Culture, Civilization, Societal Institutions (Mod 1)

Last week Google sent out a notice reminding domain administrators that the end of the classic version of Google Sites is near. That prompted me to publish directions for transition from the classic version of Google Sites to the current version. I also shared a set of tutorials for building your first website with the current version of Google Sites. 

Once you've made the switch to the current version of Google Sites, you might want to go beyond the basics to add some interesting features to your site to make it a one-stop shop for all of your students' and parents' needs. Here are some things you can do to enhance your Google Site with additional features. 

Teachers often wrestle with two big questions: How do people learn, and how can they do it better in a constantly evolving context?

When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in early 2020, organizations across the globe had to quickly transition their employees to a remote work environment.

Roughly a year later, full-scale telework is still a reality for many organizations, especially so in the United States. Research from Mursion, Inc., a virtual reality training platform, found that most companies will stay in a remote or hybrid work environment, as just 9% of managers and 13% of employees plan to go back to the office full-time in the next six months.

Teleperformance, a customer experience management company, recently announced a shift to a hybrid work model across its global operations, a decision based on its telework success during the pandemic.

“Work from anywhere is not a pandemic play,” said Jose Guereque, executive vice president of infrastructure and chief information officer at Teleperformance. “We will keep the hybrid scheme forever as our permanent model.”

"Could greater public approval of homeschooling be an unexpected result of the pandemic’s forced experiment in remote online learning? Two surveys make it look that way."

By their very nature, pandemics shake the systems of society, and that is certainly true for the global educational system right now. Institutions have had to adjust their entire structures, and fo…

The printing press and social media democratized communication in their respective times. They both turned the order of things on its head — for good, for ill, and forever.

The evidence for the harm the pandemic has caused is all around us, but if there is one characteristic that defines humankind it’s our ability to adapt and learn from adversity: over the last year we have carried out the largest experiment in remote working in history. What we now need to do is build on that achievement, instead of just waiting for the pandemic to subside before we go back to working like we did before.

Unlocking knowledge, empowering minds. Free course notes, videos, instructor insights and more from MIT.

Ten stories that defined the year.

To gain business agility, leaders must deconstruct jobs into tasks and deploy workers based on their skills.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy.

At the core of every culture, within their respective holidays and customs lie an almost inherent tradition of gift-exchange.  From striped-ribbon boxes that sleep under a tree, to envelopes that don a rich red hue, the idea of “gifts” has manifested itself across nearly every nation and culture, simultaneously embedding itself at the heart of Read More

Founders and executives around the globe have taken lessons learned over the past year to inform their view of what their workplace will look like in the future. At this week's Collision conference, the future of the workplace was top-of-mind--though founders had a wide diversity of expectations about how their companies will work coming out of the pandemic. Here are a few of the most fascinating.

Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is the outsourcing of core, information-related business activities. KPO involves contracting out work to individuals that typically have advanced degrees and ex…

Numbers are up across the board for employer-based credential programs as companies develop a robust parallel higher education infrastructure. Research out of credentialing platform Credly found that the number of organizations building their own curriculum and issuing credentials is up 83% since the start of COVID in 2020.

The rapid advancement of technology, combined with increased uncertainty, is making the most important career logic of the past counterproductive going forward. The world, to put it bluntly, has changed, but our philosophy around skills development has not. Today's dynamic complexity demands an ability to thrive in ambiguous and poorly defined situations, a context that generates anxiety for most, because it has always felt safer to generalize. Just think about some of the buzzwords that characterized the business advice over the past 40 to 50 years: Core competence, unique skills, deep expertise. For as far back as many of us can remember, the key to success was developing a specialization that allowed us to climb the professional ladder. 

By now, it’s clear that the office isn’t going away. And yet, with the rise in remote work and an increasing number of companies adopting hybrid work models, it is just as clear that the role of the office has evolved and the workplace is not likely to ever operate the same as it did prior to the coronavirus pandemic.

