DIGITAL Promise.......Just Continue to....DO IT!

Published 13 November 2006

Securing U.S. Public Funds for Educational Technology Research and Development:

Additonal: Learning to Learn / Luskin Interview
http://www.imsglobal.org/articles/18Sep2006Luskin1.cfm

Digital Promise Project
http://www.digitalpromise.org

An Interview with Larry Grossman of the Digital Promise Project

Lawrence K. (Larry) Grossman is co-chair of the Digital Promise Project with former FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow of "TV is a vast wasteland" fame. Mr. Grossman is former president of NBC News and PBS. Before that he founded an advertising agency to serve media and not-for-profit public service clients and was vice president of advertising at NBC. After leaving NBC News, Mr. Grossman held the Frank Stanton First Amendment Chair at the Kennedy School of Government, and was senior fellow and visiting scholar at Columbia University. He serves on the boards of various educational, science, public broadcasting, and health organizations and is author of The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age.

IMS Global Learning Consortium recently talked with Mr. Grossman about Digital Promise and the need for federal legislation to support research and development of advanced information technologies to serve the public interest, particularly in education, skills training, and lifelong learning and to help bring museums and libraries and the nation's public institutions into the digital age.

IMS Global: Perhaps a good place to start is to define for us what is the Digital Promise Project? What exactly do you hope to achieve?

LG: Digital Promise began in 1999, before the nation had any public policy or serious discussion about how to exploit the great potential of the new information technologies to serve the public interest, especially in education, skills training, and lifelong learning. A group of major foundations, including Carnegie, Century, Knight, MacArthur and Open Society, were concerned that in the approaching digital age, the rapid advance of new information technologies was revolutionizing the commercial segments of our society - in communications, business, banking, finance, entertainment, and manufacturing, to name a few. But the nation's nonprofit and civic institutions - our schools, libraries, museums, universities, and other public institutions that serve the crucial centers of our society were being left behind in the emerging digital age. The foundations asked Mr. Minow and me to direct a project that would develop recommendations for what should be done. We agreed to take on the job on a pro bono basis. After extensive research and interviews throughout the nation, we concluded that the U.S. had an overwhelming need to launch a new, federally financed R&D trust fund that would do for education, lifelong learning, and skills training in the digital age what the National Science Foundation does for science, NIH for health, and DARPA for the military. We called our proposed trust fund the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust, or DO IT, and urged that it grow eventually into a billion dollar a year fund to transform the nation's learning and training through intelligent use of advanced information technologies.

IMS Global: Is the Digital Divide in this country growing wider?

LG: The term Digital Divide usually refers to the disparity of access to computers and the Internet by the affluent and by inner city, rural and economically deprived segments of our population. That disparity continues, although in most parts of the nation it is diminishing. Increasingly schools are encouraging and subsidizing the use of computers by students. The great majority of today's students, even in poor communities are "digital natives," at least when it comes to the hardware. According to the most recent Department of Education report, 97% of high school students today have access to computers. Most have some experience using the Internet. The real deficit we see today is not in the hardware as much as it is in the development of educational and training software and content. The real opportunity and need is to transform education, lifelong learning and training for the digital age by the application of the remarkable new advanced information technologies that are being developed every day.

The federal government funds substantial R&D that translates into advancements in key U.S. industries, and those investments pay off handsomely in improved productivity. Unfortunately there is no such R&D model for education. U.S. taxpayers invest nearly $1 trillion per year on K-12, higher education, and skills training, yet we invest relatively little to explore the application of technology for learning. And what little is spent goes to the Defense Department, which is making extraordinary advances in training troops through information technologies. But what they're learning is not available to the general population. Most formal teaching and learning still use 19th century methods: reading texts, listening to lectures, blackboard exercises, and the like. Firms and industries with higher IT intensity have higher levels of productivity growth. In education today, low IT intensity yields low, in fact diminishing productivity. A recent Commerce Department study of 55 industries found that the education and training services industry has the lowest IT-intensity of the industries studied, even though education is arguably one of the most knowledge intensive industries of all.

As the Federation of American Scientist's Kay Howell has written recently in e-learn, "When we talk about technology for learning, we're talking about much more than using email to communicate with students, Google for doing homework research, and Powerpoint slides to support distance learning. We're talking about sophisticated information technologies tightly integrated into daily learning activities. We know that such software tools are possible because of the way information technology has been used in other service sector industries: powerful simulations and visualization tools used in computer games and movies; sophisticated help systems to provide accurate answers to questions; websites to undertake continuous evaluations of the individuals who use them, often tailoring offerings to interests and preferences revealed by the user. These technologies can be adapted to learning and will make it practical to adopt approaches to education that learning scientists have been advocating for years. New communication tools could enable learners to collaborate in complex projects and ask for help from teachers and experts from around the world. Learning systems could adapt to differences in student interests, backgrounds, learning styles and aptitudes. They could provide continuous measures of competence, integral to the learning process that can help teachers work more effectively with individuals and leave a record of competence that is compelling to students and to employers. And new tools could allow continuous evaluation and improvement of the learning systems themselves."

IMS Global: The R&D that is being conducted in other countries - is that being subsidized by their governments?

LG: Substantially. Other nations, ranging from Great Britain, to India, Singapore, and Italy are setting aside substantial amounts of money to bring their students up to speed. And we, alarmingly, and ironically, are falling way behind in comparison with just about all developed nations in how our students are progressing in math, science, reading and other basics.

And keep in mind that when we talk about the need for DO IT to invest in technology, we're not talking about buying computers and hardware as much as we are focusing on content and software. We have great precedents in American history for farsighted, transformative legislation that improved and expanded public education and higher education. One of the very first actions of Congress, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, required every new state to reserve public land to pay for public education, which started public education in the young nation, and indeed, in the world. In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Congress passed and Lincoln signed the Land Grant Colleges Act, called by historian Alan Nevins the most farsighted legislation in the nation's history. That act also required public land to be set aside in every state to help finance public higher education that would increase our nation's competitiveness with Europe by developing more productive agriculture and advanced manufacturing. The result is today's remarkable network of 105 outstanding public research universities serving every state. That act did provide no funds for buildings; it was assumed that the states would pay for that. The money from the federal legislation was to pay for teacher salaries, textbooks, and content. And in the 20th century, Congress passed the GI Bill of 1944, which opened higher education to millions of veterans and helped bring unprecedented post-war prosperity to the nation. In that spirit, we believe America needs once again to act and to provide a transformative education initiative for the 21st century.

IMS Global: The Digital Promise Project is seeking to establish the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT), the proceeds from which would be used to provide this type of research. How would the trust be funded? And how much money is needed to adequately support the type of R&D that is needed?

LG: There is no more publicly owned frontier land to help pay for this initiative, but today's equivalent is the publicly owned telecommunications spectrum, the radio and television frequencies that Congress has mandated be auctioned off for commercial uses such as cell telephones and digital transmissions. We said that eventually the interest earned on just 20 percent of the revenues received from those auctions of this publicly owned resource would amount to over a billion dollars a year. That trust fund money should be spent, at the direction of Congress, on critically needed R&D to help bring our schools and universities, our libraries and museums, our essential nonprofit civic and scientific organizations into the digital age. The trust fund would be overseen by a blue ribbon board of directors, recommended by those in the disciplines it serves, nominated by the President and confirmed by both houses of Congress. DO IT would be modeled on the National Science Foundation. We need that kind of decision-making authority so that the best ideas in education and learning can be funded, and partnerships can be established with the private sector, with states and local school districts, as well as with libraries and museums and similar public institutions. DO IT would start in a modest way, and build up its funding just as NSF has done since its launching in 1950.

