Society | Learn to Adapt

Feb 28

L2A Links for February 28th

Can We Change the Web’s Culture of Nastiness? – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – A new book by Jaron Lanier, a Web pioneer, suggests that the “drive-by anonymity” of the Web has fostered a culture of meanness. But does it have to be that way?
The Real Roots of the Crisis – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review – An insightful post from Umair Haque. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get away from nihilism and back to “Truth, Justice, and The American Way”?
Web 2.0 in Instruction: Adding Spice to Math Education — THE Journal – From the article: “Math 2.0 has been interpreted with a variety of phrases. Participants in weekly Math 2.0 Interest Group meetings co-created a definition where Math 2.0 links math education to social networking; involves using Web 2.0 tools to build and share knowledge of math concepts; is collaborating and connecting with others on problem solving, math thinking, and learning; and is an ability of users to create their own math-rich social objects using Web technologies.”

Aug 06

Mashable’s Twitter Guide Book Now Available for Download – And for those who are considering taking up the Tweet…
Why Teens Don’t Tweet – Interesting analysis by Ben Parr on why it might be that teens do not use Twitter.

Jul 07

FREE — Teaching Resources and Lesson Plans from the Federal Government – A nice collection of educational resources available for free from the Federal Government. It will be interesting to see how this and other resources (such as data.gov) continue to grow as the Feds try to become more open and transparent.
Facebook Users Are Getting Older. Much Older. – Watching nech tech go mainstream. Remember whaen e-mail and AOL did the same thing? From the article: "If the iStrategyLabs numbers are correct, Facebook, simply put, is not a young site anymore. Most of the users (20,3 million, or 28.2% overall) on the site belong to the 35 – 54 age group. Compare that to the age group that was once Facebook’s bread and butter – the 18 – 24 group – which is now in third place with 18 million (25.1%) users, behind the 25 – 34 year old group, which makes for 25.2% of Facebook’s user base with 18.1 million users. The number of users aged 55 and over has grown from negligible 950,000 to 5.9 million in mere six months."

Mar 01

Progressing Through Change – Introduction – Great (if I do say so myself) online tool you can use for free to see how you or your team are progressing through the changes your organization is facing. Chock full of tips to help you or your team work through change successfully.
The Unsociable, Radically-Individualist Soul of Social Media – Another thoughtful (and lengthy – I wish I could commit to typing like Venk does!) post from Venkatesh Rao explores the psychology of people who are successful in "social" media.

Feb 18

How Facebook is taking over our lives – Feb. 17, 2009 – Jessi Hempel at Fortune provides a lengthy profile of how Facebook is changing our lives. Boy does this remind me of AOL back in the dial-up days! AOL did get "America Online" and perhaps Facebook is the one that has cracked the nut on what they like to do there…
Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom | Video on TED.com – A great video of the Barry Schwartz talk about how our drive to codify society is costing us wisdom and morality.