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Work­ing well remotely takes practice

What they don’t always think about, though, is the inher­ent fire­wall a com­mute cre­ates between “work” and “per­sonal life”. Work­ing out of a home office opens up an entire world of sur­pris­ingly difficult-​​to-​​handle dis­trac­tions, par­tic­u­larly for those of us with fam­i­lies. It’s easy to avoid a gui­tar wield­ing tod­dler when the office is 5 miles away and he has no driver’s license. It’s harder when the wall between the liv­ing room and the office makes a delight­ful bang­ing noise when struck with a guitar.

Hav­ing cen­tral­ized offices can wreck a bud­ding remote friendly cul­ture. Work­ing in a way that’s inclu­sive of peo­ple who aren’t phys­i­cally (or even tem­po­rally) present is not entirely nat­ural, and exclud­ing remote employ­ees from impor­tant inter­ac­tions is a quick path to agony.

As I reflected on my own experience over a 25-year career in technology, I realized that there is more to it than an oppressive male dominated environment and an unconscious bias in corporate cultures that hold us back. 

Personal power is the energy behind all your actions. 

It’s the way of putting your ideas, visions and inspirations out in the world.  When you’ve internalized negative beliefs and disempower yourself, you are shutting down the flow of energy to do meaningful work, to take action on your own behalf, and to trust your decision making process because you begin to live in a state of constant self-doubt and frustration.

If you share the work of others, it’s your duty to make sure that the creators of that work get proper credit. Crediting work in our copy-and-paste age of reblogs and retweets can seem like a futile effort, but it’s worth it, and it’s the right thing to do. You should always share the work of others as if it were your own, treating it with respect and care. When we make the case for crediting our sources, most of us concentrate on the plight of the original creator of the work. But that’s only half of the story—if you fail to properly attribute work that you share, you not only rob the person who made it, you rob all the people you’ve shared it with. Without attribution, they have no way to dig deeper into the work or find more of it.

The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education. It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.

SG_Debug && SG_Debug.pagedebug && window.console && console.log && console.log('[' + (new Date()-SG_Debug.initialTime)/1000 + ']' + ' Bottom of header.jsp'); SlateEducationGetting schooled.Nov. 19 2013 11:43 AM The King of MOOCs Abdicates the Throne 7.3k 1.2k 101 Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s “pivot” toward corporate training. By Rebecca Schuman &nbsp; Sebastian Thrun speaks during the Digital Life Design conference on Jan. 23, 2012, in Munich. Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images requirejs(["jquery"], function($) { if ($(window).width() < 640) { $(".slate_image figure").width("100%"); } }); Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun—former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity—just admitted to Fast Company’s openly smitten Max Chafkin that his company’s courses are often a “lousy product.” Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate. Follow This is quite a “pivot” from the Sebastian Thrun, who less than two years ago crowed to Wired that the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the “lousiness” of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room wit

nd why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.

Skype to talk on a regular basis with my close Internet Time Alliance colleagues (Jay Cross, Charles Jennings, Harold Jarche and Clark Quinn) and I mainly use Twitter to connect with my extended set of colleagues around the world. This is the way I find out what they are up to, ask them questions, share ideas and brainstorm with them. (This is my equivalent of going to meetings and having coffee breaks or watercooler conversations, etc.)

t is true, that in some organizations it will require (organisational and individual) mindset changes to appreciate&nbsp;that workplace learning today is more than just training. In particular, managers will need to recognize the value of this form of continuous learning, and that they will need to provide time to do it, and indeed measure its success in&nbsp;other ways than through training attendance or online course completion.