In February, Daniel Seaton and his colleagues shared data about the very high level of teacher participation (28% identified as past or present teachers) and engagement (over four times more active in discussion forums than non-teachers) in a series of MITx MOOCs.  Very interesting article when thinking of teachers as multipliers, mediators and facilitators of learning (and not just transmitters). Unlike earlier MOOC research that has been criticized for being ahistorical, Seaton shares the following example of pre-MOOC massive, open online education: One of the earliest precursors to modern MOOCs targeted high school teachers in the United States. In 1958, a post-war interpretation of introductory physics called "Atomic-Age Physics" debuted at 6:30 a.m. on the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) Continental Classroom. Daily viewership was estimated at roughly 250,000 people, and over 300 institutions partnered to offer varying levels of accreditation for the course. Roughly 5,000 participants were certified in the first year. Teachers were estimated to be 1 in 8 of all certificate earners,  indicating reach beyond the target demographic of high school teachers. Through its expansion of courses between 1958 and 1963, the Continental Classroom represented a bold approach in using technology to address national needs in education reform. In contrast, the current MOOC era has largely focused on student-centric issues like democratizing access. Source: Seaton, D.T., Coleman, C., Daries, J., Chuang, I., 2015. Enrollment in MITx MOOCs: Are We Educating Educators? EduCause Review. Ho, A.D., Chuang, I., Reich, J., Coleman, C.A., Whitehill, J., Northcutt, C.G., Williams, J.J., Hansen, J.D., Lopez, G., Petersen, R., 2015. HarvardX and MITx: Two Years of Open Online Courses Fall 2012-Summer 2014. Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series. Photo: Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab (1950-1951) (ORAU.com)

So I’m reading John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, which begins by asserting that the university "is a place of teaching universal knowledge". I’m fascinated by the historical context (Catholicism in Protestant England), by the strength and substance of the ideas, and by the narrative style of carefully-constructed arguments. I’m also struck, however, by the centrality of learning as transmission, the line of demarcation between invention and teaching, and the belief that it is possible to know by disconnecting from society (although I acknowledge that concentration and flow tend to require quiet, in a pragmatic sense): To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. […] He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new. The common sense of mankind has associated the search after truth with seclusion and quiet. […] It must be allowed on the whole that, while teaching involves external engagements, the natural home for experiment and speculation is retirement. If all three of these characteristics of institutionalized knowledge creation and production no longer align with the demands of the world we live in, what needs to change and how likely is the change to occur within organizations founded on very different ideas and assumptions? Newman’s Idea is also crystal-clear with respect to the relationship between the university and the corporation (in his context, the Catholic Church): Just as a commander wishes to have tall and well-formed and vigorous soldiers, not from any abstract devotion to the military standard of height or age, but for the purposes of war, and no one thinks it any thing but natural and praiseworthy in him to be contemplating, not abstract qualities, but his own living and breathing men; so, in like manner, when the Church founds a University, she is not cherishing talent, genius, or knowledge, for their own sake, but for the sake of her children. Through the lens of organizational learning and the need for mission-driven organizations in a knowledge economy to invest in their people, this rationale stands, in my opinion. Photo: Aerial view of Finney Chapel, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, United States (oberlin.edu)

Previous weekend three current and one former LearningSpaces devs went to Berlin to attend BattleHack, a hackathon organised by BrainTree (PayPal). Because we love both writing code and Berlin. A hackathon is an event where you collaborate intensively on a project, usually involving technology. Hackathons are a lot of fun and every developer that hasn't yet attended one should do it at least once. It's a great playground to try out new technologies. And it's a good experience to have a clear goal and focus on that for a set period of time without distractions. Agile on steroids 24 hours to build a product is a good training in product thinking. Which features are essential to convey the concept during a demo? The limited amount of time forces you to build only that. Onions and beef This is not about the food during the event. Which was great by the way. We actually made an app to buy food directly from local farmers. Our mission was to help people: Reconnect to your food. Buy real ingredients from local farmers while it's still alive or in the ground and follow how it's grown. We're convinced that good ingredients are the key to taste, health and environment. Yet often we don't know where are food is coming from and how it was produced. Onion Square is a marketplace where farmers and urban gardeners can sell their produce directly to their customers. Cut out the middlemen! For the the BattleHack there were a couple of sponsors whose technologies we've incorporated in our app. We had to use BrainTree or Paypal, and we could obviously use that to process payments. Braintree launched a new marketplace feature that we used to send the payments directly to the farmers. When a product is sold we send a text message to the farmer with Twillio, and we use Pusher for live updates in our app. Sendgrid was used for sending confirmations an password resets. Finally the app was deployed on Heroku. It's a contest! Ready to be judgemental! #BattleHack @ Cafe Moskau Berlin https://instagram.com/p/4MH9K6j9DA/ - @theopani The 1st prize was won by a smart bike lock. Technology wise a very nice hack. My personal favorites where these: PayPowr, a PayPal controlled electric power outlet. Pot o' Gold, a GitHub bot to reward open source contributions with bounties PrivateCircle, a lone hacker trying to help us use PGP What's next for Onion Square? We didn't win anything nor got any feedback or questions. Yet we're still very excited about what we made. And so are most people we've talked to. So we will start talking to some farmers to see if they think the idea is feasible. And who know we'll all be eating fresh and local soon! Interested? Checkout onionsquare.com and subscribe to this list.

