By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why No One Really Wants Creativity
Barry M. Straw, Foundations of Creativity, 2015/12/24

The media and popular press lead us to celebrate the innovative and creative, but few would want such people in their organization, much less to be one themselves, writes Barry M. Straw. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Complex Project Manager Competency Standards
International Centre for Complex Project Manage ment (ICCPM), 2015/12/24

Scott Johnson dropped this 2012 post into my new OLDaily Facebook page (100 page PDF). It's an Australian Department of Defense set of standards and criteria for 'complexity management'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. No, the Best Science Students Aren’t Becoming Financiers
Nicole Torres, Harvard Business Review, 2015/12/22

Money. It's at the heart of so many endeavours. It grabs the attentions of many top graduates (though if this article is to be believed, not the very top graduates). It's also a system in jeopardy. This visualization of all the world's money has been making the rounds this week. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Examining value creation in a community of learning practice: Methodological reflections on story-telling and story-reading
Filitsa Dingyloudi, Jan-Willem Strijbos, Seminar.Net, 2015/12/22

This paper documents an effort to measure value using Wenger, Trayner and De Laat's framework (60 page PDF). It's not straightforward, as the expectations of the investigators can play a significant role. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework
Etienne Wenger, Beverly Trayner, Maarten de Laat, Ruud de Moor Centrum, 2015/12/22
This is pre-reading for the next post. Wenger, Trayner and De Laat provide "a conceptual foundation for promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks." (60 page PDF). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Trust and the On-Demand Economy
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2015/12/22
I know that the dominant story today is if "the shift of value from suppliers to consumers." We have seen the digitization of content, then the creation of consumer-generated content, then finally on-demand services like Uber and AirBnB, where consumer provide each other with everything from cars to houses. According to Irving Wladawsky-Berger this shift is made possible by trust. More...

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist. He was born in London, and his parents were early computer scientists, working on one of the earliest computers.
Growing up, Sir Tim was interested in trains and had a model railway in his bedroom. He recalls:
“I made some electronic gadgets to control the trains. Then I ended up getting more interested in electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made a computer out of an old television set.”
After graduating from Oxford University, Berners-Lee became a software engineer at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists come from all over the world to use its accelerators, but Sir Tim noticed that they were having difficulty sharing information.
“In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee…”, Tim says.
Tim thought he saw a way to solve this problem – one that he could see could also have much broader applications. Already, millions of computers were being connected together through the fast-developing Internet and Berners-Lee realised they could share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext.
In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the Web in a document called “Information Management: A Proposal”. Believe it or not, Tim’s initial proposal was not immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time, Mike Sendall, noted the words “Vague but exciting” on the cover. The Web was never an official CERN project, but Mike managed to give Tim time to work on it in September 1990. He began work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve Jobs’ early products. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 25 years of the web
Dave Winer, Scripting News, 2015/12/21

True for learning technology as well: "The people we celebrate as heroes of tech are the ones who made the most money, and that money is directly proportional to the amount of diversity they destroyed. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. College at Oxford Will Remove Cecil Rhodes Plaque
Inside Higher Ed, 2015/12/21

I have always been opposed to the Rhodes Scholarship. Not only are the obvious reasons to oppose it - as in the case of the monument, the scholarship "an uncritical celebration of a controversial figure, and the colonialism and the oppression of black communities." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Put Down Your Damn Cell Phones
Jadelin Pikake Felipe, Inside Higher Ed, 2015/12/21

The original title for this post was "Colleges need to teach healthy digital boundaries," which I guess wasn't click-bait enough for the IHE editors. More...