Group items tagged

It stresses the strategic interdependent interests of humans and assumes that in games there is always a rational choice which is the best counter-choice to your opponent's.

If winning efficiently is the goal, then the rules (ethical, moral, legal, and spiritual), are essentially obstacles to game.

In our schools, competition for access to elite preschools, for grades, for social status, in sports, over positions of leadership, and for admission to exclusive colleges transforms one of our most basic institutions for fostering community, ethics and learning into competitive, individualistic corporate training-grounds. In these settings, the importance of competitive sports becomes paramount, for both financial and training purposes, and the artistry of cheating (see this year's Stuyvesant High School cheating scandal) and rule-bending (see Joe Paterno) revered. Such intense competition encourages the professionalization of parenting -- through tutors, highly-educated nannies, prep courses, and professional training camps (such as investment camps). You can imagine the deleterious effects these trends have on the ethos of care and moral responsibility in our families and schools, a critical buffer against bullying and violence in the lives of our children.

We become hyper-connected through technologies, boasting our number of "friends" on Facebook, and have less and less intimacy.

We choose friends with benefits or Internet porn over romantic relationships as they are less messy, more efficient.

Life is a race and we are losing.

Talkwheel’s design makes class conversations easier to follow, more interactive, and more effectively organized. It eliminates the problem of navigating multithreaded conversations, enables real-time group conversation, and makes referencing asynchronous conversations much easier. Talkwheel’s dashboard organization allows teachers to organize all their classes and projects in one centralized location, while Talkwheel's analytics helps teachers and administrators quantitatively monitor their students’ progress throughout the year.

Quora is a Q&A site nicely integrated with Facebook that has done a good job providing a means to ask questions and get answers.

Quora has been able to form quite an elite network of VCs, entrepreneurs, and other experts to answer questions.  They've also created topic pages such as: Learning Management System. 

Finally, Namesake, is a tool for real-time and asynchronous conversations.  It's a bit like Quora but more focused on conversation as compared to Q&A and it allows real-time conversation a bit like twitter.  You can see an example of a conversation around phones below.

All of these point to new types of conversation models that are emerging in tools.