Another congratulation goes out to the Band of One. I used to think it was the Band of One because they have one unified sound. Over the years I have determined it is really because they only get ones in competition. This year marks the 28th straight year they have received a one rating in the Class A finals. That’s quite a streak.
Here is another tool that you can use to publish your PowerPoint with audio. SplashCast does it all.
The SplashCast service enables anyone to create streaming media ‘channels’ that mix together video, music, photos, narration, text, as well as RSS feeds, PowerPoint presentations and PDF documents. These user-generated channels can be played and easily syndicated on any web site, blog, or social network page. When channel owners modify their channel, their content is automatically updated across all the web pages ‘tuned’ to that channel.
Thanks to Sarah for showing me this one.
Here is an article in Computer World that should give us some insight about our future workforce. This article repeats many of the trends I have seen in other publications: 95% of graduates have solid basic technical skills, 50% are poor writers and 25% lack critical thinking skills.
These new “Generation Y” employees place one job criteria much higher than their “Generation X” parents did. They want more free time. Typical parents of these young people worked more than 40 hours per week, especially if employed in a technical field.
Generation Y employees also consider the basic tools of any job to include a company smart phone and laptop. “Working” doesn’t mean sitting in a cubical. They want flexibility in work hours and location.
The next twenty years are going to be interesting.
I have had three “real-world” problems presented to me this week that are a good representation of problems present in the day-to-day life of a technical consultant. I work with several schools as a consultant and I end up getting a few troubleshooting calls. This week I had two that looked identical but were completely unrelated.
On Monday one of the administrative computers could not get email. On Tuesday another computer couldn’t get email either. There was one main difference; the “Tuesday” computer could not get to any web pages while the “Monday” computer could get to most places on the web.
It turned out that the first computer had an erroneous DNS setting and the second computer had lost its connection to the DHCP server. Both of these problems are fairly simple to troubleshoot, but required a solid understanding of basic computer networking.
As I handled the second problem, which on the surface looked exactly like the first problem, I thought about the “multiple choice options” available to me to fix the problem. No one was dangling a list of “answers” in front of me in the standard NCLB form.
On Wednesday I was asked to solve a completely different problem. A group of people needed a way of sharing documents online, but the documents must not be available to people outside the group. This was a problem with many possible solutions, but I wasn’t given a list of possible answers.
None of these problems took long to solve. Each one required a basic knowledge of the systems involved. Formulating the answers required what I consider to be typical problem solving skills not assessable by a multiple choice test.
I had the good fortune of running into Kevin O’Malley at a conference. We happened to be standing at the same table. I saw him doodling on a sheet of paper and struck up a conversation. I found out he was a children’s book author and that he had recently been to the Mazza. He was drawing what looked like an ostrich. He asked my name and said he would look me up the next time he was in Findlay.
A little while later he stopped by the table again and gave me the ostrich picture, autographed and customized with my name at the top. Cool.
Everyone in my group loved it and lined up asking for an autograph. He doesn’t do autographs. Instead, he drew a picture, put the name of the recipient at the top and signed the bottom. I don’t know which was more amazing, the fact that he did a custom picture for every person that asked for one or that he could crank one out in less than a minute.
If you have an elementary child and are looking for a great picture book, get a copy of Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude. It’s a clever and funny story about a boy and a girl that write a story together. The girl wants it to be about a princess while the boy wants it to be able a cool motorcycle dude. The combination makes a great story.
Watch the conference circuit for Kevin’s name. If he is in your area, it will be worth the trip to see him.