While there are still many people that are questioning not only when, but also why should employers bring back employees to the office, the truth is that most workers don’t want to work from home all day, every day. Gensler’s 2020 Workplace Survey found that only 12% of workers want to work from home all the time, while the rest still chose the office as their preferred place to work.

We’re in the midst of the 4th Industrial Revolution—exponential changes in the way we work, live, and interact with one another as a result of the combination of technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence intermingling with the physical world to create cyber-physical systems. It could be argued that the 4th Industrial Revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, was already evolving at an exponential rate, but as the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, the revolution accelerated. While many are anxious to “return to normal” post-pandemic, the reality is that we are creating a new normal. Let’s take a look at the changes the 4th Industrial Revolution is responsible for and how businesses must re-think their business models and also consider the skills individuals must focus on building to succeed in the new reality.

Free Technology for Teachers

Last April, states began to sporadically reopen after weeks of being shut down. Georgia was among the first to begin the process, while some states didn’t start lifting restrictions until June. 

The uncoordinated reopening caused chaos, according to Sinan Aral, director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. Why? Because Georgia pulled in hundreds of thousands of visitors from neighboring states - folks hoping to get a haircut or go bowling.

Aral was tracking Americans on social media, and it became clear to him that having uncoordinated coronavirus policies doesn’t make sense. As people watched their social feeds fill with images of people heading back outside, they stepped out too — even if their state wasn’t at the same phase.

It takes more than a decent constitution to build a democracy, as anyone who has tried to steer a country out of anarchy or tyranny can attest. And it takes more than well-turned commercial laws to make a healthy market economy. For either to happen, certain values must be widely accepted—yet defining them can be tricky.

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Joseph Henrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, has devised a teasing term to describe societies where rules and values have come together with benign results: Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. The acronym, weird, neatly makes his point that these attributes, and the mindset that goes with them, are the exception not the rule in human history.

The values that underpin weirdness, he writes, include a tough-minded belief in the rule of the law, even at the risk of personal disadvantage; an openness to experimentation in matters of scientific knowledge or social arrangements; and a willingness to trust strangers, from politicians offering new policies to potential business partners. These may not seem original insights, but Mr Henrich’s work is distinguished by the weight he places on the extended family as an obstacle to healthy individualism, and on religious norms as the determinant of family obligations. He reinforces this theme with a welter of polling data and sweeping historical arguments, mostly about medieval Europe.

at its first ever fully digital AR/VR-focused conference, facebook introduced 'infinite office' – a platform that offers a virtual working environment.

For the purposes of this site, the history of human interaction with information may be divided into 4 eras. The first (spoken) era ended with the invention of writing around 3000-4000 BC. The second era ended with the invention of the printing press in 1440. The third era ended, and the fourth began, with the invention of the Internet (depending how one defines its operational beginning) somewhere between 1969 and 1982. We now exist early, but decidedly, in the fourth era.

All readers may not agree with this interpretation of the history of information, especially with the division and numbering of the eras. That is not the main point. Rather, it is that humankind presently exists in an era distinctly different from the one that preceded it -- that in fact, this new era is accompanied with, and characterized by, a new - and quite different - information landscape. This new Internet information landscape will challenge, disrupt, and overpower the print-oriented one that came before it. It will not completely obliterate that which preceded it, but it will render it to a subsidiary, rather than primary, level of influence.

Just as the printing press altered humanity's relationship with information, thereby resulting in massive restructuring of political, religious, economic, social, educational, cultural, scientific, and other realms of life; so too will the advance of digital technology occasion analogous transformations in the corresponding universe of present and future human activity.

This site will concern itself primarily with how K-20 education in the US, and the people who comprise its constituencies, may be affected by this transformative movement from one era to the next. All ideas considered here appear, to me at least, to impact the learning enterprise in some way. Accordingly, this work looks at the present and the future through a lens that is predominantly, but far from entirely, a digital one. -JL

The world no longer rewards us just for what we know — Google knows everything — but for what we can do with what we know.