FASTforward’09 Interview: Bill Ives, blog consultant and FastForward blog contributor
by Joshua-Michéle Ross
Rather that trying to figure out which generation is smarter or dumber, as was discussed by Don Tapscott yesterday, Bill thinks it is more useful to say that the definition of intelligence is changing. Prior generations were certainly smarter, he notes, than ours on many skills that were important to them. But what’s important today is to understand the characteristics of the world we live in and, since each medium draws on different skills and supports different cognitive processes, properly map media to tasks required of us. Also important: we need to know what new social medium to use for what business purpose so we can be smart with social media, regardless of generation.
BIO: Bill Ives has worked with Fortune 100 companies in knowledge management, portals, and learning for over 25 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice within the Human Performance Service Line at Accenture and was an advisor to their internal KM group. Currently he is focusing on helping firms with their market facing blogs and other applications of Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. He has published extensively on these topics and is a frequent conference speaker. Prior to consulting, Bill was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog, Portals and KM and on Twitter. He also writes for The AppGap blog and the TVissimo blog.
