talkingDigital

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/wlscience/2143293439/

I am about three days into Peter Drucker’s book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It’s a good read provided you skip the introduction that consists almost entirely of understated 1984 prophesy’s about the future of the tech space.

Drucker approaches entrepreneurship as a science centered on confronting new frontiers rather than establishing a new businesses or owning a business. The argument is that a person starting a new hamburger stand where there is a market need for a hamburger stand is not an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur would open a beatnik hamburger bar that plays old movies instead of sports in a part of town that already has hamburger stands, coffee shops and sports bars.

He goes so far as to make the point that companies like DuPont, 3M and Apple (I added Apple to his list) have proven that well established companies can be entrepreneurial. Whenever a person, partnership or company takes a risk by forging into a new frontier, entrepreneurship has taken place. Read the rest of this entry →

English: Classroom in SIM University. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have been teaching at Colorado Mesa University for almost six years. What began as a co-adjunct position teaching a Desktop Publishing course, evolved into a full-time instructor position in which I teach five courses per semester and covering 10 total course titles. I am also the faculty adviser to the student magazine and co-adviser to the school’s chapter of The Society of Professional Journalists. I keep busy, and I love it.

My first full year as an adjunct, I began teaching a course called “Web Content Development.” The previous instructor had primarily taught basic web design, but I felt teaching communication majors about web design was a little like teaching journalists how to fix the printing press.

Instead of focusing on the nuts and bolts of HTML, file management, and FTP clients, I redesigned the course to focus on social media as a communication medium. Facebook was about three years into its proliferation into the mainstream and Tumblr was brand new.

In order to get the students to use social media, I made it mandatory for all students to join a class Facebook group. Only four students in the class were on Facebook and one was on Twitter (but never used it). One or two students claimed that they had some sort of moral/ethical objection to joining Facebook, so I gave them a pass. Less than four weeks into the class every one of the students had joined – even those who had originally objected.

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There is a video going around Facebook and the other social nets that features a Fox News’ Brett Baier interviewing a “security expert” who claims that the flashlight app on your phone is malware. Oddly, people who typically criticize Fox News have no problem sharing this biased piece of “journalism” when it is far more skewed than most of the political content that gives the network its reputation.

Don’t panic.

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