Week 13: We have arrived!

We're just a week away from meeting the newest crop of Kohawks. It's an exciting time of year; a time that makes me think both about my own experiences as a college freshman and about the experiences our new students are bringing in with them.

Take a moment right now to think about the technologies you had with you when you moved in to your freshman dorm (or wherever you lived for your first semester of college).  I had an account on
the South Dakota State Telephone Network (SDSTN) in my dorm room with long distance costing ten cents a minute and a Snoopy phone I'd won selling magazines. I brought a Brother daisy wheel typewriter (I was a terrible typist and hated every key stroke on that thing!) and my newly purchased Jansport backpack. By second semester, I'd learned about the computer lab in Briggs Library and spent most of my writing time there. And, luckily my second year roommate (also Lisa) showed up with an awesome new word processing device: I could actually read about two paragraphs of text on the screen before committing to print!

Now let's think about what those new students are moving in with next week. If recent history repeats, we know almost every one of them will have computer - most will have laptops. Less than 1% will not have a smartphone. Many will have multiple devices; an iPad, a laptop, a smartphone, gaming devices and more. They'll use them in ways we might not get (I know a student who composed a five page paper on his phone).

I think it's helpful to put our students life experiences, age and a few thoughts about how they have interacted in our world into perspective before they arrive. I have two articles to share this week that will make us think about our incoming Kohawks. The first is a blog post by the Tenured Radical (written by Claire Potter) on the Chronicle of Higher Education. Two weeks ago, Potter posted Bye-Bye Birdie: Sending the Kids Away to College. It's a casual post giving advice to parents on how to prepare their kids for college.  She writes about some touchy topics (creating separation by NOT calling your child multiple times a day and talking about drugs and alcohol) and some topics we probably wish were mandatory reading for ALL parents and incoming students (college is different than high school!). If you could add to the the list for parents, what topics would you include?

The second article is the Beliot Mindset List. I've been reading this list since starting at Coe. It's a list of popular cultural, political and historical references to help "place" the incoming (traditional) first year students. The list is published by Beliot College and started in 2002. Here's what Beliot says about their list:

"What started as a witty way of saying to faculty colleagues "beware of hardening of the references," has turned into a globally reported and utilized guide to the intelligent if unprepared adolescent consciousness. It is requested by thousands of readers, reprinted in hundreds of print and electronic publications, and used for a wide variety of purposes. It has caught the imagination of the public and has drawn responses from around the world, including more than a million visitors to the website annually."

The Class of 2018 List will be published in three weeks (according to the Mindset Facebook page), which is just a little late for us. Fortunately, much of the 2017 Mindset List can also ring true. A few key elements of the list that struck me:

• Eminem and LL Cool J could show up at parents’ weekend. 
• As kids they may well have seen Chicken Run but probably never got chicken pox.
• Their TV screens keep getting smaller as their parents’ screens grow ever larger.
• Rites of passage have more to do with having their own cell phone and Skype accounts than with getting a driver’s license and car.
• With GPS, they have never needed directions to get someplace, just an address.
• They have always been able to plug into USB ports

Two years ago, after sending detailed instructions for getting to my house to a new babysitter from the Student Association's list of house/animal/kid helpers, I realized I'd been wasting time compiling these instructions. I asked our new sitter if my directions had been OK, and she said she didn't even read them, just plugged the address into her phone. It's a hard habit to break, but I've restricted myself to just saying "it's a brown house."

How do you get yourself into the mindset of a 21st Century, born-in-1996 student? 

Week 9: The Happy Secret to Better Work

Do you work to be happy or are you happy to work? Are you a glass-half full sort of a person, or are you frequently looking for the tap, worried the half that's left is disappearing too quickly? According to studies led by Shawn Achor, your optimism levels, your social support structure and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of a threat, are three times as likely as your I.Q. to predict your job success. Achor, a former distinguished educator at Harvard University, and now CEO of Good Think, Inc.,  researches positive outliers, or in other words, studies Positive Psychology.

Positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life most worth living. It is a call for psychological science and practice to be as concerned with strength as with weakness; as interested in building the best things in life as in repairing the worst; and as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling as with healing pathology. [published in Psychology Today: "What Is Positive Psychology, and What Is It Not?" May 16, 2008 by Christopher Peterson, Ph.D.]

Transcript can be read HERE.

I found this quote in the video to be particularly thought provoking as I thought about my interactions with our own students on campus:

"And what I found in my research and my teaching is that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or their physics. Their brain was focused on the competition, the workload, the hassles, the stresses, the complaints."

Achor suggests ways to 'retrain' our brains to focus on the positive. Do you believe this is possible? Do you practice any positive psychology, yourself? In our data-driven world, where students are worried about transcripts, GPAs and what's on the next test, how do we encourage a positive approach? How do you do so in your own life?

Challenge: as suggested by Achor in this talk, recount something positive that has happened to you in the past 24 hours. Share in comments if you'd like, or just jot it down on a piece of paper on your desk. Put it where you'll see it for the next few days (Achor says this allows us to relive the positive moment).

Read more: Harvard Business Review: Positive Intelligence, published in January-February 2012.

Thing 1: You're Distracted!

Let's get our things started; and as we start reading and talking about, listening and watching and trying out all things technology-related, let's just say it - it's distracting.

Thing 1 is an article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in March of 2013. The article is You're Distracted: This Professor Can Help by Marc Parry. In this article we are introduced to Dr. David Levy, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and his class "Information and Contemplation." The class attempts to scrutinize how people use technology, how fragmented attention and emotional connection factor in to technology use and what methods might improve technology-related productivity.

Here's a mini-experiment: think back to this morning. What did you do in the first 20-30 minutes after you logged in to your computer on campus? Were you concentrated on a singular task (getting through emails) or where there multiple tasks involved (reading emails, listening to VM, popping onto your cell phone to check a text, following links to new websites, checking weather forecasts, etc)?

Full disclosure: I read this article three or four times. The first several times I read it were interrupted by LOTS of distractions: emails, a Google chat that popped up, a phone call on my cell phone that could have gone to voice mail, looking something up on Facebook, and more. The last time I read it, I closed all my other browser tabs and windows, turned off the volume on my computer (so I wouldn't hear the familiar ping of a Google chat) and just read.

Some food for thought as you read the article:

• Do you align with either the "never-better" or "better-never" trains of thoughts? Never-betters: the internet holds vast potential; we can unleash and harness advanced human intelligence. Better-nevers: this whole internet-technology-social media world is destroying our capacity for concentration and contemplation (and the ability to spell).
• Is it possible to educate our selves to be more attentive?
• Do you find the tools you use are helping you connect more or disconnecting you?
• Does age or generational gap have anything to do with our ability to work attentively?
• If you meditate, do you agree with the findings of the study the National Science Foundation funded by Levy and colleagues?

Challenge: pick a time in the next few days and track your email usage (like the assignment in the article) for 15 minutes. Are you concentrating on email or are you pulled away by other distractions? Do you think you would benefit from a more structured method for limited email distractions? Do you already have a process or method in place for feeling productive using your technology tools?

Post your thoughts/comments about the article in the comments section below. Happy undistributed reading!

Week 13: The End

Although there were only supposed to be "13" things to think about this summer, I just couldn't decide between these last two talks. Read the description and determine which piques your interest most this week. Both seem like fitting topics to lead us into this new semester.

Option 1: A Kindler, Gentler Philosophy of Success (16:55)
"Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work."

Points to Ponder:

• Do you agree with de Botton's analysis of meritocracy?
• During Week 4; Kathryn Schultz's talk focused on being wrong. As de Botton described today's mindset concerning the 'bottom of society' being labeled "losers" did you find similarities between the messages? Is it true that our biggest fear in failure is not failing itself, but the judgement and ridicule?
• What is your idea of success? Where does your idea of success come from? Has it changed over time?
• How do we help our students define their own ideas of success (making sure each is truly the "author of his/her own ambitions")? How do we do this when our students place a high value on letter grades?
• What stood out for you in this talk? What do you agree with or disagree with?

Option 2: Liz Coleman's Call to Reinvent Liberal Arts Education (18:41)
"Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education -- one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day."