Unity is power, when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can happen. But let's admit it is becoming rather difficult to enhance teamwork between different generations, because every generation has a different perception of communication, and communication is vital for teamwork. Recently we had a chat with a teamwork guru Anne Loehr and she helped us to answer the question whether teamwork is being redefined by every generation. Milda: Hey Anne, I know quite a lot about you, but could you tell our readers a bit about yourself? Anne:I grew up in Ithaca, New York as the youngest of eight children. After I graduated from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Management (with an intermission to go to culinary school), I moved to Kenya where I owned and managed eco-friendly hotels and safari companies for more than 15 years. My work in Kenya left me with a deep understanding of the fact that authentic relationships are shaped by courage and respect. (You can read a little more about how I came to that understanding in the next question!) After selling my hospitality business and returning to the U.S.A., I became a certified executive coach, facilitator and management consultant. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of diverse organizations such as Facebook, US Air Force, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, American Red Cross, Booz Allen Hamilton, John Hancock, Coca-Cola and Instagram to help their teams improve communication and deepen their working relationships. I am also a speaker and author of two books: A Manager’s Guide to Coaching: Simple and Effective Ways to Get the Best Out of Your Employees and Managing the Unmanageable: How to Motivate Even the Most Unruly Employee. Fun fact: The Washington Post named me the "Generational Guru". M: How did you get into training? Why? A: I actually never planned to get into talent development! I learned about it out of complete necessity. When I was in Africa turning around the Kenyan hotel, I become fluent in crisis management, literally facing down lions, tsunamis, rivers that carried away camp generators, and plenty of interpersonal and community conflict. I had 500 employees from different tribes. Let me tell you, tribes don’t just come together and succeed on their own. I tried to find top-quality leadership, coaching, and team effectiveness facilitators for my Kenyan employees, knowing that this would help break through tribal lines and set everyone up for success—but I couldn’t find one single program. I ended up having to educate myself in leadership and talent development. I wanted my team to succeed and there was nowhere else to turn. By the time I came back to the U.S.A, I had developed a passion for leadership development and coaching. When deciding what to do next, talent development became the obvious choice. M: Could you define what is teamwork for you? And why would you choose this definition? A: The official definition of "teamwork" is the combined action of a group of people to achieve a goal. But teamwork is so much more than this! It’s about listening to people, understanding their values and purpose, creating space for them to work together well, defining clear goals, roles, process and measuring for results… then celebrating success! M: Do you think that teamwork is being redefined (is the concept being innovated often)? Or is it lacking behind? A: The definition of teamwork remains the same. However, people of each generation has their own lens on how they see the world, which impacts how they interact within the team. So as 40% of Baby Boomers retire within the next 10 years, team dynamics will bend more toward the communication and relationship building style of Gen X and Gen Y. M: Does teamwork differ from generation to generation? A: There are differences in the way each generation prefers to interact and differences in the way each generation prefers to be delegated to. Interaction and delegation are core elements of teamwork so yes, teamwork differs from generation to generation. However, there are three generations in the workforce now so teams will likely be made up of more than one generation. They can potentially really annoy each other if they don’t take the time to understand generational differences! M: What would be the main differences in the way teamwork ‘works’ in different generations (Baby boomers, generation X and generation Y)? A: Here’s a quick breakdown: Baby Boomers love face-to-face interactions. They thrive in mass protests, mass rock concerts, and larger families. It is totally foreign to them to text, email or IM if you could be speaking face-to-face. This generation saw the power of using their voice as a group to make a difference, both at the high level and the detailed level. Not only were they able to successfully protest the lack of women’s rights at a high level, they were also able to finesse the details of policy and legislation to pass the laws needed to create their vision. This is the beauty of a Boomer. They can see both the vision and the details, and then prioritise to eventually win the battle. Some ways their teams will reflect these qualities is by having a lot of in-person meetings, setting clear high-level and low-level priorities, and being very focused on time management. Being group oriented, Baby Boomers also work well in larger teams. Generation X can be perceived as too independent, too self focused, and too individualistic. However, I prefer to say that they are realistic and solution focused. Gen X often prefers to work alone, on their own timetable, with quick decisions and fast-results. They like to work in their own style and when they are able to, they can get a lot done. Gen X teams are most productive when small in numbers, or when they are given the opportunity to work either independently or with one other person. Between stagflation, high divorce rates, and the humiliation of both the Iran Contra crisis and the Challenger explosion, they learned early on to be resourceful and pragmatic when moving forward. Because of this, they have laser-focused delegation skills, which comes in handy for high producing teams. Generation Y was born with a mouse in their hand so it’s no surprise that they prefer to interact virtually. To them, an IM chat or a text is the same as a face-to-face meeting. An added benefit of working together virtually is that it allows them to have more of a work/life balance, which is one of their core values. You can expect few face-to-face meetings with a Gen Y team, and instead you can expect group chats, video meetings, workflow apps and other teamwork technology. They are also used to having a voice during family meetings so their teams must be really collaborative in order to include everyone’s research (they love having all the details on the subject possible!) and opinions. M: Is it difficult to make different generations work in same teams? Why? A: Each person, regardless of his or her generation, is an individual so not all mixed generation teams will be difficult. There are some common communication issues I see though that can be corrected with a little training. For example, Baby Boomers can be challenged by Gen Y’s insistence on virtual communication and vice-versa. Gen X can have a hard time with both the Baby Boomers love of groups and the Gen Y’s love of being part of a community when they just want to be left alone to do their work. It’s important for everyone on the team to remember that each generation has unique contributions to offer and more diverse teams are more innovative. Their differences are an asset. M: How do you enhance teamwork in different generations? Are there any special exercises or tools to help people to work within teams? A: The best tool for enhancing teamwork in different generations is education. Educating employees about generational differences makes a significant impact. Once team members are aware of the different ways each generation prefers to interact, they won’t see the other’s behaviour as annoying or prohibitive. They will instead find a better way to communicate with each other to reach their goals. M: Could you tell us a secret (tip) on how to enhance collaboration between people in teams? A: My secret tip may seem simple but it is more challenging than you might think: Listen and ask questions. We want to thank Anne for brilliant thoughts, and explaining how communication differs between Baby Boomers, Generation X and Y representatives. Let's not forget that all of us a different but with a bit of understanding and some listening everyone can achieve great results as a team. Teamwork always means the same thing, although different generations enhances it through divergent means.

