Lili's Think Telecom Blog

Lili's Musical Interlude - Music and Learning

Lili's Musical Interlude

Here is a little musical interlude I enjoyed, while taking a break in the taping for my  LIDO Telecommunications Essentials elearning series. 

This is me playing one of my favorite pieces - Schubert's Impromptu in A flat major.   My absolute favorite piece to play is Chopin's Scherzo in B flat minor.  Did you know? -  B flat is the key of the universe!  However, you and I can't hear it - it is 57 octaves below middle C!  So if a black hole hums, it hums at a frequency a million billion times lower than you can hear. 

I like to think that introducing this type of moment, a musical interlude,  in a classroom or elearning setting works wonders in addressing those high on musical intelligence.  If you're not familiar with the fact that we are comprised of multiple intelligences - read two of the books I recommend - Armstrong's 7 Kinds of Smarts and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences.

Another factor that governs how our brain thinks is our sensory style - audio, visual, kinesthetic, and read/write.  Clearly music appeals to all four - we can deduce that music can be a powerful method to accelerating learning. 

But it does depend on the type of music - it has to induce alpha waves or theta waves, not disrupt them!  What is the best music for learning by?  Experts tell us Baroque is the best music to play while using accelerated learning methods because its cadence is the same as the alpha brainwave state.  Ambient music and meditation in nature settings are also an excellent way to get the mind prepared for accelerated learning exercises.

I hope you have enjoyed my musical interlude - it is may be my last.  Tomorrow I am having a joint fusion performed on the middle joint of the left index finger, and the finger will be bent permanently at a 45 degree angle.  They say I won't be able to play - but If I could resume my playing, and read music like this, after not touching the piano for 23 years, anything is possible! 
I’ll be off the keyboard for a little while, but talk to you soon!
Lili

4 billion mobile connections reached this week - but only 100 million are broadband!

I ran across an interesting update on the status of mobile connections today, which brings up some questions.  I thought I’d share this short summary from GizMag (02-12-09) with you.

“February 12, 2009.  The world passed its four billionth mobile connection this week, passing another milestone along the road to the ubiquitous wirelss connectivity of every human being.  The first commercial citywide cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979 and it took 23 years for one billion mobiles to be connected.

The two billion mark was passed in 2005, with the three billion milestone passed in 2007 and the historic “tipping point” where 50% of all human beings are carrying a mobile phone was reached in Q2, 2008.

Further growth in emerging markets such as China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan, plus the integration of previously unconnected devices are expected to push the number of global connections to six billion in 2013.  There are only 6.7 billion human beings.

Mobile Broadband accounts for just 100 million of the four billion mobile connections, compared with 1.1 billion fixed broadband lines.  Given the rapid penetration of mobile into the global community, mobile broadband can be expected to accelerate from this point too.  Notably, with fixed line broadband included, broadband connectivity now reaches on sixth of the world’s population.”

So, I have a few questions for you….

1.   What are your thoughts regarding broadband mobile in general?

2.   How quickly do you think it will reach the same penetration that the fixed-line world demonstrates?

3.   What applications do you think will drive the demand?

And this is a pop quiz question……….

4.   Who or what represents a bigger population of users than the 6.7 billion humans we’re connecting?

Hope to see some answers from you!

And I wish you all a very special Valentine’s Day with your loved ones!

Lili

Invitation to Join New Telecom Essentials Social Network and Discussion Forum

Hello there everyone!    I hope all of you are preparing for a romantic and playful weekend  - afterall, it is Valentine’s Day tomorrow, and there's a whole weekend to celebrate it!  For those in the United States - a long weekend ;-)

 I have some exciting news to share with you - LIDO Telecom Essentials is well on its way to becoming Telecom Essentials 2.0!   And as readers of my blog, I am inviting you to be part of of what promises to be an wonderful adventure, resulting in dynamic knowledge exchange and potentially rich friendships between a group of people bound by their learning experiences with LIDO, as well as their interest in, if not love of, telecom and the ICT universe.

 My project now is to focus on expanding the Telecom Essentials 2.0 Learning Center – which will allow me to serve your learning and knowledge needs in a fashion consistent with how ICT technology is redefining every possible industry – going Web 2.0. 

