Information is expanding exponentially. Applying database concepts to your information diet can mean the difference between overload and sanity, chaos and productivity. Database fluency is mandatory in a digital world. Students and teachers should be practicing and refining this skill so that today’s learners can make the most of the…
Schools are inundated with paper and instructional materials at this time of year. Those of us who build education products and create marketing collateral should be cognizant of is how wasteful so much of this is. In our personal lives many of us go through the “more shelves or less…
Information overload is one of the defining trends of the last 10 years. The explosion of email, social media, and cellular technologies have created 24/7 leashes that drown us in information. As publishers (and citizens) we have a responsibility to help today’s kids build good information habits in this new…
Blog years and dog years have a lot in common. They go fast, take constant care and feeding, and bring companionship and warmth into your life. Dogs force you to get up and move your body, blogs force you to get out and work your mind. Social media are reshaping…
Information Overload is a serious problem in our culture today. People are frustrated and overwhelmed by the fire hose of information they are trying to absorb. But, as the American Philosopher Ann Landers was fond of saying: “No one can take advantage of you without your permission.”In summary: Personally we…
How should we design textbooks and education technology for a world where information is no longer scarce or hard to find? It is time to rethink how we build education products based on new paradigms of information management. In Part 1 of this series we explored the broken paradigms about…
“Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.” Tim Ferris In Part 1 I talked about how our old paradigm of consuming information is at the root of our information overload problems. Today I present some practical ideas you can use to experiment with changing your paradigm. I…
Are you drowning in information? You are not alone, almost all of us are. But the information is not to blame – we are. Information overload is a meta societal problem that affects our whole industry. From the personal (we are overwhelmed) to the products we build (we need to…
Input has become infinite while our individual output is still quite finite. What does this mean for teaching and learning in our schools? “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. This level of information is clearly impossible to handle by present means. Uncontrolled and unorganized information is no…
Cell phone ettiquette check. This morning on my outbound flight I cleared security and headed for the bathroom. For the second time in two weeks I encountered that most noxious creature – the guy who thinks it is appropriate to chat away on his cell phone while taking care of…