Since about a week I'm sleeping with the Sense: I've waited more than a year for this Kickstarter project to arrive on my doorstep, and for the first time in my life I'm stoked to go to bed! Sense is beautiful. This little gadget tells the air quality, light, temperature and humidity of my room. Green means I'm good to go, orange means the sleep conditions could be better, and you can probably guess what the red light means. Cool right? Sense collects data about your nights with the Pill, a coin-shaped object that, once clipped to your pillow, communicates with Sense and tells it when you were in deep sleep, or moving around a lot, etc. Trust issues But truth be told, I don't trust it. Sense wakes me up whenever it 'thinks' that I am sleeping lightly. It doesn't let me know if the device really knows when to wake me up. Leaving me in uncertainty about my alarm, before that important meeting with procurement from that new client tomorrow morning. A meeting i'd like to be on time for. Sense doesn't get my weekends Friday and Saturday nights are the nights when I'm hanging out with friends. I was a little bit disappointed when on Saturday morning I saw Sense data which told me that I've been sleeping from 23.00 till 10.00 in the morning, with deep sleep from 23.00-03.30, which I know couldn't be right, since i was sure this was the time I was still in my garden with my friends. Unfortunately I cannot delete or adjust this data after one day. Leaving Sense thinking i had a long night with high quality sleep. This weekend I was DJ'ing at a friends birthday. After work I got home and got changed. I got at the venue at 9 and got home somewhere during the night. Somehow it picked up I was in the room around 8 and decided I was going to bed then. Again. First 7 hours of deep sleep... Saturday same thing happened. Concluding i'd say, in my opinion somehow Sense at this moment doesn't make.. well, much sense. Also, this could be solved with one little update ofcourse. I was really excited at the beginning, I'm not that excited anymore. I hope Hello will improve it because I really like the idea. For now, im glad I can tell Siri what time I want to wake up when it really matters.