I’ve got many of the pieces in place already – my blog, RSS feeds to selected telecom news sources, top industry blogs, and ICT podcasts.  Telecom Essentials podcasts are in production, and soon we'll be offering mLearning --  just-in -time learning for those on the go!   But right this minute,  I’m building a social network for Telecommunications Essentials – and with the members we already have, it’s a veritable ICT Think Tank!

So I have two invitations for you.  First, it is my pleasure to invite you to join me on LinkedIn!   My connections constitute the members of our social network.  And already some are inviting their connections to join as well! 

I’m also inviting you to join my Telecommunications Essentials Group on LinkedIn.  This is where our discussion forum resides.  You need to join this group in order to participate in discussions and knowledge exchange.  And I also invite you to join my Telecom Trainers Groupon LinkedIn -and its not just for those in education, there will be a lot about learning 2.0, ICT in education, and the psychology of learning, with helpful advice on how to accelrate your own learning process! 

With this project of mine, to build our network, I have now experienced first-hand, the potential, and speed, of social networking, which I’ll address below!   Meanwhile, I have the privilege of seeing the member’s profiles when they join, and I am so impressed with our network.   I already know that all of you will be able to find answers to questions that come up for you within this group – there is someone for everyone!  And I have questions for so many of you!   Let me share the highlights.

· It is comprised of the professional and academic space – it will be a multigenerational forum – which should make it all the more exciting – with the applications LinkedIn Supports, there is opportunity to address the visual and kinesthetic learners in our group by sharing presentations using SlideShare.  And I’ve just added the poll application – and your first poll – please do cast your vote!

· It is comprised of wide range of talents – executive, scientific, engineering, sales, teaching,  and more.  With personal interests to boggle the mind!

· It is comprised of a very diverse range of disciplines – software, wireless, switching, higher education, military, network operations, legal, financial, too many to mention -  although all focused on ICT. 

· It is a worldwide group – as LIDO is a global company, with members from all continents – although we are still waiting for Happy Feet to join  J   For those that may not know, Happy Feet was the name of a Penguin in a beautiful animation film, meaning I have not gone to teach in Antarctica yet, but I’m hoping!

· And, quite importantly, most of you share me in common – you have either read my book, attended my seminars, used by elearning, or visit my website – and as such, you all have something rarely found in a social network – a common foundation for what you have learned about telecom, at least from me, made special by your own knowledge and what you have learned about telecom since Telecom Essentials!  Of course this will be less the case as more people join  by virtue of recommendations, but there will always be a core of my students as well, so please do use the forum to ask questions about topics from my learning materials if you wish to!

I also see so many great matches for discussions and friendships when I read your profiles – honestly its making me feel like a matchmaker!  Hopefully you will discover each other over time, but I may, from time to time,  bring you together in the forum by introducing a question and asking for your response :-) 

 As you can see, I’m excited about my LIDO 2.0 adventure – and in a few short hours, I was convinced me that it will be a most thought-provoking, educational, and enjoyable journey! 

Just to make the point – when I say a few hours – I mean it.  When I sent out my initial heap of invitations, within 2 hours I had 60 acceptances!  Now, less than two days later, we have 200 new members in our network!  And by virtue of your connections, we have 30,000+ mind shares between us.  

Now, it is very important that you also join both our groups - Telecommunications Essentialsand Telecom Trainers .  I humbly ask that you join, and indeed participate from time to time.  With our group of almost 300 as 2-18-09, and growing daily, there are enough of us to keep a great dialogue going, and achieve the goal – knowledge exchange and connected knowledge to expand our ICT IQ! 

I invite you all to treat this as an experiment – our own personal experiment on the power of social networking, as well as the pitfalls, while also creating a rich telecom and ICT resource for questions, advice and/or collaboration!

If you aren’t familiar with the whole 2.0 ecosystem, take a look at my powerpoint presentation ‘Innovations to Gain the Edge:  The Learning 2.0 Ecosystem” – its posted on my profile page on LinkedIn.  While it addresses Learning 2.0, the concepts are the same, and the web 2.0 technologies are the same, so you will get a good summary of web 2.0, as well as what our mission with this social network is about!   You can also Download Innovations to Gain the Edge PDF[Compatibility Mode]  

Once again, I invite you to join our growing community, given the members, its bound to be a dynamic forum of telecom thinkers – I like to think of it as the LIDO ICT Think Tank – an educational cooperative of the world’s most committed telecom thinkers J

Happy Valentine’s Day

Lili

Update - Tangible User Interface resources

Hello everyone – I hope you’ve all had a restful and entertaining weekend!

