JoelFoner.com

Bias and Discrimination – Where Are We Headed?

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Aug 31 at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Bias and Discrimination – Where Are We Headed?

Bias and discrimination get lots of focus in both general discussion and political arenas, and have for many years. Have we made substantive progress to date, and regardless of that answer, where are we headed? What is the likely trajectory of both public discourse and the “reality on the ground” for bias and discrimination? Are we headed for a world that demonstrates less bias and discrimination, or will they be presented in different and perhaps more disguised fashions (or both or neither)?

This week we will talk about the nature of bias and discrimination, how they are found and presented today, and where we think the public and private path leads going forward.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

Read more…

Does “Instant Access to Everything” Cause Polarization of Opinions?

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, July 27th at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Does “Instant Access to Everything” Cause Polarization of Opinions?

I’ve often heard the comment that the Internet exposes people of all types to more diverse opinions, with more facts and background, than ever before, that this is inherently good for discourse, and good for the generation of better ultimate decisions – whether in terms of political process or other decisions. Phrase in another way, this is “wisdom of the crowds” at global scale. On a gut level, this makes sense. More people and opinions ought to create a more balanced view, and although there will be some with extreme opinions, it is generally thought that the wisdom of the crowd will corrall them in workable fashion.

The Boston Globe ran an article this week titled “How Facts Backfire” (listed in the reading links below as well) that really got me thinking. The article pointed to work done at the University of Michigan (the published paper is also linked below for reference) that indicated a tendency for people to take more extreme positions in the face of corrective facts. This seems to fly in the face of the basis of an informed electorate providing the best case for a reasoned choice, and seems to call in to question the idea of wisdom of the crowds.

From a different perspective, the explosion of people posting raw information, sometimes carefully edited or not fact-checked, on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and many other social media systems, has created the appearance of a deluge of (maybe) factual information that is so vast we have no hope of ever understanding it all. The politicized, highly public debate about Shirley Shirrod’s at-first edited words, and then the publication of the full video, provide one view in to how our society handles the new hyper-speed, influence-driven environment in which we now find ourselves living. I’ve included a link to one blog post about this incident, in particular because it has both versions of the now-infamous speech on one page. You can find plenty more with a few clicks if you’d like!

The indexing of the web has generated an apparent global fact overload, available in seconds from a simple search engine query. Does this fact overload trigger the polarization reflex revealed int he University of Michigan study? Does it lead to moderation? How can our propensity for instant gratification, and lessened chance of correcting factual mistakes, lead us to the land of better, more informed discourse, given both what we have seen to date and this new research?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

July 6, 2010 1:54pm Added “The Neurotic Organization: Diagnosing and Changing Counterproductive Styles of Management” to the reference links section. Thanks to John Jainschigg for pointing out this title.

Can an Organization have a Personality Disorder?

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, July 6 at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Can an Organization have a Personality Disorder?

Organizations talk about internal culture and market it as a selling point, both to customers and to potential staff. organizational culture reflects a concept of shared personality, often described in flashy, positive terms.

If organizations have an organization-level personality, can organizations (collection of many people) have collective personality disorders? Do organizational personality disorders map directly to individual personality disorders defined by mental health professionals?

How can organizational personality disorders be resolved? Are such resolutions possible?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

Personal Stress Management in a Chaotic World

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This Week’s Topic

Personal Stress Management in a Chaotic World

It goes without saying that today’s world events, financial and work situation, and lifestyle can create substantial stress. There are plenty of “you should just tell yourself to feel better” web sites and books, but this sort of advice is often of limited value in the real world. What stress sources are significant to you, and what are effective ways to deal with them? Are there techniques for creating positive results from stress?

What are your best practices for recognizing and handling stressful situations, relationships and events?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

Parallels in Real and Virtual Community Development

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This Tuesday, May 11, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Parallels in Physical and Online Virtual Community Development

The development and character of communities in both physical and online environments are affected by a variety of design decisions. Some decisions affect whether the community “takes hold” as well as its growth rate, while others affect the character, level of engagement and social behavior of the community. How are community design and development decisions similar in physical and online environments, and how are they different? What can these design decisions accomplish, and what needs to be accomplished in other ways? What can physical and online/virtual community designers learn from each other?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

How Should We Deal with Cyber-Bullying?

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every Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, May 4, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

How Should We Deal with Cyber-Bullying?

Bullying has become a consistent concern of school administrators, teachers and parents. What is the best preventive approach and response to cyber-bullying? This week, we’ll discuss how we should handle and respond to cyber-bullying.

On one end of the spectrum, a middle school principal recently sent a strongly worded email to parents directing them (not asking – directing) to remove their childrens’ social media accounts, to install monitoring tools, and to monitor their txt messages.

At the other extreme, some take the position that the genie is out of the bottle, and we should educate kids while not using direct control to manage their use of communications tools.

