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.

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.

A recent feature by the New York Times reports that students taking exams in a testing center at the University of Central Florida aren’t allowed to chew gum because it could mask the use of hands-free cellular technology to share test material. If scratch paper is used, it is dated and collected at the end of the exam. And the computers themselves are recessed into desk tops so that students attempting to photograph the screen can be spotted easily. If an instructor has reason to suspect a student, the student’s work on the computer is recorded and a video camera tracks their actions. The footage is burned to a CD and kept as evidence if needed.

These tactics may work for in-house testing, but what about papers and written assignments? In the age of the social web, sharing is second nature for many students. Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology professor believes that web-savvy students ‘see so many examples of text, music and images copied online without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.’ For this reason, many universities now require training on plagiarism as a part of their admissions process. And students’ papers are scanned using Turnitin.com, a service that employs a database to check for copying. But some educators find that these preemptive methods violate the trust they want to build with their students by assuming that students will cheat if they have the opportunity.

The concern about cheating is certainly understandable: Students need to be able to think for themselves and access problem-solving tools successfully. But if the answers are within reach on Google, why not utilize those tools? We’re interacting with our world differently ‘ additional information, should we want it, is usually only a hyperlink away, and facts are instantly knowable and constantly accessible. For subjects like math and chemistry, there is no substitute for knowing. But perhaps the issue of plagiarism can be dealt with in part by teaching students from an early age how to vet and cite Internet sources. This may soon become as important as understanding how multiplication works because we are increasingly turning to the web for information. It’s important to help students develop a sense of what can be trusted on the web. There was a time when Wikipedia was far from an acceptable source; it has grown more standard in recent years thanks in part to a growing movement to ensure accuracy by providing citations.

Educators like Shelly Blake-Plock and Mary Beth Hertz understand that digital and social technologies can have practical applications in the classroom Students are bringing technology with them into the classroom anyway, rather than allowing it to be a distraction, it’s time to consider how teaching methods can be adapted to reflect our new relationship with information. For this reason, the plagiarism tutorials, such as the one implemented by Duke University, for incoming freshmen is a good idea. The tutorial provides explanations for students on what constitutes plagiarism and asks students to determine if examples presented are plagiarized. One of the examples asks the student to evaluate collaboration, which has been made even easier with the web. The point is that students are used to engaging with one another digitally and may not think they are cheating if they share work between them.

Shutting down this dialogue is not necessarily a good idea. Educators often encourage collaboration in the classroom, and the web offers opportunities for groups and individuals to connect and share ideas like never before. Papers will still need to be written ‘ in the student’s own words, of course ‘ but perhaps digital and social technology tools can be harnessed to create a collective classroom community that can benefit everyone. Allowing students to share notes ‘ or hyperlinks – can help expose them to different perspectives. This allows weaker students, who are the ones who are most likely to plagiarize according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, to benefit from resources that may help them engage material better. For this to work, though, everyone must participate. Students still need to be graded on their ability to understand and interact with the material meaningfully, but this may help ease some of the anxiety surrounding high status assignments. Cheating may have long been a part of the academic landscape, but the cultural shift in the way we view information provides an opportunity to steer students away from the temptation.

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.

What are some challenges you’ve faced? I’m sure there are people who are skeptical of an all-online and digital classroom.

The biggest challenge was my own fear to change my way of teaching. I’m a guy who used to pride himself on how much paper he used in class. I thought that the more pages in a test, the better the test. I was wrong.

What are some lessons you’ve learned along the way — and advice you’d give to other educators who are trying to integrate more participatory, social and mobile media into their teaching?

The most important practical concern is getting your administration on-board. Propose what you are doing as a pilot program in ed tech. I recently had a conversation with a teacher (@SenorG) who convinced his admins to let him start a pilot program using iPod Touches in the foreign language classroom after receiving a grant for the tech. He didn’t wait for admins to give him money and training; he went out there and found it on his own and then convinced the admins to let him use it. That’s an important thing for teachers in this environment to think about.

What are some easy things that classrooms can start doing now to go paperless?

Whether high-tech or lo-tech, the most important way to start going paperless is to put the books and paper aside and sit down with your students to get to know one another. The bond of trust that you build with your students will guide all of your efforts.