Complexity, Innovation, Knowledge and Learning: A quantum interpretation of management

Blogging in France

A little update on the use of blogs in France (but written in French) is published in Le Monde Campus of March 30, 2005.  Students report on how and why they keep their blogs alive and one of the reasons is "to show one's interest in a professional sector and to attract recruiters". For the anecdote, and as you can see in my blog, the assignments of last semester's complexity course are made public. I got a phone call from a student saying that she was surprised about that.  When I apologized that I was not aware that there would be confidential information in her assignment she answered: "That is not the problem, but now a possible recruiter can find my work and if I would have known that beforehand, I would have spent more time and effort on it".  Good to know, but seemingly a trend.

In the second part of the article, I comment on the use I make of this blog for educational purposes and my beliefs about that.  However those ideas can also be found in this blog.

The United Nations Global Compact program

"Vision and ethics at the heart of training" stated the FT on April 4, 2005, in an article on leadership.  Despite the brilliant title, and though the article correctly states the issue, it refers extensively to what we already know about leadership (and what doesn't always seem to work in practice; is Bush a great leader or isn't he ?).

However, ethics and vision are indeed in my opinion at the heart of training.  At least in our Management School we take this serious, as you can explore on our website. The United Nations have taken an initiative, Global Compact, which is an invitation for companies, schools and organisations to adhere to an "alliance for integrety". It is nice to see that companies (as an example Deloitte) start subscribing, as much as (business) schools start doing (so are we).

Next step, if we would like to get anywhere, is to try and raise the global consciousness level concerning these issues, and that is the responsibility of all of us. Indeed, vision and ethics should be at the heart of training.

Interesting workshop on blogs and wiki's at Euromed Marseille

Last week we had an interesting workshop at Euromed Marseille, debriefing my own experience with the use of this blog for pedagogical purposes and discussing other collaborative learning tools.  An challenging idea, that we are going to experiment, is integrate a Wiki in the blog, in order to replace the discussions room. A Wiki is a collaborative space, in which people co-create sense and content. Probably the best known example is Wikipedia, a commonly created on-line encyclopedia. An example (in French) is Metawiki. Not only does this allow a more active pedagogy, such as Euromed has chosen, but it opens interesting alternatives to making assignments.

First of all students co-create the assignment, but secondly it is also possible for outsiders (possibly invited) to take part in that co-creation.  Above all, however, what attracts me is the fact that students cannot only "do an assignment" but they are able to experience in real time how sense making and content go hand in hand. 

Anyway, we are currently integrating a Wiki in this Blog and within a few months we are certainly able to give you more info.  For those interested, I present a paper on the IASTED Conference: Computers and Advanced Technology for Education (CATE 2005), a paper titled "Virtual learner centred approaches for diversity in learning: recent experiments with the use of a blog."

At the end of our workshop a number of my colleagues have expressed an interest to continue working with blogs/wikis.  I think we are genuinly underway at Euromed to introduce, within a correct pedagogical framework, virtual learning.