Ken Homer's List: WVL

"I can only answer the question "What am I to do?'<br/><br/>if I can answer the prior question "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'"<br/><br/>--Alastair MacIntyre , On Virtue<br/><br/> For those of us who study narratives there is no easy agreement about what, in fact, a "narrative" is.   Academics disagree, so do practitioners.   Academics disagree because humanistic and social science scholars use separate sets of theoretical and historical references to define the term and because our diverse definitions are contextually employed differently to define a particular event or inform a particular research purpose.   Hence, it matters a lot to the individual researcher whether "narrative" refers to data drawn from someone's account of something that they claim happened, or whether it refers to an historical text disconnected from the present that may be interpreted by readers in any number of ways.

Ms. Wilson has embraced a growing movement to restore the sometimes-untidy business of play to the lives of children. Her interest was piqued when she toured her local elementary school last year, a few months before Benjamin was to enroll in kindergarten. She still remembered her own kindergarten classroom from 1985: it had a sandbox, blocks and toys. But this one had a wall of computers and little desks.

"There's no imaginative play anymore, no pretend," Ms. Wilson said with a sigh.

For several years, studies and statistics have been mounting that suggest the culture of play in the United States is vanishing. Children spend far too much time in front of a screen, educators and parents lament - 7 hours 38 minutes a day on average, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation last year. And only one in five children live within walking distance (a half-mile) of a park or playground, according to a 2010 report by the federal Centers for Disease Control, making them even less inclined to frolic outdoors.

Jay: The commons is what we share and how we share it. There are a lot of things in our lives that are rightly private and individual. We don't want to have collective underwear or shared toothbrushes. But there are things that don't make sense done in a private-property way. The classic example is public health. You can be the wealthiest person in the world, yet your health depends on the health of the people around you because you're breathing the same air. It doesn't make sense for us to be filtering our own water. The safety of your neighborhood is a commons. The streets and the parks. As you start looking you realize this is a pretty large sector of our lives and a pretty important sector.

Much of human knowledge is a commons. Scientific knowledge is a commons, and the entire market economy depends upon the commons. You need to have a legal system, you need to have regulations and enforcement by a government. You need a police force and courts. As one of my colleagues, Peter Barnes, points out, even basic accounting is a commons. You don't pay a royalty when you use the double-entry bookkeeping system. That's something that someone invented and it became a gift to all of humanity.

eight lessons for those who want to strengthen communities on the basis of respect:

Respect must be symmetrical and reciprocal.
We must appreciate the immediate and visceral way that respect is conveyed through nuance, tone of voice, and figure of speech.
We must not confuse respect with civility. Respect must go deeper than the decorum and politeness that characterize surface interactions.
Story-telling is at the center of respectful encounters. We must approach one another with genuine curiosity, authentic questions, and attentive listening.
We must get rid of code labels - like "inner-city," "at-risk," "disadvantaged," and "urban" - that mask the racial and economic realities that define contemporary social issues.
We must anticipate moments of misunderstanding and prepare ourselves to navigate moments of distrust. We must welcome the dissonance of voices and perspective.
Family origins are fundamental to shaping the ways we negotiate respectful relationships. When generational echoes are harsh or challenging, we must not unleash on others the assaults our parents and caregivers wittingly or unwittingly inflicted upon us.
Sometimes, the most respectful interaction is an engaged silence that enables another person to communicate what he or she needs.

Mixing case studies, stories, and actionable recommendations together with humor and easy-to-understand language, Jay Cross provides much more than buzzwords and back-patting, or so says his bio. He also has some very strong opinions on the future of workplace learning. A Harvard MBA and Princeton undergrad, he has been improving business processes since developing the first business curriculum for the University of Phoenix three decades ago. Jay covers topics from 50,000 feet to ground level, depending on audience and need. He has spoken with executives, marketers, entrepreneurs, chief learning officers, sales staff, instructional designers, HR directors, bankers, and academics. He has keynoted conferences in the United States, Canada, Austria, the United Kingdom, Germany, Taiwan, Australia, Portugal, Monaco, and Abu Dhabi. He travels the world, but increasingly delivers presentations and events in real time over the web. He took a few moments to answer some of our questions.

You could make an argument that in a creative organization the single most important skill today is the ability to collaborate. That's not to say brilliant writing, inspirational design, impeccable craftsmanship and elegant coding don't matter. They do. But in an age when a problem is as likely to be solved with an app as with an ad, when the bulk of a campaign's content might be user generated, when a consumer's experience is only as good as its technology and UX, or when ambiguity and market dynamics call for something far beyond communications, then it's group talent that really matters.

Some companies have it pretty well figured out.  Pixar, for example, is a shining case study.  We can watch Randy Nelson talk about the studio's collaborative culture and its contribution to creativity, story telling and execution.

