"Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character. You're too good for schadenfreude, you're too good for gossip and snark, you're too good for intolerance - and since you're walking into the middle of a presidential election, it's worth mentioning that you're too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy. Unless they went to Georgetown, in which case, they can go to hell. (Laughter)"

""I think teaching is pushing them away from you…through different doors. Not embracing them. When you embrace someone, you’re holding them back. Picasso really captured that in his art work, Mother and Child: a chunky mother, balancing the baby perfectly. She doesn’t hold him…it’s balance…he can go, anytime he’s capable of going, but he’s perfectly balanced until he takes the step. Classroom teaching should be that. Find a security spot for them and then they’re ready to go."

…the “balance” to which Cullum refers has more to do with allowing children to discover their own uniqueness, their own abilities and their own “script”. He creates the structures and the strategies that allow this discovery to take place,  but the goal is never to have them cling to him as teacher. Instead, the goal is to have them embrace that uniqueness and potential and run with it…as far as they can in whatever direction they choose."

"Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. [...]

Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. [...]

The drive for isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. [...]

The question of the future is this: Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-away in pain?"

from the page: "
Just like the phoenix, our continent is burning, and the heat is preparing us, preparing us to rise
Just like the lion, we will soon roar, and we will care for nothing, but our freedom and dignity

We have studied your ways
You use your military superiority to rule on us
You take advantage of our goodness to splash your wrath on us

You may not hear our voices, neither do we care
We are organizing
We have learnt from our past
But most importantly
We are learning from your past and present

And when we rise
And when the fire starts to burn
You will realize that the generation has arrived
And we shall not forgive, we shall have no mercy, we shall keep our Utu aside
We shall use your methods to instill humanity into you
A worse fate will meet your local stooges and puppets
For we have seen that love can't work for you

And we shall end all this
Once and for all
Because we are tired of watching you "

My lifelong dream is to anchor my self-worth with who I am right now, this second. The sun trickling in through the leaves right outside my window. Cars honking outside. I hear children laughing in the school across the street.

RT @kentbrew: Just purchased: Shay Pierce's "Connectrode." Backstory:

Power is a function of its privileged ruling elite. To be properly ‘British’ is to submit to English hierarchy and to recognise, affirm and assert the glory of its value system. This is achieved domestically on a daily basis within ‘British’ education and cultural institutions. Those who oppose this supremacist ideology are criticised for not being properly British, condemned as unpatriotic. Those Scottish, Welsh or Irish people who oppose this supremacist ideology are condemned as anti-English. The ‘British way’ is sold at home and abroad as a thing of beauty, a self-sufficient entity that comes complete with its own ethical system, sturdy and robust, guaranteed to outlast all others.

"I spent the last year trying to break down my success, what factors lead to good results. It started with focusing more on customer service a few years ago. But at the very core beneath that and other ideas was a focus on taking a longer term view of things, and the other good decisions followed."

@jobsworth this is a good read on the change of design assumptions that networks bring:

How many journalism students see editorial's encounter with commerce. Image by Scot A. Harvest
There’s a wonderfully written post on Sean Blanda’s blog about fixing entrepreneurial journalism courses. Unusually, the post demonstrates a particularly acute understanding of the dynamics involved in teaching (Lesson One, based on my experience of teaching ‘strategic learners’, strikes me as a particularly effective tactic*, while Lesson Two addresses the most common problem in students’ ideas: vagueness, or ‘mass marketism’).

But it also reminded me of a conversation I had recently about journalism students’ reactions to being taught entrepreneurialism – and the one lesson that’s missing from Sean’s list.

It’s this lesson: “Why?”

Here’s the thing: journalism students – and I hope I’ll be forgiven for generalising horribly here – often have quite a conservative perspective of the profession. For example: despite print journalism bleeding jobs and online publishing being one of the biggest areas of growth, you wouldn’t know that by looking at the application numbers for the courses leading to each industry.

The majority of students still want to be print or broadcast journalists – even while most of them get all their news online and most people in the industry are having to adapt to multiplatform roles. And unfamiliar roles like community management take a great deal of explaination and justification.

Teaching entrepreneurial journalism, it seems, generates the same reaction. Many students struggle to connect with it on an emotional level, or, more often, worry about its impact on editorial independence.

So somewhere between lessons one and seven – probably quite early on – I’d add another: ‘Saying No‘

Saying No
This lesson would deal directly with negotiating the tension between short- and longer-term commercial demands; how to maintain good relationships while also maintaining a professional distance.

You’ll notice that I avoid using the terms ‘ethics’ or ‘editorial independence’ or other normative terms. Because, frankly, that language isn’t going to get you anywhere in an argument with an investor or publisher. And it will make that week’s class stick out as somehow ‘academic’ and unrelated to the core of entrepreneurship.

Ultimately, of course, it is about ethics and independence – but specifically why those ethics and that independence have evolved in traditional journalism, and how we have those arguments in the profession.

Ideally it would involve a case study or two of people who have found themselves in those positions of having to explain to an advertiser or client why we are not going to do what they want. I don’t think you’ll have to look far to find those. Every editor, publisher, and ad sales director deals with these every month.

Here are some starters: we say no to that advertiser because it will undermine our brand and reduce our audience, which the advertiser themselves does not want. We say no to that client’s demands because other clients will stop dealing with us if we don’t treat them all the same. We say no because we will end up in court (even if that’s not always true). We say no because our boss won’t agree to it (even if we don’t have to ask). We say no because the costs would outweigh the benefits.

What else should be in that lesson – and are there others?

*The idea of grading students *entirely* based on profits – or even revenue – is of course unworkable (universities could not accredit any course module based on this measurement), inappropriate (it’s not teaching the level of critical thought that a postgrad course should), and unrealistic within the timescale of study. Most new businesses don’t make money for their first couple of years, and under those criteria some of the biggest companies of the internet age would get an ‘F’ (and the biggest failures would get an ‘A’)But the principle of a small element based on this to get students’ minds focused and reward those who make a successful start, is a good one.

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