IMS Global: Who would own this trust fund?

LG: The federal treasury would hold the auction revenues, which would be treated as an asset of the federal government. The interest from those revenues would be spent by DO IT under the direction of its independent board, with annual oversight by Congress.

IMS Global: What kind of support are you getting for this proposed legislation?

LG: We have strong bipartisan sponsorship of the bills in both the Senate and the House (The Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Act, S 1023 and HR 2512). Of course, given what Congress is up against these days with the budget deficit and the war, our goal now is to get this proposal started and its operations tested in a modest way. Given the pace of technological change, and the essential need to transform the quality and modernize our systems of education, we want to see a modest fund established as soon as possible, the board of directors appointed, and the priorities set by the DO IT board.

IMS Global: The IMS Global Learning Consortium recently came out and publicly endorsed this initiative. What kind of response are you getting from the other nonprofit and for-profit organizations?

LG: Just about every major national organization representing our nation's museums, libraries, universities, schools and teachers have strongly supported the DO IT effort. The National Council of Mayors has given its endorsement. The former chair of the National Governors Association has supported it. High tech companies, in particular, like Google, E-Bay and Hewlett-Packard are on board. And we have on the DO IT leadership council prominent people in many fields ranging from former Senator Warren Rudman to Internet pioneer and Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree Vinton Cerf to former National Science Board Chair Eamon Kelly.

IMS Global: How can individuals, organizations, and companies get involved?

LG: We'd welcome them to join the DO IT coalition. Endorse the Digital Promise initiative and the current legislation. Let others know of their support. Write, phone, and contact their legislative leaders urging them to sponsor and vote for the DO IT legislation. We'd certainly welcome any grants of financial support for the Digital Promise Project through donations to our coalition partner, the Federation of American Scientists. We are conducting public forums throughout the nation, producing our website (www.digitalpromise.org) and publications, and supporting our two staff members - our extraordinarily hard working and talented executive director and her deputy in Washington, DC, Anne G. Murphy and Rayne Guilford. For specific information, draft letters of endorsement, lists of your legislators, and further information go to the DO IT website: www.digitalpromise.org.

IMS Global: Private enterprise has done a pretty good job of developing and applying technology. Don't companies have a role to play here in developing technology?

LG: Certainly, they do. The job of the Digital Trust is to encourage the private sector to develop technology for public interest and public service uses by providing funds to stimulate R&D. Content is expensive to create and the marketplace does not encourage developing new and advanced software for not-for-profit uses such as in education, training, museums and libraries. Rights issues and standards for that development need to be worked out. Digital Promise has been influential in getting modest Congressional appropriations for the Federation of American Scientists, our leading coalition member in Washington, to develop prototype educational games and a learning R&D roadmap to demonstrate what can be done. You will find examples of these prototypes on our website, www.digitalpromise.org. The beauty of the new technologies is that once the software is developed, the costs of distribution through the Internet, digital public television stations, CDs and DVDs, are minimal. They can actually be made available to the entire world.

IMS Global: If America doesn't make this investment in developing information technologies for the sake of learning, don't we run the risk of falling behind other nations?

LG: We have already fallen behind other nations. Recent reports from the Council on Competitiveness of the corporate world, and the National Academies of Science document that fact. The influential U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century warned: "The inadequacies of our systems of research and education pose a greater threat to U.S. national security over the next quarter century than any potential conventional war that we might imagine. American national leadership must understand these deficiencies as threats to national security. If we do not invest heavily and wisely in rebuilding these two core strengths, America will be incapable of maintaining its global position long into the 21st century."

IMS Global: What you're talking about here seems to go to the heart of DOE's commission findings on the need for assessment for accountability and accessibility.

LG: Testing, or assessment, has become central to new educational initiatives, in order to demonstrate accountability, productivity and responsible use of funds. With the new information technologies, we not only can assess how far students have come through standardized tests, but far better, can assess each person's individual strengths and weaknesses. Teachers and parents, and the students themselves, then can learn exactly what needs to be done and how it can best be achieved for each student. The best education, after all, is interactive and individually focused.

IMS Global: Considering your extensive background working in television, what do you believe we've learned from working in multimedia and its application to learning?

LG: The Digital Promise Project actually got its start by focusing on television, especially public television. Back in the 1990's I served on the board of Connecticut Public Television and chaired its strategic planning committee. Congress mandated that all television stations, public and commercial, had to convert to digital from analog distribution, a much more efficient use of the publicly owned radio spectrum. Digital TV allows many more channels per frequency; makes interactivity possible, and improves the quality of sound and picture. It became clear that Connecticut public television had to redefine its role in this new digital environment. In a digital world it has the opportunity to bring into the home, school and workplace the state's libraries and museums, which contain the DNA of our civilization; the services of its schools and universities, its public health and civic centers. Our project aroused the interest of the major foundations which then broadened the inquiry to explore the ways in which the new information technologies could serve the public interest. The result of our research was a book published in 2001 called A Digital Gift to the Nation, which laid out our recommendations, which eventually were translated into federal legislation in the House and Senate.

IMS Global: Are you frustrated that this initiative is not getting as much visibility as it should? Or that it is taking so long to gain momentum?

LG: The slow pace of progress can certainly be frustrating. But look at the precedents for our effort. The farsighted Land Grant Colleges Act was vetoed twice before it was signed by President Lincoln signed. The GI Bill was passed out of committee by just one vote. And a Senator had to be carried from his sick bed to cast that vote. In 1950, landmark legislation establishing the National Science Foundation was ready for passage when North Korea invaded South Korea. All new programs were put on hold, given the need to build up our armed forces and prepare for war. Eventually Congress realized the critical importance of improving and expanding our nation's investment in science. And so NSF received a small appropriation to start, and now has evolved as a major national force for innovation in science with a budget of several billion dollars a year.

We are optimistic that Digital Promise will have similar long-term success, and will be voted by Congress if not in this session, then in the next. As Brooklyn Dodger fans used to chant, (WE AT OPERATION DIVE, MUST NOT AND WILL NOT) "Wait `til next year."

20th Century IT (Information Technology) vs. 21st Century DIGITAL IT (Instructional Technology)

Words of Wisdom from the Technology Experts

Excerpts from School CIO's archive of CIO Profiles.
Compiled by Susie Meserve

Charles Thompson, CTO of the District of Columbia Public Schools, on getting good data:

“My definition of good information is that it must be accurate, concise, able to be manipulated, and timely to the user. But most districts have their data residing in individual silos. Right now we’re investing in applications that can easily “talk” to each other so data elements can feed from all the functional areas into a data warehouse that allows analysis to take place. Every application will be School Interoperability Framework certified—not just compliant, but actually certified—so if we decide we don’t like a partner, we can pull them out and put another SIF-certified module in without much disruption. My advice to other CIOs: Don’t build a data warehouse to meet NCLB, build it to capture the appropriate data for analysis.”

Bijaya Devkota, CIO of Maryland's Charles County Public Schools, on information technology:

“The bottom line for technology is that if it’s not used for the purpose of instruction, it’s all a waste of money. Most small school systems do not take good care of IT needs and decisions, and often IT is not well liked or well respected. We’re focused on IT here because it is critical to everything we are doing, and we can bring up any issues we have for very quick resolution. IT cannot be pushed aside, not if you want to make good use of your technology budget and improve the ability of your district to provide effective curriculum delivery now and in the future.”

