Shift to the Future

Before I dive into this tricky little topic, let me tell you about what I did Saturday.  9 of us climbed Golden Ears in Maple Ridge, BC, Canada.  It’s a grueling 9-11 hour round trip covering 24km in distance and 1.5km up and down vertical.  This picture shows our destiny in the background. At this point, we’re just over an hour from the top.  It’s a scramble, we encounter a significant ice field that we have to navigate around (it’s steep, sketchy). Here’s some of the crew at the top (about 1700m) chillin’ and taking in the 360 degree view.  We could see to Whistler, Vancouver, Mt. Baker, etc.  We relaxed for about an hour before making our way back down.  Most of the group had never been to the summit so it was pretty inspiring.  By the way, my legs are still killing me… So what does this have to do with creating an IT Service Catalogue?  Well, I’ve never done it, I’m finding it quite a challenge, and I’m in un-charted territory (for me) – kind-a like a first timer on a serio

It’s amazing how time seems to speed up as we accumulate more personal history.  I find the seasons and yearly cycles to be coming up faster now then they did 25 years ago.  School start-up is just two weeks in the future.  September is a chaotic period in general for those in the school system and the parents of our students.  Specifically though I would like to ponder the technology agenda for the next year or so. I just read an article in FastCompany “ How TED Became the NEW HARVARD ”.  It tells the store of TED.com which is quite fascinating.  I love their mission “Ideas worth spreading”.  It is described as an educational platform.  The best minds and ideas are shared for free with the world.  TED used to be an insular conference, a closed system.  But has, through effective use of technology, transformed itself into a platform for spreading creative ideas.  I wonder how K12 can learn from this approach… In our District we have a number of initiatives looming.  I wrote a post

A few months ago I read an article “Roadmap to the Electric Car Economy” (by Michael Horn) in March-April 2010 issue of The Futurist .  Essentially the writer advocates for shifting to an electric vehicle (EV) economy away from one powered by gas (and oil).  He lays out a roadmap and suggests how it might be accomplished.  If you believe the writing about peak oil (2020-2030) and think about how much money is invested in obtaining oil, processing it, protecting it (wars), dealing with the environmental fallout, it runs in the trillions of dollars.  Our education system had better be ready to prepare millions of young people to tackle problems like this – our future success as a society depends on it.  In the July-August 2010 issue of The Futurist, I read an article “Sustaining Urban Mobility in 2010” (by Ryan Chin, PhD student in Smart Cities group at MIT Media Lab) that talks about how cities and cars should be redesigned to minimize the impact of transportation.  Cars in cities sh