How Social Media is reshaping job search
Created by: MBA Online
Learning
Can Facebook get you a job?
Education and Character
Educationists ,the world over or for that matter any one trying to nurture a child have been pondering over this question : How to develop good character in children? But there is an appended question also. What is good character? Is it really something that can be taught in a formal way, in the classroom, or is it the responsibility of the family, something that is inculcated gradually over years of experience? Imagine that you have found an answer to this , then comes the next question. Which character/qualities matter most for a child trying to negotiate his way to adulthood?
This article by Paul Tough , a must read for people working in education , has an apt title- What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? He narrates various examples to show that many of the elite school students fumble when they face ‘failure’. “ Students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically ..; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next . Read it.
The 10 paradoxes of Technology
Andrew Feenberg, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology, School of Communication in this video has this message. ‘Though we may be competent at using many technologies, most of what we think we know about technology in general is false. Our error stems from the everyday conception of things as separate from each other and from us. In reality they belong to an interconnected network the nodes of which cannot exist independently qua technologies”
Ten Paradoxes of Technology from The IRMACS Centre on Vimeo.
Noam Chomsky on the Responsibility of Intellectuals
The Responsibility of Intellectuals- Noam Chomsky has brought back the issue once again . In 1967, during Vietnam War, Noam Chomsky wrote The Responsibility of Intellectuals, rebuking scientists and scholars for their subservience to political power.
Chomsky says we face a similar situation and has published an article in the Boston Review .
In the article Chomsky says “The concept of intellectuals in the modern sense gained prominence with the 1898 “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” produced by the Dreyfusards who, inspired by Emile Zola’s open letter of protest to France’s president, condemned both the framing of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason and the subsequent military cover-up.” .
What are the obligations of intellectuals in this day and age?
Chomsky is very critical of President Obama’s dispatch of 79 commandos into Pakistan on May 1 which he says was to carry out “what was evidently a planned assassination of the prime suspect in the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, Osama bin Laden. Though the target of the operation, unarmed and with no protection, could easily have been apprehended, he was simply murdered, his body dumped at sea without autopsy. The action was deemed “just and necessary” in the liberal press. There will be no trial, as there was in the case of Nazi criminals—a fact not overlooked by legal authorities abroad who approve of the operation but object to the procedure.”
See also the reply to this article by Archon Fung The Constructive Responsibility of Intellectuals
You can also watch Chomsky’s talk live “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the 21st Century”
on Thursday, September 22, 2011 (MIT Wong Auditorium)
4:30–6 p.m. (Boston Time)
Re-establishing Nalanda
Amartya Sen, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, is now in effort to re-establish the Nalanda University, considered to be the world’s oldest centre of higher learning . As chairman of the Interim Governing Board of Nalanda University Sen is spearheading an Asian initiative, involving India, China, Singapore, Japan and Thailand. He believes that Nalanda stands for the passion of propagating knowledge and understanding. It was a residential university, and at its peak had 10,000 students from many countries, especially China, Korea, Japan, and Turkey, studying various subjects. Read Professor Sen in an interview to the Hindu .
On Creating Fans in Social Media
Nielsen Company issues its first report on Internet traffic, declaring social media as online king. See this NY times post: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/report-details
Social media account for 22.5 percent of the time that Americans spend online, according to the report, compared with 9.8 percent for online games and 7.6 percent for e-mail.
That makes social media the No. 1 specific category and the No. 2 category over all, behind “other” ways Americans spend time online, among them perusing adult content, visiting retail Web sites and reading about subjects like sports and health.
In such a scenario you may like this presentation , ‘Think like a Rock star and how to build fans and community around your social Media efforts.
Think Like A Rockstar
View more presentations from Mack Collier
Elearning Costs
How Long Does It Take To Develop An Hour Of Elearning? Presentation by the Chapman Alliance, which talks about development costs for an hour of Elearning based on a survey. it is estimated that Elearning development costs per hour range between 10,000 USD at the lower end for basic courseware, and up to 50,000 USD at the high end.
The 4 Cs
These are the 4Cs – communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity -which are becoming increasingly required for students to cope in the 21st century.
The above video titled ‘Above and Beyond’ is a story on what is possible when communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity take center stage in schools and create learning opportunities for all kids. This was created through collaboration by members of Partnership for 21st Century Skills and the talented folks at FableVision,
GOOGLE PLUS
What do Buzz, Wave and Orkut have in common? All these services feature in an infamous list of social networking ‘has-beens’, from Google’s stable. Unfortunately, the horses had bolted by then. Orkut was demolished by Facebook, while Wave was too complicated for the lay networker. As for Buzz, it simply didn’t seem to grab eyeballs. Now, Google is pitching once more for its share in the lucrative social media sector through Plus. As with most services from Google, Plus is on a field trial during the initial stages.The million, may be billion, dollar question is whether it has finally found its answer to Facebook.
Google is an old hand, one of the most experienced Internet companies in the world. It can use its enormous reach and accesss to lure netizens. The launch of Google Plus will also be an experiment from Google’s side as a (possibly) last effort in this direction.
Will Google+ replace Facebook and/or Twitter? Facebook will have the most to lose from Google Plus if it hits the mark – or it may be that Facebook, Google+, and Twitter will go in hand, each migrating to niches areas: like Twitter for news, Facebook for games and private networking and Google + for circles, video chats or hangouts.
For the moment, let’s wait and watch. In the meantime, here is a primer on Google+ worth reading.