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The new science of social physics which is about the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors. Alex Pentland has a new book: Social Physics: How Good ideas Spread: The Lessons from a New Science that explores the patterns of information exchange in social networks, the ways humans are like bees, and how networks large and small can be tuned to increase exploration and community engagement.

Excellent slidedoc on why slidedocs are important by Nancy Duarte. Really like the distinctions made on slide 15 between presentations and conversations in two columns. Use presentations when you need to communicate an already-formed idea; already have information about the audience's wants and needs; need to inform, persuade, or entertain an audience; does not require real-time feedback from the audience; or need a single event to move an audience toward your objective. Use conversation when you need to build upon, get consensus on, or more fully develop an idea; need more information about the group's wants and ideas; need to build a personal relationship with the audience; need the group's input in order to move forward; need continuous engagement to accomplish your objective. I believe that we are much more about conversation at the Studio.

"Something successful entrepreneurs should aim to have: Conviction. Being an entrepreneur is not the easy road to success. Sure, you're your own boss-making the conversation in which you ask for a raise far less awkward-but the hours are long, the market always crowded, the naysayers plenty. There will be discouraging news. But the ability to stand behind your decisions is essential. No one else can tell you what you want for your company, and don't let them try. Drive. As an entrepreneur, time is not on your side. The best-laid plans are those that are executed as swiftly as possible. Don't sit on an idea or wait until you've had a chance to "sleep on it." Act now. Innovation. The original brainchild might have been the thing that got you excited enough to take the leap into entrepreneurship. But longevity will depend on continually coming up with new ideas, from products to ways to market them to which audiences to target. Not all of these ideas will be winners. But having them is not optional. Inspiration. You may be your only employee. Or you might have a team that looks to you to engage them, foster their talents, and involve them in the bigger picture. Those employees who feel excited about, and part of, the overall vision will be encouraged to grow alongside you, and work hard for you. Focus. Establish your daily, weekly, quarterly goals and go after them. Connect dots on a daily basis. Avoid distractions, and distracting people. Independence. It's a lonely road, entrepreneurship. Though your goal is to foster community within your company, there will be days when you wish everyone else would be willing to work as hard as you are, to want it as much as you do. But realize that your company's success does mean more to you than it does to anyone else. Be willing to go the road alone on those days when everyone else has seemingly pulled off for lunch. That's what'll make the difference."

News article on shooting death of Dan Markel, a rising star in the legal world and an FSU professor, 7.26.14. They describe his desire to create dialogue and how his blog PrawfsBlawg gained national attention. (and may have led to his irritating someone who killed him) "In Tallahassee, Markel's star ascended. He launched a legal blog, a forum for law professors called PrawfsBlawg. The site gave scholars an avenue to vet ideas and listed job opportunities. PrawfsBlawg attracted a national following, propelling Markel into a network of high-profile scholars. He was invited to conferences nationwide. Markel's scholarship, which raised philosophical questions about the justice system and argued against the death penalty, also received national attention. His writing was featured in the New York Times and Slate. "He was very eager to engage other academics in dialogue," said Berman, the Ohio State professor. "He believed the more you got resistance to your idea, the more refined and sophisticated the idea would become.""

some good ideas for planning and convening effective meetings/conferences

Review by Rob Jenkins on the Chronicle, 3.18.13, on why MOOCs are a massively bad idea for wait-listed community college students in California as proposed in new legislation there. Excerpt: "We know that succeeding in online classes requires an extraordinary degree of organization, self-discipline, motivation, and time-management skill. A simple Google search of "how to succeed in online classes" yields a plethora of Web sites-including many college and university sites-offering students such gems as "be organized," "manage your time wisely," and (my favorite) "stay motivated."" Excerpt: So to recap, California's plan (or to be fair, one senator's plan) is basically to dump hundreds of thousands of the state's least-prepared and least-motivated students into a learning environment that requires the greatest amount of preparation and motivation, where they will take courses that may or may not be effective in that format. Here's a prediction: Those students will fail and drop out at astronomical rates. Then the hand-wringing will begin anew, the system will pour millions more dollars into "retention" efforts, and the state will be in an even deeper fix than it is now. (Virtual cheating will probably run rampant, too, followed by expensive anticheating measures, but that's another blog post.) Look, I'm not a politician or an economist. I don't know the answer to California higher education's budget woes. But I'm pretty sure herding community-college students into MOOCs is not it.

A Slideshare by Etienne Garbugli on using time effectively that went viral to get 1 million views since being uploaded in March 2013. Very effective ideas; maybe we could use it as an experimental exercise--"find three ideas to test doing in the next week; come back and tell us how it went"

Blog post by Chris Collison on 2.26.13, that discusses reciprocity in fostering a learning atmosphere and adoption of best practice in an organization. Excerpt: "Reciprocity is an important principle for knowledge management, and one which underpins the idea of Offers and Requests. Offers and Requests was a simple approach, introduced to make it easier for Operations Engineers at BP to ask for help, and to share good practice with their peers. The idea was for each business unit to self-assess their level of operational excellence using a maturity model, and identify their relative strengths and weaknesses. In order to overcome barriers like "tall poppy syndrome", or a reluctance to ask for help ("real men don't ask directions"), a process was put in place whereby every business unit would be asked to offer three areas which they felt proud of, and three areas which they wanted help with. The resulting marketplace for matching offers and requests was successful because: i) The principle of offering a strength at the same time as requesting help was non-threatening and reciprocal - it was implicitly fair. ii) The fact that every business unit was making their offers and requests at the same time meant that it felt like a balanced and safe process."

