One strategy is to have only the student co-teaching team keep their laptops open while they are helping me lead the class; one member of the team makes notes on the wiki, sketching in top-level headings that the other students will fill in AFTER class, another member of the team identifies words for the lexicon and adds them to the wiki (and again the class, as a whole, fills in the definitions before the next class), and a third member of the team looks up sites online and projects them (I have three screens in my classroom at Stanford).

You can read the whole interview here. I’m grateful to Shel Israel for getting this out of Howard. Nicely done, sir.

Photo credit One Laptop Per Child

On Twitter, I pointed out a great article by Jack Neff about Unilever CMO Simon Clift. Several people appreciated the article, but one person responded back that they felt Unilever was morally bankrupt. I’m not sure from where her stance came, but that was her take.

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion, but where you run into a potential risk is by letting your opinions get in the way of learning something new. I learn best by paying attention to how others do things, especially when I’m learning how not to do things.

If we don’t look for models, if we don’t separate our feelings from our efforts to learn, we miss many opportunities. That last bit bears repeating slightly differently: If you can break out the concepts from the content, the entire kingdom becomes yours. Learn about what people are doing, versus what exactly they’re talking about.

Getting caught up in the little things or falling into the story instead of paying attention to its structure means a missed opportunity to learn. There are lessons around us daily, several of which we can apply to what we do. From that excellent restaurant server teaching us how to blog a better offering of dessert, to the observations gleaned from paying attention to our rivals, we have chances to learn.

Are you separating out the lesson from your other feelings and emotions?

Photo credit omniNate