 

Points to Ponder:

• Have we (the liberal arts colleges) lost our roots? Coleman says "We have professionalized the liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century, the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. … The progression of today’s college student is to jettison every interest except one, and within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less — this despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things. …" Do you agree? Is Coe guilty? Is this true of your liberal arts alma mater (if you came from one)?
• Coleman talks about the connection between education and the public good, indicating the academy simply does not empower this connection. Do you think our students understand or feel a connection? Do our students connect their liberal arts education to civic engagement?
• Is there any way to know when Coleman's ideal marriage between liberal arts and public good is met?
• What do part of Coleman's talk to you most deeply agree or passionately disagree with? Why?
  

Week 12, July 30

My apologies for the late posting today!

Let's take a brain break with a little humor this morning. Many of us have an iPod, or some type of MP3/music playing device; and we've all heard the news reports of music and movie piracy. Rob Reid takes a shot at deciphering the real cost of pirated media in this short talk "The $8 Billion iPod"

Running time: 5:11

 

Comment if the talk moves you to do so!

Week 11, July 23

Week 11? That means there are only two weeks of our summer thinking left!

Did you know there is a competition called the U.S. Memory Championship (which of course, leads to the World Memory Championships)? Yes, an event where people compete to see who has the best memory. If you haven't found your sport yet, this might be for you!

Science writer Joshua Foer heard about this event and wondered how people prepared. An initial look into the event led him to study memory and memory techniques in a broader sense. After spending a year in study, he even entered the competition!

Running time: 20:19
note: be sure to follow the instructions at the beginning!

 

Points to Ponder:

• Foer says technological advances seem to be taking the place of memory/memorizing: books, photographs, an Excel spreadsheet with a grand matrix of all of our passwords. What do you think about that? Are these essential things we should be storing in memory? Could future technology include a USB port into our brains for external storage?
• Do you actively practice memory techniques? What is your current method for committing something to memory?
• Foer says we remember best when deeply engaged and when we can make a connection (Baker, baker). What types of techniques do you use with students to both engage them with content and to help them make connections to what's going on in your course?
• What stood out in this talk? What didn't make sense or work for you?

Week 10 July 16

One of the most popular and prolific speakers in the TED circles is Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Even if you've never heard of Professor Rosling, you may have used the statistical visualization software he developed, GapMinder. This software takes data from sources like the United Nations, the World Health Organization and others and presents a clear, user-driven and insightful way of seeing comparisons and global trends. The online version of Gapminder is available HERE.

In this TED talk, Rosling makes what appears to be a counter-intuitive claim: to stabilize world population, we must increase child survival rates. Hmmm...sounds mathematically unstable, right? If more children survive, wouldn't that add to the population size?

 

Points to Ponder:

• Do you agree that we're still in an antiquated mindset? "The Western World and the developing countries"? In a different TED talk, Rosling quotes "my neighbor knows 200 kinds of wine, I know two: red and white. But my neighbor only knows two kinds of countries, western and developing, I know 200". Why is it important to stop thinking in terms of developed and developing?
• Education of women is key; countries where women have the highest literacy rate are also the countries with the lowest family sizes. Smaller family size equals lower infant mortality rates. Should there be a more intense focus on the education of women in our poorest countries? Why or why?
• Anything insightful, new or intriguing catch your attention in this talk?
• Have you experienced Gapminder? How have you/could you use these visualizations for your courses, research or other purposes?
• If you have some extra time, watch these additional talks by Hans Rosling for further insight: 

1. The Magic Washing Machine: in this short talk, Rosling "shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading."
2. Let My Dataset Change Your Mind: taking the Gapminder visualizations on global poverty to test.

Week 9, July 9

Although our mission and our status as a residential college does not lead us down the path of online education, it's hard not to think about it; it's everywhere. We see billboards plastered on I-380; we hear recent news about Iowa public school students having online options, and we're frequently exposed to articles about online learning in our scholarly articles.

Can you imagine a 100,000 student classroom? Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun couldn't either, until they were teaching one. Nationally known for his expertise in artificial intelligence, Peter Norvig had been teaching courses on the subject at Stanford, in person for some time before taking on the challenge of the free, online course.

