In our fast paced and globally interconnected world, having the right skills is essential to success. As rates for global unemployment keep soaring with dramatic consequences especially for our youth, we need to reflect on what exactly those 21st century skills are, how they can be learned, and consequently, how they can be measured.
ATC21S™ (Assessment and Teaching of 21st-Century Skills) is a multi-stakeholder collaboration founded and funded by Cisco, Intel and Microsoft and headquartered at the University of Melbourne. Since 2009, ATC21S™ has brought together the national governments of Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, Netherlands, Singapore, and the United States as well as intergovernmental organizations and more than 250 researchers and teaching institutions from around the globe to produce an integrated system to research, develop, and create innovative resources for assessing and teaching key 21st century skills. ATC21S™ has developed methodologies, tools and materials to assess skills and learning progression in collaborative problem solving and ICT digital network literacy; to produce reports showing skill assessments at the individual, class, and system levels; and to induct teachers into the ATC21S™ approach.
Organizations of all types enter 2013 with one key priority: how do they move faster and execute with greater agility while still remaining flexible and adaptable to the rapid changes in markets?
CEOs around the world are looking to collaboration as their top strategy to increase the speed of their organizations. Why? Because collaboration eliminates the friction that slows organizations down — whether that friction comes from people or processes.
The amount of friction in your organization is directly proportional to your ability to speed up your team. Friction is sometimes purposeful, such as passive-aggressive behavior. Other times friction comes from processes that create decisions without any clarity or a clear definition of success.
Here are four New Year’s resolutions for all leaders to Read More »
Tags: collaboration, culture, leadership, Ron Ricci Blog, strategy, The Collaboration Imperative
Yesterday, I attended the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) annual Supply Chain Members Roundtable. Cisco has hosted this meeting for several years using Cisco TelePresence rooms in our offices, this year in London, New York City, São Paulo, and San Francisco, with AT&T attending from their own Cisco TelePresence room in Denver.
Supply chain GHG emissions is a complex topic, but the biggest challenge is simple… appropriately “encouraging” suppliers to report their corporate emissions to CDP. I put “encouraging” in quotes because throughout the typical year, we see two views on supplier reporting (or any desired supplier action).
A lot of external stakeholders see reporting as a requirement, something to be demanded, as if failure to report can simply be corrected with larger sticks. If this sounds reasonable, just imagine your boss managing your performance similarly. Not much fun and not the way to sustained high performance.
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Tags: carbon disclosure, suppliers, TelePresence
A year ago, I met our customers and partners at Cisco Live London and demonstrated the power of medianet for Cisco TelePresence for my first time. It was a time of a few other firsts including my first time in London, first time eating fish and chips, and first time being stranded in an airport.
Continuing on this theme of “firsts,” we have some exciting new things to showcase at Cisco Live London this year! For the first time, we will be showing the value of medianet end-to-end with demos in both our Enterprise Network and Collaboration areas. We have expanded our portfolio of medianet-enabled products to include Cisco Jabber, Cisco VXI, and more Cisco TelePresence endpoints. Stop by the World of Solutions and experience the quality difference between non- and medianet-enabled endpoints. And what’s new with our core networking? You can learn how we made our networks much smarter with abilities to recognize third party endpoints and applications.
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Tags: Cisco Live London, collaboration, medianet, rich media applications, video
Last month Brian Shoda, a 12 year veteran of Cisco and most recently the director of Cisco’s IP NGN architecture sales for the Asia Pacific theatre, sat for an interview with Telecom Asia magazine. During the interview he discussed the impact of programmability on the network and why dynamically configuring services is important for telecom operators. Since some of our global audience doesn’t read Telecom Asia magazine they’ve graciously allowed us to reprint the interview.
1. [Telecom Asia] What are the key trends driving the transition in SP networking?
[Brian Shoda] Over the past several years, service provider networking has primarily focused on cost reduction through network optimization and revenue generation and the development of new and innovative products. However, recently with the explosion of mobile data traffic growth many operators have struggled to control capital expenditures as they scale their networks to support demand, often diverting capital from product development to ensure the on-going scalability of the infrastructure. In many markets, this has led to the stagnation of innovation and the commoditization of network services, which, in turn has lowered revenues and reduced margins as operators compete on price to maintain and grow their customer bases.
Other factors such as Read More »