Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012

A learning tool is a tool to create or deliver learning content/solutions for others, or a tool for your own personal or professional learning. (http://c4lpt.co.uk)
Here is the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012 as voted for by 582 learning professionals worldwide. Below is the slideset available via Slideshare and beneath it the textual list.  Other pages are available as follows:

Startup part 1

There is a notion that “startup” is just a small business and “Entrepreneur” is just a “fancy” name for a small business owner. Small businesses such as grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, street food business etc all have owners who start their own business. They work hard and hire people, mostly family members. Some are barely profitable as these small businesses are NOT designed to grow. Their goal is simply to survive and support the family. These people have skills and little capital borrowing from relatives. They are not rich and only survive in the local market. Every country has millions of them. Of course, they can be called “entrepreneur” as they seize opportunities and willing to take risks but their goal is only to feed their family, or create jobs for relatives.

Entrepreneur part 2

There is a new government report on business trends. It found that the current economic recession has been a stimulus for entrepreneurship. By examining the percentage of people who start their own companies, it found that in 2008, there was 3% went up to 6.5% in 2009, then 12% in 2010, and 18.5% in 2011. The interesting fact is a similar situation also happened in 1978. During this economic recession (1978-1982) Steve Jobs started Apple and Bill Gates started Microsoft which stimulated the explosion of the electronic, computer and software industry. The report concluded that economic difficulty tends to stimulate the entrepreneurial spirit.

Entrepreneur part 1

Entrepreneurs can be defined as people who start a small company that create new products or new services and successfully grow that into an enterprise. Of course the term “Entrepreneur” is often associated with famous people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg etc. However, there are thousands of entrepreneurs that people do not even know their names. These people are successful but often lead quiet lives so people may not hear about them.

Inside Amazon Web Services

From storage to payment, the king of clouds is dangling an array of low-cost services. We take a close look at the tools for IT and developers.

Amazon's Web Services (AWS) are based on a simple concept: Amazon has built a globe-spanning hardware and software infrastructure that supports the company's Internet business, so why not modularize components of that infrastructure and rent them? It is akin to a large construction company in the business of building interstate highways hiring out its equipment and expertise for jobs such as putting in a side road, paving a supermarket parking lot, repairing a culvert, or just digging a backyard swimming pool.

The 21st century skills

The 21st century is known as the “Information Age” in contrast to the 20th century as “The Industrial Age”. It is important to know that the skills needed in today's global economy are different from the skills needed in the past. With globalization, the world is becoming an open market where countries and companies are competing for economic advantages. The application of Information Technology (IT) has forced many changes that never happened before. In this “Connected world”, no country is strong enough to withstand the impact of global economy forces. Without knowledge of the global economy, a country cannot defend itself to forces that it cannot control. The same thing also happens to company, without a good strategy it cannot defend itself to competitors that it does not even know.

Trend in Information technology

According to a U.S. government 2011 report: Information Technology fields (Computer Science, Software Engineering and Information System Management) have become the most popular fields of study at U.S. Universities. The enrollment is increasing more than 28% mostly due to the better opportunities in a tight job market.

Understanding What the Customer Buys

What does the customer consider value?

The final question needed in order to come to grips with business purpose and business mission is: “What is value to the customer?” It may be the most important question. Yet it is the one least often asked. One reason is that managers are quite sure that they know the answer. Value is what they, in their business, define as quality. But this is almost always the wrong definition. The customer never buys a product. By definition the customer buys the satisfaction of a want. He buys value.

Defining Business Purpose and Mission: The Customer

Who is the customer?

Who is the customer?” is the first and the crucial question in defining business purpose and business mission. It is not an easy, let alone an obvious question. How it is being answered determines, in large measure, how the business defines itself. The consumer—that is, the ultimate user of a product or a service—is always a customer.

Most businesses have at least two customers. Both have to buy if there is to be a sale. The manufacturers of branded consumer goods always have two customers at the very least: the housewife and the grocer. It does not do much good to have the housewife eager to buy if the grocer does not stock the brand. Conversely, it does not do much good to have the grocer display merchandise advantageously and give it shelf space if the housewife does not buy. To satisfy only one of these customers without satisfying the other means that there is no performance.

