2013 - as imagined in 1968

KIN held a sold-out Masterclass on 'Knowledge Visualisation' yesterday with Lulu Pinney.
The day was a hands-on exploration of the difference that well crafted and appropriate images can make to the communication and sharing of knowledge. All too often we resort to the written word, when images can convey meaning so much better. This was proven through some fun and powerful exercises.

In the afternoon, Steve Dale, KIN Associate for Enabling Technologies briefed us on the latest developments in digital and social curation. Potentially helping us make sense and filter the onslaught of digital detritus heading our way, it seems that auto-curated content for online magazines is coming of age. As Steve puts it 'it took a while for Web 2.0 to become Enterprise 2.0, but that is where we are heading with digital curation'.

In 1968 the Los Angeles Times bravely predicted what life would be like for us 25 years hence - in 2013. The article is reproduced here.
If you take a look at page 3 (see 6:00am), it seems that their prediction for auto-curated content was amazingly acurate.

MOOCs

My daughter is currently completing her geography degree  at Nottingham University. I was impressed at how much of her course material was available online, allowing her to study when suits her (ie when she gets out of bed or at 3:00am).

You may not have heard of MOOC, but Massively Open Online Courses are a phenomenon which gives everyone access to university learning, completely free.

www.coursera.org is a wonderful MOOC resource that uses this wealth of online material and offers it in the form of structured online courses, usually of 6-12 weeks. This is no second-rate resource; universities such as Stanford, Penn State, Duke, LSE and Insead all have offerings, with top course tutors and supplemented participant assignments, discussion forums and exams.

What a wonderful and novel way of sharing knowledge 'san frontiers'.

I'd like to sign-up for the Stanford University course in Organisational Analysis; I've asked if it will be re-run this year. I'm hoping that other KIN members will do it at the same time, so that we can learn together.

Coursera was kindly pointed out to me by KIN Associate Steve Dale, who has started a University of Michigan course in Organisational Network Analysis.

 (Photo credit: AJC1)

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