Jim Hirsch, associate superintendent for technology at Plano Independent School District in Texas, on learning in the 21st century:

“Our students are very much into a world that is collaborative, and because of that, they tend to see things a little bit differently. They are exposed to a greater number of information resources than ever before, and whether it’s good or bad, they’ve come to expect that information to be available and free. Because of the Internet and its growth in their lifetimes, they’ve had the opportunity to share and remix information that none of us have had before. If nothing else, over the past 15 years, the rapid increase in understanding of learning in terms of brain-based research has taught us that our school systems have been successful for more than 100 years, but we also have to take into account the fact that information doubles every 2.5 years. We can’t just say that students will learn in the same environment [year after year].”

Sharnell Jackson, chief eLearning officer of the Chicago Public Schools, on virtual professional development:

“Why is classroom training for teachers and administrators declining while e-learning gains? I'll tell you why. Because there's a reduction in cost per person, increased reach, reduced time to train, increased consistency and compliance, and increased tracking and reporting [with e-learning]. So think about the benefits—it's immediate interaction and feedback, collaboration and social learning, reduced travel costs, and reduced time away from work and home. Those are huge benefits. Classroom training is like eating out at a restaurant: you need to make reservations. Asynchronous e-learning is like doing your own microwave dinner at home. But synchronous e-learning is like room service. Who doesn't like room service?”

Gerald Crisci, director of technology for Scarsdale Public Schools in Scarsdale, New York, on measuring return on investment:

“It’s easy to show what the impact of technology is on someone’s teaching, but it’s difficult to show a direct correlation between IT and student learning. In studies that I’ve seen, people talk about things like improving student attendance and improving student test scores. At the end of the day, that’s not really a compelling argument in terms of the value you put on technology. How does IT change what kids can do? How does it change how they learn? Those are the key questions.”

Tutorial: SMART Whiteboard

SMART Whiteboard Tutorial

A "little something" for the Fear Monster in ALL of US!

We Have Nothing to Fear but Fear of Learning

by Marcia Conner

Could you learn more if fear didn't hold you back?

Some people believe they require fear to excel. They count on an adrenalin rush caused by wicked deadlines or overbearing colleagues (or by positive emotions) to push them forward.

Pressure can play a useful role, but stress that's powerful enough to cause fear ultimately shuts us down. Fear causes the amygdalae, regions of the brain, to release the stress chemicals cortisol and vasopressin, putting the body on alert, quickly shutting down higher-order thinking, long-term memory, and our capacity to perform.

Fear constrains performance no matter the setting. While some business leaders blame everything from unmotivated workers to outmoded training departments for lackluster productivity, fear of learning -- actually, fearing what's to be learned -- results in the greatest stagnation. When employees become uncomfortable about learning -- when fear influences how we do our jobs -- it affects the bottom line.

As a coach and educator I see five fears of learning play out: worry over others' opinions, anxiety around changing routines, panic over the possibility of failing, personal distrust around mastering a topic, and terror facing scary stuff. Each fear leads otherwise curious people to avoid exploration and to lose out on learning experiences.

Examine what you fear learning and find a way through.

Feeling Dumb

Do you fear people losing respect for you if you ask questions? Perhaps you believe you'll reveal a terrible secret: You're not as brilliant as you lead everyone to believe.

A colleague who lives near me in Virginia asked an electronics store clerk in Boston to explain how to use an iPod. Some 800 miles from home, she felt less frightened to appear dumb than she did at a local store. She confessed she was deeply uncomfortable recognizing she couldn't grasp a piece of modern life.

If fear of feeling dumb makes you uncomfortable, frame a half-empty answer with something lighthearted. "I thought I knew everything about this field. Great to know I have room to grow. Where can I learn more?" Once you shed a desire to know everything, pressure's off. You can learn from everyone.

More Work

If you expand your knowledge, do you fear people will expect you to put it to use? Learning more might mean extra work. Or it might change comfortable routines. Some people find this so unsettling that they simply stop learning.

Knowledge-transfer guru Steve Trautman (Peermentoring.com) admits he's fearful to learn about the technology in his own house, even though he worked in software for years. He fears that if he does learn about it, his genius wife (who already knows how to make repairs) might expect him to fix things once in while.

Discovery itself doesn't necessitate change. It provides us options to choose from: Do I continue working the same old way, do I want to change everything, or do I pick from what I learned to find a practice that suits me best now?

Failure retry abort

Are there daunting implications about what you yearn to learn? Perhaps your romanticized view of how things should work will be ruined if you discover more.

A gifted guy, on the leading edge of his field, resists marketing himself. He fears success might change him, unsure how he'd maintain his integrity if he became well-known. And he fears the possibility of finding out that people don't care about his work.

Marie Montessori recognized that seemingly simple activities require many steps. Rather than view the areas you fear in total, consider them as small individual parts. Start with a few small activities, a little at a time, then equilibrate, build your momentum, and overcome your fear.

Not Me

Do you fear you can't learn a subject, or maybe you can't learn enough of it? Schools often teach topics from beginning to end, leaving people with the mistaken impression we should (or could) master a full subject in the real world.

I serve on the PR committee for a small community group. A savvy interior designer has created our newsletter for years although she only knows desktop publishing basics. Certain she couldn't learn further, each month she muddled through. When we worked together on a recent newsletter, she made great strides. She recognized she didn't need to learn everything. Rather, she benefited from finding helpful resources. As she learned, she gained self-confidence to learn more.

Because of our unique learning styles and the way information is presented in schools, some of us mistakenly believe that when it comes to learning we're doomed. Not so! Out of school, we can try assorted approaches. If learning from a book bores you, try a simulation, or create for yourself a way to experience the information first-hand.

Danger Danger

Sometimes learning feels too perilous to pursue. Would identifying the creaky noise in the ceiling require you to enter a dark attic with bats? Do you always skip asking the opinion of a coworker who once berated the sweetest person in the office? Informal learning guru Jay Cross (Informal Learning), who has a policy to try almost anything once, tells me he's afraid to attempt rock climbing. He fears if he were having a wonderful time on a rock face, at some point he'd fail to find a crevice and he'd fall to his death. He doesn't want to learn enough to be able to try.

Imagined dangers can hold us back as much as real ones. The emotion center in the brain doesn't distinguish between what it remembers and what it imagines. Catastrophes you envision feel real. FEAR could be an acronym for F-fantasy, E- expectations, A-appearing, R-real. When we don't feel safe, physically or emotionally, we struggle to learn.

If you didn't fear bats or that coworker your queries might instead release brain chemicals that create anticipation, excitement, the thrill of discovery-or little reaction altogether.

Fear Forward

When you fear learning something new try these tactics:

1. Say aloud exactly what you fear. "Bob scares me" or "What if I fail?" Daylight makes fear seem less menacing. Then remind yourself that your reaction is natural and you can choose to address it.
2. Watch a highlight film. Visualize a mental movie staring you as a capable and competent person who knows he can endure under upsetting circumstances. Pull your clip from past experience or script it from your imagination.
3. Walk around the block or down the hall. Physically moving forward helps you feel strong and fit to deal with the situation.
4. Create a mantra. Say "I can handle it" to bypass the state triggering your fear.
5. Talk about what's stopping you. Tell someone what you need to take action. Perhaps you could use a helping hand, an extra telephone call to check in, or a specific resource or referral.
6. Adjust your reaction by unlearning it. While fears can make learning feel difficult, when we truly want to learn something it often seems effortless. Deliberate steps to unlearn our habits can open us to new ways of working.

Acknowledge fear by naming it, relate it to other experiences, recognize how a recent situation differs from past ones, and decide to try a different and new approach. When we gather our fears and then meet them, we can then work our way past them. If we do this enough, we change our feelings about our situation, and we can return to learning again.

