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?