Sorry for the recent low levels of blog activity. In addition to the usual summer doldrums, I've been wrapping up a bunch of projects and tooling up for a busy fall season of writing and speaking. For the past couple of weeks, I have been focused on revising and extending the text of Listening to the Future: Insights from the New World of Work, a ...

Microsoft and Insurity released a new study earlier this week on ''Millennials and Insurance,'' showing a strong relationship between the IT capabilities of an employer and the ability to recruit younger workers. This is an urgent issue for the insurance industry, which faces a shortage of new workers; 60 percent of its current employees ...

Mike Gotta points to this article by Dennis Howlett called ''The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social computing,'' in which Howlett observes: In the context of ’social’ anything, these are incredibly important concepts because what we’re really talking about are power relationships. In any business, power relationships are what provide the ...

Clay Shirky writes: ''Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn't create change; it has to be around long enough that most of society is using it... for our young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is ...

In Philadelphia, a fair number of the better private secondary schools are run by Quakers. I graduated from one of them, the William Penn Charter School, in 1985, and benefited not only from a good education, but also from the school's forward-leaning approach to technology, even back then. I saw my first PC (actually an Apple II) in the school's ...