My friend Tom dropped out of the Chief Level Officer life to follow his passion to build sustainable housing. His current project just got a short mention on a couple of local Chicago blogs. So in a blatant attempt to drive up his project blog’s page rank with some more incoming links, I encourage everyone to read up on his progress here.

Go Tom!

You can read his recent press here at Re-next.com and here at ChicagoTalks.org.

I get depressed when I come across claims like this:

Learn about XXX®, an innovative, rapid, intuitive way to take existing content, in a wide variety of existing forms, even Instructor Led Training material, and make it available as e-Learning.

Though, if half of all American adults believe in ghosts, nearly a third believe in astrology and more than a quarter believe in reincarnation, I shouldn’t be surprised there are people who will pay money for something they believe can transmutate their content into (e)learning. <sigh> If it was only that easy.

In his latest New York Times editorial, Thomas Friedman says:

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …

We can’t do this anymore.

As told to Charlie Rose by Google’s Erich Schmidt:

Eric Schmidt:
And that’s how (Sun’s Bill Joy) learns. So rather than having a textbook, he starts with a search on an idea. The combination of Wikipedia, which is a remarkable achievement of humanity, just phenomenal, and search engines like Google, mean that you can literally get it all if you’re willing to be motivated. So my idea about school would be that you would sit there with however many students you have and you’d say students, I’m going to give you a set of search terms to get started with. And we’re going to see which of you learn the most. And what would happen, of course, is about a third, the ones in the back row that are asleep are going to wait for the other two-thirds. And out of the other two-thirds, some of them will do great, some will do poorly. Then you have a conversation among all of them. It’s a complete inversion of the textbook model. And, of course, you could supplement it for the textbook for the people who are uncomfortable or not creative in that regard.

Charlie Rose:
What you said is you could. Are these kinds of things being translated to the people on the front line of education, the teachers and the principles and the schools?

Eric Schmidt:
I’ve met educators who are doing this. I was giving you the extreme example. If most important accomplishment I’ve seen in education has been the development of these community sites around topic areas. Some of the best teachers in physics, chemistry, and so forth, get together and they put together lessons, ostensibly as an online lesson plan. But it’s really to get a compendium of information. And we have a lot of evidence that committed people, professionals like people here in the audience who work collaboratively across all the United States, produce an enormously valuable product. And that product can serve as the basis for the next revision of textbooks, the next revision of certification. And I think so it’s wonderful.

The view out my office window is always spectacular, but today it’s spectacular for a different reason. Not seven miles away, a fast moving fire has broken out and is sending up dramatic plumes of smoke that are drifting over the Denver metro area. So far, no homes are threatened.

When you are following what you love,

Life comes to you.

Frank Orrall

In very concise, if not very scientific format, I humbly present my findings:

As you can see, BlueRay really is the cat’s meow, somehow, AppleTV HD rocks, and Comcast bites. Stay tuned for updated studies that include Amazon Unbox and XBox360 Live Marketplace.

Seen in the (very numerous and very lengthy) comments to a recent blog post:

I wish I had time to read all the comments, so if someone already mentioned this, then I second it.

From today’s post-work random-eLearning-web-walk:

Updated: Oops, thanks to some sloppy linking, my pointer above refers not to Will Richardson who runs Weblogg-ed, but to another fine edublogger out at the National College of Natural Medicine in Portland Oregon.

And in the participatory eLearning space, there’s “LearnHub” (all Ajax-y, built on Ruby On Rails; headed by two Toronto-based entrepreneurs with funding by India-based Educomp Solutions Ltd.): http://learnhub.com/about

Latest find: this podcast interview with John Seely Brown, compliments of the Classroom 2.0 Ning network.

Covering ideas contained in his upcoming new book as well as some recent publications, JSB offers great insight into how the perfect storm of open software and “web 2.0″ tools of wikis, blogs, and social networking sites are combining to — possibly for the first time ever — drive and make possible the social learning ideas first covered in “The Social Life of Information.”

Of course, a treasure-trove of all-things JSB can be found at his web site, www.johnseelybrown.com.