I went to the Chicago New Media Summit on last Monday and Tuesday… but I didn’t do it the traditional way.  By that, I mean I didn’t pay… and I figured out how to make yourself the luckiest person at the conference. Here are a few tricks I learned that worked great: Volunteer – Instead [...]

If you love garage sales (like myself), but don’t have the time to go to one, you need to check out Mike Sansone right now.  He’s having the first Garage Sale 2.0. He’ll sell basically anything you’d want (including his dog…  maybe.) He’s UStreaming the sale, so you can check in at any point during [...]

When I was in college, a friend and I taught a ten week course about presentation skills to underclassmen.  One of the lessons was about the properties of influence… SPARCLS is acronym we used.  Right now I’m going through a training called “Building Credibility and Influence.”  Naturally, these same six principles popped up again… Social [...]

Analytics.  Blogger.  iGoogle.  Gmail.  Picassa.  Docs.  Alerts.  Reader.  Desktop. See the trend in the naming of Google products?  Simplicity. They haven’t come up with brilliant names… they’ve taken simple words and put “Google” in front of them.  And it works because of the brand Google has built. Today Google will release “Google Chrome.” What’s Google [...]

Beloit college released their “Mindset List” today. It’s a list of 60 things that have shaped the way the class of 2012 views the world.   Most notable?  25. There have always been gay rabbis. 1. Harry Potter could be a classmate, playing on their Quidditch team. 2. Since they were in diapers, karaoke machines [...]

“Don’t compare yourself to others” I read that somewhere… and I completely disagree. You HAVE to compare yourself to others… Especially when you’re young. That’s how you know where you rank.  Think of it like sports… if you’re the best at your school, how do you compare against others in your conference?  If you’re the [...]

I spent last January and February backpacking across Europe… For five of the eight weeks I was alone. And as you can guess… I had a lot of time to get to know me. Ironically, I’ve never really had that chance made time for that… And it sounds weird, but I didn’t really know myself [...]

Iowa – you have a problem… You have a too many jobs and not enough qualified people to fill them. Right now, there’s a surplus of roughly 48,000 jobs; that number is expected to go to nearly 200,000 within six years. This is what we commonly refer to as “The Brain Drain.” So why is [...]

This is video is fantastic.  It shows exactly why students aren’t engaged in their classes anymore and why education systems haven’t evolved like students have.

On Monday I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel at The Midwest Literary Institute. The MLI is for teachers who realize that there is something missing in our education system today… That schools need to find a new way to approach the classroom. Angela Maiers and Mike Sansone put on a great show. [...]