As you can see, I’ve been a little busy with my blog – it is my personal mission to make up for my absent months!

I wanted to follow- up on my first blog on Tangible User Interfaces by providing you with a good list of related blogs and resources that you can monitor in order to keep abreast of developments in this very exciting area.  

For example, go to Channel 10 (by Microsoft) –  a blog for enthusiasts with a passion for technology for technology enthusiasts with a network of worldwide contributors – there’s a few great photos and discussions of surface tables, as I discussed in my previous post - like this application at this year’s Superbowl!

 

 

I gave you three examples in my blog, but there are so many many more – as a couple of slides from one my recent seminar tour in Asia illustrate.

 

 

Now you want to see more?  Then start with these resources, and they’ll lead to the “touchy-feely” side of ICT :-)

Happy exploring!

All my best,

Lili

 

Channel 10 (highly recommended for examples)

Vizoo (Cheoptics 360 3D interface)

 Smashing Magazine –Future for Gamers:  Cheoptics 360

Human Productivity Lab

The Female Perspective of Computer Science

Microsoft Surface Tables (great videos)

Microsoft Live Labs

Microsoft Photosynth

Microsoft Seadragon

Reactable - Collaborative Electronic Music Instrument

Tech Digest

Pantipicon – A Thousand Tomorrows

CScout Japan – Japan Trend Spotting and Innovative Research

Emerging Technologies - ZDNet Blog

Tactile Display – Band-aid Size

The Future of E-Paper

Flexible Computers

Illuminating Clay – MIT Tangible Media Lab

Wikipedia - Tangible User Interface

Telecom and Neuroscience and PLC and......

Greetings everyone!

I recently recieved and email from a student, a reader of my book. It led to some very interesting observations, so I want to share just a bit of what Ron Gonzales had to say - and yes, I have his permission to quote him :-)  Ron, like myself, has a degree in   Psychology. But, after reading my book, he has quite elegantly envisioned a connection between ICT networks and the human nervous system.

"Ms. Goleniewski, I really enjoyed your book. I've been taking telecom and computer networking classes after getting a bachelor's degree in psychology (I was a pre-med student), and I like this field an awful lot". "

"It's struck me for awhile now, how similar telecom and computer networks are to the human central nervous system. In the brain and spinal cord, you have discrete areas that communicate by means of specific neurotransmitters, and in computer networks, you have areas that use common signaling protocols."

"In the brain and spinal cord, you have tracts and nerves, and in networks you have trunks and conduits. In psychology, you have the subconscious and the conscious, and in networking, you have backplanes and CLI's".

"It's funny how a few good ideas get recycled all over the place in life..."

There is most definitely such a connection – much like multimedia strives to enable computers and machines with the sensory systems we use to perceive the entire world – physical or virtual!  And if you haven’t noticed – telecommunications is as much about psychology today, as it was about engineering in the past!  One of the greatest knowledge sets ICT companies should be investing in, is introducing more pshychologists – in particular from the sensory & physiological, development, cognitive, and organizational disciplines.  Okay, we could probably use some good clinical psychologists in the industry as well –and will need more for technology induced disorders!

Interestingly, a couple of weeks later, I got a note from another reader - who also saw a relationship - but in his case, as an electrical contractor, it was to PLT systems.  Here's what Alex had to say......

"I just wanted to thank you for writing Telecommunications Essentials 2nd edition.Im learning alot and you are a great teacher.Im an elecrical contractor/engineer, and decided to detour in depth to the communications field.Some of the subject matter is common with process control technology im familiar with such as that with PLC's.

I also have been involved with digital audio and own a project recording studio .The common thread between these technologies is amazing.

anyway ,awsome book.now if i can just remember all these

acronyms...........:-) thank you!”

I'm hoping Ron and Alex continue this discussion, and  as this group comes to life, we'll have many such intriguing discussions - while also talking about what you’re learning, and what you’re interested in, when it comes to building your telecom knowledge!

Meanwhile, let me know what you’ve discovered about telecom that came as a surprise to you!

All my best,

Lili