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Article link: New forms of online communication spell end of email era in Korea

This article cites research that finds that over two-thirds of high school and college students in two South Korean provinces rarely or no longer use email to communicate. Younger generations are instead turning to SMS, IM and blogs to communicate.

“Email’s efficiency falls in terms of promptness, convenience and credibility,” observed Yoo Hyon-ok, president, SK Communications. “With the continuous emergence of new communication means, communication formats will develop further in the future.”

Allee, V. (2003). The future of knowledge: increasing prosperity through value networks. Amsterdam ; Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Allee provides a collection of frameworks and ideas to help organizational leaders navigate through the challenges in a knowledge-based society. Her value network approach identifies key and exploitable relationships within complex, dynamic, organizational systems. These ideas are compatible with creating strategic dialogues within learning organizations.

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Article link: Issues in Engineering And Technology Education

Cut-and-pasted from the article’s abstract: University of Lagos (UNILAG) lecturers, Prof. S. A. Balogun and Dr. D. E. Esezobor in this piece from African Regional Conference on Engineering Education (ARCEE) examine the factors affecting the quality of engineering education at the tertiary level and ways by which the decline in quality may be stemmed.

Enders, J. (1999). Crisis? What crisis? The academic professions in the “knowledge” society. Higher Education, 38(1), 71-81.

Enders addresses the uncertainty of academic professions at universities in a future, knowledge-based society. The changing role and nature of universities in a knowledge-based society will cause fragmentation and differentiation among the professoriate to proliferate as new concepts of professional identities emerge. Citing previous research, the author highlights analytical problems in determining the future of academic professions.

As a special Thanksgiving holiday treat, Vernor Vinge’s 1993 article on the Singularity originally presented at NASA’s VISION-21 Symposium follows…

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Ogilvy, J. A. (2002). Creating better futures: scenario planning as a tool for a better tomorrow. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

Ogilvy writes that the future is neither predictable nor constructed of endless possibilities. We can create better futures by thinking ahead and planning with scenarios. In a chapter on using scenarios for educational reform, he offers two scenarios: a “technology fix” and a “corporate fix” (privatization) (pp. 191-201). In educational reform, he argues, scenario planning is an ideal tool as it allows for the input and participation of education’s vast array of stakeholders and has the potential to take into the account the dynamics and needs of each individual system.

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Article Link: Computers as authors? Literary luddites unite! (free registration required)

The New York Times reports that to write novels, computers don’t need writers anymore. Selmer Bringsjord at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and David A. Ferrucci at IBM created “Brutus.1” an artificial intelligence program that simulates literary creativity.

Read one of Brutus.1’s stories.

Article link: Education key to economic survival

The BBC’s Sean Coughlan asks, “how can a small, affluent country such as Finland maintain a high-wage, high-skill economy?”

The answer: heavy investment in education and life-long learning. Says the Finnish Minister of Education, “we believe that if we invest in all children for nine years and give them the same education then we will reach the best results.”

Learn more about the educational system in Finland from the Ministry of Education’s Web site.

Van der Heijden, K. (1996). Scenarios: the art of strategic conversation. Chichester, England New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Van der Heijden argues organizations need to face up to uncertain possible futures. In this book, he argues leaders need to develop organizational processes that foster success. Organizations are characterized as feedback-looped, complex adaptive systems, driven by the “conversations” and interactions of individuals that comprise them. Though organizational systems may be complex and chaotic, processes that acknowledge this characteristic of organizations may allow the organization to be perceived as more-deterministic in the long-run.

Scenario planning, he proposes, is a tool that allows leaders to redefine the contexts and processes that drive decision making in their organizations though adaptive organizational learning. Scenario planning allows individuals to see how events and forces in an organization may fit in patterns and how they might ultimately be resolved.

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Senge, P. M. (1994). The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization (1st ed.). New York: Doubleday/Currency.

Senge argues traditional organizational leaders need to “revolutionize” their management philosophy toward the highly conceptual approach of systems thinking as the basis for building learning organizations. He adds this “fifth discipline” to four others: building shared vision, mental models, team learning and personal mastery. Learning organizations are defined as “organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together” (p.3).

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