Within LearningSpaces we think it's really important for people to contact us. For a long time we've only used Helpful for this and we gave it a good place in our UI. Since we've released Helpful in our app there were a lot of messages from our customers with feature request, questions on how to use the product, and bug reports. It helped us to understand what issues were helpful for our audience and what not. After that we continued to look at how we can improve our customer support and we found Intercom. Intercom offers to help with observing costumers, acquiring, engaging, learning, and with support. Of this list we use engaging with the basic plan, support with the pro plan and observe which is still free because it arrived in beta. We only let the admins and team owners in Intercom because of the pricing (for the support with the pro plan) all other users are still served by Helpful. Why intercom next to helpful? We already had a product that helped us supporting customers, why a new one that costs money? Helpful works mostly email based, customers send us a message through the app and we respond by email. With Intercom a user sends us a message and we reply in chat with that customer, this helps to respond faster, even with just a hello and the customer knows that we are on our way to help them. Our median response time is below 4 minutes and our customers praise us for that. Intercom gives us the possibility to make announcements about what we think is important or good to know in our app. It doesn't have to be all over the screen but there will be a little notification with our message to which the customer can respond directly. There are stats in the Intercom app that gives us a good idea of how active the customers are. Based on these stats we send mails to them for coming back to the app, to add more spaces, chapters or paths. We use it also to send mails to notify users how far they are in there trial. Auto in app messages and mails We're really happy with Intercom but when we started we had a hard time to get going. For us the interface of the app was hard to understand in the beginning. We didn't know how to get to our settings or to the documentation we read minutes ago. The other thing we're not really happy about is that not all of our users are in the app because of the extra costs, and thats left for consideration for now. All in all we're really happy with it and feel that we should have implemented it a lot sooner. It was always in the backlog to do it sometime in the future, but using it made us understand that we couldn't have begon too early with it.

I'm a working mom with a high energy toddler, a needy cat and a busy partner. Balancing your life as a business woman, a loving mom and partner while maintaining an active social life can be pretty difficult. Sometimes it might feel like everybody is pulling you in a different direction, while you are trying to keep calm and focus. On other days you find yourself having too much time and not knowing what to do. Just joking. That never happens. But here are some tricks and apps that help me deal: Work hard play hard I never said it gonna be easy, but if you want to be a power mom/ worker/ human being, you need indeed energy and lots of it. So don't give in to tiredness and laziness. Your little one is in bed and your partner doesn't mind to stay at home, go for it. You can get a babysitter, go for it. You have awesome parents/parents-in-law, go for it. An hour of free time a day keeps insanity away! Its for the greater good of everybody around you ;) But of course all of this means great organizational skills. Knowing what needs to be done and when. To organize my different lives I like to use Trello. The cool thing is its super easy to use and you can have different projects with a bunch of boards to get a perfect overview of your busy life (well sort of... haha). I have a project for each aspect of my life (whether its business, social or home stuff). So one project is e.g. 'LearningSpaces' with a bunch of boards on e.g. development, sales and marketing. Each board has cards with a bunch of ToDos or stuff you are busy with (or whatever you want to organize). So you can keep everything perfectly organized in one place! Just do it Everybody always talks about planning and making time. I say 'just do it'. Organize your To Dos, make a list (if you don't already have one), and then DO them. Don't think 'I'll finish that tomorrow'. Finish it today. Don't set certain things aside. DO them now. Be your own drill master. And at the end of the day you can look at your list and think 'Yes! I did it' (even if it was just one thing). For a quick and simple ToDo list, I recommend Wunderlist. Just write down what you have to do for the day or the week, set a deadline, and DO it. And in the end when you tick it off the ever so rewarding 'ping' is already enough for a good start in the evening. Done for the day 'ping' 'Ping' 'PING'!! Don't worry be happy Of course we all want to be perfect... It stinks if something goes wrong, but sometimes you just have to let go. The more you stress about things, the harder it gets to shut off and be in the moment you are suppose to be in. You didn't finish writing a proposition at work, your little one was sick, your cat is not potty trained yet? There is nothing you can do about it with pure willpower. Try to leave work at work and personal stuff at home (not including chitchat with co-workers about how great your kid is doing and that she must be a genius ;) My app recommendation: don't use them. Don't check your social apps at work and especially don't use your work apps at home, including your work email! And yes, that is a hard one and I'm not particularly good at it myself, but at least try to reduce it to a bare minimum and be in the moment! Location location location This one is for all the dreamers among us. If you work in a sunny country at the beach while sipping gin tonics, great, but for those of us that work at an office day in day out staring at the rain outside: Break monotony! Take the bike to work, work standing up, take a walk during lunch, change office... anything to switch it up! Ideally you have an employer that encourages that with flexible work time or special lunches. If everything else fails, at least get a new beautiful desktop wallpaper every day with Kuvva. Specially curated from some of the world’s leading photographers, designers & illustrators. If you need any help with balancing the way you learn, don't hesitate to contact us on Twitter or just head to LearningSpaces and get a free trial!

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