Last year Lift and AlpicT partnered to organize a venture trip in Korea. We helped emerging start-ups from Western Switzerland such as Poken, Arimaz, KeyLemon, Secu4, Lighthouse, Pixelux to develop and promote themselves. They had the opportunity to meet-up key people in Korea, potential clients, suppliers, partners, or investors and show their project during the Lift conference in Jeju.

In the context of Lift Asia next fall, we renew this partnership for the "Asia Venture Trip 2009" in Seoul and Jeju between September 14 and 19. The project targets entrepreneurs based in Western Switzerland (Vaud, Valais, Geneve, Fribourg, Bern, Neuchatel, Jura) in the field of information and communication technologies and with a strong focus on interactivity.

More details and information can be found in the documents below (in french):

It has been a tight two hours - but the participants of the blurredworld workshop actually achieved some nice results... check out blurredworld to see more of what they've done!

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about elearning, one of the topics that will be addressed during the upcoming Business School 2.0 workshop.

E-learning is expanding worldwide and is deeply changing teaching modes and knowledge management practices. We agree that e-learning may lead to positive changes in facilitating circulation of knowledge and access to education of people with social or financial difficulties. Moreover, we may admit that younger people may find in the ICT a funnier way to learn, closer to their habit of social networking on the web.

However, and as any radical innovation which is both technological and social oriented, e-learning does not always reach the expected objectives. And in a more severe way, we postulate that, when mis-implemented and misused, e-learning may undermine knowledge management and teaching modes. Such “dark side” or negative aspect of e-learning are often neglected. We present the main results from a qualitative and inductive research which has been conducted at Euromed Management two years ago around the general topic: “what is ideal course?” and “what are the very appropriate ICT to learn?”

We found that students were facing difficulties, not only in using the "tools 2.0" (collaborative tools, shared resources, ...) but also in understanding and challenging the different resources available to them (Wikipedia-like web sites, online courses, dedicated databases such as EBSCO...).

Before going further with even more complex tools and procedures, those two basic issues point out that the successful e-campus needs to at least address the following:

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about the MIT's OpenCourseWare, an initiative that interests the participants of the upcoming Business School 2.0 workshop.

The OpenCourseWare changes the education world because it makes course materials available on the Web, free of charge, and open to the educators and learners anywhere in the world. The concept was born in 2003 when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began providing its courses online for free. OpenCourseWare allows self-learners to access high-quality knowledge for free, gives alumni a link to their school, provide educators with teaching materials, and enables prospective students to virtually get into university classrooms. The program is free and offers no reward other than knowledge.

In 2005, MIT and other higher education organizations formed the nonprofit OpenCourseWare Consortium with the objective to provide “free and open digital publication of high quality education materials, organized as a course.” As of mid-2008, more than 200 higher education institutions and organizations had joined up with the Consortium to offer courses ranging from art history to economics. The course content varies and may have a combination of lecture notes, quizzes, exams, video clips and audio lectures. The movement also includes its own YouTube channel, YouTube EDU, which hosts videos from more than 100 colleges and universities, as well as Academic Earth, which lists video lectures. Apple, too, with iTunes U, allows curious minds to download video and audio lectures to their iPods for learning on the go. What used to be expensive and inaccessible becomes convenient and accessible to everyone.

Making course ware from premier institutions available online to all for free is a frank success. The OpenCourseWare Consortium boasts more than 100 million visits since its launch in 2006. The MIT OpenCourseWare alone, which provides 1,900 free courses oline, has recently published data (http://www.tofp.org/blog/?p=420) that show impressive numbers :

• More than 53.7 million individuals have now visited the MIT OpenCourseWare’s site & affiliated sites (1 million in April 2009 alone),
• OpenCourseware servers have now delivered over 3.1 billion files (“hits”) since launch,
• 8.5 million zip files of full course content have been downloaded from the site,
• 2.1 million OpenCourseWare videos have been downloaded from iTunes, with its videos viewed more than 2.5 million times on YouTube.

The competition between universities and technological improvements add up to education for anyone interested in learning. By making up-to-date educational content widely available, OpenCourseWare upgrades the level of standard education and focuses faculty efforts on teaching and learning on their campuses. The school expertise, the expert knowledge, will be crucial components of the future Business School model.

Ammie Eichenbaum, World Med MBA participant
Sources : Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Education-portal.com, The CS Monitor.

(French below)

A little more than a week to go. Let's look at what you are interested in.

OK, innovation comes out way ahead...
Then design, social media (aggregating social network, networks, networking and media), collaboration and ART!
Open the larger picture a take a look.

Larger picture / image plus grande

Un peu plus d'une semaine d'attente fébrile. A quoi vous intéressez-vous?

Evidemment, l'innovation est loin devant...
Ensuite le design, le social media (aggrégation de social network, networks, networking, media), la collaboration et l'ART!
Ouvrez l'image plus grande et jetez un coup d'oeil.

Michael Shiloh needs your help for the workshop he is running! Bring your foam board, craft sticks, wooden dowels, bottle caps and much more!

Judy and I (who are Teach me to make) are leading the Tinkering and Chain Reaction Construction Workshop on Thursday, in which we will build a chain-reaction project which will remain on display for the duration of the conference.

Whether you plan to attend our workshop or not, we need your help, because we are flying from California and can't bring all the supplies we need with us. We plan to bring or buy as much as we can, but if you can help with any of these basic supplies we will have room for more fun and advanced gadgets.