Communities "Going Digital"

January 10, 2007

Special Focus

The Dimensions of a Digital Community


A yearlong search for a full definition of digital communities -- something that will help to define the evolution of 21st century communities.

It Seems EVERYONE & EVERYTHING is GOING DIGITAL These Days!

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Leo Burnetts's Rebhan Talks Pontiac G5 Launch At Ad Club Luncheon

GRAND RAPIDS – Mark Rebhan, from Leo Burnett in Detroit, will talk next week about how his ad agency handled the digital launch of the Pontiac G5 last June, the first program in the Ad Club of West Michigan's 2007 line up.

The meeting will be held Jan. 17 at 11:30 am at the BOB in downtown Grand Rapids. Reservations deadline is Jan. 13.

Last spring, Pontiac came to Leo Burnett to launch the new G5 coupe in June. Burnett said, “OK, but we’re already way behind for a national TV campaign.” Pontiac replied, “That’s OK, since there’s no budget for national TV. What can you do for regional media in a couple of weeks?” Burnett said, “Let us do some research.”

The Burnett team dug in, and by the time they learned about the car and its target consumer, the question had changed from, “What about TV?” to, “TV? Who needs TV?”

Just six weeks into the campaign, G5 sales exceeded August goals by 185 percent - in a campaign that cost 60 to 70 percent less than a traditional car launch.

How did Leo Burnett and Pontiac do it? They went digital. By taking the digital highway, potential G5 buyers are able to take a virtual test drive—and Pontiac can deliver a branding experience that resonates. “Pontiac's campaign may not generate as much awareness as TV, but what it lacks in breadth it will make up in depth, targeting deep into the younger male demographic for the niche model,” writes AdAge.

The G5 strategy isn’t Mark’s first-time launch. He developed the launch strategy for the 2004 Ford F150, as well as three other Ford launches, and the launch strategy for the 2006 Pontiac Solstice, including “The Apprentice” integration.

He developed the Buick Classic and New England Classic PGA Tour title-sponsorships for Buick, and in 2000, developed, launched and executed two most successful promotions in Buick history, LeSabre “Free Gas for a Year” and the “Buick Golf Dream House” promotion. And by the way, he initiated the Tiger Woods/Buick relationship.

Mark Rebhan joined Leo Burnett Detroit in July, 2004 as a senior vice-president in Research and Development, after four years at J Walter Thompson, where he was a Senior Partner and Director of Account Planning. Thompson was his first ad agency experience after a lengthy career at GM, which began in 1985 as a technical writer for GM’s Rochester Products Division in Grand Rapids, MI. He grew up in Flint, MI, and graduated from Hope College in 1985 with a double major in Business and English.

DIGITAL Seed-Pods? GO DIGITAL!

HEAD em UP, MOVE em OUT, MOVE em ON, RAWHIDE!

How About YOU?

ALERT! YOUR Brain on DIGITAL!

Don't Worry..........BE HAPPY!

---

January 7, 2007

Happiness 101

By D.T. MAX

One Tuesday last fall I sat in on a positive-psychology class called the Science of Well-Being — essentially a class in how to make yourself happier — at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. George Mason is a challenge for positive psychologists because it is one of the 15 unhappiest campuses in America, at least per The Princeton Review. Many students are married and already working and commute to school. It’s a place where you go to move your career forward, not to find yourself.

The class was taught by Todd Kashdan, a 32-year-old psychology professor whose area of research is “curiosity and well-being.” Kashdan bobbed around the room or sat, legs dangling, on his desk beneath a big PowerPoint slide that said “The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness” as he took the students, a few older than he, through the various building blocks of positive psychology: optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope, spirituality. Though the syllabus promised to “approach every topic in this class as scientists” and the assigned readings were academic, the classroom discussion was Oprah-ish. The students seemed intrigued by the research Kashdan presented mostly in relation to their own lives.

The focus of Kashdan’s class that day was the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure — they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill — and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness. The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. They approached the first part of the assignment eagerly. One student recounted having sex with her boyfriend 30 feet underwater while scuba diving. Another said he “went to Coastal Flats and got hammered.” A third attended a Nascar race in North Carolina, smoked, drank and had sex. Some also watched favorite TV shows; others chatted with friends.

When it came time to talk about the second part of the assignment, the students were excited, too. The Nascar attendee, who was afraid of needles, gave blood. Another collected clothes from family members and donated them to a shelter for battered women. The boy who had gotten hammered bought a homeless person a 12-pack of “Natty Ice” at a 7-Eleven, wondering if it was the right thing to do. A fourth gave her waiter at Denny’s a $50 tip. At times, Kashdan, who ran the class in the nonjudgmental manner of a ’70s rap-session leader — he used the word “cool” a lot — would compliment them on their behavior and pull out a moral. In this case, as one student wrote in a summary she submitted to Kashdan, comparing “a day at the spa covered in really expensive French” stuff and “a day of community improvement covered in horse” manure, the smile on the community organizer’s face “beat out the smile on the masseur’s face any day.” That is, she had learned that doing good is good for you.

Though Kashdan brought up published studies that optimistic people live longer and that certain regions of the brains of positive people show more activity (“Have a very active left prefrontal lobe day,” he joked at one point), in class they didn’t spend a lot of time on clinical research. Absent were the rats with electrodes, data charts, syndromes and neuroses. The main experimental corpus seemed to be the students themselves, with Kashdan assuming the role of therapist, asserting that pleasure isn’t enough. True happiness comes with meaning, he said, and the students agreed.

I sat in on the course a few more times during the semester, and when Kashdan was done with pleasure versus selfless giving, he took up gratitude and forgiveness, close relationships and love, then spirituality and well-being and finally “meaning and purpose in life.” “I never use the word morality,” Kashdan said. Rather his goal was to show that “there are ways of living that research shows lead to better outcomes.”

More than 200 colleges and graduate schools in the United States offer classes like the one at George Mason. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Barbara Fredrickson passes out notebooks with clouds on a powdery blue cover for each student. At the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, students pass out chocolates and handwritten notes to school custodians and secretaries. The introductory positive-psychology class at Harvard attracted 855 students last spring, making it the most popular class at the school. “I teach my class on two levels,” says Tal Ben-Shahar, the instructor. “It’s like a regular academic course. The second level is where they ask the question, How can I apply this to my life?” True, the course is known as a gut, but it is also significant that 23 percent of the students who commented on it in the undergraduate evaluation guide said that it had improved their lives. “It wasn’t until my senior year that I started thinking maybe law school wasn’t for me,” wrote one graduate, Elizabeth Peterson, in her biographical précis for the masters program in applied positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She had decided to take the class on a whim. “I was pretty much hooked from there. I realized that what I loved the most was talking to people about their problems.”

Positive psychology brings the same attention to positive emotions (happiness, pleasure, well-being) that clinical psychology has always paid to the negative ones (depression, anger, resentment). Psychoanalysis once promised to turn acute human misery into ordinary suffering; positive psychology promises to take mild human pleasure and turn it into a profound state of well-being. “Under certain circumstances, people — they’re not desperate or in misery — they start to wonder what’s the best thing life can offer,” says Martin Seligman, one of the field’s founders, who heads the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Thus positive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity. “Aristotle taught us virtue isn’t virtue unless you choose it,” Seligman says.

