Group items tagged

excellent explanation by Tom Vander Ark on why parent-managed learner profiles are becoming more important all the time for young people.  Is the corollary true for adults owning their learning in portable, digital carry-alongs for sharing with potential employers, etc.  

ComsterCollege.com article by Lauren Bayne Anderson, June 16, 2011. Excerpt Here are some benefits to joining a professional organization: Jobs Many professional organizations help their members find jobs, or at the least, offer up job listings that other members may be offering. Mentoring Mentoring is the cornerstone of many professional organizations when it comes to working with younger members. You may never get in the room with someone at the top of your field, for a very long time. But professional organizations have the ability to pare you with someone much more experienced. Professional Development Many organizations offer professional development via courses, workshops, publications, and information on their website shared only with members. They also keep members up to date on industry trends and how to deal with them. Some organizations (take the National Association of Black Journalists for example) offer news and print coverage of their annual conferences, run by students-which is an excellent opportunity to gain experience. Networking Most organizations have an annual conference. This is an opportunity for you to mix and mingle with others in your field in both professional and leisure settings. There is also often a job fair where you can make contact and stay up to date with the very people who hire - even if they're not hiring right now. In fact, some people find recruiters follow their career and stay updated when you stop by their booth at the job fair. They may be keeping an eye on you until they are ready to finally offer you a job. Scholarships For the youngest of members (high school and college), scholarships may be the primary reason to join a professional organization. Many offer scholarships to the new members studying to enter the field.

"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

Four minute video by Michael Wesch in St. George, KS, an assistant professor of anthropology. His video chronicles the evolution of the technical internet through html, XML phases and how the current use of code enables us to share our ideas at an unprecedented rate because anyone can click to write and publish to the world with the simplicity of an off/on TV control. We are (re)creating something new every second and can build relationships with people we never knew existed before. It's now one degree of separation between internet residents even though people may be miles apart in location, employment, lifestyle, temperament, etc. We can choose to collaborate with anyone who agrees to work with us. In fact, we can learn from afar from anyone without affiliating with them or they with us if they have some presence on the internet. We must figure out how to organize the things that matter to us that we harvest from across the internet. Tagging helps us do this. The web 2.0 transition has already had and will have impacts on copyright laws and practices, self-identity in different contexts, privacy, relationships, etc. Are you ready? Am I ready?

Opinion piece in the July 19th 2014 NYTimes by Joshua Wolf Shenk, the author of the forthcoming book: Powers of Two: Finding Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs". He begins:"the lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness. Fortunately, a more truthful model is emerging: the creative network, as with the crowd-sourced Wikipedia or the writer's room at "The Daily Show" or - the real heart of creativity - the intimate exchange of the creative pair, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney and myriad other examples with which we've yet to fully reckon." and ends with: "This raises vital questions. What is the optimal balance between social immersion and creative solitude? Why does interpersonal conflict so often coincide with innovation? Looking at pairs allows us to grapple with these questions, which are as basic to the human experience as the push and pull of love itself. As a culture, we've long been preoccupied with romance. But we should also take seriously something just as important, but long overlooked - creative intimacy."

Although the author stresses pairs, the history of genius is really interesting - for example, before the 16th century, individuals were not geniuses, but having genius which was a value that emerged from within a person given to them at birth".

interview with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, September 2012, Harvard Magazine on business ecosystems and how they thrive with connections between large and small businesses, education and business, turning ideas into enterprises, and cross-sector collaboration

Fascinating article on Baylor research on how internal social networking sites supported and managed within the workplace helps newcomers (younger people usually) to connect and learn from each other, interact directly with more senior people, and inadvertently cause problems for middle managers who did not want to mentor new hires and who did not necessarily have the social/technology proficiencies to participate in the SNS, Science Daily, 1/29/2013. Their conclusions showed that a "company can improve morale and reduce turnover." Researchers are Hope Koch, Baylor, Dorothy Leidner, Ph.D., Ferguson Professor of Information Systems at Baylor; and Ester Gonzalez from Washington State University. Excerpt: he study centered on a financial institution's efforts to reduce IT employee turnover by starting a social and work-related online networking site. Under the supervision of executives, the IT new hires developed and managed the site's content. Since most new hires had moved hundreds of miles to start their new jobs with the institution, they initially used the social pages as an introduction to the community. After a year or so with the organization, the more senior new hires began using the system to acclimate and mentor incoming new hires. All study respondents worked in the institution's IT department and included new hires, middle managers and executives. With less than three years of experience, most new hires and interns were men between 21 and 27 years old. The middle managers and executives were baby boomers or members of generation X. The internal social networking site helped the new hires build social capital in several ways, according to Koch. "It gave them access to people who could provide useful information and new perspectives and allowed them to meet more senior new hires and executives. These relationships set the new hires at ease during work meetings, helped them understand where to go for help and increased their commitment to the financial

