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Every now and then I like to stop and think about the future. Or maybe more accurately, the potential future.

No matter what the folks on the Psychic Friends Network want you to believe, no one can truly and completely predict the future. Certain tuned-in people might be able to make educated guesses based on available information, but no one has told me yet what I’ll eat for breakfast on June 11, 2013, or who I’m going to vote for in 2016. I also don’t really know what the next big innovation in learning technology will bring, and I most certainly don’t know what innovation that innovation will spawn (though I am sure that cascade of progress will happen).

This all reminds me of James Taylor. No, not that James Taylor … there’s a futurist working in this industry with the same name as the famed singer/songwriter, and I heard him keynote at a conference several years back. I still rem Read more…

In July 1994, East St. Louis School District 189 settled a class-action lawsuit in which it promised to educate students with behavior disorders—the district had been turning them away.

The district promised that it would not permanently exclude children with disabilities from school, and it would provide a free, appropriate education to all students with disabilities, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote at the time. In other words, it would meet the basic premise of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Nearly 20 years later, the Legal Aid lawyer who brought that case says East St. Louis still doesn’t know how to do right by its students with disabilities.

“What kills me is, these kids have the same potential as your kid or my kid,” said attorney Tom Kennedy, who still takes cases on behalf of students with disabilities at no charge. “

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Used to be that if you worked in information technology or provided training for the IT field you;  1) listed Star Wars, Star Trek and any Monty Python movie as the best movies ever!; 2) Thought that calculus was somewhat easier then talking with the opposite sex;  and 3) communicated only in cryptic Unix shell commands to friends and family.  For most of us, it’s good that things are different now.

For us in the IT training field we see ourselves having grown it to an industry onto itself. We are more likely to hear IT training referred to as the “IT Training Industry” – or at least IT Training being referred to as a hugely important subset of the entire overall training industry.

IT training is no longer just about the field in which we teach about computers, how they work, how fast they work or how to fix them when they crash. The IT t

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FORT WORTH A Fort Worth mother is hoping to find her daughter who has special needs.  Autumn Lee Ware has been missing for six days now.

I just cant hardly stand this, says her mother Cindy Corbin If you see her bring her back.

Ware has been spotted in downtown Fort Worth, but there has been no alert issued for her.  Autumns mom says there needs to be a system to find missing people like her daughter.

They need it as much as an Alzheimers patient as much as a child, says Corbin They are the same category maybe even more so.

Endangered missing children have the Amber Alert.  The elderly have the Silver Alert.  But there is no such system for tracking down the missing with mental disabilities.

And it looks like a bill that would create one wont pass either all because of budget problems.

Deborah Hailey thinks thats a mistake.  Her daughter Tiffany Demus who was mentally challenged disappeared from home in Mansfield in November.

I think she walked too far and couldnt find her way back, explains Hailey.

Demus, 31, was found just miles from her home in a creek.  According to the Medical Examiners office, she drowned.  Because she didnt meet Amber Alert Criteria one was never issued.

She didnt know she wasnt going to get back home just like they do it for the elderly and children they need to do it for the mentally disabled also, says Hailey.

John Butler helped in the search for Demus.  Its just shocking that nothing like this is already implemented, says Butler.

His own brother William, 29, has Down Syndrome.  It terrifies me to know that something could happen to my little brother, explains Butler He could be seen my multiple people who wouldnt even know they should be looking for him.

Butler has been working on a bill with State Representative Vicki Truitt which pushes for an alert system that would include those with special needs. But hes

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Many leadership gurus declare the old styles of top-down leadership are ineffective in today’s business climate. The creativity and innovation needed to build a long-lasting competitive advantage require more collaborative and inspiring approaches. There are skills like coaching and delegation that will leaders succeed in the new workplace, but the change in the nature of leadership requires a shift in emotions.

Although work is an economic system where people are paid for their efforts and acknowledged for good results, the brain experiences the workplace first and continually as a social system. In this system, the leader sets the emotional tone. Every aspect of the leader’s presence has social meaning.

Even if unintended, if employees feel unsure, unrecognized, or betrayed, they are not capable of giving their best effort even if they “suck it up” without complaint.

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