Building courseware is not our job; it’s a by-product. “Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge” The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn” The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. MORE >>

For centuries, people have worked in coffee shops, tea houses, pubs and libraries, productively. Bars, Pubs, Tea Houses and Coffee Shops… these are all places where diverse groups and individuals get together and co-mingle. Steven B. Johnson (@stevenbjohnson), in his book “ Where Good Ideas Come From ,” describes how in coffee shops and places like them, many innovations were born: The science of electricity. The insurance industry. Modern democracy. The Inklings ” gathered there to meet, hang out, work, write and talk. Among the Inklings were C.S. MORE >>

few weeks back at ISTE 2011, a product was launched called MindShift , focused just. Then five minutes later, the same gentleman complained about how there are over 16,000 middle schools in this country, each of them with a Educational Technology director he has to get through to sell his content/service/thing/whatever — implying it’s the Ed Tech person’s responsibility to move his product. Get users to love you and your product because YOU love your product — because it helps YOU. One of the panel discussions today was on “Education 2.0″ MORE >>

It helps that they’re not looking to sell you a product so much as they’re selling you on their idea: that a commons benefits all of us; not just a select few. Defining a web strategy for any organization is a tough haul. There are lots of questions and like so many things we do, while there are all sorts of things that have to be custom to our particular needs, it sure would be helpful to look at the format of how other people do their work, especially when their work is pretty successful. Openness commons mpedson open sharable smithsonian Strategy web MORE >>

People collaborate together, negotiate each others’ knowledge and experiences and toolsets to determine how to work together productively — this happens all the time, even if it’s invisible from the top-down. "Break on Through" by gorillaradio. In today’s #lrnchat on “Tools of the Trade” we ran through a number of topical questions related to how we find out about, select and replace tools for learning in our organizations. In a discussion of how we replace tools, a tweet came up: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” MORE >>