I wrote a post about a related topic in January “The Mobile Invisibility Cloak of Today’s Internet-Enabled Kids,” and when I heard about the principal’s email mentioned above I thought it might be  time for us to talk about this issue head-on.

Does technology create cyber-bullying? Will controlling technology stop it? What approach should we use to prevent cyber-bullying, and what should we do when it is discovered? Which strategies will instill the most useful skills and beliefs in our children for their future?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

What Would it Take to Create a Non-Violent Human Society?

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every Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Apr 27, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

What Would it Take to Create a Non-Violent Human Society?

Anger. Conflict. Bombings. War. Threats of violence.

Are these things endemic to the human condition? Is violence built in to humans, in an unavoidable way? There have been long debates in academic and non-academic circles about this topic, with strong positions on both sides.

Rather than debate whether violence is preventable, what if we thought about the issue from a different perspective? If we were to assume that it is possible to create a non-violent human society, what steps might be necessary to make a transition from where we are to the removal of violence as a constant in our world? What would this transformed world look like if we could “snap our fingers and have it be done”?

Are there downsides to the creation of a non-violent society? Are there parts of our culture, belief system, economy and psychological well-being that are reliant on the presence of violence in society (perhaps that is why the goal of non-violence is so hard to achieve)?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

Does Global Social Communication Cause Bad Behavior or Reveal It?

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This Tuesday, Mar 30, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Does Global Social Communication Cause Bad Behavior or Reveal It?

This week’s news of serious threats against politicians, after passage of the U.S. health care bill, got me wondering “Are the Internet, the media and video games the causes of increased bad behavior, has bad behavior actually increased, or has global instant communication revealed the reality of the human condition more clearly, in a way we were not expecting?”

Many articles (and people) proclaim that the Internet, the media and video games are the primary causes of increased bad behavior. It is easy to rationalize increased bad behavior based on exposure to the environmental messages from the Internet, media and games, however might not be the case. However, it wouldn’t be the first time that a seemingly obvious conclusion does not explain the nature of human behavior.

What is bad behavior, in the context of global social communication? Is it taught and learned? Is it different, and if so, how is it different than bad behavior in face to face and non-online settings? Do parts of our social belief systems encourage or support the on-going existence of bad behavior “by design”? Is it important to us for bad behavior to be present (just throwing out a random hypothesis here…)? Is there value in bad behavior, or can we extract value from it? Has bad behavior increased, or are we just now able to see the scope of it more clearly? What are the causes, can we determine them, and what, if anything can be done about it?

This week we’ll discuss the nature of “bad behavior” in this context, both to better understand what it is, explore the causes, and see what may lie ahead of us as global social communication continues to develop.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

How has our Networked Society Changed Personal and Business Relationships?

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every Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / SL time

This Tuesday, Mar 23, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

How has our Networked Society Changed Personal and Business Relationships?

Today’s society has changed, and been changed by, the emergence of systems and tools that have provided a near real-time communications fabric that connects us individually and collectively in new ways. They expose our social graphs, encourage us to explore each others’ social graphs, enable us to meet new people and re-connect with people we’d lost track of, all with speed and a level of ease and fluidity that was unheard of a few years ago.

It is easy to find commentary denouncing these systems as the emergent cause of the downfall of individual relationships and society in general. Is it really all one-sided? Are there advantages and positive changes brought on by our new socially hyper-networked world, as well as some risks and negative implications? We are in the midst of an evolution that is only enabled by technology, but is far more about us and how we relate than the technologies themselves. A while back I wrote a post The Networked Audience is Here. Now. Are You Ready? That post focused on professional presenters, but the true impact has much wider reach. This week we’ll explore the effects of these changes on our relationships in general.

How has the emergence of our networked society changed the way we relate to each other, the way we communicate, the way we create and maintain relationships? Have we started to change the nature of human relationships—what it means to be social, what it means to be part of a society, or what culture itself means?

Much of the literature on the web about the impact of networked society on relationships focuses on personal and intimate relationships, and this bias is reflected in the reading links below. That being said, the same issues apply to many types of relationships, including family, purely social and business relationships, so please read them in that light, as we’ll be discussing this larger view of the topic.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

An Exploration of Game-Based Education

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every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Mar 2, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

An Exploration of Game-Based Education

The incorporation of game-like elements have started to become more common in educational settings, as well as in business. The typical reason for these additions have been to increase “engagement” and interest. In some cases there are clearly documented improvements in objective results.

In this session we will explore common game-based approaches, find out how game-based curricula and approaches can enhance education, and discover situations where game-based learning may be ineffective or even counter-productive.

… I wonder if I put up a leaderboard and keep track of points for number of comments in the discussion whether it will further enhance the depth and quality of the discussion? (kidding… sort of?)

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…