Connecting Technology and the Humanities, STEAM, and William Shatner

How well do you and your organization encourage connection and collaboration in attacking problems and challenges?

Jonah Lehrer writes about the emphasis Steve Jobs placed on bringing technology and art together at Apple, NeXT, and Pixar.  Money Quote:  "In an age of intellectual fragmentation, Jobs insisted that the best creations occurred when people from disparate fields were connected together, when our distinct ways of seeing the world were brought to bear on a singular problem."

Bringing this theme home to South Carolina, John Warner makes the same point over at Swamp Fox, arguing that the State's push for STEM (Science, Technology, Education, and Math) needs an A for Arts.

And finally, in a true marriage of technology and the arts, William Shatner has released Seeking Major Tom, an album of covers inspired by David Bowie's Space Oddity.   Bringing together people from disparate fields, Shatner sings Spirit in the Sky with Peter Frampton, She Blinded Me with Science with Bootsy Collins,  and Bohemian Rhapsody with John Wetton.

The album also features Lyle Lovett, Sheryl Crow, Dave Davies, Warren Haynes, Johnny Winter and others.
  

Personal Knowledge Management: Turning Down the Information Firehouse

From the ABA Law Practice Magazine:

Lawyers are knowledge workers who must cope with an ever-increasing volume of information flowing within and outside of their workplaces. In this ever-more connected world, sifting through irrelevancies to find what you need can take a lot of time. Solution: Try Personal Knowledge Management

RSS, Google Alerts, Hash Tags, wikis and blogs, tagging, engaging and collaborating-- but critically learning by doing one, some or all of the above.

Collaboration Tools for The Office

Post from Michael Sampson that mentions the need to use collaboration tools (rather than email) for group projects. Money quote:

"If you are running projects in email, what's going on is locked up in individual email inboxes. That makes it so much more difficult to induct new people into projects as they join your firm, or to pick up projects that exiting people drop on the way out.

You need ... a collaboration tool that supports team projects, with all project artifacts in one place (documents, timeline, team profiles, tasks, calendar meetings and events, etc.), and the ability to add new people and remove departing people easily and quickly. There are a plethora of options ... inhouse variants (Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr, Microsoft SharePoint, Jive Clearspace, etc.) and hosted variants (Central Desktop, 37signals, Huddle.net, etc.). If you aren't already, shifting the doing of projects to project collaboration tools such as these should be a top priority. You will face costs in getting these tools deployed at a technical level, as well as costs in training your people how to use the tools and make the best use of them."