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"My friend had filled the day. He was busy. But the things that made him busy were the result of his own decisions. He didn't lack the time to read. He was simply choosing not to. Throughout the day, we face a number of decision points about how to spend time. Too often we approach these decisions passively, as if our hand were being forced, our free will compromised. Let me add one caveat: if you have young children, a brutal commute or juggle several jobs to make ends meet, you are exempt from everything I write in this piece. You are truly busy."

"It seems disruption is hard when poor people insist on existing. Thrun has the right to fail. That's just business. But he shouldn't have the right to fail students like those at San Jose State and the public universities that serve them for the sake of doing business."

"I believe that words mean things and the names we attach to the things we care about serve as little icons that can tell a very brief story about the things themselves. I think flipped learning is at the point now where it's past the point of being the Next Big Thing in Education, and the first order of business, it seems to me, in moving the conversation about flipped learning forward is just figuring out what story we want to convey by way of the terminology we use."

Ah, this is so interesting. Over lunch I announced that I love how Twitter is being used in OLE. I can see integrating it in a similar way that OLE is: As a way to announce that assignments (or makes) are complete. Given that 'ah hah' moment with me, and this article, it's pretty clear that there's a lot you can do with it, on many levels. Knowing your audience and making sure it meshes with the parameters and goals of the course are key.

"They were so busy hating Twitter they didn't realize how much they were learning or how much they were thinking critically."

Really need to think about how to do more with this internally for some of the routine support stuff. "It's no secret that newsrooms are increasingly using bots to cut down on busy work. Software now routinely churns out quarterly earnings stories for The Associated Press and earthquake alerts for Los Angeles Times, freeing reporters to pursue more in-depth projects. And while no bot can write 3,000-word investigative stories, it can assist reporters by alerting them to new data and filtering the information for them."

Maxine Greene (1995) writes:

"The role of the imagination is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve.  It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected" (p. 28)

In this age of constant information and busy lives, it's difficult to get teachers and parents to read large amounts of research, or to understand the importance of boycotts, resolutions or petitions. The information we wish to share regarding the ill purpose and effects of corporate ownership of education must be expressed using all of the senses, in our bodied actions-instantaneously and with the emotion it warrants. As Nick Sousanis considers, we have to remember that conception (i.e as what we believe, what we think of as "real") largely comes through our perception (i.e what we see with our eyes and how we construct meaning).

Greene writes that through the "art of knowing"-"The experience and knowledge gained  by this way of knowing opens new modalities for us in the lived world; it brings us in touch with our primordial landscapes, our original acts of perceiving" (p. 149).

We need to redesign the social landscape with new images, new stories, new ways of understanding what corporate reform "is" and how it works.  What we need is action-creative action collectively inspired in local communities and through national organizing-to UNFLATTEN our worlds.

To extend Friday's conversation even further . . . "The second type of busyness also results in health problems, but it is a sickness we bring on ourselves. Like voluntarily licking the door handle of a preschool bathroom or having a sweaty picnic in the Ball Pit at Chuck E. Cheese's. It's busyness we control. Self-created stress. Ever since my conversation a month ago, I realized that my busyness is this second type. Busyness we control. In fact, many times I create rush and worry where none exists. Any typical morning, you can find me riding my kids like a couple of three-dollar mules in a sea of marbles, begging them to move faster." h/t D'Arcy Norman

"Design thinking is an approach to innovation that combines human desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility to develop solutions to society's everyday problems. By putting people at the center, designing thinking and the human-centered design process ask innovators and leaders to tackle problems from multiple perspectives, especially those of people whose needs and desires are at the core of any problem. "

We've known this stuff for decades, but, still...

" he starts with a rapid-fire primer on heady concepts like the Internet of Things, the mobile revolution, cloud computing, digital disruption, and the perpetual increase of processing power. ("It's exponential, folks. It's just growing and growing.") The upshot: If you don't at least try to think digitally, the digital economy will disrupt you. It will drain your town of young people and leave your business in the dust. Then he switches gears and tries to stiffen their spines with confidence. Start a website, he'll say. Get on social media. See if the place where you live can finally get a high-speed broadband connection-a baseline point of entry into modern economic and civic life."

not much that's new but a good overview of the business of Twitter

Well, except enrollments *are* down slightly at VCU...

"I'm talking about @HistoryInPics, which, as I discovered, is run by two teenagers: Xavier Di Petta, 17, who lives in a small Australian town two hours north of Melbourne, and Kyle Cameron, 19, a student in Hawaii. "

""We were initially torn between collaborating with universities and working outside the world of college," Thrun tells me. The San Jose State pilot offered the answer. "These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives," he says. "It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit.""

I"ve pitched this to Robertson School folks + VCU Arts folks. An interesting area for collaboration...

Ongoing series of profiles on new University building construction, including a few learning spaces.

The Netflix of podcasts?