Project 365 Day 258: Campus Lecture on Globalization and IT

Thanks to Amy's knowledge of the happenings in the IT community at Iowa State University, I found out about a distance education class that hosts a lecture series in Howe Hall's main auditorium on campus. Tonight's speaker was George Strawn (bio), who was formerly associated with ISU in various capacities in the Computer Science department and at the Computation Center. He is now a fellow member of the federal government community, though with much more stature than I have attained. His title is "Director of the National Coordination..." ok, hold on, this is really long so I'm going to blockquote it instead:

Director of the National Coordination Office (NCO) for the Federal government’s multiagency Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program.

The government is at least good at creating names and acronyms that are next to impossible to remember!

Mr. Strawn gave a very interesting talk on Globalization, and though he loosely tied it to Information Technology, it was really more general, discussing at a very high level the history of mankind and how technological evolutions and advancements have been occurring at an increasing rate. One of his final points was that some are predicting the next 50 years will hold just as many innovations as the past 200, and it is a very exciting time to be alive.

I knew Amy would consider the lecture worthwhile as soon as he opened with his first slide covering a list of recommended books! There were actually quite a few that sounded very interesting to me as well, and he mentioned that he didn't really start reading voraciously until he turned 30, so maybe there's still hope for me...

The distance education course webpage for this class has the list of the instructors and speakers, and next to each speaker who has already given his or her talk is a video link you can use to watch the session. If you're interested in history, IT, globalization, books, or all of the above, check out Mr. Strawn's talk.

I may have to return for some future lectures. One of the upcoming speakers of note is Christine Romans, an ISU alum who currently hosts a few shows on CNN and is a correspondent for the cable network's American Morning show. She's giving a talk on October 6th called The New Normal and the Value and Values Consumer.