To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions A leader’s most precious resource is not their time. It’s their focused attention. Time merely passes, while focused attention makes things happen. When we’re able to gather and direct our attention toward a particular task or interaction, we can have a significant impact in a minimal amount of time. But when we’re unable to bring our attention to bear on the work at hand, all the time in the world is insufficient. So what are the implications of this for leaders? Leaders must recognize that it’s essential to work at enhancing their ability to direct their attention and minimize unhelpful distractions, and one of the most important steps in this process is managing emotions. Consequently, awareness and regulation of our emotions are central to the productive use of our attention. Build Capacity. While these activities are often enjoyable in themselves, they aren’t indulgences–they’re investments in our ability to operate at peak effectiveness. Plug Leaks. Create Space.
Education Elements Retools Predicting the tempo of an emerging market--especially how fast it moves and what customers will be willing to pay--is hard. Just ask Education Elements. Last week, the San Carlos-based startup company, which has been a leader in helping schools adopt "blended learning," let go a significant portion of its sales force. Anthony Kim, chief executive and founder of the company, declines to comment on the scope and numbers involved in the layoff. But while the company employed 45 people a year ago, it's now down to 23. The majority of last week's layoffs came from the sales staff. "We thought the market would be different in terms of the demand side," Kim told EdSurge in an interview. Restructuring the sales team, Kim says, should not affect Ed Element's current customers. The restructuring comes at a poignant moment for Ed Elements, which counts NewSchools Venture Fund as an early investor. Even so, Ed Elements' services are not cheap. The company is working hard to address these points.
Interactive Classroom Projector Shootout Marc Davidson, January 18, 2013 Interactive projectors combine the capability of a standard projector plus an interactive whiteboard at a lower cost. However, not only do the various models differ in all the usual projector features, they differ in their interactive features as well, which means you can't treat the interactive part as a given. For this shootout, we gathered what are really two categories of interactive projector: four DLP projectors that use TI's interactive technology, and two LCD projectors that don't. Two Categories All four of the DLP projectors share some strengths and weaknesses that are built into TI's technology. On the minus side, all four have an interactive mode that, when activated, causes you to lose some brightness. The LCD projectors offer the exactly opposite strengths and weaknesses. Given these differences, you may want to start by choosing the interactive technology you prefer, and then focus on the projectors with that technology. What's True for All
How digitally engaged is your organisation? How can you tell your boss that your organisation is lagging behind in the adoption of internal social media? Or how do you know how well you are succeeding compared to other organisations in your sector? The SMiLE Index (Social Media in the Large Enterprise) is the most comprehensive and accurate analysis available - and it's free for all to use. Engage for Success, a movement committed to the idea that there is a better way to work has launched a Social Media and Digital Engagement Network dedicated to applying new social enterprise tools in the quest for building employee engagement. The first part of their work is to support the SMiLE Index as the diagnostics tool for you to use to benchmark your own organisation against others on the digital index. The Index helps you assess where your organisation is on its journey towards a collaborative internal social network. Are your colleagues co-creating across the silos or are they stifled by the hierarchy? How the Index works
Is K-12 Blended Learning Disruptive? Last week the Clayton Christensen Institute published its fourth major paper on K–12 blended learning , titled “ Is K–12 blended learning disruptive? An introduction to theory of hybrids .” Clayton Christensen joined Heather Staker , who has authored all four of our papers, and me in writing this paper, which takes a different approach from our past discussions of blended learning. Whereas our past work took a descriptive approach in defining blended learning, in this paper we analyze blended learning for the first time through the lens of disruptive innovation theory to help people anticipate and plan for its likely effects on the classrooms of today and schools of tomorrow. The paper represents another first: we introduce formally a new concept to the world of disruptive innovation: the theory of hybrids. The process of disruption is often painted as a straightforward phenomenon. What we see from our research, however, is that the transition is rarely that clean. Yes and no.
Welcome to Boston Day and Evening Academy | Boston Day and Evening Academy How Accelerators Lead Digital Transformation More CEOs are setting bold IT innovation goals for their company. Meanwhile, CIOs are tasked to quickly build the required business technology infrastructure. What’s the primary motivation? The growing expectation that all leading organizations will achieve their key strategic business objectives via superior IT-enabled advancements. In fact, a recent study found that 55 percent of survey respondents said their environment will be changed ‘significantly’ — 20 percent actually said it will be ‘completely transformed.’ The apparent benefits extend beyond the traditional commercial enterprise. The HBR survey respondents also said that IT-enabled innovation would change the way employees do their work (48 percent significantly changed; 15 percent completely transformed), the company’s products/services (46 percent changed; 11 percent transformed), and business models (42 percent changed; 13 percent transformed). Why Some Organizations Surge Ahead of Their Peers
Center for Collaborative Education The Procrastination Matrix Note: To best understand this post, you should first read Part 1 of Wait But Why’s previous post on procrastination. PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. Back in high school, if you had asked me if I was a procrastinator, I would have said yes. Except I wasn’t. There was definitely an Instant Gratification Monkey in my head, but he was cute more than anything. One day, high school ended, and so did my life as a somewhat normal-acting person. Without deadlines to occupy him, my Panic Monster, who can’t think too far ahead, began to spend a lot of time in hibernation. The more the Panic Monster slept, the more confidence the monkey gained. The RDM would slip further into despair, and only the times when things reached their most dire would anything change. It didn’t matter how obvious a decision seemed to the RDM, it was becoming clear that he was totally unable to control the monkey without the Panic Monster’s help. 1) The Disastinators
New Tech Network Why The Next App You Use Might Be In A Social Network While social networks are still just getting their sea legs in most organizations, the next big leap forward -- in addition to social analytics -- is likely to be the integration of our productivity and line of business apps into our activity streams. Will this unleash significant new value? Very probably. But it's also possibly the big integration opportunity that businesses have long looked for. Even though the popularity of social networks has grown to the point that it's a primary way that we engage with each other, just like e-mail, telephone, or face-to-face conversation, we are still learning to make the most of them. How social media relates to the myriad systems of record that we have in the workplace or in our personal lives is another significant question. Like software mashups attempted to address a few years ago, we instinctively know that there should not be a contextual gap between our individual use of applications and the overall work process we're engaging in. 1. 2.
Re-Inventing Schools Coalition - RISC Integration and Connection To Work Are Central To Social Business Success Over the last few weeks, several important parallel threads in social collaboration have begun flowing together at long last, though still a little uneasily yet. From this discussion I believe there's a real chance to address some long-standing social business challenges if we can work through and address these issues better than we have up until now. Unfortunately, any progress will require connecting some technology thinking with some business thinking, which is the quintessential oil and water of the information technology divide. However, I believe we can now do this better than we ever could in the recent past and that a major opportunity lies ahead. Specifically, these threads are: 1. 2. The first thread on social integration with IT systems is one that I've been exploring in recent months with social app stores, OpenSocial 2.0, social networking applications, and so on. Focusing on the work Related: Open Work: Using Social Software To Make Our Work Visible Again How might this look?