Article on Leaning into Discomfort: Social Sector Leadership inthe 21st Century, NPQ (Nonprofit Quarterly), May 7, 2012 Excerpt from interview with Nancy Northup, Center for Reproductive Rights: ""In fact, leaning into discomfort, I think, is critical, to make sure that what we are doing-both externally, as we work to establish reproductive rights around the world, and internally, at the organization level-is bold enough. The organization had better be feeling discomfort if it's leaning into new strategies and ways of working. "You have always to ask, Am I pushing for the change that's really needed? On all of those levels, you have to continually refresh and check and make sure that you're getting the most power for the mission by being as uncomfortable as possible. Because change is hard, and the reason why you have to look at all those different levels-yourself, your organization, and then the world-is that if you're not willing to hold the tension of change as an organization, how can you begin to understand what you have to risk and what others have to risk to make change happen in the world?"" Excerpt from interview with Ai-jen Poo, National Domestic Workers Alliance: As Poo observed, "Domestic workers work in isolated workplaces. They don't have any job security whatsoever, and there are no labor standards or protections, except-for now-in New York, because of us. But really, there's nothing mediating the relationship between a worker and an employer-your workplace is somebody else's so-called castle. It already takes a lot of courage to assert your rights and dignity, and to make sure that you get paid on time, and to make sure that you can get home on time to your own children. And all of these challenges that are just day-to-day challenges of living in that environment already demonstrate a tremendous amount of day-to-day courage." Excerpt from interview with George Goehl, National People's Action �

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.

blog by Chuck Thompson, June 2009, in Men's Journal. To improve your athletic performance and to feel clearer all the time, start with the most fundamental act of life. Excerpt: "We all come into the world with the ability to take full, unencumbered breaths, but as we get older we forget how to breathe properly," says Don Campbell, a journalist turned wellness expert who champions a new movement among doctors and athletes known as "conscious breathing." A host of challenges conspire against our breathing well, Campbell says: "Poor posture, restrictive clothing, bad habits such as smoking, diets that lead to high blood pressure and racing hearts, increasingly rapid and emotionally stressful lives, lack of exercise, multitasking, polluted environments, and slouching in front of computers are just a few of the things that literally take our breath away, creating a lifestyle that's incongruent with proper breathing." Modern life causes the average person to use about a third of his natural lung capacity, while drawing about 15 breaths a minute." Breathing exercises: Relearn How To Breathe Do this exercise five times a day and you'll start thinking and performing better in no time: 1. Inhale deeply 2. Exhale with a short burst (as if blowing out a candle). This helps activate your diaphragm, which most people don't use. 3. Exhale with a long, slow finish to empty the lungs. Breathlessness comes from not expelling enough CO2. 4. Inhale, filling your lungs from the bottom to the top, instead of taking short sips. Most use a third of their lung capacity. 5. Hold for a moment to allow oxygen to saturate the cells. 6. Exhale slowly and completely. 7. Repeat steps 4 through 6 for five minutes. Read more: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/you-re-breathing-all-wrong-20130227#ixzz2t8BfTHcj Follow us: @mensjournal on Twitter | MensJournal on Facebook

