Quick note on "80 Essential Blogs for the Modern-Day Marketing Student | Online Colleges"

80 Essential Blogs for the Modern-Day Marketing Student | Online Colleges

Ok. 80? Let's say 20 of these are high value, and it's chunked into B2B, General, etc.categories.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Guy Kawasaki #win, but no Seth Godin.... de gustibus.


Been a tad busy driving forward with my friend Tommy Sower's campaign for Congress. The hubris of the failing insurance lobbyist Incumbent is ineffective, but amuses my 83 year old mother. Me? I take the high ground. As Tommy says, "Home is worth fighting for".


But, back to marketing and online social media. Which the Sowers campaign groks most excellently.


Above is an example of asocial media. Christabel chewing on Dumplin on top of Good Dog Red.

Sustainable Local Foods Farming Program at John Wood Community College

JWCC’s new Sustainable Local Foods Farming program provides courses and hands-on training in sustainable fruit and vegetable production, entrepreneurship, and marketingJWCC’s new Sustainable Local Foods Farming program provides courses and hands-on training in sustainable fruit and vegetable production, entrepreneurship, and marketing. More athttp://www.jwcc.edu/instruct/agriculture/LocalFoodsFarming/default.asp


Course brochure (pdf) athttp://www.jwcc.edu/instruct/agriculture/LocalFoodsFarming/docs/SustainableFoodsBrochure.pdf

SIU Innovative Systems Conference SIUIS4 First Light

A very quick look at some photographs from the Southern Illinois University Innovative Systems conference, SIUIS4.

Flyover Country No More!!!

Tight security involved gas powered weaponry capable good for three to five rounds of T-shirt bombardment in this backpack-mounted platform. I'm sure 2.0 will be good for ectoplasm.

I'm all for elegant code, but there's something about cannon that just says one *really* cares about the project.

See also http://www.punkinchunkin.com/ for more insights into the Sport of Geeks. Now *that* is art.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Anil Mehta, sweating the small stuff to make a good conference even better.

The weather's been outstandingly North Sea here in the Carbondale Illinois area, but I say that will make the Seattle area visitors feel right at home.

There was a nice level of enthusiastic chaos amongst the student volunteers pulling together services for the conference, and a pretty comfortable, smiling group of people moving through the event.

Like a said in another post: World View, Intimate Venue. Nice, bright folks pumped about what they're doing and the potential of it all.

Cheeze Pizza Cheese Pizza Cheese Pizza

The "Green Room" loaded with Pizza, coffee, and volunteers. (And hungry people like me sneaking pizza.)

Logistics were a little shaky, but this is the kind of conference where a few more bucks would really make it sing. Parking permit in advance would have been nice, 'frinstance.

I want to see another conference here in six months, oh please.

Low cost, low hype, high content, real people. Sahweet mercy what a refreshing spin on tech. All here in Southern Illinois.

Robots? Got 'em. UAVs? Sure.

These guys had just torn down a 4H robotics demo from the night before and bless their cotton sox were back putting it together for this conference. The group's also working on some interesting UAV concepts and I hope DARPA, et.al, pick up on the potential.

All for now. Two more good days of the SIUIS4.

-30-

Small Business Econometric Study / Trends From SBA

Highlights from " An Empirical Approach to Characterize Rural Small Business Growth and Profitability"

• Education was a significant explanatory variablein assessing the growth of rural small businesses.The number of high school graduates increases thenumber of rural small businesses. Moreover, one of the challenges facing rural communities is how to retain a younger, more educated population.

• The amount of “natural amenities” available in an area can impact rural small business growth. This is defined as the attractiveness of a place to live,based on factors such as climate, topography, and proximity to surface water.

• Rural areas have difficulty attracting profitable,high-tech businesses, primarily because of a lack ofboth an educated labor force and necessary infrastructure.

• Rural policy initiatives are geared primarilytoward specific topics or regions, which often proveseffective when there are sufficient resources to helprural small businesses. According to individualsinterviewed on the topic, rural development centersand non-profit organizations are vital components foreconomic development.

• Some explanatory variables were specific to particular states. These range from the number of ruralprimary care physicians per capita in North Carolinato immigration growth in Maine.

Interesting read (for wonks and mortals).

Network Based Language Learning: Crowdsource Model

Learning From a Native Speaker, Without Leaving Home

By ANNE EISENBERG

Published: February 17, 2008

If you can’t manage a trip abroad to learn a foreign language, the Internet and a broadband computer connection may do the job, too.

Commentary: Trend O'Rama!

One of the challenges of learning the foreign language becomes the available time to practice, and to a great extent learning the agility required for fluency.

"LiveMocha (livemocha.com), for example, is a free site where members can tackle 160 hours of beginning or intermediate lessons in French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi or English. There is no charge for tutoring; instead, members tutor one another, drawing on their expertise in their own native language."

The "technology" has great potential (and testimonials from its users) and solves problems of time, location, and costs. Expect with time that these services will have certifications; institutions might well consider how to interoperate with these networked educational programs and leverage the resources offered.

Over time, both "real" video and improving audio will continue to enhance the "being there" experience (referred to as telepresence). For the shy, virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) will be used to shield identities (as well as promise French instruction from, say, Pepé Le Pew).

Thank You Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich, founder of Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC)and author of many essays of ethical pondering and proscriptive advice in education (Deschooling Society, for example) anticipated the deconstruction and ubiquity of informational systems as resource webs.

"Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree--public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available."

"Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators' curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals:

1. Reference Services to Educational Objects-which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off hours.

2. Skill Exchanges--which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as modelsfor others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached.

3. Peer-Matching--a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

4. Reference Services to Educators-at-Large--who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients."

"I will use the words "opportunity web" for "network" to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. "Network" is often used, unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one another. I wish we had another word to designate such reticular structures for mutual access, a word less evocative of entrapment, less degraded by current usage and more suggestive of the fact that any such arrangement includes legal, organizational, and technical aspects. Not having found such a term, I will try to redeem the one which is available, using it as a synonym of "educational web."

"What are needed are new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching."

Illych began the work which comprised "Deschooling Society" in 1967, and finalized the published work after discussions in Cuernavaca at Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) in November, 1970.

Now that's futurism. After 37 years, reality starts lining up with the vision.

I've relied upon Illych's "big ideas" in crafting my own educational path after attending CIDOC in 1974. Later, I returned to Illych's thoughts in developing technology adoption "models" for telecommunications clients and financial companies who needed to deal with what was apparent chaos but in fact celebration of the access and flow of information.

Thank you, Ivan Illych.