Stories

Tag: Quotes

  • Relishing change

    Relishing change

    Jack Welch in General Electric’s Annual Report, nearly two decades ago:

    We’ve long believed that when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight.

    The only question is when.

    Learning to love change is an unnatural act in any century-old institution, but today we have a Company that does just that: sees change always as a source of excitement, always as opportunity, rather than as threat or crisis.

    We’re no better prophets than anyone else, and we have difficulty predicting the exact course of change.

    But we don’t have to predict it.

    What we have to do is simply jump all over it!

    Source: Welch, J., 2000. General Electric Annual Report 2000 (Annual Report). General Electric, Fairfield, Connecticut, USA.

  • Seven months

    Seven months

    Alan Todd, Founder and CEO, Corp U:

    Today’s workplace culture is evolving at a break-neck pace as technological advances, shifting demographics, and new economic realities force corporations to reorganize, on average, every seven months. The challenge is real. Fortunately, so are the solutions.

    Source: The Science of Learning: How to Develop Mindsets for Success in the Workplace

    Photo: My baby at seven months, on a beach in Soulac, France. August 2012. Personal collection.

  • Education is the science of sciences

    Education is the science of sciences

    “We want to talk about science as a certain kind of ‘knowing’.

    Specifically, we want to use it to name those deeper forms of knowing that are the purpose of education.

    Science in this broader sense consists of things you do to know that are premeditated, things you set out to know in a carefully considered way.

    It involved out-of-the ordinary knowledge-making efforts that have a peculiar intensity of focus, rather than things you get to know as an incidental consequence of doing something or being somewhere.

    Science has special methods or techniques for knowing.

    These methods are connected with specialized traditions of knowledge making and bodies of knowledge.

    In these senses, history, language studies and mathematics are sciences, as are chemistry, physics and biology.

    Education is the science of learning (and, of course, teaching).

    Its subject is how people come to know.

    It teaches learners the methods for making knowledge that is, in our broad sense, scientific.

    It teaches what has been learned and can be learned using these methods.

    In this sense, education is privileged to be the science of sciences.

    As a discipline itself, the science of education develops knowledge about the processes of coming to know.”

    Kalantzis, M., Cope, B., 2012. New learning: elements of a science of education, Second edition. ed. Cambridge University Press.

    Image: Neurons in the brain. Bryan Jones, University of Utah

     

  • Bill Gates on education, MOOCs, poverty and disease

    Bill Gates on education, MOOCs, poverty and disease

    This quote is not new. Given the increasing focus of MOOC debates on corporate MOOCs, it is interesting because bridging gaps in knowledge and skills is needed to address global health and poverty gaps. However, these twin strands of the Gates Foundation have, so far, been led by separate teams.