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The culture appears to be grounded in not only a need to share, but also a desire to be recognized. Retweets – when someone sends your tweet (message) out to their followers (a term supporting the need for recognition) somehow elevates your status within this community.

Social Media as a dominant force for communicating has penetrated every element of society. Can a virtual community possess a culture? Every company and organization possesses a definable culture. Behaviors, decision-making models, intrinsic and extrinsic actions and how people are treated may all play a part in defining it. These elements of culture are measureable and easy to define within a controlled entity. Social media lives and breathes in a virtual reality. It permeates all corners of the world, allows people to communicate across all traditional boundaries and thrives 24 hours/day. So…does it have a definable culture? If you have spent any time on Twitter, you quickly realize thousands of people have a need to respond to the question, “What’s happening?” Twitter has developed it’s own language with tweets, retweets, tweeple, twitpics, twibes, etc. You can follow topics with a hashtag and people with lists. What is most apparent is the need people have to share. The culture appears to be grounded in not only a need to share, but also a desire to be recognized. Retweets – when someone sends your tweet (message) out to their followers (a term supporting the need for recognition) somehow elevates your status within this community. There are etiquette protocols as many people publicly thank you for following them and for retweeting. Retweeting becomes a type

As you get deeper into the structure of Twitter, you can join a twibe or tweeple group, which provides inclusion – another indication that the need for recognition is systemic.

The term carries a bias that is not hard to see: it suggests thinking about copyright, patents and trademarks by analogy with property rights for physical objects.

alternative names would be an improvement

The term “intellectual property” is at best a catch-all to lump together disparate laws.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,”

behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making

deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world

life isn't as simple as it once appeared. Career and Marriage are transformed from abstract hopes into concrete decisions. Every one that is made closes off other possibilities. And every so often, we take stock of life, pondering its purpose, what it is that makes us happy, our responsibilities to others, whether meaning can be found in our work, etc.

prep schools and top tier colleges traffic in a perverse illusion: that building a perfect resume is the same thing as building a perfect life

since every subculture has its pathologies, you're probably not doing things right unless the other people in your world are at least slightly uncomfortable with some way in which you're challenging its assumptions.

To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.

Drilling students on sample questions for weeks before a state test will not improve their education. The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot be replicated to serve millions of low-income children. Yet the reform movement, led by Gates, Broad, and Walton, has convinced most Americans who have an opinion about education (including most liberals) that their agenda deserves support.

THE COST of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year

the traditional preoccupation with what a leader does is misplaced. Instead, he says, we should look at the way leaders think and at the decisions they make.

great leaders have an unusual characteristic - "a predisposition to and capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once."

integrative thinking is where you have the capacity to create a better model, superior to both and incorporating aspects of each model, rather than choosing one model at the expense of the other.

The goal of the workshop was to help students become aware of how much they share on Facebook and to help them make conscious decisions about what they would share.

Unfortunately, Facebook changes its interface on a semi-regular basis, so I thought it might prove useful to share the six steps I walk students through to help them check the various places where Facebook has tucked its different privacy settings. And yes, you read that correctly: there are six different steps for locking down your Facebook privacy settings.

But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.

By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

Innovative technology and marketing strategies might be able to nudge students toward better decisions without limiting their freedom to choose. For example, it would be much easier for students to identify and compare relevant courses if academic catalogs were less like phone books and more like, say, Netflix. Then students could interactively search and browse on dimensions like course subject, timing, difficulty, prerequisites, major requirements or instructor ratings. Over time, students could be offered personalized suggestions based on their previous choices. New students could even be offered the equivalent of a prix fixe menu, offering a limited selection of prepackaged pathways while still allowing students to choose à la carte.

nteraction should be frequent

as in human conversation

active environment maintains student interest for a long period of time, even with difficult learning material.

When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”

Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.

how the district was innovating.

According to a yearly national survey of more than 200,000 first-year students conducted by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, college freshmen are increasingly "overwhelmed," rating their emotional health at the lowest levels in the 25 years the question has been asked. Such is the latest problem dropped at the offices of higher-education administrators and professors nationwide: Young adults raised with a single-minded focus on gaining admission to college now need help translating that focus into ways to thrive on campus and beyond.

Many young adults weren't taught the basic life skills and coping mechanisms for challenging times.

The consequences for students who lack those skills have become increasingly clear both on campus and after graduation. At Pitt, where I teach, and at other institutions, student-life administrators have noticed a marked decrease in resiliency, particularly among first-year students. That leads to an increase in everything from roommate disagreements to emotional imbalance and crisis. After graduation, employers complain that a lack of coping mechanisms makes for less proficient workers: According to a 2006 report by the Conference Board, a business-research group, three-quarters of surveyed employers said incoming new graduates were deficient in "soft" skills like communication and decision making.