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Great exploration of focus as a verb (process) and noun (single goal) by Greg McKeowan telling the story of Gates and Buffett talking at dinner. Here are three ways to combine both types of focus to ensure we getting the vital few things done. --Ask the right questions --In order to have focus we need to escape to focus --Know how valuable your time is

Colorful, informative graphical mindmap by Jane Genovese at Learning FUNdamentals in Australia for high school students on how to focus in the age of distraction. The branches include taking time to reflect and review, creating rituals/habits, how to work; managing your space, taking a digital technology detox, and help for addicts. From Learning Fundamentals. Also has a presentation for use with with these learning outcomes: By the end of "The Facebook Effect" workshop students will: 1.have developed an understanding of how social network sites (e.g. Facebook) are highly addictive; 2. have developed an understanding of the many benefits of working in a focused manner in a distraction free environment; 3. have access to a range of tools to help them eliminate distractions in their work environment; 4. have a deeper understanding of how multitasking can slow down their mental processes and lead to poorer learning outcomes; and 5. be aware of strategies to enhance their focus and concentration

Focus at Will--a new music service that helps people focus on their writing, editing, researching, etc. by Natalie Houston, 12.3.2015

blog by Eli Dourado on March 6, 2013 on binge learning. Excerpt: A combination of technology (DVRs) and market service providers (Netflix, Hulu, On Demand) have transformed how and when and where we watch "television." I suspect that students want the same things. Technology and market forces appear to be reshaping how and when and where we learn. Perhaps we education providers should pay attention. But the kind of bingeing that people might like to do with online courses is entirely different. Most people who sign up for an online class at Udacity or Marginal Revolution University want to take the class for its own sake, not as a requirement for some broader credential. The point is not to learn and forget-it is to indulge an interest. This seems like a more natural way to learn than traditional educational structures can offer: develop an interest and mercilessly indulge it until another interest supersedes it. It is a method that conserves the mental energy associated with willpower, leaving more of the brain's resources to focus on the material itself. Since it relies on the student actually being interested in the class, it is hard to fit into a physical schooling environment, where classes have to begin on a schedule, go slow enough for everyone to keep up, and run in parallel with other classes. Online education also saves the resources associated with context switching. Humans are notoriously bad multitaskers. Each time a high school student has to change classes, she has to quickly stifle the thoughts and questions raised in previous classes to focus on the current class. She has to expend mental resources remembering where the previous session of the current class left off. And when she returns to the class that stimulated the thoughts that had to be stifled, she may not recall them. Far better to focus on-or even to binge on-one subject until she is at a good stopping point.

Great article by Carol Kinsey Goman on the impact of business silos and how to tear them down. No date. Actions to take: Reward collaboration; focus on innovation; communicate transparently; encourage networks,create alignment, mix it up in teams; focus on the customer; get personal;

Research study by Gloria Mark, Stephen Voida, and Armand Cardeno, 2012 on impact of work with/without email "ABSTRACT We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email. Interview data were consistent with our quantitative measures, as participants reported being able to focus more on their tasks. We discuss the implications for managing email better in organizations" CONCLUSIONS Our study has shown that there are benefits to not being continually connected by email. Without email, our informants focused longer on their tasks, multitasked less, and had lower stress. It is an open question to what extent the effects we found in our study might be sustainable. How the benefits of reduced email usage might outweigh the known benefits of email in reaching larger numbers of people rapidly with information is not clear. What our study suggests is that the tradeoffs among email usage, work pace, stress, and collaboration need to be more closely explored. There will always be new "zombies" lurking with advances in information technology, and we must continue to be vigilant in assessing the human costs that are incurred when these advances are adopted in the workplace.

