… if, that is, the community that develops around it is sufficiently large and active, which remains to be seen. Something to keep an eye on.
Posts Tagged ‘education’
OnStartups Launches “Answers” for Entrepreneurs
Saturday, October 10th, 2009To Kindle, or Not To Kindle …
Monday, January 12th, 2009
One of the things I love about Bend is our public library. It is a centerpiece of our community – friendly, modern, useful, and bustling with activity. Which is why I was delighted to see that in these troubled economic times library use is up 10%. It flies in the face of long-running predictions that libraries would suffer as more and more people turn to the internet, and is a notable contrast to the layoffs that hit the book publishing industry back in December on a day now referred to as “Black Wednesday“. So it was a bit of a surprise to hear myself recommending to my friend Bryan that he stop using the library.
Bryan and I were chatting about how his daughter had become a voracious reader, something he was naturally excited about. The problem was that in preparation for a trip his family was taking to Costa Rica for two weeks, he and his daughter had gone to the library and checked out a half dozen books to satisfy her reading appetite while they were away. Schlepping these rather bulky, mostly hardback, tombs around while they were on vacation was no mean feat, but anything for daddy’s little girl, right?
She finished them in four days.
As a techno-geek, my response was immediate and obvious, “Get a Kindle!” The Kindle, Amazon.com’s e-book reader, is about the same form factor as a normal book, but can hold 100’s (1000’s?) of digital e-books. It seemed like a perfect solution to the problem – his daughter could read for months, if not years, with all the content these things can hold. (more…)
Crossing the Chasm – Part 1: “Rebooting Central Oregon”
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009In 1942 Neal C. Gross and Bruce Ryan began work on a sociological model, now formally known as the Technology Adoption Life Cycle (figure 1), with the original purpose to track the purchase patterns of hybrid seed corn farmers. A few years later, in 1957, Joe M. Bohlen, George M. Beal, and Everett M. Rogers took this a step further and wrote a paper documenting their study around what is known as the Diffusion Process or Diffusion of Innovations. Their paper outlined how farmers accepted new ideas or innovations into their community and was later formalized in Everett Rogers book which outlined the “theory of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures.” To further clarify this, their work documented what is known as the “Roger’s Bell Curve” along with their summary findings as shown in figures 1 and 2 below:
Figure 1
Figure 2
Their study fundamentally outlined how farm people accepted new ideas and the break-down and the demographic mix that outlined how and by whom new ideas were accepted. Fast forward almost 50 years to 1991. Geoffrey Moore took this original theory and model of Diffusion and the Technology Life Cycle and put his own take on it in his book Crossing the Chasm. (more…)