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?

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If you look toward the RIGHT, you'll see a "Follow by email" box. By adding your email address here, you'll get an email notice every time something new is posted to this blog. Consider it your weekly reminder to spend a little time with 13 Things!

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.

On the 12th Day of a Christmas....thoughtful ways to give

We'll go a little off track on this last day of Christmas and talk about how the internet and it's wide variety of tools can help us have a BIG impact with a small gesture. I'll highlight three easy ways to use your internet connection to change someone's life (by loaning, giving or clicking...)

Do you have an extra $25? Don't worry, you'll get it back! Kiva is an online, mico-finance organization. It works like this: a woman in Uganda makes her living selling food from a cart. Her cart falls apart, and she needs $ for a new one. You loan $25 to her through Kiva, which works through a micro-financing organization in Uganda. The women gets a loan of $100 (or whatever she requested to purchase or build a new cart). She makes more money because her cart is more effective. She re-pays the loan. Kiva gives you your money back (or lets you invest it in someone else's loan request). The total amount of money loaned through Kiva to date is over $170 million. The average loan size per individual is only $360. That's a lot of people getting helped! The underlying mission of Kiva is to alleviate poverty by connecting people (through lending).

Do you have an extra $10? You don't get this back in green, but you'll get it back by improving the educational experience for someone right here in your own community. Donor's Choose is "an online charity connecting you to a classroom in need." It works like this: a teacher identifies a need in his/her classroom (something the tight educational budgets aren't able to handle). He/she writes up a project on Donor's Choose website. You and your extra $10 look through the requests on the Donor's Choose website until you find one that deserves your $10. You can search by state, city and school. Cedar Rapids currently has 10 or 11 open projects. As you peruse the site, you'll see teachers are requesting anything from pencils for poetry writing, to a set of books or instructional materials, to ipods or a data projector. You can give anonymously or if you choose to share your identity, you'll get a thank you from the teacher.

Do you have some time to click? Every day you visit The Hunger Site and click the big yellow "Click Here to Give" button, you're giving 1 cup of food to a person in need. Your screen will show you a list of sponsors who are actually funding the cups of food (in exchange for the opportunity to advertise to you). Even better; if you don't have all of your holiday shopping completed, consider shopping on The Hunger Site. You'll find unique gifts, made around the world (and from here); and with every item you buy on the site, you'll also be funding a food donation. For instance; I ordered one of these awesome bags for my sister-in-law. It's hand-made by Cambodian women out of recycled rice bags. When I purchase this, I'm helping a Cambodian woman retain her financial independence, I'm supporting recycling, and I'm donating 50 cups of food toward the fight to end world hunger (and I'm also giving my sister-in-law a bag as cool and unique as she is).

I hope you have a wonderful holiday and a relaxing break. Upon your return, check your mailbox for a Brewed Awakening's card! Enjoy a cup of coffee to ease yourself into the Happy New Year!

On the 11th Day of Christmas...a visual thesaurus

Used with permission
from DiscoveryEducation

The word is right there on the tip of your tongue...but you just can't make it come out! You've got lots of other words that mean something close...but just not the right word.

You need a visual thesaurus. A visual thesaurus shows you all the synonyms to your word, plus, with a click of the mouse allows you to drill deeper into one of the related words, and then see all of the synonyms to THAT word. Somewhere in that exercise, you'll find the perfect word.

The Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus is actually a commercial tool, with a limited free interface. Even with it's limitations (you'll have to click "try" when you first start, and you'll be limited to a handful of drill downs) the tool is rich. Enter a word you'd like to explore, and you'll get a pop up application with all the related words, plus definitions of your original word. Click any of the related words, and get a new view. You can print with the free trial, but you won't be able to save your word searches or share them. A membership will cost $19.95/year. Also worth noting is the information included on the main Visual Thesaurus website: a word of the day section, a blog feed written by writers talking about writing, featured word lists, lesson plans and more.

Other visual thesuarus tools to try:

• Visiwords: very similar to The Visual Thesaurus, but not quite as robust: you don't get the drill-down functions, and you'll have to decode the color codes to determine meanings based on word type (nouns have a purple background)
• Lexipedia: again, very similar in visuals, but this one, in my humble opinion, is a bit easier to read than Visiwords. Mouse-over tips help you decipher color coding, and you can show or hide different word forms (keep nouns, hide verbs when applicable).
• The benefit that both Visiwords and Lexipedia have over The Visual Thesaurus is that they are free (open source).

Go ahead, start visualizing!

By the way...if you have kids, these are great tools for vocabulary building.