Saturday Links of the Week — March 1, 2008

• Geoff Cheshire explains the Generosity Economy
• Nancy White loves Picnik as a simple web-based photo manager. She used it to produce my new blog photo, at right, by playing with a photo by Chris Heuer.
• Barbara Dieu loves Friendfeed as a means of keeping track of all the ‘stuff’ your friends are doing online in one place. You can take a look at mine as an example here. I wish it could also track my posts on other people’s blogs.
• Stephen Downes talks about Learning 2050, focused on the future of online learning. Examples:
• how objects teach us how to use them (especially evolving technologies)
• peer-to-peer learning through ubiquitous observation
• learning through conversation
• self-directed learning and the importance of critical and creative thinking
• learning as a participatory process
• learning objects as multi-media self-assessment of knowledge
• keeping your learning in your network
• simulations and other new environments that animate our learning
• Both Nancy White and my colleague Greg Turko are praising a new, free, downloadable book Visualizing Information for Advocacy. A visual feast, it makes the point that to get your point across, and to change people’s thinking, you first must get their attention.

Important Stuff:

• The New Yorker has a great (long but concise and articulate) explanation by Michael Specter of carbon emissions and the challenges we face trying to reduce them.
• If you still have the illusion ‘leaders’ are going to get us out of the mess we’re in now, read the pathetic answers of the specially-selected gurus to this year’s Edge question “what have you changed your mind about“? What a sad end to what was once an intellectually invigorating institution. So tell us: What have you changed your mind about? We’ve got to be able to do better than the sorry Edge lot.
• HTWW notes Obama’s aversion to NAFTA and his plan to renegotiate it, and says Canada has more to gain than the US from such renegotiation. Indeed, all three signatories, and especially our workers and our environment, have a lot to gain from scrapping NAFTA entirely.
• Alanis Morrissette’s song That I Would Be Good cuts right to the heart of how our sense of self-esteem drives us and holds us back.

Fun Stuff:

• Four people sent me the Diebold 2008 Election Leak satire. Priceless.
• Attention Economy, the Game, from Ulises Mejias lets you understand and show people what this economy is all about and why attention is the new commodity of business and social exchange (thanks to Chris Lott for this link and the Stephen Downes one above)

Thought for the Week: Poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, passed on by Jen Lemen:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting ’Äì
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.