If I wasn’t busy today, I could see a couple of tweets using these words…

A University’s List of Words to Revive

Found this TED talk to have some appropriate suggestions — particularly related to how government advertises opportunities to interact…

see http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_meslin_the_antidote_to_apathy/transcript?language=en

a new tool that reveals which data in a web account, such as emails, searches, or viewed products, are being used to target which outputs, such as ads, recommended products, or prices. It can increase end-user awareness about what the services they use do with their data, and it can enable auditors and watchdogs with the necessary tools to keep the Web in check.

 

Check it 0ut at http://xray.cs.columbia.edu/

Google Snippets

Quick project management

Holocracy

How to manage talented people by not bossing them around

review this site

http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php

WordPress has snuck this in … unless I pay $99 per site — you will be subjected to ads I do not control.  And we thought FB was bad for abusing folks.

#Wordpress #FAIL

One of my first tasks in state government was to review the plans and progress for Y2K upgrades — some $320 million spread across 2 dozen agencies.  The State CIO developed a simple system of measuring momentum and progress — red, green, yellow signals.  If you made no progress in a month, or backed up, you got a red light.  If you had made progress, but not complete all tasks on schedule, you got yellow.  Green meant everything was going according to plan

This NYT story reminds me how effective such an implementation tool can be:

Getting Stuff Done: It’s a Goal, and a Rating System

Everybody should know what everybody’s goals and controls are, and everybody should understand their individual ones relative to their department, and their department’s goals relative to the company’s.  To achieve that, we publish company wide goals and controls. We have six major goals this year, and there might be three or four metrics for each. We publish that every month for the company. It’s transparent. Then we talk every month with the company about whether we’re at green, yellow or red on any of those six things, and we are very transparent about that. We don’t hide the bad news.

Good read

http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Teachers-and-technology

From David Warlick’s blog on teaching and learning — a thought-provoking essay (wait, I am redundant), an essay discussing the utilities of a textbook.  Lots of ideas that may provoke many more essays, hopefully to learn why we use texts, how texts may transform, what we should do about texts whose cost exceed both present and future value….  But, nonetheless, lots of ideas…  like:

The job of the teacher would be to locate (or cause to be located) and attach content (both open-source and/or commercial), in any appropriate format, to that arrangement of scope and sequence-forming tags and constantly filter and refine that content based on changing conditions and newly available content?

What might this process look like as an integral part of teacher education?  Might the act of starting their own flexible digital textbooks be a part of learning to teach.  (Is “Flexbook” trademarked?  How about “flexibook?”)