Lessons from 4 independent years
In 2003 I quit my management job at Microsoft to try to live by writing books, teaching and public…
Category: Teaching/Training
A magic day in Pittsburgh: MAYA Design & CMU
I had a secret. Back as an undergraduate at CMU, I’d see authors visit and lecture in the Adamson…
Conference materials (and more) done right – Webstock ’08
One highlight of webstock 08 was the fantastic design of their handouts, badges and bags. Most conferences, including design…
Why Teachers Should Lie (to promote critical thinking)
The Overcoming bias blog has a post about the author’s favorite professor, who had a habit of intentionally lying…
(Seattle) Full day courses – interested?
Hi folks – you may know I make most of my living performing lectures and teaching workshops. I love…
Is Google ‘white bread for young minds’?
The Times Online has a short piece about the dangers of Google dominance for education, called White bread for…
Learning from London’s speakers’ corner
On my first trip to London in 1996, on a whim from a blurb in some guidebook, I checked…
Innovation Myths in Schoolhouse Rock
When lecturing about creativity I often ask the crowd how they know what they know – How do we really…
The best public speaking tip ever
This is it. This is the big one. It’s the best, simplest advice I’ve ever heard about public speaking:…
Why conferences have bad speakers
Most of the time, at most conferences, most speakers won’t be very good. Public speaking is hard, but the…
More social software: Crowdvine + Pathable
FOO Camp saw the power combo of two different social software technologies: Crowdvine, a linked-in type system for pre…
Lessons from FOO Camp ’07
(Photo by Nobihaya) No matter what my expectations are for O’Reilly’s annual FOO camp, an intense social/geek/intellectual weekend run…
Social software applied: Pathable
I experienced an innovation doubleheader last week. First, the inaugural Bizjam event in Seattle, where several hundred independents got…
Mindcamp 3.0: report
Seattle mindcamp was this past weekend and surprise: they let me in! Here’s the short report: The good: New…
IDEA 2006 Conference: summary
I’m finally figuring out that small conferences are better in almost every respect than large ones. You can easily…
Can CounterStrike teach your team? (Video games as training tools)
One of the many great conversations I had at the Construx summit was about how games like Quake, CounterStrike…
How to create & manage ideas: the course
This fall I’m teaching a course for the University of Washington in the Masters of Communication in Digitial Media…
How to run a great unconference session
It’s easy to assume that unconferences, the popular trend in tech-sector events, require little thought on the part of…
Report from FOO Camp ’06 [foocamp06]
Foo camp is an annual O’Reilly unconference event and I was fortunate enough to be there again for foocamp06.…
The Office sitcom meets Microsoft
If you like the original british series w/David Brent, you’ll dig this: Part1 and Part2 (link from Ario, Rbanks)