Sitting in Kashdan’s classroom, you might wonder whether psychology had abandoned its proper territory or found a new one, and if a new one, whether it owed more to science or to Sunday school. Perhaps that was because the class reflected the discipline’s own tension between simplicity and complexity, “good tough science,” as Seligman calls it, and airier talk of values. With its emphasis on the self in the world, positive psychology is already an ethics seminar. Which is fitting, given that it has its roots in a Socratic dialogue of sorts. Seligman likes to tell the story of how his daughter Nikki, when she was 5, accused him of being a grouch. She reminded him that he had criticized her for being whiny and that she had worked hard to stop whining. If she could stop being whiny, he could stop being grumpy. He realized, he says, that she was right, that he was “a pessimist and depressive and someone of high critical intelligence” and that he needed to change. Seligman, who at 54 had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association and was renowned for his hard science — most of his research had been in depression — decided to put his considerable talents into finding out “what made life worth living.”

Though positive psychology is only beginning to be used as an educational tool in classrooms and secondary schools, in the nine years since Seligman’s epiphany it has taken a firm hold in academia. The field’s steering committee includes a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who have done highly regarded clinical work: Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose specialty is “subjective well-being”; Christopher Peterson at the University of Michigan, who has made a study of admired character traits around the world; George Vaillant, who has long headed a Harvard project tracking success and failure among the college’s graduates; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, who has spent years studying “optimal functioning,” or the state of being intensely absorbed in a task, what he calls “flow.” Seligman’s book, “Authentic Happiness,” published in 2002, lays out the field’s fundamental principles and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. Last year’s annual positive-psychology summit in Washington attracted hundreds of academics working in the field or interested in doing so, as well as a children’s programming director, who was working to imbue her cartoons with positive psychology messages, and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who studies the relationship between economics and perceptions of happiness. In addition there were a lot of “life coaches,” independent consultants who hire themselves out to help clients achieve their life goals.

Despite its seemingly American emphasis on self-reliance and self-expression, positive psychology is also proving popular in England and the British Commonwealth. Nick Baylis, a psychologist at Cambridge University, helped found the Well-being Institute there last year and is consulting with Wellington College, a private boarding and day school, on how to apply positive psychology to its curriculum. The Geelong Grammar School, a prestigious boarding and day school in Australia, is planning to shape its curriculum around the precepts of positive psychology in 2008, and the government of Scotland has also been in touch with Seligman to see whether the discipline might help its citizens. “Our old nation has been renewed through our new Parliament, and if we can embrace this new science of positive psychology, we have the opportunity to create a new Enlightenment,” one government official announced.

Positive psychology is popular with educators because if happiness is something that can be learned, it can be taught. And because being happier seems to have positive long-term effects not just on well-being but also on health and life span. In one often-cited study, researchers at the University of Kentucky analyzed the essays novices born before 1917 wrote on entering the School Sisters of Notre Dame and correlated them to the nuns’ life spans. They found that 9 out of 10 of the most positive 25 percent of the nuns were still alive at 85, while only one-third of the least positive 25 percent were. Overall, their study showed positive emotions correlated to a 10-year increase in life span, greater even than the differential between smokers and nonsmokers. Another study, by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at U.C. Berkeley, correlated the smiles that the female graduates of Mills College in Oakland, Calif., displayed in two mid-20th-century yearbooks with life satisfaction and found that the bigger the smile, the more satisfying the marriage and the greater their well-being. Inspired by studies like these, positive psychologists have developed “interventions,” or practices, designed to maximize positive emotions and have tested them on thousands of people. One such intervention is to think every night about the good things that happened to you that day. Another is to make sure in any given day that you either work or play in a new area that draws on what positive psychologists call your “signature strengths” to create a sense of well-being. Gratitude visits — looking up someone who has taught or mentored you and thanking him or her — are important in positive psychology, too; this last intervention, studies show, gives the biggest increase in happiness of all.

In the first few weeks of the semester, Kashdan asked his students to keep a record of their thoughts and experiences. He then gave them “experiential assignments” to make them happier, working their emotions the way an athletic coach might work their muscles. One week they were to report on attempts to go into “flow.” “Sex, drugs and chocolate are all highly useful avenues for people to attain flow states,” Kashdan said. To enter flow, students were asked to do something that they were good at, be it writing, playing basketball or talking to their friends. According to positive psychology, your signature strengths play a special role in building your confidence and thus bringing you happiness. Seligman’s Web site, authentichappiness.org, has a 240-question test to help determine whether your gift is for creativity, bravery, love or something else. In class, one student recounted going into flow during a fistfight; another told of being at her father’s grave. A third talked about being with a friend watching TV and suddenly having a profound conversation. “We had so much love for each other,” the student remembered in class, “and suddenly we were crying.”

Several studies undertaken by positive psychologists have suggested that meditation enhances well-being, so another class assignment was to meditate for 15 minutes three days in a row, attend a free yoga class (Kashdan’s wife, a yoga instructor, arranged this with her studio), be mindful twice a day and report on the results. The mindfulness exercises — excercises in heightened awareness and openness to experience — are central to positive psychology and made a big impression, according to Kashdan: “Some said they just noticed for the first time how many types of trees there are on the way to campus.”

The following week, students were asked to watch “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” movies starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. In the former, the two fall in love through intense conversation during one long evening in Vienna and then part. The sequel catches up with them nine years later. The students had to write about the first time they fell in love. The next assignment was to pay a gratitude visit or write a gratitude letter. After that, the students were to exercise their curiosity by doing something “novel, complex, and uncertain . . . epistemic, sensory and social” — that is, they were to use their signature strengths to try something new. One student tasted a pomegranate for the first time; another went to a book reading by Carly Fiorina, the former C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard. Finally, the students were asked to select one memory they would be willing to spend an eternity with, an intervention inspired by the Japanese movie “After Life.”

Kashdan’s enthusiasm — he is a passionate teacher — ate up class time, and so the students never got to other parts of the syllabus, among them optimism exercises and exercises that would make them better teammates. On the last week, students handed in their final papers, describing how they had tried to enhance their lives toward, in Kashdan’s words, “a specific, personally meaningful positive outcome” during the semester. There was no final exam; the students’ grades were based in large part on the paper and class participation.

In an era when psychology is seeking to become a hard science of fM.R.I.’s and evidence-based therapies, when, as Seligman says, “if it doesn’t plug into the wall, it’s not science,” positive psychology can seem like a retro endeavor with the appeal of a cure that fits on a recipe card. While this may make it particularly adaptable for use in the classroom, critics are often most disturbed by what they perceive as its prescriptive nature. “There is way too little evidence of stable, long-term benefits — and lack of harm — to justify large-scale incorporation of positive psychology programs into schools,” Julie Norem, chairwoman of the psychology department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, said in an e-mail message. “It pays scant attention to individual differences.” For all that the open, 1960s-style classroom has fallen out of favor, it allowed a child to find his or her own way. In the words of the founder of the famous Summerhill school in England, a child should be free “to live his own life — not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best.” Children were treated as unique, which you might think would result in a more capable, independent adults. By comparison, positive psychology can seem as if it is laying out a road and asking the adherent to follow. “If I could wave my magic wand, there would be no positive psychology — there would be positive psychologists,” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, whose own work in the science of affective forecasting suggests that what we think will make us happy rarely does, or at least not for long. “I guess I just wish it didn’t look so much like a religion.”

