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article by Sarah Haffee--interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on issues for women that must be addressed-glass ceilings for women in politics and corporate America. what about access to health care, reproductive health care, child care, living wage jobs? March 1, 2017

How the Golden Years Disappeared by Marc Freedman, Salon, April 2, 2012. This is an excerpt from the Big Shift, a book written by Marc Freedman, the man who started Civic Ventures about 10 years ago. Perhaps the WLStudio takes on this social imperative and this is how we get funding? "The new migration is across time and the life course, as tens of millions (8,000 a day, one every ten seconds, are turning sixty) reach the spot where middle age used to end and old age once began, the new territory where a resurgent purpose gap, and gulf in identity, stands. Opportunity is there as well. The surge of people into this new stage of life is one of the most important social phenomena of the new century. Never before have so many people had so much experience and the time and the capacity to do something significant with it. That's the gift of longevity, the great potential payoff on all the progress we've made in extending lives. Realizing these possibilities will require the courage to break from old and familiar patterns that once were our friends but just don't work any longer. It means considering ideas like "gap years" for grown ups, new kinds of internships and fellowships for Americans moving beyond midlife, remodelling higher education to help retrain people who have been working for 40 or 50 years, even the creation of new kinds of investment accounts to help cover the costs of transitioning to new careers. What we're facing is not a solo matter; it's a social imperative, an urgent one that must be solved as the great midlife migration gathers scale and momentum."

blog post by Kurt Mackey at MongoHQ, a distributed company, on working remotely and how hard it is to come up with an effective system for engaging workers. It is a work in progress. Need firewalls between personal life and work life--sound has to be managed for one thing. Mentions the blending of in-office staff and remote staff and a 'standard' for everyone to use the same collaboration tools, be available via the same channels, and produce documentation of interactions that are important to share. Has a whole section on the practical (and the tools they use to communicate) prefer async communications! Have a central work tool (Compose to record what is being produced each day); day to day communication in Hipchat, use pre-reads to meetings on a Wiki that get updated on Hackpad during the meeting, open mailing lists, Sqwiggle for face time, and Google Hangouts, too. Final recommendation is to "keep iterating" to build a remote friendly culture.

blog post by Jennifer Gilhool, 6.4.2013 "You are connected to work 24/7. You don't need your lap top to be connected. You are connected via BlackBerry, iPhone and iPad to name just a few. These devices no longer provide flexibility. Instead, they tether you to the office. They enable you to work all the time and anywhere. And, now, many companies believe that is the definition of flexibility: "'What flexibility means today is not part time,' the head of work-life at one large organization told me recently. 'What people want is the ability to work anytime, anywhere.' That's true if your target labor pool is twenty-somethings and men married to homemakers. The head of HR at another large organization asked, when I described the hours problem, 'What do you mean, how can we get women to work more hours?'" - Why Men Work So Many Hours, Joan C. Williams, May 29, 2013 Harvard Business Review Why Your Manager Doesn't Want You To Innovate Ron Ashkenas Ron Ashkenas Contributor LinkedIn: Busting 8 Damaging Myths About What It Can Do For Your Career 85 Broads 85 Broads Contributor Someone has taken the "human" out of "Human Resources" departments across America. And, this behavior is not limited to operations in America. I work for a multi-national corporation that cannot seem to wean itself from the 24 hour work day. Colleagues in China often begin their day with a 6:00 a.m. meeting and end it with a meeting that begins at 10:00 p.m. or, worse, 11:00 p.m. To combat this problem, the company leadership agreed to a global meeting policy. The policy provides that global meetings should occur only between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. and that no meetings should occur on Friday nights in Asia Pacific. Further, the policy provides a 10 hour fatigue rule. In other words, there should be 10 hours between your last meeting of the day and your first meeting on the next day. First, if you need a global meeting policy, you are in

article by Diane Stafford at Kansas City Star, 9/20/13 on whether to use Facebook for work connections. It is not a clear progression of tips. Nor does it start from the very first thing one should do: find out about the workplace policy on using social media. 1. Let your boss ask first (?? meaning don't initiate?) 2. Check out how co-workers link (makes sense) 3. Ask first (makes sense to ask workers f2f about connecting) 4. Review your profile (looking for professionally harmful information on pages--makes sense to do regardless of Facebook friends at work) 5. Set privacy settings (yes, good practice to set privacy settings)

A PDF presenting the mission and strategic plan for Association for Women in Science 2011-2014. Well done in design and content. Look at these goals and objectives: Increase awareness of issues that impede and endanger American competitiveness by limiting progress in STEM careers Promulgate results of important national studies on gender inequity in learning environments and workplaces Work with federal and local agencies to show how gender equity aligns with their goals for workforce development Actively seek out opportunities for positive coverage in the media of AWIS activities and positions Highlight ways to restructure STEM environments to foster diversity and inclusion to advance national competitiveness Focus on career transitions and special needs of women of color and other underrepresented groups Actively propose and support federal legislation and initiatives which are consistent with AWIS policies and position statements such as, but not limited to: 1. Economic equity; 2. Flexible work options; 3. Parental leave; 4. Improvement of post-doc employment status; and 5. Title IX compliance. Develop mechanisms to engage individuals and chapters in advocacy Identify opportunities for innovation and systemic change across multiple work sectors Promote best practice models for employers and educators by gathering and highlighting examples from different disciplines, work sectors, and industries Highlight the central role of professional societies in advancing women's careers Expand our voice through strategic alliances and partnerships

"According to a new study by Professor Susan Madsen there are more female executives heading nonprofits than males both nationally and in the state.  This is a standout fact in Utah, which was ranked last by the Center for American Progress for women in positions of decision-making and leadership."

