The Web Top

Some of the world's most innovative thinkers and strategists have shared their views on how business is adapting to global challenges. Download our podcasts each day this week and hear the presentations made at the recent London Business School Global Leadership Summit:

Web 2.0 - Understanding the substance behind the buzzwords. As part of a panel debate at Webstock.org.nz. Created by Philip Fierlinger. philip@turntable.com http://turntable.com/blog

Young people's views on work and careers Future Innovators commissioned DEMOS to undertake a short study examining young people's attitudes to the future of work. It is based on a survey of 15 and 16 year olds, who are about to make decisions regarding their future, such as the careers and qualifications they are going to pursue. The study The study explores young people's attitudes towards work and skills and argues that a wider set of skills and personal attributes are likely to be required from them when they reach the workplace. The study paints a picture of a generation that understands the value of hard work: 90 per cent believe if you work hard you'll usually succeed. However, with more employers identifying skills like creativity as key to the workforce of the future, it warns of a disconnect between employers' demands and young people's skills and perceptions. It suggests that they may be entering the workforce lacking the full range of skills, which will allow them to contribute to the expansion of the economy. The study also examines some of the key influences on young people, to understand how their world views are shaped and where successful interventions might be targeted in the future. 'Parents and family' were identified ahead of school, showing the importance of both formal and informal learning. 'Ready for the future?' Full report 'Ready for the future?' Executive summary

Examining what people do online as they look for information, communicate with others, make transactions, and entertain themselves.

A new open-source social networking software gains its power to be used in schools and other organizations. University of Brighton was the first to introduce Elgg, a social network to help teachers in their interaction with children and use social networks like MySpace, blogs and document.write(MLnkMk('=b!isfg>#iuuq;00efm/jdjp/vt#!!ubshfu>#`cmbol#?Efm/jdjp/vt=0b?'))Del.icio.us feeds for educational purposes. If earlier, the access to these sites were seen as a an obstacle and were banned, now many teachers see it a helpful tool as this attracts great interest among teenagers. Every participant taking part in the project will have a blog with profile page, and have an opportunity to share photos, ideas and communicate with friends in online communities.

Writing effective text for the Web is more than just stringing words together and hoping for the best. It goes beyond just conveying information. If you really want to capture the interest and engagement of your users and members, the text needs to do much more. Ideally, you want your writing to:attract their attentiongrab their interestpull them into the contentadd real value to their workmake then want to register or return, andincrease their sense of trust in your community.

"Individuals are forced to consider more information and opportunities than they can effectively process. This information overload is made worse by ‘data smog’, the proliferation of low quality information allowed by easy publication. It leads to anxiety, stress, alienation, and potentially dangerous errors of judgment." Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control by Francis Heylighen. Even when we’ll have much better summarizing and other meaning-making tools than we have today, no amount of technology will give us peace of mind when we will need it most - in the midst of rapid technological changes which affect how we live, work, learn, and play. To rightfully trust our capacity to learn as fast as necessitated by the pace of changes which affect us--individuals, communities and organizations--, we need to learn how to learn faster together. Recommendations and pointers to resources, emailed by friends and colleagues in our social and knowledge networks, are some of the signposts that many professionals and managers use for navigating in today’s fast-moving landscapes. If none of us is as smart as all of us, then creating shared resources, shared social and knowledge capital, is one of the smartest things we can do. The intent and core idea of Collaboration Campus™ is to provide a space for mastering the arts of collaborative learning, and building valuable social capital just by participating in the life of the campus community.

George has been designing, facilitating and hosting online communities for 20 years. Out from that experience, he developed his Community Design Architecture (CDA), that he refined and tested during his work at INSEAD. He provides consulting and virtual community architecting services to organizations in the private and public sectors. George is also known for his first-of-its-kind, virtual or hybrid (online/off-line) events he designed and facilitated, which were attended by from 30 to 6,000 participants. George designed and leads an innovative, highly interactive, executive workshops on “Collective Intelligence 2.0,” in which participants are learn to upgrade the collective IQ of their organization, by applying the principles of CDA.