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Let’s hear your idea about… TIME

May 5, 2012 | 1 comment

Photo by Telstar Logistics

04. TIME

Here’s an opportunity to get creative. You might have an idea for saving time, or for a time-management technique. You may want to think about keeping time, or doing something that involves altering the tempo in a piece of music. You might come up with a new type of watch, or some way of making things last much longer. You might have an idea about overcoming the problem of different timezones, or even decide to invent a method of time travel. It’s entirely up to you.

Put your ideas in the comments. Criticisms of the ideas will not be published – just the ideas. So feel free to be as imaginative as you like with it.

Look forward to seeing what you come up with.

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Let’s hear your idea about… HOUSEWORK

May 4, 2012 | 1 comment

Photo by bies

03. HOUSEWORK

This time, let’s think about something completely mundane. Everyone has to do it, and I think there’s room for it to be a lot less onerous, more environmentally friendly, more fun and more fairly distributed.

Whether you have an idea for a service that takes care of chores, delivers household goods or performs certain tasks; whether you have a clever way of doing the dishes that takes less time or a special system for getting the housework done; whether you’ve got a way to divide up or incentivise tasks so that the kids practically beg to get involved… or whether it’s an idea for grass-stain resistant kids clothes or compostable underwear that saves you laundry time – let’s hear it.

What are your ideas for housework-type chores?

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Let’s hear your idea about… EDUCATION

May 3, 2012 | 10 comments

Photo by Trondheim Byarkiv

02. EDUCATION

Today’s challenge is to come up with ideas about the learning process. It might be something to do with how to learn things, ways in which testing could be improved, innovations in the classroom, ideas for topics that should be introduced, ways of getting smarter or tools for managing lesson plans. Completely over to you.

Having been involved in lots of conversations about pedagogy and curriculum recently, I get the sense that this is an area ripe for fresh ideas and new ways of thinking. So let’s hear what you’ve got!

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Let’s hear your idea about… RAIN

May 2, 2012 | 14 comments

Photo by eirikso

After this morning’s conversation about sharing ideas, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to do a series of blog posts asking for ideas on a theme.

The purpose of the theme is to either remind you of a particular idea you might have already had, or to get you thinking about something you might not yet have had an idea about.

So here’s the first of them:

01. RAIN

This has been a big topic of conversation around here recently, and there’s been an awful lot of it, so it’s something I’ve been thinking about.

What ideas do you have related to rain? It could be a new type of umbrella, something about rain collection, flood prevention, rain-powered cars, new things that we could do with rain — anything at all related to the concept of rain.

You may have a fun idea, a serious idea, a business idea, a simple idea, a complicated idea or perhaps an idea that you’d like to start a conversation about. Over to you.

Simply post a comment under this blog post about your idea, and let’s give the matter some thought. Who knows what we might come up with?

You should feel free to brainstorm, to take the theme in any direction you like, or to use it as a springboard into other things. There are essentially no rules – except the fact that any ideas that you come up with here are SHARED.

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What’s the big idea?

May 2, 2012 | 1 comment

I received a nice email this morning from Kevin Boyle, one of the guys behind Ideas Improv (watch the video above).

He writes:

Hey Andrew — I don’t know how I happened upon your 30 ideas in 30 days but it gave me …an idea.

I wanted to see if there were more Andrew Dubbers out there. I convinced a buddy to join me in this quest. For the past several months we’ve been asking people — cold on the street — if they’ll share ideas.

We actually carry Ideas Wanted and Ideas Improv signs through the streets of New York (with brief stops in Miami and Sydney). Turns out there are many Andrew Dubbers — perhaps not as ingenious but similarly generous. We’ve gotten ideas from the wacky to the astonishing.

I’ve included a link at the bottom of a radio segment featuring us BUT the real reason I’m writing is to tell you the NY Times will be doing a story on us AND I will be giving you credit for inspiring my idea (at least in part). I don’t know if you’ll get the credit in the paper but I will be telling the reporter about you.

So… Thanks for the idea(s).

Radio feature: Looking for new ideas

You’re more than welcome, Kevin. I love what you guys have done.

In fact, it’s given me an idea…

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Your logic cannot help you here

Feb 24, 2012 | 3 comments

I ended up in something of a debate about ad-blockers on the internet yesterday. Radio “futurologist” (inverted commas because that term is so problematic for me) James Cridland wrote a blog post entitled Piracy and Ad-Blockers Are Both Theft.

To which my simple, immediate and gut-response was simply “you’re wrong”.

James tweeted a link to his post, and I responded on Twitter. He invited me to discuss it further in the comments of his blog on the basis that he found it difficult (in his words “it is impossible”) to have a nuanced debate about the issue in a 140-character medium. I declined on the basis that I was reluctant to contribute to his (then) ad-supported blog.

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