Saturday Links of the Week — June 7, 2008 — The Thoughtful Edition

Posted on June 7, 2008 by Dave Pollard
blog courseware

Why You Don’t Want a Personal Brand: William Tozier explains how personae are a useful shorthand for explaining who you are and what you stand for, but a personal ‘brand’ is just an indelible and expectation-creating oversimplification that none of us needs.

Survey Shows IM Saves Time, E-Mail Wastes It: A new survey suggests that, despite corporate executives’ and IT departments’ aversion to IM, it is a far superior communication and knowledge transfer tool to e-mail. But then anyone in Gen Millennium could have told you that.

Disconnecting Distraction: …and if you want to get anything done, Paul Graham explains that you must first turn off all those distractions that are deliberately designed to tear your attention away from what’s important.

Mirrored Speech: Pearl Pirie reminds us of an indigenous practice that helps ensure all participants in a conversation are heard — require each speaker to begin his/her comments with a brief reiteration of what the previous speaker said. “Yes, and…”

Could Blogs Be the Ideal Online Courseware?: A number of online courses are now structured through blogs (see illustration above), with an ‘article’ for each ‘lecture’, and the categories replaced by syllabus sections. Here’s a working example. Thanks to Chris Lott for the link.

What the World Needs Now: Jen Lemen, blogging from Rwanda where she’s doing some remarkable volunteer work, paints a portrait of the incredible bravery and spirit of the people of a failed and desolated country.

organic takeovers

How Agribusiness Has Taken Over Organic Foods: The chart above is one of several by Phil Howard explaining how Agribusiness, smelling profit in organics, has taken over most of the larger organic companies and launched their own greenwash brands. Thanks to Rachel Cullar for the link.

What You Really Need to Learn: A brilliant slideshare deck of critical competencies from Stephen Downes (thanks to Michele Martin for the link); the 10 things are:

  • how to predict consequences
  • how to read critically
  • how to distinguish truth from fiction (and propaganda)
  • how to empathize
  • how to be creative
  • how to communicate clearly
  • how to learn
  • how to stay healthy
  • how to value yourself
  • how to live meaningfully (decide what to do with your life)

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Unschooling: From Chris Corrigan, the best of Illich, Gatto, Holt and others on the benefits of un-institutional, self-directed education. I did it for one year, my last year of high school, and went from C student to scholarship winner. What I learned most in that year were the 10 competencies in Stephen’s list, above.

MÈxico Becomes a Failed State: I wrote last year that Jeff Vail had convinced me that MÈxico would soon become a failed state, due to its horrific overpopulation, resource scarcity, corruption and inexperience with democracy and constitutional liberalism. It is now clear that organized crime is so powerful in Mexico that the police and politicians either do their bidding or die. Expect another right-wing military dictatorship soon.

World’s Most Polluted Cities: All in struggling nations…not in my back yard. Thanks to Candy Minx for the link.

Thought for the Week: From Barb Klaser, in comments to one of my posts earlier this week:

I had a colleague once whose favorite joke when things didn’t go right on a project was, “I feel so much better since I gave up hope.” But in fact I think there’s a point in our lives when we realize that acceptance of what we can’t change is wisdom, and then our lives change gears for the better.

Those who haven’t seen the wisdom in that might call it laziness. I have a problem with the word “lazy” in that it’s a catchall and nearly always seen as negative. More and more I wonder if there’s really any such thing as laziness, other than the ability and wisdom to slow down and take life in — which I view as a positive trait, a kind of thrifty respect for life — one’s own as well as everyone else’s.

Most of the other people society looks at as lazy are dealing with dysfunction or challenged in some way not in their control. Those who’ve made a conscious choice to slow down and value each day — not for what they can produce to make someone rich or to “fix” the wrongs of the world, but for what life means in the greater scheme of things — are likely in the “boomer” age group. Younger people think they have to put up with an employer’s self-absorption, ambition, or greed, but many boomers have wised up and see it for what it is, and they aren’t going to wait for years to “prove” themselves to yet another of this kind of employer. Life’s tooshort…

 It’s also the reason I try to take my business, as a consumer, to where I see contented employees.
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6 Responses to Saturday Links of the Week — June 7, 2008 — The Thoughtful Edition

  1. raffi says:
    June 8, 2008 at 22:12

    Hi David!Really good set of links today. I look at your work from time to time (thanks to Wendy on Gabriola for introducing me to you) and really enjoy it.I looked at the set of indicators of an emergent failed state from the post you referenced on Mexico. Is it that much of a stretch to say all of the following is true for your neighbor to the south? Having returned to the US having lived abroad for a number of years, it’s fascinating to see how things have changed here. Of course, these processes have been going on for at least 50 years if not longer…All of this begs the question, what is the sustainable alternative to a failed state (failed world?)? There’s no doubt that that we are moving very quickly to the dystopia described in the movie Zeitgeist. And what’s the other emerging paradigm? If failed nation states are part of globalization, what does the quiet, emergent process of relocalization imply for the future of nation-states?

  2. Jon Husband says:
    June 9, 2008 at 01:09

    I think that blogs as ideal online courseware, supplemented by wikis and / or services like Google docs, were identified as such a few years ago. If your link suggests that the notion is gaining wider awareness and acceptance, glad to see it.

  3. mattbg says:
    June 9, 2008 at 07:38

    I found the link on organic market structure interesting, although it seems to mostly deal with processed food products, and I’m not sure there are many processed organic food products (other than packaged raw ingredients) that I would consider much more healthy than their non-organic counterparts. There are some, but not many.The problem is in the processing methods more than in the ingredients, although “organic” does sometimes refer to better processing methods… but probably not from the conglomerates.

  4. Bob Watson says:
    June 9, 2008 at 09:41

    One of the things Gatto did when he left public school teaching was to investigate extensively the educational practices of US elite private boarding schools, the Choates,Andovers, and Grotons. As far as I know, he never published the results of that research, but he does speak of it extensively here: http://www.edflix.org/gatto.htm (watch the first four little videos)Gatto elaborates a dozen or more competencies these schools actually help their students achieve in a list that is worth comparing to Downes, and I don’t think Gatto mentions using new tech even once.

  5. Barbara W. Klaser says:
    June 10, 2008 at 14:29

    Thanks for the mention, Dave. Great collection of links.

  6. Dave Pollard says:
    June 12, 2008 at 19:40

    Thanks everyone. Bob — amazing Gatto videos!

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