Interesting blog by Jenny Mackness on attending two keynotes at the Association for Learning Technology Conference in Manchester, UK: Jonathan Worth and Laura Czerniewicz. She attended virtually. She found some common themes in the keynotes about privacy, vulnerability, and trust in open learning environments on the learner level. From Jonathan she says: he talked about the difference between the image and the photograph and how there is a paradigm shift because the image is breaking away from the photograph. Photographs are about evidence, images about experience. Laura's talk was about the inequality on a global scale and is a life or death issue and it is a challenge to address inequality in new online landscapes. Jenny ends the blog with: Jonathan's focus on vulnerability and trying to see the image clearly will inform issues of inequality and Laura's focus on inequality will inform Jonathan's concerns about privacy, trust, and vulnerability.

Continuous acquisition and application of knowledge, skills, and beliefs by individuals, teams, and the whole enterprise is an essential aspect of high performance organizations. However, barriers to this learning are common in organizations. These barriers must be overcome in order for organizations to have long term success. Stephen Gill has identified 12 common barriers to learning in organizations: Program focus; Limited resources; work-learning dichotomy; passive leadership; non-learning culture; resistance to change; not discussing the un-discussable; need for control; focus on short-term, simple solutions; skilled incompetence; blame-not gain language; selective attention.

blog by Eric Barker on greater productivity, June 1, 2014 1) Manage your mood--If you start the day calm it's easy to get the right things done and focus. "2) Don't Check Email In The Morning" Research shows email: Stresses you out. Can turn you into a jerk. Can be more addictive than alcohol and tobacco. And checking email frequently is the equivalent of dropping your IQ 10 points. 3) Ask whether it should be done at all 4) Focus is nothing more than eliminating all the distractions 5) Have a personal system 6) Define your goals the night before

great exploration of four types of platforms including learning platforms by John Hagel, August 14, 2014

Blog on leadership by Neil Smith, Fast Company on eliminating barriers that keep departments/groups from sharing the same priorities, knowledge, information for the good of the whole organization.

Explores value of Pinterest for business, Donston-Miller, March 6, 2012. Pinterest users are heavily women and younger (ages 25-44) Assessment: "Companies are finding themselves challenged to effectively marshal their externally facing social networking efforts, and most are likely focusing on Facebook and Twitter. So, with resources at a premium, should your company be paying attention to upstart social network Pinterest right now? The short answer is yes." Pinterest experiencing huge growth and now drives more traffic to Real Simple website than Facebook does. Caveat: Pinterest user boards overwhelmingly focus on food, fashion, home decor, and hobbies, things that are visual and usually visually appealing. "Pinterest is best used to inspire or remind... looking at capitalizing on Pinterest as a gift registry ...even if your company doesn't make or promote something highly visual ...it probably has something that can be visualized and put into context... data ...house infographics--things like data sets, visualization of data.... even with something like a technology company, there are always ways to visualize information in an engaging way."

Podcast and list of actions to take to overcome the resistance that most of us have when starting a new project or improving our lives, Michael Hyatt. Excerpt: In order to deal with the Resistance, you have to first understand what it is. It has four attributes. Attribute #1: It is invisible. Attribute #2: It is internal. Attribute #3: It is insidious. Attribute #4: It is infallible. But what can you do about it? You can only defeat the Resistance by understanding its three primary strategies and applying appropriate countermeasures. Strategy #1: Fear. The typical response to this strategy is procrastination. The countermeasure is to START. Strategy #2: Uncertainty. The typical response is distraction. The countermeasure is to FOCUS. Strategy #3: Doubt. This usually occurs at the end of a project, and the typical response is to quit and leave the work unfinished. The countermeasure is to FINISH.

ALISON MOOC--"With more than 1.2 million unique visitors per month and 250,000 graduates worldwide, Advance Learning Interactive Systems Online (ALISON), founded in 2007, is considered by some the first massive online open course (MOOC). " blog by Ellis Booker, Information Week Education, Excerpt: "Our focus is workplace skills," company CEO Mike Feerick told InformationWeek in a phone interview. Indeed, ALISON started with two globally in-demand skills: English and IT literacy, the latter in the form of ABC IT, a 15- to 20-hour training suite that remains the site's most popular course." Excerpt: "Employers don't care where you found those skills or how much you paid for them," he insists. Rather, employers want one thing: Verified competency. One service ALISON offers is tests for prospective hires that employers can administer to check the competence of job applicants who come with ALISON certificates. For a small fee, students can purchase an ALISON certificate after successfully completing a course, as a PDF, paper parchment or framed parchment."

