I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since the B.I.G. Summit occurred! I better get on telling you the awesome stuff that I learned from it!
The Mobile Business Trends program was chock-full of info. There were four panelists: Carol Cox, founder and owner of InterMedia Solutions, Bret Lockett, a partner at Mobli, and and guy named Jody, who was the stand-in for another guy who couldn’t make it. I seemed to not write his full name or company down, but he knew his stuff. The moderator was Joshua Johnson, the co-founder of Learn Everywhere, and he was also my liaison with helping me get pictures and tweets of the event up on my digital billboards. That was a fun experience to try to do at the event, on the fly. Lots of lessons learned.
Anyway, Joshua began with a presentation to set the context by discussing trends. He talked through mcommerce, social sharing, and how training and education should be available anywhere and at any time a person is ready and wanting to learn something. Currently, he said, there is a lag in this arena, hence the start of his own company. He’s building apps that will allow for people to have their manuals and information at their fingertips. One of the stats he quoted was from a meta analysis a UCF professor did on new employees one year after they had training and found that 90% of what they learned back then, they had lost.
One anecdote I’ve always kept with me is the time a reporter asked Albert Einstein what his phone number was and Einstein said he didn’t know. The reporter was incredibly surprised that this Super Genius couldn’t remember something as simple as that and said so. Einstein replied why should he bother storing that kind of useless information in his head when he knew how to look it up.
I think that education of the future should be based more on critical thinking skills, reading for the purpose of understanding meaning and analysis and not what we’ve been doing so far with multiple choice and regurgitation. I believe that being able to have information at the tip of your fingertips, like on a mobile device, will allow people to use their brains differently than stuffing it full of formulas and processes that don’t allow for horizontal thinking and strategic decision making. While knowing some specialized information is important, I find that understanding many broad ideas and theories so that you can easily piece information together to get to new and creative answers help make a person become more valuable to their business, their community and the world.
However, everyone should know basic math. Or at least the ideas behind basic math so they can use a calculator or excel in order to solve for x. So that should go to the list, too.
Critical thinking, reading for meaning, and basic math. Then you’re covered.
Patti is still learning 