Day: December 4, 2008

The news this evening carried a story concerning Apple Computer’s attempt to become “greener”. Sure enough when I visited the Apple site and searched for green I found a note from Steve outlining the efforts being made to remove harmful toxic chemicals from computers and to increase recycling. 

However, the story also reminded me of some pictures I took a couple weeks ago.

Cindy received a grant to use iPods to help ESL students and their families. I took these pictures as she was in the process of unboxing her new equipment. There must be a less wasteful way to ship this product.

I have been working on my final Intro Psych lecture for the semester. The general topic is social psych. While reviewing the themes covered in the book, I was struck by how many topics could be applied to my personal interest in productive and unproductive uses of the “participatory web”. After all, social psychologists should have something useful to say about the social web. Actually, an understanding of what  social psychologists have to say about groupthink, persuasion, and group thinking could easily be substituted for most of what is said in the last dozen books I have read. So, review an old Intro Psych book and save your money. Actually, I am just kidding, those folks need to make a living too. Perhaps a more careful analysis of what one might learn about the issues associated with the participatory web from the social psychology chapter in a freshman intro psychology book should be focus of a future blog post.

Anyway, I prepared a collage consisting of the covers of several books I have read recently in order to talk to may class about some issues in group processing and filtering of information. Perhaps books they have heard of (maybe) might show the relevance of these issues. The Wisdom of Crowds is most relevant for my situation, but there are interesting associations among all of the books I have included.

For some reason, I look at this collage and see the potential for a card sort task. The way a “sorter” creates groupings is supposed to reveal their organizational schemes. So, here is my collage, give it a try. What, for you, goes with what?