Great blog post on drawing small targets for your business by Sean Smith, Copyblogger, Excerpt: Are you struggling to get traction? Are you dissatisfied with your progress attracting visitors to your blog, subscribers to your newsletter, followers on Facebook and Twitter, or whatever else it may be? Your target isn't small enough … so make your target smaller. Tighten your scope, find your tight-knit group. And reach more in the long run. Want to discuss? Reach out to me on Twitter or join the discussion on Google-Plus.

A big study by TNTP on teachers' professional development basically conceding defeat on helping teachers improve their classroom practice, especially once teachers pass the 5 year mark of experience. Sounds to me like the measures they are using to evaluate teacher improvement are too big and inflated so that individual progress cannot be observed much less evaluated for effectiveness from a reliable starting point. The other problem seems to be in recruiting teachers who are good to start off with.

Don Kilburn/Tom Vander Ark blog post on how formative assessment made possible by technology is helping GenerationDo-It-Yourself students (and teachers?) remediate while still in high school. Pearson is behind this article (remember Barb McDonald's mention of this in a CPSquare discussion).

Video on PAR (Predictive Analytics Reporting) by Ellen Wagner on evaluating work by secondary educators (including online schools) to affect graduation rates, progress, competency development, and completion. Need common data. Differences in performance by 2 year and 4 year schools, not between public and for-profit so much. Knowing what you can do with the numbers makes the difference.

New York Times, May 28. 2015 by Claire Cain Miller "The biggest obstacle to women in joining the highest ranks of the business world is a lack of family-friendly policies. That, at least, has been the conventional wisdom in recent years, and it has been embraced by progressive companies that offer flexible schedules or allow people to work from home. But some researchers are now arguing that the real problem is not the lack of family-friendly policies for mothers, but the surge in hours worked by both women and men. And companies are not likely to want to adopt the obvious solution."

Great article on why more progress in the classroom isn't happening with student-centered uses of technology. June 10, 2015 Edweek, quotes Larry Cuban.

first tip is to find a digital home for projects in a LMS but it can be as simple as Google Sites or Wikispaces instead of Schoology or Edmodo or Google Classroom. 2. make sure everyone has anytime, anywhere access 3. set your support structures 4. turn the work over to the workers 5. track student progress and offer guidance when needed 6. learn from your mistakes

from The Future of Work. Elizabeth Segran "For women in tech, a humanities background can be an added liability, since there is already a perception that they are less competent at science and math. Danielle Sheer says that when she joined Carbonite, her first impulse was to hide her lack of knowledge and retreat at meetings. However, she quickly changed strategy, deciding it was more important for her to ask questions to fully grasp the technology. She's spent hours tinkering with the software and working with engineering teams to learn about it. She says her colleagues are supportive, even if she sometimes slows them down. "By articulating complicated technical or strategic ideas in plain English, you'd be amazed at how much progress we've made solving problems," she says. "We've become very good at assuming that we don't have the same definition.""

The authors Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton, and John Kania in this magazine article from Winter 2015 outline their belief that the deep changes necessary to accelerate progress against society's most intractable problems require a unique type of leader - the systems leader, the person who catalyzes collective leadership. They use Nelson Mandela as the supreme example of this, but state that they have met many systems leaders on a national, regional, and local level. Systems leaders have the ability to see the interconnection of all the moving parts of a problem, issue, or crisis and develop interventions designed to bring diverse views and standings together in supportive and structured ways to address differences. "The simple idea that you could bring together those who had suffered profound losses with those whose actions led to those losses, to face one another, tell their truths, forgive, and move on, was not only a profound gesture of civilization but also a cauldron for creating collective leadership. Indeed, the process would have been impossible without the leadership of people like Bishop Desmond Tutu and former President F. W. de Klerk."

article by Bryant Nielson on how to develop new skills--online courses, study LinkedIn for certifications held by people in youer field. 

nice post by Lauren Levine on her progression in life to her 60+ years to realize a "greater and richer understanding" of things that matter.

Stephen Downes's keynote to the World Congress on Continuing Professional Development, San Diego, CA from May 19, 2016 He begins with the assertion that learning is personal - based on personal practice - then put into practice in a learning network. Progress and evaluation through practice is based on performance in authentic communities. Contains slides, audio, and video