Indeed, the sectlike feel of positive psychology can be hard to shake off when watching classes like Kashdan’s or even when reviewing the record of the field’s beginnings. When Seligman was first trying to establish the discipline, he and his colleagues invited 25 young psychologists to the Yucatán to discuss the positive side of life. They snorkeled and talked philosophy and then swam some more. They summarized their work and listened to others’ reactions. One evening, the group devoted itself to poetry and song. Seligman recited Ezra Pound’s “Immorality”; a colleague named Sonja Lyubomirsky read some of Prospero’s speeches from “The Tempest.” Seligman’s daughter Lara — Seligman educates his five younger children in part by traveling with them — recited a Delmore Schwartz poem, “I Am Cherry Alive.”

The talk under the palapas was not just about happiness but also about engagement. Participants contrasted the “hedonic treadmill” with “the meaningful life.” To find the qualities that gave life purpose, the team examined Western religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Bushido as well as the mores of 70 nations. Over time, positive psychologists, led by Christopher Peterson, settled on 24 virtues — or character strengths, as they prefer to call them — including courage, modesty, spirituality and leadership. “The agenda comes from the world,” Seligman told me. “These are universals we’re after.”

The search for what unites humans in virtue was an ambitious effort to integrate psychology with those fields that have long sat alongside it: ethics, religion, philosophy. Before the retreat in Mexico, Seligman met with one of his former professors, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. His book “The Examined Life,” written late in his career, looked at how questions of value might be related to everyday experience. It was Nozick who suggested a “taxonomy of character,” by which he meant, as Seligman put it, a list of “those abiding moral traits that everyone values.” Lyubomirsky remembers that many of the young scientists were uncomfortable doing so. “There was a lot of debate about it,” she said. “We were trained as hard scientists.” Seligman wasn’t so sure himself that he wanted virtue to be part of positive psychology either: he was wary of science becoming prescriptive, but Csikszentmihalyi was enthusiastic, Seligman recalled, and in the end Seligman agreed.

Two criticisms as troubling as the problem of positive psychology’s religiosity are 1) that it is not new — psychology always cared about happiness and 2) that the publicity about the field has gotten ahead of the science, which may be no good anyway. True, there have been attempts to marry psychology to ethics, to enlist it in the service of decoding what it means to be fully human, throughout its history. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, among others, established humanistic psychology to focus on what gave meaning to life, looking at the very subjects positive psychologists now take as their own. But where Maslow and Rogers relied primarily on qualitative research for their theories, Seligman and his colleagues hope to establish positive psychology — and thus the nature of happiness itself — on firmer scientific ground. The idea that whatever science there is may not yet be first-class troubles Seligman, too. “I have the same worry they do. That’s what I do at 4 in the morning,” he says.

When Todd Kashdan asked his students at George Mason to tell him which they liked better, experiencing pleasure or doing good, he cautioned, “Don’t give me the Miss Universe answers.” But when I met the participants in the nation’s only master’s program in applied positive psychology, at the University of Pennsylvania, I felt the spirit of Gandhi was hovering over us. One woman wrote in her application essay, “My strange and energetic career has included activism for peace and justice; teaching safety and self-defense skills to 10,000 students.” She was also a founder of two nonprofit organizations and taught “Swedish massage and stress-reduction skills.” Another sold her Mercedes and was using her savings to pay for the course. A third left banking to find the meaning in life.

There were, in all, about 30 students in the master’s class at Penn on the Saturday in September I attended. MAPP, as the program is known, is organized around intensive days of class time, online work and conference calls. Seligman, who runs the program, says that he likes to invite others to lecture so he can learn what’s going on in the field, and so that day Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina was presenting her “broaden and build” theory, while Seligman sat at a little table nodding and taking notes. “It’s a neat design that allows humans and other organisms to grow and become more resourceful versions of themselves,” she told the class.

The first part of her theory stems from a series of experiments that she published in 2005 in which five groups of 20 people each watched short film clips. The clips were meant to elicit negative, positive or neutral emotions. The participants were given a sheet ruled with 20 blank lines and asked to write down what they were feeling. Those who had just had positive emotions induced were able to provide more ideas about what their responses would be than those with either negative or neutral ones.

For Fredrickson, this was evidence that positive emotions lead to broader thinking. The participants were also tested for what is called global-local-visual processing. When asked to look at a design on a computer of three squares arranged in a triangle, those who had watched happy-making film clips tended to see the broader pattern — i.e. the triangular pattern — while the angrier subjects saw only the squares. (The neutral ones saw some of each.)

This was only the first part of Fredrickson’s theory. But it could be that thinking broadly has no effect on happiness or well-being — it might even be a deficit. To show that broadening led to building, she then described an experiment she had undertaken on a group of employees at Compuware, a progressive information-technology firm in Detroit. With the company’s assistance, she followed two groups — one that was taught a loving-kindness meditation (a meditation in which the practitioner repeats phrases that cultivate a caring attitude toward all life) and one that was wait-listed for the meditation. After eight weeks, she compared the two groups’ responses to questions about well-being. Those who meditated reported higher mental resources than before; their mindfulness, freedom from illness and connectedness to others all increased. But interestingly, their sense of well-being hadn’t, at least not immediately. It dropped at first. “It’s like you started a gym membership and then you realize you have to go,” Fredrickson theorized. But once their sense of well-being increased, they retained their edge over those who only wanted to meditate even after the meditation program was over.

All this interested Seligman’s students, but what Fredrickson says always catches their attention most is a study Fredrickson did with a Brazilian workplace psychologist named Marcia Losada, who observed annual strategic-review meetings of employees through one-way mirrors. The data she collected showed that the most effective teams — the criteria were customer satisfaction, profitability and internal review — were the ones who had more positive meetings. There was even a number that corresponded to the minimum amount of positive to negative feedback necessary to encourage successful functioning. That number, Fredrickson told the class, was three positive comments to one negative comment. “The ratio lady,” one student called her.

With its emphasis on universals and practical applications, positive psychology fits these divided times: it preaches values without linking them to a particular value system and embraces spirituality without making you go to church. When positive psychology was introduced into the language-arts program at Strath Haven High School outside Philadelphia in 2003, the left-leaning parents welcomed it because the values were internationally accepted; all but the most conservative ones were reassured that there were values at all.

Seligman recently held a meeting with the leaders from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pa., the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx and the KIPP program, a national network of public charter schools, at which the educational leaders discussed introducing positive psychology into their schools. They are all looking to restore “wholeness” to the teenage years, to replace the supposed sense of certainty that the ’60s removed and that returned in the ’80s as a national political objective but that teachers are now too bogged down in the fundamentals to teach and adults, working longer and longer hours, are simply too busy to shore up at home. A follow-up meeting is scheduled for June, this time with a dozen schools; one item on the agenda is to add personal strengths and virtues to admissions criteria. (Educational Testing Service is exploring a test that students wouldn’t be able to fake.) “What this is about is building character,” Seligman says.

Currently, the biggest project on positive psychology’s drawing board is at the Geelong School. “As a school, we would like to know how to make all students more resilient, how to turn depressing thoughts into positive ones,” Charles Scudamore, the head of the project at what Seligman calls “Australia’s Eton,” wrote in an e-mail message. That there is a need for a curriculum to promote engagement and happiness among teenagers is obvious, and Geelong is the first school to give positive psychologists a chance to show that they can really change teaching. According to Scudamore, “When we adopt a positive-psychology approach, it will be seen and practiced in all that we do.” The Australians “have had a lot of depression in kids, that’s half the reason they want it,” said Ed Diener, the professor of psychology at the University of Illinois.