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

Blog post by Sylvia Browder at the Story Exchange--where women mean business. "Challenge 2: Undefined Niche To Niche or Not to Niche…that is the question. What is a niche? A niche business is one that targets a very specific group of people with specific shared interest. A business with an undefined niche is like a ship sailing in shallow water. By creating a niche business allows you to market to your ideal clients. For example, if you were a behavioral psychologist targeting teens, you would market your services in places where parents are likely to find out about you; such as advertising in parent magazines, providing resources to local middle and high schools or joining organizations geared towards parents. Solution: By understanding who and where your ideal customers are; it is easy to craft a marketing plan to target them. Here are three easy ways to target your potential clients: * Improve your website's SEO with specific key words * Generate exposure locally and virtually with professional speaking, seminars or publishing a book or articles. * Craft a clear message that speak at the heart of your customer " Challenge 4: No Social Media Plan Random tweets and meandering Facebook posts will result in a lot of time devoted to zero results. Before making another useless post, sit down with pen and paper and make a list of what you want to achieve from social media. To which social media do you belong? What are some social media marketing strategies that you have noticed from other companies? What do you have that will offer value? You may find that your company is spread a little too thin across the social media spectrum. Quality truly is superior to quantity in this respect. Solution: Create a social media marketing plan and stay the long haul. Establishing a strong presence can be a very time consuming process. It is unwise to expect your list of fans, followers or subscribers to grow overnight.

article by Tim Wu in NYT weekly magazine, June 3, 2014 in Culture. Maintaining your brand The euphemism is "sharing," but Klein would probably just call it selling a personal brand, whether you consider yourself the pretty young thing with literary tastes and a traditional side, the family man who brews his own beer or the tough lawyer with a sense of humor. It can be nice to share, but brand maintenance takes constant work and demands consistency. A serious self-brand should have some presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Foursquare, Google+ and Tumblr; keeping it all up can feel like working as an unpaid intern for a Z-list celebrity known as Oneself. excerpt Any old-timer will tell you that anonymity online is nothing new, but how things originally were. There has, of course, always been an anonymous culture, usually tied to deviancy or dissidents. In the '80s and '90s, anonymity was indelibly linked to online culture, concurrent with getting at stuff that was otherwise hard to find or illegal. It was kind of the point really, to go where, as one early adopter wrote, "no one knows you're a dog." It allowed users to escape to a place with few restrictions, where you could say things, and maybe do things wholly without social consequence. In the early days, there was no need for any consistency with the rest of your life, and that's what was so great about it.

Great blog post by Holly Clark on Edudemic connecting education & technology, September 24, 2014. She suggests: Find another class to do a project, blog or twitter chat with. Change the classroom set up to allow for more student movement & interaction Have students create blogs to foster global interactions Use Skype to promote interaction with the outside world If your class has 1:1, look for other schools to collaborate with Tweet your learning with another class Understand that learning is happening through networks--not textbooks--"Textbooks are a solitary and isolated learning source and their days are numbered. Learning will become about networks. It will be about the people and information you know how to access and create. Your students are not quite savvy enough to do this effectively on their own, so show them how to interact with a network of experts from your subject area. ..."

Blog by Kevin O'Keefe, "Real Lawyers Have Blogs," on the topic of the law, firm marketing, social media, and baseball, February 23, 2014. O'Keefe reviews a study by Gerry Moran on using social media to teach, not to sell. Other key points that O'Keefe makes: Build a large social network of people modeled after your customers and their influencers. 75% of B2B decision makers use social media to learn. (wonder where this stat comes from?) Pass on valuable information. Don't use your social media and networking channels to promote yourself. You want to be known for handing out knowledge and not brochures. Use social so that people will want to visit with you in person. 73% of customers are willing to engage with you on social media, so the opportunity is there. Use social media to teach, not sell. Selling is best done face-to-face. However, Social Media Today reports B2B buyers look at an average of over 10 digital resources before ever making a purchase. Since customers need to learn before they buy, use this opportunity on social media to connect. Teach and connect with today's technology. Connect and get on the radar of your customers and potential networks by retweeting, sharing, commenting and favoriting others' content. Develop Insights. Before you teach and connect with your customers, you need to listen to the customer and their customers. Social is an excellent listening tool. Be a publisher. In addition to curating and passing on the great content to your network, create your own assets on a blog. Organizations who blog get clients. Later Excerpt: Over the years LexBlog as been all about helping lawyers understand how to use the Internet in a real and effective fashion so as to grow their practices. By sharing information from third parties along our own insight via blogs and other social media we established a reputation as trusted advisors. Even when I reach out to meet with lawyers and law firms I have never met f

