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Videos from The #Promise: The Future Promise, panel discussion curated by Fast Company, is now online!
All of ThinkSocial’s programming content has been uploaded to our online video channel: http://vimeo.com/channels/thinksocial.
Check out this #Promise panel, curated by Fast Company Senior Writer Ellen McGirt, features Jumo’s Chris Hughes, Hunch.com’s Caterina Fake and Personal Democracy Forum’s Andrew Rasiej. Panelists offer their take on how technologies enable communities to social action and which capabilities are still in need of improvement. They discuss the differing needs of NGOs vs companies and how all can achieve their social impact goals through the effective use of technologies that create real, measurable results. See the entire conversation here:
The #Promise: The Future #Promise, panel discussion, curated by Fast Company from ThinkSocial on Vimeo.
Posted in: Promise | Tagged: #Promise, andrew rasiej, Caterina Fake, Chris Hughes, ellen mcgirt, Fast Company, online media, social media, ThinkSocial
Q&A Caterina Fake, Hunch founder — and now #Promise panelist
Here’s another Q&A and another panelist announcement: Caterina Fake, Hunch founder. She’ll be also speaking on The Future #Promise panel, curated by Fast Company.
In your opinion, over the last few years, what have been the biggest
shifts or changes in the way we think about the business landscape?
For consumer tech, there is an amazing amount of data on the web.
And what are the reasons for these changes? What technologies, in particular, do you think are most responsible?
Web 2.0 put tons of new data on the web.
What are some of the greatest challenges in the changing business
landscape today?
It is much harder to launch a new site or service because of the
installed sites.
Can you give a best, perhaps unexpected “lesson learned” in your experience with Hunch?
Well it’s the same as with all startups — you have to adapt with the
changes in the business landscape.
About Caterina Fake
Caterina Fake is an American businesswoman and entrepreneur.
She is the co-founder of Hunch, a site that is building the “taste
graph” for the internet, mapping every person to every entity, and
their affinity for that entity. It launched in June 2009.
Fake co-founded Flickr, the popular photo-sharing service which
ushered in the so-called Web 2.0 integrating features such as social
networking, community open APIs, tagging, and algorithms that surfaced
the best, or more interesting content. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo!
in 2005. At Yahoo! she ran the Technology Development group, known for
its Hack Yahoo! program, a stimulus to innovation and creativity, and
Brickhouse, a rapid development environment for new products.
Prior to Flickr, she was Art Director at Salon.com and heavily
involved in the development of online community, social software and
personal publishing. She joined the board of directors of Creative
Commons in August 2008 and in May 2009 received an Honorary Doctorate
from RISD.
She has won many awards, including BusinessWeek’s Best Leaders of
2005, The 2010 Most Influential Women in Technology, and an Honorary
Doctorate from RISD in 2009. In 2006, she was named to the Time 100,
Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, and
appeared on the cover of Newsweek the same year. She sits on the board
of Etsy, and advises many startups and new businesses.
Posted in: Interviews | Tagged:
Sourcing the social web
Crib sheets are archaic. They’ve long been replaced by camera phones, MP3 players, and scientific calculators. Cheating, which has always required some creativity, has gone high-tech. And though educators are taking steps to turn technology around on dishonest students, plagiarism remains a persistent problem. A few well chosen words typed into a search engine and that 15 page paper on Napoleon’s early expedition to Egypt has all but written itself. Are high-tech solutions the answer, or is it time to think about our relationship with information?
Posted in: Education, Thinking, Uncategorized | Tagged: digital cheating, Duke University, Education, google, Mary Beth Hertz, National Bureau of Economic Research, plagiarism, Shelly Blake-Plock
Q&A with Shelly Blake-Plock, aka @teachpaperless
We interviewed educator and paperless activist Shelly Blake-Plock. Check out his insights below on the two-fold TeachPaperless mission, tweeting in the classroom, and getting your school’s administration on board with digital learning. Visit the TeachPaperless blog and follow @teachpaperless for more.
Old technology was about bringing hardware into the classroom in a sort of digital “re-creation” of the analog world; social technology in education is about going beyond the traditional limits of classroom walls and teacher/student hierarchies.
For ThinkSocial readers, can you briefly describe it is that you do — and explain the “TeachPaperless” mission?
