Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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Sunday, 18 November 2007

Did You Know ... Shift Happens?

I was watching the Federal Consortium on Virtual Worlds Friday when they showed a short video during a break. It was called Shift Happens and had a profound message about educating the next generation. I searched YouTube, found it, and circulated the link to several colleagues. One colleague (my son Eric) replied that it was actually another YouTube video. Two identical videos? Hmmmm So, I investigated.

There are actually more than 20 variations. Here are some better ones:

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RXNWwGUsBU
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUsYFCfmNMo
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqfunyCeU5g

They all started in August of 2006 by Karl Fisch with a PowerPoint presentation to a group of teachers. The original title was Did You Know. Fisch's thoughts, along with his original materials, are available at...
http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html

Scott McLeored remixed the Fisch material with better fonts, rewording, “upbeat” soundtrack, and YouTubed it! For details from McLeod, see...
http://scottmcleod.typepad.com/dangerouslyirrelevant/2007/01/gone_fischin.html

That was in January. It went viral! And, it has spawned many subsequent variations. The first link above has more than 2.4 million views!

The bottom line: This is a thought provoking video that is well worth 5 minutes of your time. In Fisch’s words, “I remixed content from David Warlick, Thomas Friedman, Ian Jukes, Ray Kurzweil and others.” In a delight way, I must say. It challenges many old notions of world order and technology. It is especially pertinent for educators of today’s youth. The world that these youth will experienced will be quite different than what we have experienced.

Oh, about Karl Fisch... He is a teacher at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, CO, just a few miles from where I live in Boulder. Global thoughts in a small world!

Posted by Richard Hackathorn at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday, 2 November 2007

Where to Pick Your Battles

Over breakfast I had a delightful chat with Richard Buckle, an experienced, well-traveled student of the IT industry. He is quite a blogger, rather extensive in his comments and subtle (not!) in his humor. See his latest blogging creation.

An issue that surfaced amid our eggs and pancakes was the impact of Web 2.0 technology. I was relaying my perceptions from the IBM IOD Conference. In particular, I was surprised by IBM's emphasis of Web 2.0 as an essential part of future enterprise architectures. I even queried a panel of IBM executives on the sanity of executing such flaking technology on sacred mainframe systems.

The answer that I got involves the careful choosing of one's IT battles within the enterprise. Given the demands of today's global businesses and given the complexity of relevant information to the business, traditional IT has no hope to satisfy all those requirements. Doing IT as the same will result in a chaos far beyond the proliferation of user-created spreadsheet systems of the last decade. Using Web 2.0, leave the User Interface layer to the users, because each will want something different and will want it NOW.

Choose, instead, battle lines around supplying quality enterprise information through a Service Oriented Architecture organized by key business processes.

Hmmmm This is a new twist - a political one - to the whole SOA discussion. For more details, see Richard's blog.

Posted by Richard Hackathorn at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)