What the psychologists have in mind for Geelong is very much the sort of intervention Kashdan was teaching at George Mason. The draft proposal by which they secured Geelong’s support included gratitude exercises, exercises in the “three pathways of happiness,” “the four ways to promote savoring” and “the five ways to overcome” adversity. To teach savoring, the teacher would explain mindfulness and show the students how to taste their food more thoroughly and then instruct them to try “savoring with a friend.” The students would have journals to record their emotions, their “grudges and gratitudes.” They would mentor a younger student too. Scudamore says he hopes that even the teachers will feel “their well-being” and their teaching skills enhanced. Seligman and his family are scheduled to make a six-month visit. An American-trained positive-psychology instructor will be in residence to provide training and real-time feedback.

This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like “Lord of the Flies” and “Romeo and Juliet” with some reassuring thoughts — or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the Swarthmore school district’s curriculum, who helped teach the classes, the animalistic and murderous Jack in “Lord of the Flies” shows “what happens when someone is lacking in signature strengths.” And when reading “The Odyssey,” students were asked: “What are the signature strengths that Odysseus lived and breathed? What are the things he might have improved on to make things go better?” It is too soon to know the effect of these stratagems on the school’s students, since part of the protocol agreed to with the Department of Education requires that they be followed for four years. The results will be compared with a control group that received the standard curriculum. (For his part, Seligman home-schools the children he had with his second wife. He says he likes to balance the standard high-school fare he gives the older ones with “books in which notions of virtue and nobility do not end in humiliation and death,” like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.”)

Not all positive psychologists are sure educational interventions are a good idea. Lyubormisky, for instance, turned down a similar request from the Compton school system in California. “I did not think the science was ready to be applied in that big a way,” she told me. Linkins acknowledges that happiness may come at the cost of a full understanding of literature and human complexity. But, he said, “it’s preferable to be happy than not, even if that means the potential for creative output is diminished.”

The question is, Can positive psychology actually fulfill its promise of making people happier? If positive emotions widen the sphere of what it is to be human, as positive psychology asserts, then positive psychology, at least as it is taught in the classroom, can seem to narrow it. If you are not optimistic, fake it. If you do not have friends, make some. I wondered what sort of student positive psychology would create. Was he or she more likely to be a future Nobel Peace Prize winner or J. P. (Gus) Godsey, the Virginia Beach stockbroker, dad and Craftsmen-tool enthusiast whom USA Weekend Magazine declared in 2003 “the happiest person in America” (“You are a blessed, happy person, Gus,” Martin Seligman commented in the article. “You’ve created many of your blessings on your own.”)

When I e-mailed various graduates of Penn’s first master’s class, I found that they continued to take positive psychology’s emphasis on the engaged life very seriously. One woman was using positive psychology to teach first-year medical students better patient-communication skills, citing Fredrickson’s optimal flourishing ratio as a benchmark. John Yeager, who has a doctorate in education and runs the Center for Character Excellence at the Culver Academies, a boarding school in Indiana, wants to “help teachers ‘broaden and build’ character strengths and positive emotions in children, young adults and themselves.”

Of course the master’s students were a self-selected group, willing to pay almost $40,000 for a degree with no clear career track. The students at George Mason, though they, too, had chosen the course, were perhaps more relevant to the question of what positive psychology can really teach. There I found a mixed response. They seemed remarkably sure that they had undergone an important experience but less sure what the nature of that experience had been. Had they saved the world or themselves? I spoke to Brandon Rasmussen, an easygoing student who seemed to me like a surfer dude washed up on some New Age shore. The class had energized him, and he had been a vigorous participant — earning an A. His final paper was about learning to really be with his friends, going into flow with them, something he had long had difficulty doing. “My personal satisfaction is the personal measure for me, and my personal satisfaction is great,” he explained. “I hate to say this, but really in the scheme of things we’re not going to change the war in Iraq.” Then he paused and thought how that sounded. “We can only fix the world one person at a time.”

The WORLD is FLAT. CHANGE or DIE!

Fastcompany Excrept:
http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2007/01/change-or-die.html

DIGITAL LEARNING Goes GLOBAL

Low-cost laptop could transform learning: Forget windows, folders and boxes that pop up with text. When students in Thailand, Libya and other developing countries get their $150 computers from the One Laptop Per Child project in 2007, their experience will be unlike anything on standard PCs. For most of these children the XO machine, as it's called, likely will be the first computer they've ever used. Because the students have no expectations for what PCs should be like, the laptop's creators started from scratch in designing a user interface they figured would be intuitive for children. The result is as unusual as - but possibly even riskier than - other much-debated aspects of the machine, such as its economics and distinctive hand-pulled mechanism for charging its battery. More.

AND They Wear Wooden Shoes........

Dutch ban Segways from public roads: Dutch police banned Segways from all public roads, bike paths and walkways as of New Year's Day, surprising the nation's official importer of the two-wheeled, self-balancing scooters. Segway Nederland director Piet Kruijt said Tuesday the company was "completely ambushed" by the decision, first announced by national police on Nov. 27, 2006. "We're working on all fronts to get this resolved," Kruijt said. He estimated that "a number of hundreds" of Segways have been sold in the Netherlands. For the time being, they are only legal on private property. Police said that with no approval of the vehicles in sight by the country's Royal Traffic Agency, they could not be allowed to continue using public streets. More.

21st Century Corporations: Desperartely Seeking Following

Intention: Digital Learning Officer

Director, Digital Learning

Duties include: Serve as internal consultant to Content & Product Development teams in the areas of learning styles, training techniques, pedagogy, & curriculum design; lead market research on e-learning technologies, vendors, delivery methods; play critical role in design, presentation, delivery of educational product offerings, & supplemental training tools.

Requirements: Advanced degree preferred w/experience as an instructional designer, educator, learning consultant, or the like. Knowledge of psychometrics, self study, distance learning methodology, e-learning marketplace, & certification testing; strong organizational, project management, & communications skills; ability to work collegially; ability to respond to changing demands; & flexibility to assist team members in meeting other organizational priorities. Financial background a plus.

Reply: 21st Century Digital Learning Environments
586.228.0608
E-mail: jross2@earthlink.net

EUROPE: "Goes Digital" (Read It Here!)

What Makes Countries Competitive? The European View

December 21, 2006 News Release

"What makes some countries more competitive than others?" asked Viviane Reding, the EU's commissioner for information society and media. "These are the countries that focus their investments on research and technological innovation. They have well-developed infrastructures and institutional frameworks and they have introduced sufficient flexibility to support efficient markets.

Reding (R) with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

"There is also consensus," continued Reding in a speech yesterday in Brussels, "that faster growth during the last decade has been related to higher investments in ICT [information and communication technologies]. The highest-performing countries have been those that have been more innovative in ICT products and services and more active in adopting such innovations in other sectors of the economy, in particular in the service sectors."

Europe, said Reding is the world industrial and technology leader in essential ICT fields such as mobile and broadband communications.

She cited Europe as a world leader in telecommunications, embedded systems, photonics, microsystems, nano-electronics, and media technologies, and said that European technology is the basis of key developments such as Web browsing, music compression, ADSL, voice over IP and open source operating systems.

Conundrum, Gordian Knot or just plain ole MAGIC?

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January 2, 2007

Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t

By DENNIS OVERBYE

I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was one of those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged into a vortex, swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward the edge of a black (chocolate) hole. Visions of my father’s heart attack danced before my glazed eyes. My wife, Nancy, had a resigned look on her face.

The outcome, endlessly replayed whenever we go out, is never in doubt, though I often cover my tracks by offering to split my dessert with the table. O.K., I can imagine what you’re thinking. There but for the grace of God.

Having just lived through another New Year’s Eve, many of you have just resolved to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming months and years. After all, we’re free humans, not slaves, robots or animals doomed to repeat the same boring mistakes over and over again. As William James wrote in 1890, the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.” Get over it, Dr. James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest. A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.