Action point: Take one product or service that you are responsible for and determine how many kinds of customers you have for it. Then figure out if you are satisfying all of your different kinds of customers, or if you are ignoring some category(ies) of customers.

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Peter Drucker

Defining Business Purpose and Mission

What is our business?

Nothing may seem simpler or more obvious than to know what a company’s business is. A steel mill makes steel; a railroad runs trains to carry freight and passengers; an insurance company underwrites fire risks; a bank lends money. Actually, “What is our business?” is almost always a difficult question and the right answer is usually anything but obvious.

Nanotechnology

A student wrote to me: “What is Nanotechnology? I have read several articles about nanotechnology science but I cannot understand it or imagine what it is. Is it possible to explain it in simpler examples? Please help."

Balance Continuity and Change

Precisely because change is a constant, the foundations have to be extra strong.

The more an institution is organized to be a change leader, the more it will need to establish continuity internally and externally, the more it will need to balance rapid change and continuity.

The Educated Person

The educated person needs to bring knowledge to bear on the present,not to mention molding the future.

In his 1943 novel, published in English as Magister Ludi (1949), Hermann Hesse anticipated the sort of world the humanists want—and its failure. The book depicts a brotherhood of intellectuals, artists, and humanists who live a life of splendid isolation, dedicated to the Great Tradition, its wisdom and its beauty. But the hero, the most accomplished Master of the Brotherhood, decides in the end to return to the polluted, vulgar, turbulent, strife-torn, money grubbing reality—for his values are only fool’s gold unless they have relevance to the world.

Postcapitalist society needs the educated person even more than any earlier society did, and access to the great heritage of the past will have to be an essential element. But liberal education must enable the person to understand reality and master it.

Action point: Read a book on politics, history, or anything that interests you. What did you learn? How can you put that knowledge to work?

Post-Capitalist Society

Peter Drucker

depicts: describe

anticipate: guest

splendid: sáng lạng

vulgar: tầm thường

strife-torn: xung đột tàn phá

grubbing: Đào xới

fool: người hề

heritage: di sản

Knowledge and Technology

The new technology embraces and feeds off the entire array of human knowledges.

The search for knowledge, as well as the teaching thereof, has traditionally been dissociated from application. Both have been organized by subject, that is, according to what appeared to be the logic of knowledge itself. The faculties and departments of the university, its degrees, its specializations, indeed the entire organization of higher learning, have been subject-focused. They have been, to use the language of the experts on organization, based upon “product,” rather than on “market” or “end use.” Now we are increasingly organizing knowledge and the search for it around areas of application rather than around the subject areas of disciplines. Interdisciplinary work has grown everywhere.

This is a symptom of the shift in the meaning of knowledge from an end in itself to a resource, that is, a means to some result. Knowledge as the central energy of a modern society exists altogether in application and when it is put to work. Work, however, cannot be defined in terms of the disciplines. End results are interdisciplinary of necessity.

Action point: List results for which you are responsible. What specialists are you dependent on to get these results? How can you improve coordination among these specialists?

The Age of Discontinuity

Peter Drucker

dissociated: phân ly

embrace: bao trùm

Interdisciplinary: liên ngành

Knowledge and Skills

A skill is different from knowledge. Skill is the application of knowledge to produce desired results. A skilled worker is someone who can produce desirable results by having specific knowledge and practical experience. While school training provides the necessary knowledge but only through actual working on the job that student develop their skills. That is why in the U.S and some Western European countries, college students often work in the summer to gain those important skills. Today more companies require one to two years of experience even for entry-level job. If students work in the summer, it counts toward the needed experience. If they work for three summers, it counts as one year of experience. If they have a Capstone project, it counts as six months of experience.

Reinvent Yourself

Knowledge people must take responsibility for their own development and placement.

In today’s society and organizations, people work increasingly with knowledge, rather than with skill. Knowledge and skill differ in a fundamental characteristic—skills change very, very slowly. Knowledge, however,changes itself. It makes itself obsolete, and very rapidly. A knowledge worker becomes obsolescent [nerver use] if he or she does not go back to school every three or four years.

This not only means that the equipment of learning, of knowledge, of skill, of experience that one acquires early is not sufficient for our present life time and working time. People change over such a long time span. They become different persons with different needs, different abilities, different perspectives, and, therefore, with a need to “reinvent themselves.” I quite intentionally use a stronger word than “revitalize.” If you talk of fifty years of working life—and this, I think, is going to be increasingly the norm—you have to reinvent yourself. You have to make something different out of yourself, rather than just find a new supply of energy.