Norvig discusses the project in this six minute, twelve second talk:

 

Points to Ponder:

• Norvig and Thrun set out to provide a course "equal or better in quality" to the courses taught at Stanford in person; do you think this is possible?
• Twenty thousand students completed the 10-week courses, putting in anywhere between 50 and 100 hours of course work during the course session. None of these students paid for the course. Is there a new level of motivation in our society - one leading self-starting, driven students to seek out high quality education without the high-dollar tuition?
• What's the most striking element of this short talk? What surprised you or baffled you?
• Do you agree with the statement on peer instruction? How do you encourage your students to work together in your courses?
• Would you consider taking or teaching a course like this, online?

Week 8, July 2

It's a short week, full of fire-cracker celebration, so we won't think TOO much this week. We'll look at a topic that almost all of us engage in on a regular basis, but most of us don't think about at ALL: drying our hands with paper towels.

In this short talk, activist Joe Smith gives us a solution for saving over 500,000 pounds of paper towels from landfills every year. Follow Joe's simple instructions for drying and you'll be part of the solution!

This is a short talk, coming in under 5 minutes. Let's give our brains a little break this week; comment if you've got another tip for saving the world, but feel free to watch, implement and NOT comment if you'd like this week.

Happy 4th of July!

Week 7: June 25

We're over half-way through our 13 week study!

How much TV do you watch? Be honest now, and count your Hulu, Netflex and ABC.com time, too. If you're an average American, you watch about five hours a day. Seventy percent of us consume television programming on hand-held devices (iPads, tablets) or smart phones or computers screens in addition to our flat-screen TVs.

Television executive Lauren Zalaznick, after spending time in the industry, embarked on a study to determine how closely television follows our national collective consciousness. In this TED talk, she shares her methods and results.

Running time: 13:12

Points to Ponder:

• Is television the reflection of our national conscience or is this just 'what the people want to see' with a few interesting coincidences?
• Which charts speak to you or gave you an 'aha' or 'of course' moment? (if any)
• Did anything stand out or surprise you?
• Do you agree with the list of mothers? 
• What shows do you think are most popular with our student demographic and what might that say about their social, political, moral and emotional states?
• Last week's top five rated shows according to Nielson ratings: 
1. America's Got Talent, Tuesday Night
2. America's Got Talent, Monday Night
3. NCIS
4. 60 Minutes and The Big Bang Theory (tied)
5. NCIS Los Angeles
• Do you see a trend or can you infer anything about what's going on in our emotional, political or social state that would connect to these shows?

Week 6: 18

How far are we away from a new version of ourselves? That sounds like a question answered in a sci-fi movie or some alternate-universe web meme. "Human," in its various forms, is a relative newcomer in the history of the universe, and even as newcomer, we've documented 26 versions. What's next?

In this talk, Juan Enriquez, founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, "shows how technology is revealing evidence that suggests rapid evolution may be under way."

Running time: 16:49

 

Points to Ponder:

• Why are we here? Is there a theory besides the two Enriquez suggests? (1. we're it...it doesn't get any better than what we have right now OR 2. we're just another version of an evolving species)
• Enriquez hinted at some ethical situations we could potentially find ourselves facing as we continue to map genomes and identify differences. What worries you? Can you imagine ethical considerations for future generations - your grandchildren or great-grandchildren?
• There is great hope for curing disease and healing the sick/injured as we increase the ability to build organs or cell sets from single cells. Are there drawbacks?   
• Could we be on the cusp of the beginning of the end of plastic surgery?
• What struck you in this talk? What stands out or seems remarkable or far-fetched?

Week 5: June 11

Larry Lessing: On Laws that Choke Creativity

In 1906, John Phillips Sousa was lobbying Congress against the new technology referred to as "talking machines." Sousa declared the "infernal talking machines" might lead to the evolutionary loss of our vocal chords!

The reality, as Lessing interprets, is that Sousa worried the American family would no longer be "re-creators" of the daily music. Without recorded music, families would re-create the songs on the front porch or sitting room. The invention of the "talking machines" would mean music would simply be consumed (or "read only" in our digital language).

