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?

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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?

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