from Fast Company.com Explanation of Mightybell and interview with Gina Bianchini about why she created it. Again, the focus is on groups. "Today, the number of social networks available to us means there's a surfeit of places to come together online--we share aspirational photos on Pinterest, photos from our lives on Instagram, news on Google+, Internet happenings on Tumblr, and everything else on Facebook. But with so many channels to work with (waste time on?), the things we want to say are easily drowned out in noise, making it hard to establish genuine, intimate relationships with groups of people who aren't close friends and family. Sure, you can like a photo or retweet a clever one-liner as gestures of social solidarity, but they don't go far in making connections that count. Which is why Gina Bianchini, founder of new social network Mightybell, thinks it's time for an AOL chat room renaissance. Collaboration and action in intimate circles could be her competitive advantage."

More on Mightybell

Techcrunch.com article on how Mightybell is morphing into a more collaborative space from its original design and focus, which was creating step-by-step private guides for anything. Users create spaces, and "Users in these spaces can post photos, write a note, chat with others via a chat functionality, comment, like an interaction and more. Users can also customize a particular collection and create a these around their space."

More on Mightybell

Blog by Clark Quinn on scaling a la MOOC and supporting learning in those contexts, March 26, 2013. Feel that the excerpt below could affect WLS's appeal to buyers. Excerpt: "And it seemed to many of us that the focus could be not just on meeting the job categories that are estimated to be needed, but also on employability and creativity, meta-learning as a layer on top. Others were concerned that learning to learn doesn't mean much until you have a job (what's more important, entrepreneurial spirit or a toilet?), but they don't have to be mutually exclusive."

"The Varied Functions of Badges" summary from HASTAC discussion, 9/2012 My interest in the functions of badges was spurred along when the MacArthur Foundation asked for help documenting the design principles for using digital badges that emerge across the 30 projects underway by the awardees in their Badges for Lifelong Learning project. We needed to come up with a manageable number of categories. Here is what we came up with: Recognizing Learning. This is the most obvious and arguably the primary function of badges. David Wiley has argued cogently that this should be the primary purpose of badges. If we focus only on purposes, then he may well be right. His point is that badges are credentials and not assessments. This is also consistent with the terrifically concise definition in Seven Things You Should Know About Badgesby Erin Knight and Carla Casilli. Assessing Learning. Nearly every application of digital badges includes some form of assessment. These assessments have either formative or summative functions and likely have both. In some cases, these are simply an assessment of whether somebody clicked on a few things or made a few comments. In other cases, there might be a project or essay that was reviewed and scored, or a test that was graded. In still other cases, peers might assess an individual, group, or project as badgeworthy. Motivating Learning. This is where the controversy comes in. Much of the debate over badges concerns the well-documented negative consequences of extrinsic incentive on intrinsic motivation and free choice engagement. This is why some argue that we should not use badges to motivate learning. However, if we use badges to recognize and assess learning, they are likely to impact motivation. So, we might as well harness this crucial function of badges and study these functions carefully while searching for both their positive and negative consequences for motivation. Evaluating Learning. The final category of

from Future Tense on June 11, 2016 by Teddy Wayne. he posits, with research to back him up, that we are losing the time, ability, and desire for reflection that leads to deeper thinking and learning. As smart phone, computer, and other digital uses increase, our focus on the immediate is replacing the practice and habit of reflection.

Absolutely fabulous video (6 minutes) on Connected Learning and how we must change the outcomes based focus of education to awaken the curiosity of each learner and engage with them in learning how to learn given the distribution of resources, ideas, experts, etc. while preserving the learners' autonomy, access to diversity, openness to others for learning, interactivity with similar and diverse co-learners, etc. Film by Nic Askew at Soulbiographies.com interviewing McArthur Foundation person and two professors of education