As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.

“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Maryland. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.

“If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”

Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.

That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”

Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.

How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will. The traditional definition is called “libertarian” or “deep” free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined. This school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.

At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.

“That strikes many people as incoherent,” said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. “Both are bad news for free will,” he said. So if human actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some weird magical power?”

People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.

But whatever that power is — call it soul or the spirit — those people have to explain how it could stand independent of the physical universe and yet reach from the immaterial world and meddle in our own, jiggling brain cells that lead us to say the words “molten chocolate.”

A vote in favor of free will comes from some physicists, who say it is a prerequisite for inventing theories and planning experiments.

That is especially true when it comes to quantum mechanics, the strange paradoxical theory that ascribes a microscopic randomness to the foundation of reality. Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at the University of Vienna, said recently that quantum randomness was “not a proof, just a hint, telling us we have free will.”

Is there any evidence beyond our own intuitions and introspections that humans work that way?

Two Tips of the Iceberg

In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock.

Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.

The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.

In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.

Dr. Libet’s results have been reproduced again and again over the years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions. Patients with tics or certain diseases, like chorea, cannot say whether their movements are voluntary or involuntary, Dr. Hallett said.

In some experiments, subjects have been tricked into believing they are responding to stimuli they couldn’t have seen in time to respond to, or into taking credit or blame for things they couldn’t have done. Take, for example, the “voodoo experiment” by Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, and Emily Pronin of Princeton. In the experiment, two people are invited to play witch doctor.

One person, the subject, puts a curse on the other by sticking pins into a doll. The second person, however, is in on the experiment, and by prior arrangement with the doctors, acts either obnoxious, so that the pin-sticker dislikes him, or nice.

After a while, the ostensible victim complains of a headache. In cases in which he or she was unlikable, the subject tended to claim responsibility for causing the headache, an example of the “magical thinking” that makes baseball fans put on their rally caps.

“We made it happen in a lab,” Dr. Wegner said.

Is a similar sort of magical thinking responsible for the experience of free will?

“We see two tips of the iceberg, the thought and the action,” Dr. Wegner said, “and we draw a connection.”

But most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot. Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers.

Naturally, almost everyone has a slant on such experiments and whether or not the word “illusion” should be used in describing free will. Dr. Libet said his results left room for a limited version of free will in the form of a veto power over what we sense ourselves doing. In effect, the unconscious brain proposes and the mind disposes.

In a 1999 essay, he wrote that although this might not seem like much, it was enough to satisfy ethical standards. “Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’ orders,” he wrote.

But that might seem a pinched and diminished form of free will.

Good Intentions

Dr. Dennett, the Tufts professor, is one of many who have tried to redefine free will in a way that involves no escape from the materialist world while still offering enough autonomy for moral responsibility, which seems to be what everyone cares about.

The belief that the traditional intuitive notion of a free will divorced from causality is inflated, metaphysical nonsense, Dr. Dennett says reflecting an outdated dualistic view of the world.

Rather, Dr. Dennett argues, it is precisely our immersion in causality and the material world that frees us. Evolution, history and culture, he explains, have endowed us with feedback systems that give us the unique ability to reflect and think things over and to imagine the future. Free will and determinism can co-exist.

“All the varieties of free will worth having, we have,” Dr. Dennett said.

“We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes,” he said. “We have the power of imagination, to see and imagine futures.”

In this regard, causality is not our enemy but our friend, giving us the ability to look ahead and plan. “That’s what makes us moral agents,” Dr. Dennett said. “You don’t need a miracle to have responsibility.”

Other philosophers disagree on the degree and nature of such “freedom.” Their arguments partly turn on the extent to which collections of things, whether electrons or people, can transcend their origins and produce novel phenomena.

These so-called emergent phenomena, like brains and stock markets, or the idea of democracy, grow naturally in accordance with the laws of physics, so the story goes. But once they are here, they play by new rules, and can even act on their constituents, as when an artist envisions a teapot and then sculpts it — a concept sometimes known as “downward causation.” A knowledge of quarks is no help in predicting hurricanes — it’s physics all the way down. But does the same apply to the stock market or to the brain? Are the rules elusive just because we can’t solve the equations or because something fundamentally new happens when we increase numbers and levels of complexity?

Opinions vary about whether it will ultimately prove to be physics all the way down, total independence from physics, or some shade in between, and thus how free we are. Dr. Silberstein, the Elizabethtown College professor, said, “There’s nothing in fundamental physics by itself that tells us we can’t have such emergent properties when we get to different levels of complexities.”

He waxed poetically as he imagined how the universe would evolve, with more and more complicated forms emerging from primordial quantum muck as from an elaborate computer game, in accordance with a few simple rules: “If you understand, you ought to be awestruck, you ought to be bowled over.”

George R. F. Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, said that freedom could emerge from this framework as well. “A nuclear bomb, for example, proceeds to detonate according to the laws of nuclear physics,” he explained in an e-mail message. “Whether it does indeed detonate is determined by political and ethical considerations, which are of a completely different order.”

I have to admit that I find these kind of ideas inspiring, if not liberating. But I worry that I am being sold a sort of psychic perpetual motion machine. Free wills, ideas, phenomena created by physics but not accountable to it. Do they offer a release from the chains of determinism or just a prescription for a very intricate weave of the links?And so I sought clarity from mathematicians and computer scientists. According to deep mathematical principles, they say, even machines can become too complicated to predict their own behavior and would labor under the delusion of free will.

If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer’s operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions. But, Dr. Lloyd said, “If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say ‘I don’t know, wait and see, and I’ll make decisions and let you know.’ ”

Why can’t computers say what they’re going to do? In 1930, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel proved that in any formal system of logic, which includes mathematics and a kind of idealized computer called a Turing machine, there are statements that cannot be proven either true or false. Among them are self-referential statements like the famous paradox stated by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who said that all Cretans are liars: if he is telling the truth, then, as a Cretan, he is lying.

One implication is that no system can contain a complete representation of itself, or as Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University and author of the 2006 novel about Gödel, “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,” said: “Gödel says you can’t program intelligence as complex as yourself. But you can let it evolve. A complex machine would still suffer from the illusion of free will.”

Another implication is there is no algorithm, or recipe for computation, to determine when or if any given computer program will finish some calculation. The only way to find out is to set it computing and see what happens. Any way to find out would be tantamount to doing the calculation itself.

“There are no shortcuts in computation,” Dr. Lloyd said.

That means that the more reasonably you try to act, the more unpredictable you are, at least to yourself, Dr. Lloyd said. Even if your wife knows you will order the chile rellenos, you have to live your life to find out.

To him that sounds like free will of a sort, for machines as well as for us. Our actions are determined, but so what? We still don’t know what they will be until the waiter brings the tray.

That works for me, because I am comfortable with so-called physicalist reasoning, and I’m always happy to leverage concepts of higher mathematics to cut through philosophical knots.

The Magician’s Spell

So what about Hitler?

The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail message, it would mean that “people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets.” Anything would go.

Dr. Wegner of Harvard said: “We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to power?”

He added, “A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what they’ve done might be a good thing.”

Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on people’s lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.

“It’s an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,” he said, comparing it to a magician’s trick that has been seen again and again. “Even though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t go away.”

In an essay about free will in 1999, Dr. Libet wound up quoting the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the Paris Review, “The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.”

I could skip the chocolate cake, I really could, but why bother? Waiter!

I am WHAT I THINK or I THINK WHAT I am? Jim Ross