Although this talk was filmed in 2007, the big revolt Lessing is waiting for really hasn't happened yet. Small steps have, though. Lessing briefly mentions a solution involving artists being able to choose their own level of sharing (you'll see the CC fly across the screen). He's referring to the Creative Commons repository, which is now alive and thriving. (An additional small step: one no longer needs a $1500 computer to generate content...a $100 smart phone will do.)

Running time: 18:59

 

Points to Ponder:

• Do you agree with Lessing's idea that we are again in a read-write culture - similar in concept to the days (before recorded content) of sitting on the front porch and "singing the song of the day"?
• Can our read-write culture revive our vocal chords (that Sousa predicted would fall pray to evolution because of disuse)?
• How do you see the way our students (or your children if applicable) view content and content creation? How does this differ from the way you consumed content as a former student?
• Lessing talks about "People produce(ing) for the love of what they're doing" as the equivalent of the families of the early 1900s sitting on their porch singing songs. This concept is prevalent in things like open source software (ex. Moodle and Linex: both are open source...nobody makes a cent on licensing these softwares, yet they continue to be upgraded and widely used), Flickr photo pools, self-publishing websites and free music sites. Could the idea of 're-creating' be one of the standard past times for today's generation (just as singing on the porch, listening to the Lone Ranger on the radio, or watching Walter Cronkite at 6pm were for other generations?)
• What struck you as interesting, remarkable or insightful or short-sighted, neglectful or irrelevant about this talk?

Week 4: June 4

"I've only been wrong once, and that's when I thought I was wrong." 

What's so wrong with being wrong? Kathryn Schultz is a journalist, author, and public speaker and quite possibly the world's leading wrongologist. In this talk, Kathryn leads us to think about our assumptions about being wrong and makes a case for embracing our fallibility.

  

Points to Ponder:

• Kathryn says that by age nine, we've developed a cultural mindset: the people getting things wrong on the assignment are dumb or lazy and success means no mistakes. Have you experienced this mindset? Did you live it? If you have children, how do you get around this mindset with them? If you teach, does this materialize in your student base? How does this concept work into your teaching philosophy?
• When you think about discussions in your class or in your office, can you relate to the "Series of Unfortunate Assumptions" Kathryn outlines? 
• Do you have an "I thought this one thing was going to happen, then something else did" moment; either in a class or elsewhere that comes to mind?
• Have you ever thought much about being wrong? or the implications of assuming you're right (on a large scale? If everybody assumes he/she is always right...)
• What's one thing that stands about this talk?
  

Week 3: May 28

STANDING OUT

Seth Godin says "Be Remarkable" - in an time when our choices are many and our time is limited, it's no longer enough to 'be good'.  

Seth Godin is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age.

Running time:17:05

 

Points to ponder:

• How do ideas spread? What's the best idea you've heard of that's gone nowhere?
• Godin says 'success isn't always about what the patent, or the factory, is like' but it has more to do with getting the idea out. Is it really all just up to the people in marketing? 
• Is the reverse true? Can you think of poor products or ideas that had great marketing campaigns?
• How do you spread your good ideas to your students? To your colleagues? Do you have some of your own 'purple cow' thoughts?
• What is most remarkable to you about this message?

(If you like Seth Godin and need a little humor - check out his "This is Broken" talk).
 

Week 2: May 21

We eat food to nourish our bodies, right? And we like to know things about our food - we read the information labels to learn how much fat our snack contains, where it was made and who made it. We search for a date to tell us when it might be a good idea to discard the food instead of ingest it.

JP Rangaswami ponders the idea of treating our consumption of information like we treat our consumption of food. In this age of information production, can you imagine labels on our information, like the labels on the side of a cereal box? Instead of seeing the total percentage of saturated fats, we'd see the total percentage of verified facts.

