Want to be a writer?

Want to be a writer? No, a real writer. You know, a person who writes, everyday. Well, this little piece will tell you the simple secret to becoming a real writer: How To Push Past The Bullshit And Write That Goddamn Novel: A Very Simple No-Fuckery Writing Plan To Get Shit Done « terribleminds: chuck wendig. Great advice!

Oh, and here’s a handy infographic if you’re one of those writers who doesn’t like to read.

Schools… Not Factories

I listened to Sugata Mitra’s TED talk on self-organized learning, and it was extremely inspiring for anyone interested in learning or the education of children. Sugata Mitra won the TED Prize for 2013 to help seed his ambitious project to create a “school in the cloud.” Here was the a-ha point for me in his talk:

But first, a bit of history: to keep the world’s military-industrial machine running at the zenith of the British Empire, Victorians assembled an education system to mass-produce workers with identical skills. Plucked from the classroom and plugged instantly into the system, citizens were churned through an educational factory engineered for maximum productivity.

In other words, the Victorians assembled a global human computer to run the world, and they created the school system to produce more human parts for the computer. But we don’t live in that age anymore. We have real computers now. So why hasn’t our educational system changed?

Here’s another great point:

Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain — to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are. Schools ensure their storage and retrieval. Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.

I constantly hear a refrain of “innovation” and “creativity” as what we need for the 21st-century world. Yet our school system is designed to stifle innovation and creativity. Today, we need schools not structured like factories, but like clouds.

Read more and watch the TED Talk: Sugata Mitra: We Need Schools… Not Factories.

The new work…

I read two interesting articles by Harold Jarche this morning on the future of work. The first posits that knowledge workers are the new artisans of the network era:

Small groups of highly productive knowledge artisans are capable of producing goods and services that used to take much larger teams and resources. In addition to redefining how work is done, knowledge artisans are creating new organizational structures and business models, such as virtual companies, crowd-sourced product development, and alternative currencies.

The second describes the four types of jobs and speculates that two of those job types will increasingly become automated, so if you want to work, you either need to be a thinker or a builder:

As we move into a post-job economy, the difference between labour and talent will become more distinct. Producers and Improvers will continue to get automated, at the speed of Moore’s law. Those lacking enough ‘Talent’ competencies may get marginalized. I think there will be increasing pressure to become ‘Thinkers + Builders’, similar to what  Cory Doctorow describes as Makers in his fictional book about the near future.

Big ideas…

Just look what people are doing. Flying a solar-powered plane across America. Planning a permanent colony on Mars. Planting guerrilla gardens. The ability of people to imagine, invent and just make things happen never fails to amaze me. Whenever I’m feeling discouraged or cynical about my species, I must remind myself of how incredible we can be.