apple juice

Yes yes yes!

It seems as though the newest wave of mothers is saying no to prenatal Beethoven appreciation classes, homework tutors in kindergarten, or moving to a town near their child’s college campus so the darling can more easily have home-cooked meals. (O.K., O.K., many were already saying no, but now they’re doing so without the feeling that a good parent would say yes.) Over coffee and out in cyberspace they are gleefully labeling themselves “bad mommies,” pouring out their doubts, their dissatisfaction and their dysfunction, celebrating their own shortcomings in contrast to their older sisters’ cloying perfection.

via Let the Kid Be – NYTimes.com.

Now we’re trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldnt solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

via The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online .

This article neatly ties up a lot of the thoughts I’ve been rolling around. The big question is, how do we apply this logic to education? What do your SAT scores matter if you can’t collaborate with others? I’d like to make the terms ‘project’, ‘paper’ and ‘test’ synonymous with ‘group’.

And, I think ‘digital socialism’ is a much nicer term than ‘dot-communism’.

This NYTimes article, Psst! Need the Answer to No. 7? Just Click Here. Hits on the same idea, from a different angle:

Course Hero offers three million student-submitted items from 400,000 courses at more than 3,500 institutions, including lecture notes, study guides, presentations, lab results, research papers, essays and homework assignments. Users who submit such items can navigate the site free of charge; others pay a monthly fee. Mr. Kim declined to say how many users had registered beyond “hundreds of thousands” and said they included more than 1,000 professors using the site to refresh their teaching materials.

The emphasis is mine, but these professors are the ones who are seeing value in the network, and using it to better their own work.

It will be a defining shift in the education system, when sharing and cooperation are the norm for students.

The nation’s first large-scale bike share program will be launched in Minneapolis next spring and could become a model for programs in other cities. If all goes well in raising $1.6 million in private matching funds for a $1.75 million federal grant, one thousand bikes will be available at 75 kiosks located primarily in the downtown, uptown and university areas.

via MinnPost – From Our Partners: Twin Cities Daily Planet: 1,000 bikes coming to Minneapolis?.

Great news! When we were in Paris a couple years ago, the bike sharing program there had recently begun, and it sounds like it has been very successful there.

I just found The Story of Stuff via an article at the New York Times.

The video is a cheerful but brutal assessment of how much Americans waste…

“Cheerful, but brutal” is a perfect description for this video.

I’m too much of a sucker. Technology “stuff” is a major impediment to being more environmentally friendly. It just never stops.

Why do I feel a twinge of sadness and longing as the Airbus A320 painted with the colors of Delta Airlines announces its presence in my airspace, the tailfin painted with the greek symbol meaning “change”?

I think it’s in the blood of the Minnesotan.

I have no reason to love Northwest Airlines, nor reason to mourn its demise. My experiences in flying different airlines have shown them all to be roughly the same. (Though, as it turns out, Delta serves peanuts on their flights, allergies be damned.)

Why do Minnesotans cluck in digust at the sound of “Macy’s” or “Marshall Fields” while longing for the chance to once again walk through the revolving doors of Dayton’s. Aren’t we looking for the same sales on the same jeans?

It seems to me that we are a bit lost in the stateless and shifting world of multinational organizations. Who are you if you fly Delta Airlines? Who are you if you shop at Target, or Wal-mart?

Instead, why don’t we identify with our place? Your neighborhood, your park, your book store, your coffee shop?

These are places that will reward you with an investment of your time. The proprietor of my coffee shop knows the sound of my car and has a drink ready for me when I walk in.

Find what makes your place special, and make a little nest around that stuff. Like your wacky neighbor, a quirky restaurant, or the hardware store that lets you walk your dog inside for a treat.

this is why I love my job. I get to promote things like this:

“to compose, and to compose successfully in the 21st century, you have to not only excel at verbal expression and written expression, but you also have to excel in the use and manipulation of images.”

taken on the north side of our house.