"I remember going into a room to meet a group and at the sight of the uniform they shrank away and clammed up," he says. "I thought: no, that isn't how we do policing here."Within the week, he was on the internet, checking out Teach Yourself Lithuanian courses. By the end of the month, he took delivery of a set of CDs.

Ellison is not your typical teen, although he modestly says skipping five grades is attainable feat for other kids."It's just easy," said the Lincoln Park teen. "I don't understand why other kids couldn't do the same thing."Ellison found himself in college at age 12 because of boredom and a bet.Unchallenged by middle school, Ellison skipped seventh grade because he was earning straight A's without doing any homework. His father then challenged his son. If he could accomplish the same feat in eighth grade, he'd find a way to get him in college. Ellison quickly won that bet.

Dweck’s next question: what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura (daughter of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura), and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you—whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an “incremental theory,” and use the term “entity theory” for the fixed mind-set.)

Much of the current web 2.0 vibe was born by the folks who started the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL (first online community), and Wired magazine. Well, here in this panel interview are the founders of all three: Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, and Howard Rheingold, talking about how it started, why they did what they did, and what they think of where we are today. 80 minutes long in Realvideo format. Skip to ~15 minutes in to bypass the various intros.

Gapminder and Google share an enthusiasm for technology that makes data easily accessible and understandable to the world. Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software unveils the beauty of statistics by converting boring numbers into enjoyable interactive animations. We believe that Google’s acquisition of Trendalyzer will speed up the achievement of this noble goal. Trendalyzer’s developers have left Gapminder to join Google in Mountain View, where Google intends to improve and scale up Trendalyzer, and make it freely available to those who seek access to statistics. The Stockholm-based Gapminder Foundation will continue to spearhead the use of new technology for data animations. The goal is to promote a fact-based worldview by bringing statistical story-telling to new levels. In collaboration with producers of accurate statistics that are eager to give the public free access to databases, Gapminder hopes to recruit and inspire many users of public statistics.

Working via networking Dear Helen, thank you! Yes, it's actually amazing! Currently our company is in some projects and we are responsible for a lot of things. I'm practically alone in my office for days on end, at the same time virtually I'm extremely busy networking with project partners and my employees constantly. We interact via Skype, email, wiki and phone, and sometimes it amuse me with how much people from different countries I contact at once. But what's become clear to me after all - an idea that virtual collaboration could be effective only when it is supported by periodical face-to-face (or at least, vocal via phone/Skype) conversation. Otherwise, a level of trust and mutual responsibilities is reduced even you were a good partner earlier. Helen Baxter, 10-Oct-06 @ 03:41AM Networking = Happiness & Higher Productivity I now run two networked companies, a record label and 3D/TV production house. We have studios interconnected with a combination of free Google Tools and the wonderful Basecamp PM system. Innovators & Creatives don't keep office hours and tend to work on a results not time basis. Overall I think my crew are much happier and far more productive than if we all tried to work out of the same office. This way I never feel like I'm herding cats ;)

The demand for IT professionals has grown rapidly since 2001. The number of employed IT professionals has increased from approximately 8,400 in June 2001 to over 28,000 in June 2006. Employment growth of IT professionals of 27.3% per annum was well above 2.8% growth for all occupations. On average, about 4,000 new IT jobs were created each year between June 2001 and June 2006. About 1,300 degrees and postgraduate diplomas with an IT major were awarded in 2005. This was 24% lower than in 2003, when qualification achievements peaked. A comparison of the number of degree and postgraduate diplomas awarded, with the number of employed IT professionals yields a training rate of 5.1% in 2005. This has declined from 12.4% in 2000. The number of students enrolled for IT degrees declined by 44% between 2001 and 2005. This indicates that the number of IT graduates is likely to continue declining in the next few years. Since 2002 permanent and long-term migratory flows of IT professionals have made a small but positive contribution to the supply of IT professionals in New Zealand.

Collaboration is an exciting topic given all the changes that the Internet has made in helping people achieve common goals across boundaries. Let's celebrate and document these changes through a great collection of links and comments. Now that's collaboration!!!

I'm Managing Directrix of 3D / NetTV production house Mohawk Media, and co-founder of digital label TMet Recordings. I'm also an online strategist for Creative Kiwi Community The Big Idea, and share a fortnightly 'Digital Life' slot with Chelfyn on Afternoons with Jim Mora for National Radio, New Zealand.

Welcome to the OLPC Wiki, home to collaborative notes about the One Laptop per Child project and related projects and communities. We currently have 1,166 pages and over one-thousand registered contributors; please join us and share your ideas.

What does Citizendium offer that you can't get with Wikipedia? > The world needs something in addition to Wikipedia. The world needs a better, more reliable free encyclopedia. There is little chance that Wikipedia is going to change the policies that I think are responsible for its lack of authoritativeness. A lot of people - and I don't mean just experts - have contributed to Wikipedia and come away with a bad taste in their mouth. The problem is that their work tends to be dismissed, and they are often treated disrespectfully. There really needs to be a place that is more inclusive. Wikipedia, by being open to all sorts of abusive and anonymous people, actually makes itself closed to people who don't want to work in that kind of atmosphere. >

You can't get much more basic than the lead finding of Poynter's EyeTrack07 study, presented this morning to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C.Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly.And there's a twist: The reading-deep phenomenon is even stronger online than in print.At a time when readers are assumed to have short attention spans, especially those who read online, this qualifies as news. RELATED RESOURCES -- Marketplace report on Poynter's Eyetrack research -- Editor & Publisher report That was the predominant behavior of roughly 600 test subjects -- 70 percent of whom said they read the news in print or online four times a week. Their eye movements were tracked in 15-minute reading sessions of broadsheet, tabloid and online publications. Evidence from these sessions revealed how long readers spend with the stories they pick, as well as a host of other details about reading patterns.This first look at EyeTrack07's headline findings is presented here in four formats:A video produced at Poynter last week, that replicates the presentation Sara Quinn and Pegie Stark Adam gave this morningA text version of that presentationThe slides [PDF] used in this morning's presentationA brochure [PDF] summarizing both the findings and the methodology of the studyAlso, be sure to take a look at this video, produced by Poynter's Al Tompkins, and included in the ASNE presentation this morning.The study, which was planned more than a year ago, tested readers in Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and St. Petersburg, Fla., last summer and fall.But analysis of the readers' eye movements was just completed recently. The project is still a work in progress. Deeper analysis is ongoing, and more findings are slated to be released later this year.The application of these initial findings to print and online design is just beginning.Discussion continues at a major Poynter conference April 10 through 12. That conference is full, but you can still sign up for a hands-on EyeTrack workshop to be held at Poynter in September. Click here to learn more and register.A book with complete results, pictures of the materials test subjects viewed and a full account of how the research was done will be available in June.