‘Book reviews’...

A review by Ed Lines

For a book dedicated to the promotion of audience engagement and highly immersive scenarios, it is strange that A Guide to Authentic e-Learning is about as exciting as a party political broadcast. And like a lot of politicians, this book makes bold promises based on an insignificant amount of evidence.

The Guide is certainly not thin on examples. In fact, far from it; every page is stuffed full of references old and new. Scholarly theories, backed up by other scholarly theories. But the whole way through the book, the real results and success stories that I most craved to see were sadly lacking.
Read more…

A review by Tom Harrison.

The Future of Work, sequel to The History of Work by the same author, former FT journalist Richard Donkin, is about the changing face of work in the 21st century.

Donkin believes we are currently undergoing a revolution in the pattern of work every bit as profound as the changes brought by the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. He puts this down to a number of factors including globalisation, demographics, commoditisation, women’s role in the workplace and, perhaps most importantly, the advent of computer technologies. According to Donkin, the combination of these influences will soon see our current patterns of working become largely untenable.

Read more…

Review by Donald Clark

Daniel is an autistic savant, one of less than fifty worldwide that have ‘Savant syndrome’, with almost unbelievable mental abilities in maths and language acquisition, matched by weaknesses in social skills. In this, his second book, he tries to lay bare the workings of his own remarkable mind.
Read more…

Review by Donald Clark

Most books on the internet look at it from the outside, but Trancer is an expert in inside knowledge – “search data”. He harvests data on what people search for to predict trends. He uses searches on porn, pills, politics, dresses, bands, real estate and anything that takes his fancy. He’s the search king and we’re his subjects.
Read more…

Review by Donald Clark

Caused a bit of a fuss among policy-makers, and it certainly opens up an interesting debate on how one makes things happen in health, wealth and other human affairs. Whether it delivers the answers is another question.
Read more…

Tools and Techniques for Transferring Know-how from Boomers to Gamers

Conference presentations are full of baby boomer versus gamer comparisons, but few do what Kapp does, in being specific about how one uses gamer ideas in learning. Read more…

Review by Donald Clark

Most parents have a sneaky suspicion that schools are hopelessly old-fashioned and deeply dysfunctional, but don’t quite know why. John Taylor Gatto was a teacher for 30 years and one of the top teachers in the US. He won numerous Best Teacher awards, but he left, seeing the whole system of public education as a failure.
Read more…

Review by Donald Clark

Every fresh paradigm has critics who hold on to the old paradigm by putting together every possible argument against the new. This is healthy and keeps us honest. So in line with the old adage of ‘keeping thy enemy close to you’ I bought the now infamous, anti-Web 2.0 book. I could have downloaded the text, but that would have been playing into Keen’s hands!
Read more…

Review by Donald Clark

Where do you put a book like this in a library or bookshop? Weinberger, also co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, asks precisely these questions showing that traditional ways of seeing knowledge, like the Dewey Decimal System or physical classifications in bookshops, are constrained by the real world of atoms. It’s different in the digital world.
Read more…

As befits a book on informal learning, Jay Cross takes an informal approach. Jay often sits in presentations at conferences blogging live as the speaker presents, and this book is really a super-blog, where Jay tell us stories about his experiences and encounters in companies, conferences and conversations. If you’re after a structured formal, here’s how it’s done approach, forget it.
Read more…