links for 2010-09-03

Depressing news from depressing places.

The late management theorist Russell Ackoff once told a story of a Mexican school in a poor, rural region that simply could not afford to hire teachers. It was forced to let the older students teach the younger students (8th graders would teach 7th graders, who would teach 6th graders, and so on.) The students were expected to fail, but contrary to expectations, the students at this school went on to achieve some of the highest test scores in Mexico. Ackoff concluded that you learn more from being a teacher than from being a student, the way schools are set up today.

About a month ago, I discovered Paper.li, a service that aggregates content linked to by people in a Twitter community into an online newspaper. It’s one of the most useful ways I’ve found for surfacing news and information I might otherwise have missed entirely.

Not only that, "Neville Hobson Daily," the newspaper I created with Paper.li, gives me insight into the kinds of content some in my own Twitter community find useful or interesting that they link to it. Some of it is similar to the sort of things I would link to but more is new, part of its discovery appeal.

Links provided on Twitter by IABC members, updated daily.