News Articles

At the Boston Academy, Ed Morrison gave a helpful overview of WIRED Nation, what you as a WIRED Nation user should try to get out of it, and what you can do to contribute and interact in the community itself:

If you don't have an effective way to structure information, you end up with a 'garbage bag' of stuff - this is why on WIRED Nation we are making effective use of categories and tagging. It helps the community identify common themes as it to relates to a piece of content, such as 'advanced manufacturing', 'biosciences', etc. Moreover, categories and tags allow you to search using the 'Advanced Search' to

A few key components of WIRED Nation include:

• Forums: essentially a running list of comments - a discussion unfolding as a series of comments on comments
  

• Weblogs aka 'Blogs': generally represent a way for an individual to share information with a group
• Wikis: a fantastic way for more than one person to create content ; a quick and easy way for business professionals to be able to author content to the web quickly and effective - in a matter of minutes.
• RSS: allows you to grab content from the web and be automatically updated anytime any content is changed on that webpage.

In WIRED Nation, we have the following tabs:

• 'Forums' is an area for you to have ongoing discussions around particular topics
• 'Regions' is a wiki page which has been created to share the industry segments, key contacts, implementation plan, etc. in each region.
  
• 'Home' is yet another great example of a wiki page in action - this is a easily editable webpage including graphics, a slideshow, etc., which is updated by members of WIRED Nation, not an IT professional.
  
• 'Stories' is where we are sharing complex stories of what is working in various WIRED regions.
• 'Library' is where we are putting files - files can include a detailed description of what a particular file is
• 'Events' is a great place for us to share schedules for key sessions and events with other regions.
  

WIRED Nation is an open community which allows us to have the most qualified and well represented discussion - there is no 'webmaster', but rather the community as a whole driving the discussion.

A few points Ed emphasized include:

Categorization and tagging.

According to Ed, "categories are like the chapters of a book." For example, in WIRED Nation they include broad ideas and concept areas such as 'Innovation', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Talent', etc. Tags, however "are like the index in the back of the book." Use categories and tags together to make if far easier to find content later as well as to help people more quickly deduce what the relevance of a particular post is.

Weekly Webinars

Fridays at 1PM EST, we have a webinar in which we discuss what is new in WIRED Nation, and go over regional initiatives and how to increase visibility and support for these initiatives in the community using WIRED Nation.

Blogging:

The blog is a great way to quickly share points of interest with the rest of WIRED Nation - maybe a paragraph our two or a link to an interesting research finding or editorial related to economic development.

Jump in - contributing takes only a few minutes. The Law of Networks states that value accrued from a network increases exponentially as each new connection is added.

The leaders of Detroit's regional efforts are promoting the idea of sustainability as a job generator: Going green can help grow new jobs

If you are interested, a couple of new reports came out last week. Pittsburgh held Good Jobs, Green Jobs national conference last week. Read more.

During the conference, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy released Greener Pathways: Jobs and Workforce Development in the Clean Energy Economy.

In addition, the Apollo Alliance released a report on green collar jobs. 

In December of 2006 NJIT was awarded a grant to develop freely distributable course module curricula to support job-market specific training for the financial sector workforce. The New Jersey Regional Economic Innovation Alliance (NJEIA) the national association, WIRED, and its associated industry partners have identified segments of the financial services industry that would benefit from potential employees who already  have certain enhanced skill sets when hired.

Developed to close the apparent gap between the skills that high-school, community college, and four year institution students were graduating and the needs of employers in the growing financial services workplace, the program, IPI Financial, is a collaboration among educators and IT professionals to develop and package effective training courseware archives.

At the initial IPI curriculum meeting, two NJIT professors from the School of Management, Asokan Anandarajan and Katia Passerini, presented their proposed training curriculum for the first of the financial training packages. Included in their presentations was commentary from financial institutions about the types of skills that were needed, but lacking, in potential employees and newly hired personnel.

