You can always depend on Hugh to point out the obvious.

Yet the obvious can and is often the farthest from what we do.

Here is the text that came with today’s cube bomb.

I was interviewed by Paul Barron today for his RETHINK video blog. We talked about Evil Plans, and what the book is really about.
Don’t buy the book if you don’t want to, just print this out and put it on your wall – it pretty much sums it up.

Hugh’s second book, EVIL PLANS will be available on February 17th.

This picture sums up the book!

Imagine?

I am certain the book will be cool but I love the honesty and personal trust that Hugh delivers.

Be who you are and do what you love, YES.

And one of the constant challenges is keeping a steady stream of up to date teaching resources in the hands of the students.

Actually this is a global problem.

As soon as we get that newly minted text on new media in our hands it is already grossly out of date!

Academics the world over are faced with enormous fiscal and information challenges when it comes to designing and delivering effective content packages for students.

So what do we do?

1. go to the net

2. use online journals

3. grumble and use dated texts

4. nothing

I suspect that most of my colleagues in the world union of professors (the lot globally) opt for options 3 or 4.

Well there are solutions and one of the best resources around is FastCompany Magazine! And I do mean the online free version!

Although I do read the hard-copy as well, it is just too good to pass up.

FastCompany, from my perspective is a living textbook that offers resources, ideas, context and it as current and historical as you might ever need.

FastCompany, for me, becomes an information conduit that points in many directions.

Teaching advertising? Teaching ideas? So what do you use as a resource that will not induce sleep?

How about a conversation on Advertising and whether the industry can save education?

But what if it was more than just reading and actually about engaging?

That month FastCompany is going boldly where few have gone before!

This month we asked a bakers dozen of contributors for fresh ideas on how to reinvent education. Now a coalition of ad industry heavy hitters from Wieden + Kennedy to BBDO has come out with a major campaign to promote creativity in education.

And it is happening through the No Right Brain Left Behind Project!

Here is what it is all about.

No Right Brain Left Behind is a speed innovation challenge, calling on the creative industries to concept ideas that can help the creativity crisis happening in U.S. schools today.

In collaboration with Social Media Week 2011, teams from creative industries will have 5 days to concept ideas. On the last day of the week, ideas will be submitted virtually to this site, and an expert panel will pick 3 winning ideas that are to be featured by our media partners. The best ideas are to be piloted in 2011 and 2012.

We are inviting teams of various sizes from advertising agencies, innovation companies, design consultancies, and communication schools. Ideas can be in form of tools, applications, or products, or whatever else we have not thought of.

If adapted, this will be a yearly challenge where creative industries will spend one week out of the year, responding to a burning crisis.

The power of an idea can transcend wars, politics, races, and economies. We hope that this collaboration will demonstrate the ability of our leading creative minds to step up to the challenges where conventional thinking fails.

It is not about creating more artists. It’s about giving the students tools to solve 21st century problems. We must understand that creativity is a key constituent that can no longer be neglected in the school systems.

I love this medium and I love the way it challenges us to move the way we think and do education.

Is it viable for every professor to teach and employ a far more fluid set of resources? Only if we are teaching for the real world that our students are going to walk into.

YES it is viable.

Challenge?

Getting others to jump on board and run with scissors.

FastCompany is my textbook of the semester and I will let you know how things pan out.

I have been following Hugh MacLeod on his blog www.gapingvoid.com for some time.

Hugh is one of those rare people who has sat back, looked at what he is doing, what he is good at, what he is not good at, and made the choice to follow his heart.

10 publishing offers later Hugh is going to see his book on the shelves June 11th.

The take home form a conversation with Hugh MacLeod?

Rise above the crowd and consistently sustain your ideas because for the most part people are light on them and more willing to follow the other lemmings!

Listen and learn from Hugh MacLeod!

So what do we do?

Mr. Dave Harris talking about education re-design.

There are no simple answers.

But we can be sure that waht we do need to do is ensure that we are not letting the fixtures and the framework get in the way of the desired outcome, and believe me this is no easy task.

What do we need to keep our eyes on, according to Harris?

Attitudes and Abilities!

Build our education around the attitude to confront challenges and create the base abilities to facilitate the necessary learning and thinking to confront those challenges!

The education segment of the 2009 Abu Dhabi Book Fair is going to allow the interested public to confront these very issues!

What it all comes down to when we think about education is a community of young and old learning together, said Mr. Harris.

I wonder when we are going to wake up and remember this?

The OECD is full of bright ideas that often seem to be left hanging.

The OECD in its work on sustainable development talks about the idea of books on demand.

I do not want to suggest that the bookstore is going to die or even be challenged.But the the idea of OnDemandBooks is pretty basic.

What Gutenberg’s press did for Europe in the 15th century digitization and the Espresso Book Machine will do for the world tomorrow.

Library quality paperbacks at low cost, identical to factory made books, printed direct from digital files for the reader in minutes, serving a radically decentralized world-wide multilingual marketplace. In essence, an ATM for books.

Where is this going?

All sorts of new places to sell books!

How about setting up the book machine in a library to sell other books or copies of the books that students might like to own?

What about using this machine to print textbooks?

The fact of the matter is books still play a vital role in both our informative and entertainment complex and the ondemandbook might actually change the way we think of that very old technology that seems to constantly reinvent itself.

Who says the publishing industry is dead?

At school it is every man for himself.

Yet in the work place we are thrust into an environment where in the end we are expected to work as members of a team!

What?

We train as lone wolves and then get told we are ant and need to work as a team?

Sadly this is the case and our education systems are failing miserably at getting us ready for this reality.

Sadly things are not going to change in the near future because academia and the business world are light years apart.

The business community has contempt for academia and academia, well we are in the ivory tower and maybe the key has been tossed.

But Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School has put up the white flag and may, in her new book HOT SPOTS, be suggesting how the stodgy academics and the business community could learn from one another!

If you have not read or seen HOT SPOTS go and buy it!

Here is the idea from Professor Grratton herself!

I listen to students complaining day in day out about the fact that they have too little time to get things done.

Given that students, generally speaking, are so awful at managing time, setting priorities and figuring out how best to direct their energy is it any wonder that so many in the work world suffer from the same malaise?

Tim Ferriss the author of the book titled THE FOUR HOUR WORK WEEK has set out in black and white a few common sense ways to wrestle your life back from that time sucking abyss called a job.

I love the idea of putting a cap on the amount of time you spend on email.

I love the idea of putting a cap on the amount of time you spend on the phone.

I love the idea of empowering those around you to stop second guessing and calling on you to make decisions that they can make.

Once again I am left asking if we are doing enough as educators to re-focus the thinking process from how much time we invest in something to the quality of time we invest?

I gave students a project, over 10 weeks that asked them to do just as Ferriss is suggesting, more with less.

The students were shocked and beside themselves, it took them 8 weeks to realize that there is amazing productivity when you have a clear focus and when the worst case scenario is well defined.

Give my conversation with  TIM FERRISS about taking control of your work life a listen.