tank Better Than Free: How Lynda.com Made a Pay Wall Pay by Megan Erickson January 26, 2012, 12:00 AM Computer What's the Big Idea? Free is easy. In an age when just about anything can be shared, the hard part is getting people to pay for it. For ten years, content creators have argued that if you want watch, read, or listen to something, you have to support the writing, editing, and production work that has gone into it. Usually, this translates into nothing more than guilt-tripping or flattering an audience into making a donation, since it's widely assumed that putting content behind pay wall is a sure way to kill a site's traffic.

"The big theme of Mr. Shirky's talk was openness. Taking advantage of technology, he argued, will require "doing more sharing than we're used to and then learning to live with results." He underscored the power of sharing with an anecdote about what happened when the Smithsonian Institution made a cache of photographs available on Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Users catalogued the archive with tags that reflected an unpredictable range of interests, including facial hair, the history of photography, and the fiction genre known as Steampunk. "There's all kinds of hidden value in our systems which you can't even understand until you open them up to see what people do with them," Mr. Shirky said. "The thing that drives me craziest in conversations with large institutions about large data sets is they want to know in advance what will happen. Why should we open up our data? To which the answer is, you open up your data to see where the value is. It's the value you can't even predict until you try it that you get back.""

Tobler's First Law of Geography: A Big Idea for a Small World

""Educon is both a conversation and a conference." It is an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas - from the very practical to the big dreams."