The “mission” of TeachPaperless is two-fold. First: to encourage paper source reduction by eliminating redundancy in printing. This has an environmental impact, as schools are one of the biggest contributors to paper waste, as well as a financial impact as schools are spending money on redundant printing costs with funds that could be reallocated to much more important areas. In my school of about 800 kids, our annual printing costs are around $25,000 — and we’re a 1:1 laptop school; one can only imagine the dollars being wasted in bigger schools struggling to find dollars to bring tech into their classrooms. With paper reduction, however, comes responsibility; and digital teachers should advocate for e-waste reduction, computer recycling and laptops with easily switchable component parts, and greener battery and power sources.
Secondly, the TeachPaperless mission is to help teachers understand how to use social technology in the classroom to create authentic 21st century dynamic, collaborative, real-time, and global learning. Old technology was about bringing hardware into the classroom in a sort of digital “re-creation” of the analog world; social technology in education is about going beyond the traditional limits of classroom walls and teacher/student hierarchies. An obvious example of this is textbooks. Rather than replace the paper textbooks in our classes with online versions, we’ve opted for Internet-based primary source alternatives. The Library of Congress’s Teaching with Primary Sources project, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline, the Perseus Project, the Internet History Sourcebook, and the resources of PBS, the BBC, and NPR are just a sampling of the sorts of things that have replaced textbooks in our classes.
When did you first realize that web 2.0 and other online and social media tools/platforms would work well in the classroom? What were the first tools and platforms you used and had your students use?
And what tools are you using now? What have students seemed to latch on to the most?
We began using blogs back in 2007, and quickly they became open alternatives to the traditional spiral bound notebooks. Now, each of my students has a personal blog where they keep notes, submit projects, and keep a daily journal. This really has opened the door for formative assessment, as we are able to gauge the student’s development on a day-to-day basis in a searchable and multi-media format.
In 2008/09, we began using Twitter in the classroom. At first, we didn’t even know about hashtags, but before long we were using Twitter for general communication, access to news, experts, and conversation outside of our classroom, backchanneling, creating places (in conjunction with Delicious) to vet online sources, and as a lifeline on tests and in-class projects.
This year, we introduced Wave to my Latin II class and it completely changed the way we did business. Particularly with Wave, one of the exciting things was to see how the students themselves flipped out over the tech and created their own ways of using it that I never would have thought of.
Posted in: Interviews | Tagged: @teachpaperless, activism, Delicious, digital classrooms, Education, Shelly Blake-Plock, twitter
Justmeans and Twitter’s Claire Williams at the #Promise
Justmeans interviewed Claire Williams, the social innovation whiz at Twitter.
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged:
Justmeans and Margaret Morey Reuner from Timberland
Margaret Morey Reuner presented Timberland’s #Promise to plant trees in Haiti in China at the #Promise Conference. She also took the time to talk to Justmeans about Timberland’s socially responsible mission. Check it out below.
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: Justmeans, Margaret Morey-Reuner, the #promise, Timberland
PepsiCo’s Jeremy Cage on the “Dream Machine,” with Justmeans
PepsiCo’s Jeremy Cage heads up the company’s Dream Machine Recycling Initiatives. After giving one of the keynote presentations at the #Promise, he interviewed with the folks at Justmeans:
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: Dream Machine, Jeremy Cage, Justmeans, pepsico, the #promise
The #Promise: Douglas Rushkoff, in interview with Justmeans
A highlight of The #Promise for many attendees — certainly those that gave him a standing ovation — was author Douglas Rushkoff and his keynote lecture / interview with ThinkSocial executive director Jamie Daves. If you missed his lessons on feudalism, commodification and the evolution of branding, check out what he had to say to Justmeans.
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: Douglas Rushkoff, Justmeans, the #promise
The #Promise: Justmeans and Charity: water
Justmeans also interviewed Rod Arnold, chief operating officer at charity: water.
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: charity: water, Justmeans, Rod Arnold, the #promise
The #Promise: Justmeans and Andrew Katz of PepsiCo
Justmeans interviewed PepsiCo’s senior marketing manager, Andrew Katz, at The #Promise. See what he had to say about the food giant’s commitment to people, culture and the planet, here:
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: Andrew Katz, Justmeans, pepsico, the #promise
