The idea for this blog was born in a moment of frustration. It came when I was reading a piece that I mostly agreed with, by a writer I admired. The piece, “The Futile Resistance Against Classroom Tech” by David Perry appeared in the December 2017 issue of The Atlantic. Its melodramatic title belied banal speculation about … Continue reading CyborgEDU Manifesto
30 Years of Technological Transformation It’s easy to look at the ways we’ve networked organizational life over the last forty years and see only a constant stream of endless changes. In retrospect, however, it’s possible to see three discreet phases to the way information and services have flowed through networks of individuals, technologies and organizations … Continue reading Introduction to the CyborgCOM: A History Lesson
During this period of social distancing, Jews the world over took to video conferencing platforms like Zoom to celebrate the Passover Seders. The Seder is typically the most elaborate family get-together of the Jewish year, with traditions passed down from generation to generation. Elaborate meals, long recitations of prayers and rituals from the Haggadah, and … Continue reading The First (?) VR Passover Seder
The biggest objection I hear when I tell people about meeting friends and colleagues in VR is this: “But you’re not yourself, right? You’re an avatar.” I had that response when I first thought about it, too. Wouldn’t you rather be yourself on a video platform like Zoom or FaceTime, rather than someone else in … Continue reading On Being an Avatar: Mirroring, Violating, and Being Together
A few days ago, I described how I was hanging out and shooting hoops, with some friends in VR. We were doing it in AltspaceVR , a social space where you can meet up with friends as well as strangers. AltspaceVR hosts a variety of events (music festivals, improv nights), educational programming (English conversation classes, … Continue reading Meeting Up with Educators in VR
VR has always boasted about the places you can go inside a headset. Now that it's April 2020 and we can’t leave our homes, this has even greater allure. While these experiences aren’t my main reason for exploring VR, I’ve recently used my headset to tour the British Museum, enjoyed the view from the peak … Continue reading Hanging Out in VR
I've heard that being in VR resembles being in a dream, but what if your dreams come to resemble VR? Attempts to answer the question, “What is VR?” almost always include a comparison to dreams. “Shared lucid dreaming,” is Jaron Lanier’s phrase. Long before Lanier, questions about cyborg reality and dreams occurred to Philip K … Continue reading VR//Dreams
My working hypothesis is that the era of video conferencing will be remembered as an awkward in-between, a brief Brady Bunch-style interlude separating the era when telephones offered the only option for synchronous connection at a distance from an era when VR enables us to be present at-a-distance in far richer ways. I. Ever since … Continue reading Beyond Video Conferencing: Exploring the Possibilities of VR-Based Collaboration
The heyday of Action Research may have come and gone. Add it to the list of 60s enthusiasms that faded with time—alongside psychedelics, self-actualization movement, and free love. Action research has had its lasting effects but it’s faded from our contemporary moment. Indeed, intellectual history hasn’t quite known what to do with Kurt Lewin, action … Continue reading Agile Software Development As Action Research
CyborgOrg is a blog exploring the ways that the human and the technological interact in contemporary organizational life. The cyborg organization is emerging at a time when categories like the individual, groups and systems can no longer make sense of the experience of collectives. Our experience of ourselves and others is mediated by our experiences … Continue reading Why CyborgOrg: From Systems Psychodynamics to Network Cyberdynamics
A. K. Rice and Eric Miller authored one of the books at the origin of what we now call Organizational Development (OD). Their work at the Tavistock Institute usually merits a chapter in business school textbooks, as it pioneered a way of thinking about organizational life that considered the whole of an organization in an integrated way. … Continue reading The Socio-Technics and Systems Psychodynamics of Sales
Part I: Marketing and Psychoanalysis It’s well known that Freud’s nephew, Edward Barnays, was a pioneering PR man, who traded freely on his family relations to claim a special knowledge of the other’s desire. History hasn’t been kind to Barneys—his clumsy advice about how to manipulate the masses and his association with some of the CIA’s … Continue reading Digital Marketing and the Personally Identifiable Information
There’s no shortage of salesmen in literature. Death of a Salesman and Glengarry, Glen Ross come to mind, as do dozens of movies about Wall Street, and my favorite: Mathilda. But it’s not just popular fiction and media. There’s an entire industry of books that tell you how to sell. At last count, I heard there were 35,000 titles … Continue reading A Sales Literature Review
The salesman is one of the most enduring stereotypes in business. His dress, his personality, even his mindset, are seemingly eternal. His strengths—superficial likability, power of persuasion, unrelenting energy—and his weaknesses—manipulative, mercenary, ultimately empty—are the stuff of legend. He comes and goes, does things no one else wants to do, and puts himself out there for our derision … Continue reading The Cyborg Willy Loman
If you’ll excuse the long quotations, I’d like to share two authors’ accounts of the same history. It’s a history I’d never given much thought to before reading these descriptions, but we can draw powerful conclusions from it. In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Selingo writes: In the early 1900s, the “high-school movement” turned secondary schools into a nationwide system … Continue reading Dynamics of Lifelong Learning, Part III: Creating and Caring
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Selingo outlines the reality that of today’s workforce like this: Previous shifts in how people work have typically been accompanied in the United States by an expansion in the amount of education required by employers to get a good job … Now a third wave in education and training has … Continue reading Dynamics of Lifelong Learning, Part II: Human and Machine
On the “Reinventing Corporate Education” panel were representatives of a tripartite team offering MIT-based systems engineering training to Boeing engineers on the EdX platform. Anant Agarwal – CEO of EdX, TC Haldi – Sr Director of MIT xPRO, and Mark Cousino – Boeing’s Director of Learning Design and Technology each gave their perspective on the program that they had recently rolled out. There’s a … Continue reading Dynamics of Lifelong Learning, Part I: “Reinventing Corporate Education” @ SXSW EDU
This was my second Danah Boyd keynote in less than a year, and the second time I’ve tried to blog about it afterward. I find them so hard to blog about that last time I gave up and simply quoted a highly abridged version of the speech (here). This time, I’ll simply recommend that you check out … Continue reading danah boyd Keynote @ SXSW EDU
In many ways, the most powerful emotional, political and civic experience of SXSW EDU was a screening of American Creed, followed by a discussion with Sam Ball, the film’s director, as well as Deidre Prevett and Tegan Griffith, two of the people it profiles, and moderated by Anne Burt from Facing History and Ourselves. It’s a PBS documentary … Continue reading American Creed @ SXSW EDU
While there were dozens of panels about augmented reality (AR) at SXSW EDU, there were far fewer that actually showed real AR in action. “Black Gotham: Immersive Storytelling & Technology” was in the latter category, and offered many participants their first glimpse beyond the theory of AR storytelling and into its practice. The panel was led by Kamau … Continue reading Black Gotham AR @ SXSW EDU
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