Action point: Ask those ahead of you in age how they went about “repotting themselves.” What steps should you take now?

Drucker on Asia

Peter Drucker

35 Current Trends in ICT

By Robert Syputa, Partner & Strategic Analyst, Maravedis

In recent years the long anticipated convergence between mobile voice and IP data communications has unfurled at an accelerated pace, dramatically impacting individual industries as they are reshaped along many common fronts.  

This briefing outlines major trends and influences on of the converging Internet and mobile space. These are general observations, not evaluated for scale or timing of relevance for individual class of supplier, service provider, implementer or user.

Feedback: Key to Continuous Learning

To know one’s strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do—are the keys to continuous learning.

Whenever a Jesuit priest or a Calvinist pastor does anything of significance (for instance, making a key decision), he is expected to write down what results he anticipates. Nine months later, he then feeds back from the actual results to these anticipations. This very soon shows him what he did well and what his strengths are. It also shows him what he has to learn and what habits he has to change. Finally it shows him what he is not gifted for and cannot do well. I have followed this method myself, now for fifty years. It brings out what one’s strengths are—and this is the most important thing an individual can know about himself or herself. It brings out where improvement is needed and what kind of improvement is needed. Finally, it brings out what an individual cannot do and therefore should not even try to do. To know one’s strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do—they are the keys to continuous learning.

Action point: List your strengths and the steps you are taking to improve them. Who knows you well enough to help identify your strengths?

Drucker on Asia

Peter Drucker

The Managerial Attitude

The demands for a “managerial attitude” on the part of even the lowliest worker is an innovation.

No part of the productive resources of industry operates at a lower efficiency than the human resources. The few enterprises that have been able to tap this unused reservoir of human ability and attitude have achieved spectacular increases in productivity and output. In the better use of human resources lies the major opportunity for increasing productivity in the great majority of enterprises—so that the management of people should be the first and foremost concern of operating managements, rather than the management of things and techniques, on which attention has

been focused so far.

Capitalizing on knowledge

The first focus of many knowledge initiatives in organizations is one of identifying and sharing existing knowledge more widely: "if only we knew what we know". Better management of this knowledge is used to improve business processes, increase productivity, reduce new product development times and achieve many other benefits. Beyond these initial benefits, organizations then turn to ways in which knowledge management can be used to improve their external performance.

Five Most educated countries

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently released its Global Education 2012 report and list the five most educated countries in the world:

The young and richest in China

Hurun, the research company announces the 2012 list of richest Chinese under forty with thirty-three young people selected. Only individuals who have more than $1 billion Yuan in assets and less than forty years old can be chosen. This is the second year that Hurun has published the list. Yang Huiyan, 31, won first place with a wealth of 36 billion Yuan ($5.7 billion US dollars). Fang Wei, 39, second only to Yang , was found to be the richest young entrepreneur starting from scratch with assets of 15 billion Yuan ($2.4 billion US dollars). Among the richest under 40, most came from business and information technology industries. Many started when they were still in college and some even made more than million when they were younger than 25. Most people think that rich Chinese got their wealth through inheritance but actually most of them are self-made billionaires," said Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report.

Current trends in Japan

Not long ago, Japan dominated the world with its electronic industry. Today its electronic industry is struggling to survive. Not long ago, names like Sony, Panasonic or Sharp were the most valuable brands. Today they are trying to remain competitive with Apple, Google, or Samsung. What has happened? 

As technology changes, market changes, consumers’ needs changes but Japanese companies have not changed much. They continue to build the same televisions, phones, computers when their competitors are capturing the market with new and innovated products. In this fast changing world, Japanese companies are too slow to adapt new technology to develop new products. Both Sony and Panasonic missed the smart-phones and tablets when Apple, Google and Samsung captured the majority of the market. The problem is getting worst when Sony and Panasonic keep losing money and market shares. New managers were brought in but could not do much as their thinking was still remain the same. A business analyst concluded: “Japanese companies were busy focusing on their old electronic business but the market simply bypass them and move on with new devices where software is the main driver.”