blog post by Caroline Kim Oh, August 19, 2014, on reframing networking to build on your strengths, and not be overwhelmed by "networking" expectations at a so-called networking event. "Slow Networking " What I've found is that there is no one right way to build and cultivate your network. It turns out that my way of getting to know people, what I will begin calling "slow networking," is what works for me. I find that I am much better at getting to know people over time. I enjoy "collecting" relationships with people who are doing interesting work both within and outside of my field, keeping in touch with them, helping them whenever I can, informing them of what I am up to and, from time to time, calling on them when I need help. I love the process of uncovering a natural rapport with them as we work together on things we care about. How do you find your bright spot? When you feel you are excelling at a form of communicating with other people, and it comes naturally to you, that is your bright spot. And when you build your networking strategy around your one or two bright spots, you are leading with your strengths instead of trying to replicate some networking best practices book.

4 minute interview with Harold Jarche by Nigel Paine, May 2014, on what personal knowledge mastery really is--the adoption of disciplines, changes in behavior, interacting with others, be transparent about insights with others in public. "We have used each other's ideas, we can not only learn for ourselves but learn with each other." Great example of short, effective single topic podcast on audio boo. Effimova, Pollard, and Jarche use personal knowledge management terminology--Jarche changed it to mastery--practice, outlook, way of improving ourselves. If you are working in any kind of knowledge work, this is a component for everyone to use.

This page focuses on the Towards Maturity Learning Landscape Audit (LLA)--survey tool to help businesses understand how their staff learn, both formally and informally. The few bullet points contrast the views of 2,000 randomly selected learners from the private sector with 500 L & D professionals--a wide gap exists with regard to how learners are learning and like to learn with what L & D professionals are doing. For instance, 80% of learners prefer work in collaboration with other team members whereas only 1 in five L & D managers surveyed actively encourage staff to help each other solve problems using social media.

excellent points for us to stress in our work, too.

Very interesting blog post at Meetingsnet.com on how to create a viral spread of ideas/content/connections at meetings. Written by Alison Hall, August 5, 2013. Stresses that millenials, the focus of many women's organizations recruiting efforts rely on social media and technology to get through each day. They are completely connected, which has implications for how organizations need to use content generated in f2f meetings to attract engagement by people well outside the event itself. Excerpt: 12 Tips for Share-worthiness 1. Think from your audience's POV: What will they find interesting? What will help them prove the value of their industry, or their position? 2. Entertain. Infographics, photos, and (appropriate) humor have great pass-along value. 3. Feel good. What will make the world better? Emotional content spreads because it moves people. Find a way to make your content connect on a deeper level. 4. Plan your meeting with the idea that all content (with the exception of content at proprietary meetings) will be shared. 5. Loop in your presenters. Get their key insights ahead of time so you can "lock and load" content that's ready to go in real time. 6. Remember that real-time marketing only works if your audience can connect. Work diligently with your venue to ensure Wi-Fi is accessible and bandwidth is sufficient. Consider (sponsored!) charging stations to keep attendees powered up throughout the meeting. 7. Lead the way. Sharing will be (and should be) organic, but you need to be the guide. Start promoting hashtags and social channels at your event Web site and in your online registration process. On site, brand all event signage with the hashtags and channels. 8. Talk back. Hear what your audience is saying and participate in conversations. Deliver social value back to them by retweeting or sharing their content. 9. Make it easy. All content should have a one-click sharing option. Don't rely on the audience to cut and paste. Videos and phot

Harold Jarche blog, 11.16.12 Excerpt: summary by participant of keynote that Harold delivered in Denmark "Moving from local to global We live in a less barriered world: self-publication, group forming across the world, unlimited information. In the past we linked up with people with similar interests locally, due to simply physical realities… now we can link up with people from around the world. So from a learning perspective our learning group grows (personal addition: this also means that the group that lives inside the personal zone of proximal development grows, as more people can potentially be in this). Groupforming is now becoming networks. This has an effect on mentorship: per mentor you can only have so many learners, but with the growing group more mentors can stand up and the learners themselves can become mentors."