Group items tagged

blog by Maggie Jackson, on Forbes 100 list of websites for women. Written June 6, 2012. "Encore careers drive to the heart of who we are, and who we want to be. We can't google the answers to such dilemmas. Earlier in the day, I'd attended a rehearsal at the Yale School of Drama for Waiting for Godot. Asked how she prepared for a role, one student said: 'I look for the character's super-objective. What is the essence of what this character seeks?' I shared her words with my classmates, because in an age of career fluidity, we are always shaping and reshaping our life roles. Today, 31 million workers ages 44 to 70 want an 'encore' career that combines income, impact and meaning, according to the think-tank Civic Ventures. On average, they will take 18 months - and a likely pay cut - to make the change. Twelve million in this age group are interested in starting a non-profit or social venture. In this time of invention and insecurity, we need to take the time to think about our next steps. We need to have patience with ourselves."

An article for BBC by Maggie Jackson, September 2009, about our inability to pay attention in an age driven by speed through technology "Still, I'm worried. These digital age wonders will be squandered if we can't think critically, research well, and evaluate the data-floods we now have at our fingertips - and these are precisely the skills alarmingly lacking among both digital natives and older generations. Half of college students can't judge the objectivity of a website. Workers now switch tasks every three minutes, half the time interrupting themselves. As David Nicholas points out, we spend our time online 'power-bouncing' from info-snippet to data-point. And this propensity to rely on point-and-click, first-up-on-Google answers, along with our growing unwillingness to wrestle uncomfortably with nuances or uncertainties, keeps us stuck on the surface of the 'information' age. We're too often sacrificing depth for breadth in the ways we make sense of the world. Yes, we've always had 'power bouncing' and distraction. And surfing or multitasking may have an important place in 21st-century society as strategies of learning. But going forward, we need to do much more than hopscotch across the web, split-focused and pulled this way and that by choice distractions. We cannot mistake fragmented, diffused attention as avenues of higher thought. Instead, we need to do better at cultivating - perhaps resuscitating? - deep focus, keen awareness and meta-cognitive 'executive' attention - the skills crucial to creativity and problem-solving. "

Excellent blog post by Mindy Jackson on why less is needed more than ever before in terms of content, July 7, 2014. She explains why practice is more important than content. She writes in a less is more manner, too. Found her via Jane Hart's blog. excerpt: Just-in-time knowledge resources combined with a self-service model is the answer to course content glut. Text is a resource. Practice is instruction. Focus online learning programs on practice rather than knowledge acquisition. Create a risk-free tryout environment, contextualized to performance needs. Enable learners to sip from the fountains of knowledge, rather than to drown by a fire-hose of information. Knowledge is readily accessed. But experience is earned.

Scientists have discovered proof that the evolution of intelligence and larger brain sizes can be driven by cooperation and teamwork, shedding new light on the origins of what it means to be human. The study appears online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B and was led by scientists at Trinity College Dublin: PhD student, Luke McNally and Assistant Professor Dr Andrew Jackson at the School of Natural Sciences in collaboration with Dr Sam Brown of the University of Edinburgh.

There really is an advantage to working together!

article by Kelly Jackson Higgins at Dark Reading.com on what's happening with the sale of online data collected legally, but not necessarily analyzed accurately or sold ethically. November 5, 2014