Skip to main content

Yule Heibel's Library tagged groupthink   View Popular, Search in Google

Jan
19
2012

Looking forward to reading Susan Cain's forthcoming book. Signed, An Introvert.
QUOTE
The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group learning. Even subjects like math and creative writing are often taught as committee projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question.
UNQUOTE
If you're not mouthing a silent "ugh!" at that last paragraph, you're not one of us!
Check out her remarks on the internet:
QUOTE
The one important exception to this dismal record [of brainstorming's failures] is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.
UNQUOTE

introverts susan_cain nyt psychology groupthink

1 - 1 of 1
Showing 20 items per page

Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »

Join Diigo
Move to top