Financial institutions such as commercial banks, the Federal Reserve, and Goldman Sachs, had no strong interest in requiring educational institutions to provide greater technical skills to potential employees. Those institutions provide their own technical training to master day-to-day job functions once an applicant is hired. The skills that those institutions were most interested in improving or establishing were employee "soft-skills," in the workplace. Focus groups identified the following needed areas of improvement:

1. Communication skills, both oral and written
2. Skills relating to conduct (including mode of dress and proper business etiquette)
3. The ability to deal with peers,superiors and subordinates
4. The ability to understand different cultures when dealing with people of different international backgrounds
5. The ability to engage in critical thinking
6. Lateral thinking in problem solving
7. Knowing how to work effectively in a team
8. Overall integrity in the workplace environment

Does this sound like the need for liberal arts education to anyone?

The IPI Financial group expects to produce these training curriculum archives in a freely available and downloadable form by Spring of 2008. These course archives are expected to complement and supplement the educational resources that already exist in schools and will include lecture and study materials generated by subject matter experts in the specific employment areas that are targeted. Each course archive will be a self-contained learning environment that will require a computer with an unzip utility, a web-browser, a PDF document viewer and a multimedia client program to study the curriculum content.

The format and type-content of the individual course archives for this financial services training model is expected to be applied to other targeted industries where similar learning skills enhancements are needed for the future workforce.

Links to the course content modules and curricula on NJIT servers will be posted for public download.  The completed course archives for the IPI Financial initiative as well as the next courses in the sequence, IPI Information Technology and IPI Pharmacology-Biology, will be hosted on Curriki.

Further developments with this curricula will be posted here.

A report out of Connecticut provides a wealth of information on state-level innovation and technology indicators.  

Ed Werstein published this note over at a new site for Southeastern Wisconsin. 

I attended a Workforce Development Summit on Advanced Manufacturing in January. It was held at the Performance Institute in Arlington, Va.There were many good presentations. I am posting three items that were presented by:Eric A. Roe, Ph.D.Director, FLATEFlorida - Advanced Technological EducationCenter for Manufacturing EducationPrincipal Investigator, Employ Florida Banner Center for Manufacturingroe@fl-ate.org813.259.6579

Since manufacturing is at the heart of our regional economy, I was interested in this presentation on how Florida, or this part of it (not traditionally a manufacturing area), is transforming itself. It seems to me that we need a similar campaign to get past the declining image of manufacturing that exists in our region for a variety of reasons.

Ed WersteinWIA WIRED Case ManagerSpotted Eagle, Inc.3134 W. State St.Milwaukee, WI 53208414-342-0700 (voice)414-342-0804 (fax)e-mail: werstein@spottedeagle.uswww.spottedeagle.us  

Representatives from Scotland are visiting Ireland this week to learn more about the Irish National Workplace Strategy. A Scottish representative notes, 

"The Irish and other countries in the 'arc of prosperity' recognize that the quality and innovative capacity of workplaces is a key economic development issue." 

Read more. 

We also can learn more about how advanced countries like Ireland are working to increase the innovative capacity of their workplaces.  

Start by exploring the web site for the Irish National Workplace Strategy. Launched in 2005, the strategy is designed much like Wired: To support the transformation of the workforce through innovation. The Irish strategy is dealing with similar issues: 

• How to build innovative capacity at regional and national levels; 
• How to achieve effective organizational change and innovation; and
• How to design and deliver a framework of supportive policies to create incentives for innovation.  
  

You can download the 2007 annual report on the strategy here. 

The Indiana Chamber of Commerce released a report earlier this week on the skill levels of the staate's adult workforce. You can read more about the report from this article in the Indianapolis Star. 

You can download a copy of the report from this page.

The report includes county-level maps on the educational attainment of adults in Indiana. You can download these maps from this page.  

Scott Hutcheson and I from Purdue traveled to Southeastern Wisconsin to conduct a workshop for this Wired region. Southeastern Wisconsin -- which is in the process of renaming itself Milwaukee 7 Wired -- will be taking about half of its $5 million grant an allocating it to an Innovation Fund. 

We have a similar fund in North Central Indiana, and we were happy to share what we had learned.

In addition, we shared the insights of Open Source Economic Development, a new network-based approach to integrating education, economic development and workforce development. You can download the slides we used from this post. 

The Jobing Company, an online job search company, has established a nonprofit foundation to support community organizations in the states that the company serves. These states are the Southwest, Florida and Wisconsin. You can see a map here.

The foundation is relatively small, but it has some significant Internet resources that it is making available to non-profits in the regions the company serves. You can read more about these services here. 

You can read more about the foundation's launch from this press release. You can also visit the foundation's web site here.