A blog by Kirsten Olson on her new book, Wounded by School. Really like the Learner's Bill of Rights she has here: A Learner's Bill of Rights Every learner has the right to know why they are learning something, why it is important now, or may be important to them someday. Every learner has the right to engage in questioning or interrogating the idea of "importance" above. Every learner has the right to be confused and to express this confusion openly, honestly, and without shame. Every learner has the right to multiple paths to understanding a concept, an idea, a set of facts, or a series of constructs. Every learner has the right to understand his or her own mind, brain wiring, and intellectual inclinations as completely as possible. Every learner has the right to interrogate and question the means through which his or her learning is assessed. Every learner is entitled to some privacy in their imagination and thoughts. Every learner has the right to take their own imagination and thinking seriously. -From Wounded By School

from Entrepreneur.com. Another article on how to network when you are an introvert. First suggestion is network and make connections online to develop relationships on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. This is especially helpful if you are going to a conference or event as you will "know" people before you get there, and they will know you. Arrange to meet up with them ahead of time. Talk about your accomplishments to better connect with others so they know what you have done and what connections you have with them. Discuss your goals and ideas to join or jumpstart the conversation, and ask for others' goals and ideas. Don't overthink it and go over and over your interactions. Concentrate on the positives you get out of the interaction. Maintain strong relationships when they develop and keep in touch regularly. Take Notes - remember faces, names, and what they said. Send an email to them to continue the conversation and remind them of who you are.

#change11, blog post by Bon Stewart, May 2, 2012 And here's the rub... "The original MOOCs - the connectivist MOOCs a la Siemens & Downes, and the work of David Wiley and Alec Couros and others - have been, for the most part, about harnessing the capacity of participatory media to connect people and ideas. They've been built around lateral, distributed structures, encouraging blog posts and extensive peer-to-peer discussion formats. Even in live sessions showcasing facilitator's expertise, these ur-MOOCs have tended towards lively backchannel chats, exploring participants' knowledge and experiences and ideas. They've been, in short, actively modelled on the Internet itself. They've been experiential and user-driven. Their openness hasn't stopped at registration capacity, but extended to curricular tangents and participatory contributions and above all, to connections: they've given learners not just access to information but to networks. They've been messy, sometimes, but they have definitely not been business as usual. The problem with EdX is that, scale and cost aside, it IS essentially a traditional learning model revamped for a new business era. It puts decision-making power, agency, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge pretty much straight back into the hands of gatekeeping institutions."

5 minute interview by Brooke Gladstone with Maria Popova on NPR, March 23, 2012 on Maria's suggested curator's code. Don't know that her symbols are the best way to attribute stumbling across interesting writings that lead one to the source of various ideas (since as a comment pointed out below, the symbols don't appear on our keyboards). But it does argue for a consistent way of acknowledging the paths/combinations one goes through to build a map linking together concepts/ideas/new variations to readers/learners.

This excerpt from an interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, PLP founder, captures critical points for PD online. "Will and I agreed that we would only work with teams of school-based educators because the research made it clear that it was collaborative teams within in a school, working together, that really brought about sustainable improvement. That would give us what we needed to anchor the virtual experience in a local context. We also wanted participants to experience a global community of practice-to be able to have conversations with people very different than themselves, with fresh perspectives. Our thinking was that if we put teams of educators who had different ideologies, different geography, different purposes and challenges, all together in the same space, then they could each bring what they did well to the table and people could learn from that. Ultimately that would mean public, private, Catholic, and other kinds of schools; educators teaching well-to-do, middle-class, and poor kids; educators in different states and nations, at different grade levels, and in different content areas and roles. What ultimately grew out of our brainstorming was a three-pronged model of professional development that emphasizes (1) local learning communities at the school/district level; (2) an online community of practice that's both global and deep; and (3) a third prong that is more personal-the idea of a personal learning network that each educator develops as a mega-resource for ideas and information about their particular interests and areas of practice. (These three prongs are described in depth in a new book, The Connected Educator, where PLP community leader Lani Ritter Hall and I tell the story of the evolution of our model and the very solid research base behind it.)

"Yet I can also appreciate that, with so much being written out there by so many in so many places, and so little time for reading it all, the opportunity to have one's blog be a place for important conversations has diminished. But I think blogs are still the premier means and place for documenting 'unedited' substantive original thought - new ideas, analysis, synthesis, models, and new perspectives. It's sad that much of this important thinking is now lost in the deluge of glib quotes and trivia and news of the moment, and not read because of our frantic pace of life and our endemic attention deficit disorder. But it will still be there when it's ready to be discovered. And as you say in the meantime it will continue to help us formulate and learn and articulate our knowledge and beliefs and ideas, and so equip us to be of more use to the world."

This article provides some wonderful tips to women in the business world who find it necessary to approach others to sell products, ideas or services. "I've always had a pretty good relationship with the idea of being a salesperson.  For some reason, even from an early age, I had it in my head that sales was simply about finding people who wanted what I had to offer. So, for instance, selling Camp Fire Girls candy in grade school held no terrors for me: I'd go around and ask people if they wanted to buy it, and if not, I'd ask the next person.  I figured there was no harm in asking, even if they didn't want it - and them not wanting it didn't have anything to do with me; maybe they didn't like candy, or were on a diet, or had already bought some from somebody else."

Great t fit, you must acquit) 6. Twitter (leads to good information even if it is self-promotional)

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

8 ways to think about tech in ways that actually improve the classroom by Laura Moorhead from ideas.ted.com. Although geared toward k-12, this has some good advice for teachers such as not co-opting the social media most used for personal connections and fun (FB), no app is going to do everything, sharing ones passion and exploration with students is a good thing, and bringing in social learning is key - let the students explore and help each other. The technology and apps should support them to do this, not drive the content.

Zapier Blog--really cool place with great graphic on idea inspiration.

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