We can learn from Tim Brown and Ideo on how expanded teams come together to observe and solve problems with design thinking. There's even a well-thought-out system to inspire collaborative behavior.

Or we can borrow from Jump Associates' concept of hybrid thinking, the belief that it's not simply about getting multiple disciplines in the same room - they all just talk past each other - but rather training and developing hybrid "thinkers," individuals who are one-part humanist, one-part technologist and one-part capitalist.

Obviously collaboration has been a big part of the advertising and production business for decades. In fact, adman Alex F. Osborn, the "O" in BBDO invented - or at least pioneered - "brainstorming," which had been practiced at his NY agency for years, presenting it in his 1948 classic, Your Creative Power.

Many futurists today believe that civilization is heading into a series of disruptive changes - a tipping point - that will lead to either the rebirth of a sustainable society or to system-wide collapse. What will actually happen? What are the most likely scenarios? To help address such questions, it will be useful to discuss some concepts and terminology used by researchers when considering plausible, probable, and preferable future possibilities.

Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web.  They are a means for people to state what they mean by the terms used in data that they might generate, share, or consume.  Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the Social Web. They arise from data about how people associate terms with content that they generate, share, or consume.  Recently the two ideas have been put into opposition, as if they were right and left poles of a political spectrum.  This is a false dichotomy; they are more like apples and oranges. In fact, as the Semantic Web matures and the Social Web grows, there is increasing value in applying Semantic Web technologies to the data of the Social Web. This article is an attempt to clarify the distinct roles for ontologies and folksonomies, and previews some new work that applies the two ideas together - an ontology of folksonomy.

Young women in the 21st century have a lot of opportunities at their fingertips especially when they have access to education and trustworthy, competent role models. While violence, oppression, and discrimination affect women in the third world and first world, the possibility for an accomplished, impassioned life is real. These TED speakers offer all kinds of advice and inspiration for many types of audiences, but especially for young women looking for support and an excuse to live out their dreams.

Futures researchers often use the acronym STEEP (Social/demographic, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Political) to remind themselves to keep a 360-degree perspective when anticipating emerging trends and plausible/probable/preferable/feared types of change. As you might expect, most futures research is focused on relatively probable future patterns that are either desired or feared by a given population or client (technological advances, terrorism threats, global trade trends). However, another important type of futures research focuses on possible events that may have a low probability but would create a highly disruptive impact if they were to occur – for example, an asteroid hitting the earth. Futurists have traditionally used the term “wild card” for such scenarios.

January 13, 2011 — Almost a decade ago, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, I was haunted by unanswerable questions. At that time, I was reminded of an exchange in Elie Wiesel’s Night, his memoir about the Holocaust. Young Elie’s spiritual master, Moche, tells him that every question possesses a power that does not lie in its answer. "Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him," Moche explains. He adds that he cannot understand God’s answers. When Wiesel asks him why, then, he prays, Moche replies: "I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions."

Who would have thought that a little research project that was initially experimented for specific group of people called “ARPANET” will transform the world and get the revolution that will change the life life of every individual. Started from early 1960′s to the 2010, it changes lots of faces and expanded like a spider web. But there are so many of us who are looking forward on it’s expansion but the current growth making it’s harder to predict. Here, we have found an infographic in which you can see the predicted growth of internet in next 10 years based on rough estimate.

The music team at City of Bath College have utilised Facebook and YouTube to create social networking for their students. This has had a direct and positive impact on e-learning and has been so popular with the students that the College has seen a 100% success rate for assignments completed. This is the first time the College has seen such a high success rate for its music courses.

Keywords: Improving teaching and learning; improving responsiveness to learners; improving institutional effectiveness; social networks; Web 2.0 applications; music; creating and adapting e-learning materials; blended learning; inclusive learning; developing self-confidence; enrichment activities; motivating learners; giving feedback to learners; celebrating success; communication with employers; meeting employers' needs;

Mobile devices are here, there, and everywhere. Can we use them to support learning? The answer is a definite “yes”! Mobile provides a new channel for learning -- whether it be formal or informal -- and offers unique properties for just-in-time, just-in-place learning. But it’s not about augmenting learning, it’s about augmenting performance. Because mobile is not about courses, but instead supports a broad definition of learning, including innovation, collaboration, research, design and more, generating new products, services, and problems solved. Whether providing needed tools, augmenting learning, or connecting individuals, mobile is a powerful new tool for supporting performance.

In a new study, researchers report that bumblebees were able to figure out the most efficient routes among several computer-controlled "flowers," quickly solving a complex problem that even stumps supercomputers. We already know bees are pretty good at facial recognition, and researchers have shown they can also be effective air-quality monitors. 

In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.

What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles.

The Marshmallow Challenge is a remarkably fun and instructive design exercise that encourages teams to experience simple but profound lessons in collaboration, innovation and creativity.