Canada’s Innovation Strategy

Knowledge Matters: Skills and Learning for Canadians – Section 3: Strengthening Accessibility and Excellence in Post-Secondary Education is part of Canada’s Innovation Strategy. It calls for dramatic increases in graduate admissions (5% per year until 2010!) and making post-secondary education financially accessible. Of interest to me is the statement,

INCREASINGLY, SUCCESS IN THE KNOWLEDGE-BASED ECONOMY REQUIRES INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE CREATIVE AND WHO HAVE HIGHLY DEVELOPED PROBLEM-SOLVING AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS.

High-performance firms attribute much of their success to developing a wide range of competencies. Information and communications technologies also require these skill sets. Teamwork is an essential part of the production process, and interpersonal skills are becoming key determinants of business success. For this reason the arts, humanities and social sciences are increasingly valued as preparation for employment. Also important are multidisciplinary learning and teaching techniques that develop an ability to think creatively and work collaboratively.

What strikes me from the Executive Summary is how this document foreshadows the Rae Report.

Statistics Canada: Internet Usage in Canada

Internet Use in Canada is a 2003 report that shows that 64% of Canadian households had someone using the Internet regularly. There is a wealth of material linking out from the report, see the links at the end of the report and to the side for details. Some of the interesting statistics:

  • Households with children are more likely to have access to the Internet. (See Characteristics of household Internet users, by location of access.)
  • Another interesting result is that the reading materials are the most popular type of item that people buy. Books, magazines and newspapers were bought by 30% of e-commerce households. Could there be a correlation between Internet use and reading?
  • Playing games has gone from 12.3% in 1999 to 27.9% in 2003. Household Internet use at home by Internet activity outlines what Canadians use the Internet for, from e-mail (52.1% in 2003) to listening to the radio (13.1% in 2003).

For a list of the different tables around internet use see, Canadian Statistics: The People: Culture, leisure and travel.
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Digital Divide

According to a BBC story, Global digital divide ‘narrowing’, the World Bank is reporting that the developing world is catching up in usage and access to tehnologies. The World Bank doesn’t feel we need a World Summit on the Information Society. WSIS is going on anyway. WSIS has two summits, Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005. Check out their WSIS: Declaration of Principles; Building the Information Society: a global challenge in the new Millennium. This presents a vision of the importance of the Information Society connected to freedom of expression (and opinion) and human rights.
WSIS was endorsed by the UN General Assembly (Resolution 56/183)
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Pattern Books: the history of patterns

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How “Pattern Books” Fueled England’s First Speculative Real Estate Market by William Baer in the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge (Feb. 17, 2003) provides an interesting peek into the recurring idea of patterns as an alternative to rules or theories.

The term “pattern books” was used generically for books covering a variety of specialized topics that were sold to the trades and the general public. These became quite popular in the seventeenth century and on into the eighteenth, and were part of a rapidly growing publishing industry. “Writings on trade, credit, agricultural improvements, and employment schemes” are examples of some economic and commercial topics covered by pattern books.

This link came from the History Of Patterns in the Portland Pattern Repository which is one of the major foci of the WikiWikiWeb which is arguably the first wiki.
The Dave Orme authored wiki page traces the application of pattern design to software design to 1987 when at OOPSLA 87 they reported on a project for Tektronix where they applied Alexander’s “pattern stuff they’d been studying.”

Internet Safety Day

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InSafe is a Council of Europe sponsored organization promoting Internet safety information. Did you know about Safer Internet Day? One is tempted to mock such earnestness. Or you could,

Write about your journey with friends from all over the world in the exciting and sometimes dangerous cyber world of Internet and mobile technology. Take along a magical helper from the Kingdom of Internet safety.

I’m taking Alpha Dog who is good at “digging down spam”.
But seriously, what makes this site so bizarre is that it is written for children, but designed for adults. I can’t imagine any child reading pages of this stuff without any graphics and I find it hard to imagine adults reading this without cringing. Perhaps the graphical version is coming. Compare with the Canadian Media Awareness Network (MNet) to see what I mean.
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