Video running time: 8:08

Points to ponder:

• Rangaswami discovered two distinct paths concerning information preparation: one being the idea that content is distilled, value is extracted, separated and served up. The second is that everything gets mashed together (fermented) and the value emerges from the mash up. Do you see these food-information analogies?
• Have you considered the idea of information consumption in the same way you've considered the consumption of food? Does the analogy fit?
• If yes (the analogy fits) what actions do we take to be 'healthy consumers'? 
• What's your preferred method for consuming information: do you like a complete package (go to a restaurant and have someone bring you a complete meal = read the entire paper or book, listen to a complete podcast, watch each of the 60 Minutes), do you like to pick & choose (go to the grocery store, buy the ingredients and prepare it yourself = subscribe to specific, content-driven RSS feeds, read just selections of newspapers or news sites, head to HULU for the highlights or 'most watched' scenes) or some combination?
• 38,000 books? Where does he keep them and how does he keep count?

A quick note about commenting: Blogger will ask you to "select a profile" when you comment. The Google Account profile should be tied to your Coe Gmail account - use the same login credentials you do with CoeMail; OR you could choose the Name/URL option, and simply type in your name (skip the URL box) OR you could choose the Anonymous option, but include your name in the actual comment box, so we know you've posted.

Week 1: May 14

Empathy, cooperation, fairness, reciprocity. All traits we most likely consider valuable in life. We look for and encourage these traits in our students; we appreciate them in our colleagues. 

And do we view these traits as the critical factors that make us human? Frans de Waal is a biologist and primatologist. His early work sought to "compare the schmoozing and scheming of chimpanzees involved in power struggles with that of human politicians." (Insert your own joke about chimps & politicians here!) In this TEDtalk, de Waal highlights recent research being done to understand moral behavior in animals.

Frans de Waal biography can be found HERE.

Video running time: 16: 52

 

Points to ponder:

• Are we a society of competitors? Is winning or losing the only thing that matters? How does competition effect our students? Competition for grades? for jobs? for positions on sports teams or as officials in clubs and fraternities?
• de Waal implies that there may be less complexity to some traits that society has typically considered "human", like fairness. Do you agree? Could a concept like "fairness" really be simpler than we imagine?
• What did you find most interesting about de Waal's talk? For the non-biology and non-psychology people: did anything surprise you in this piece?
• What do you think that capuchin getting the cucumber is thinking when his buddy gets the grapes?

Getting Started

The count down to summer 2012 is on! And 13 Things @ Coe is back!

In light of Coe's liberal arts mission, our theme this summer is "13 Things to Think About". Rather than exploring and applying a specific tool each week this summer (as we did in our last 13 Things @ Coe), we'll explore, think about and share our thoughts about a specific idea each week this summer.

Our mission statement includes words and phrases like discover, think, and develop an attitude of intellectual curiosity and creativity. That's just what we'll do this summer!

Here's how it will work:

• Each week, you'll find a blog post here with a short reading, video or interview. Many of the videos will come from TEDtalks (TED is a nonprofit organization supporting the mission of "Ideas Worth Spreading").
• Watch the video or read the interview/report and then use the comments feature in this blog to reply to some reflection questions included in the post, or share your own thoughts about the topic. Be sure to read each other's comments - let's make this conversational when possible!

Here's a sample to get you thinking:
This is a short TEDtalk by Matt Cutts. Matt is an engineer at Google, where he works on things like search optimization and the elimination of linkspam. Best quote in this video:

“The next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, so why not think about something you have always wanted to try and give it a shot for the next 30 days?”

Instead of 30 days, our quest is to devote around 30 minutes a week for the next 13 weeks to give this a try!

What's in it for you? Aside from the benefits of new ideas, new thoughts, old ideas seen in a new light and the potential for learning something new with lots of people interested in learning with you....? Yes, there's more. To get you started, you'll get a gift card to our neighborhood coffee shop, Brewed Awakenings. Pick up a coffee and snack for your first week!

And wait, that's not all! Everyone that completes participation will get his or her name entered into a drawing for an iPad 3.  The iPad winner will be announced on Opening Conference Day, August 20.

How do you start?

1. Follow up to my email (search lstrosch in your gmail if you can't find it!). You'll find a sign-up form in the email. 
2. Put a comment under this post indicating your intent to participate!
3. Come back here each week starting on May 14 for your weekly dose of things to think about!
4. See the FAQ link on the right for fine details.