If you are like us, you might already have many of these items in your home or workshop. Assume that most supplies will be consumed, although motors and batteries can be retrieved, while tools will be carefully labeled and returned to you. We will replace any that are damaged.

To give you some idea, here are some pictures from a similar workshop we did at the Maker Faire on May 30 and 31.

Supplies:
(Used, broken, or otherwise salvaged is fine)
Foam Board
Craft sticks (standard and wide)
Wooden dowels (any diameter or length)
Bottle caps
Wine corks
Pencils and pens (non-functional is fine)
Drinking straws
Coffee stirrers
Cardboard (both thin like breakfast cereal boxes and thicker like corrugated)
Clean paper or plastic cups
Broken toys, board game pieces, charms and trinkets from trade shows or amusement parks
Assorted screws, nails, nuts, and bolts (sweep up the floor of your garage and bring to the workshop)
Interesting small miscellaneous odds and ends (yes, that's vague. You decide. If in doubt, bring it)
Scraps of metal, plastic, wood, and fabric
Wire, various electronic sizes although some larger and smaller is nice as well
Broken electronic and mechanical items to take apart and from which to salvage parts
Office supplies: push pins, paper clips, tape, glue
Anything with magnets
Anything with LEDs
Anything with motors
Battery holders (AA, 9V)
Batteries (AA, 9V)
Battery clips (those things that clip on to the top of 9V batteries)
Power supplies (cellphone chargers, laptop supplies, etc.)
Motors

Tools
Soldering irons
Solder
Hot melt glue guns
Hot melt glue
Scissors
Pliers
Hand drill
Drill bits
Utility knife to cut foam board and other material
Extra knife blades (we need them very sharp so we change them often)
Inexpensive multimeter

Please email us at teachers AT techmetomake DOT com with your offers, and we will update this blog to remove items promised.
Thank you in advance for any help you can give!
Michael and Judy

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post introducing in more details the Lift France workshop titled Managing ourself with art

[Version française ci-dessous]

How many times have you read, heard and pronounced the word "crisis" today?

These financial crises, economic, political, social as we are experiencing, affect all our businesses. But we often forget that the word "crisis" comes from the Greek "κρισισ" (krisis) that means decision. It therefore requires decisions and actions. The crisis is an unusual situation characterized by instability, which obliges us to adopt a new attitude, like an artist who continually calls into questions the existing.

In this context, I invite you to continue to have ideas, to innovate and undertake, to have self confidence and see this crisis in its positive aspects, such as a real opportunity for renewal, with the resources that are in us.

Count and identify these crises and we will talk about them at the workshop that I will run next Thursday, June 18th:

Combien de fois avez-vous lu, entendu et prononcé le mot "Crise" aujourd’hui?

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post from Deutsche Welle's Anne Le Touzé seeking participants for a radio show to be recorded during the conference.

I will be attending the LIFT conference in Marseille in order to take part to the Innov’Africa Workshop as a representative of the BOBs (the Deutsche Welle international Blog competition). This meeting will also be the opportunity to record a radio programme in form of a debate, which will then be broadcasted on the Deutsche Welle French programme.

In order to stay within the subject approached during the workshop, I suggest to debate about the networks on the internet and their contribution to development. A topic that will allow to talk briefly about the state of the connectivity on the African continent, then to consider the initiatives of human networks and their effects on development. The radio programme, called “Arbre à palabre” is only 25 minutes long, but I hope to be able to give an overview of the development of new media in African countries.

If you have any ideas on the subject please let me know.

Date and time foreseen for the recording: Saturday, June 20th, 10:30 am.

[FRENCH VERSION]
Je serai à la conférence LIFT France du 18 au 20 juin à Marseille, où je participerai à l’atelier Innov’Africa en tant que représentante des BOBs (concours international de blogs de la Deutsche Welle). Cette rencontre sera également l’occasion d’enregistrer une émission-débat qui sera diffusée ensuite sur le programme français de la Deutsche Welle.

The official Lift France 09 tag is - drum roll - #liftfrance09 !
Twitter users unite!! Fill the tweetosphere with one #liftfrance09 after another.

There are 6 different combinations of "lift", "france" and "09".
We created a sub-committee, did extensive market research, four different online polls...
Difficult questions arose, such as "should "france" be in English or in French.
There was tight competition between the finalists, but a decision had to be made!
Some people will be disappointed, but democracy rules...
The winner is #liftfrance09.

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post introducing in more details the Business Schools 2.0 workshop happening at Lift France.
Authors: Boris Bartikowski, Associate Professor of Marketing at Euromed Management and Nitish Singh, Assistant Professor of International Business, St Louis University

In recent research that we conducted in this field we argued that three interrelated Global Megatrends, namely Globalization, Rise of Networks and Open Innovation, are facilitated by the global expansion of the Web. Looking at these three Global Megatrends can help anticipating some challenges that business schools may face in the future.

Globalization comes along with convergence and integration. Globalization leads in many instances to increased standardization of social and economic interrelationships. Coincidentally, globalization leads to increased cultural flow, cultural multipolarity and growing global workforce. Business schools are at the crossroad of this development. They strive to establish global market presence, and to strengthen their position through international partnerships. One of the challenges they are facing is to create economies of scale through standardization in an environment that requires culturally sensitive dialogues and that values offerings that are adapted to the local needs of diverse stakeholders.