Over the past few months we have attended three
exciting sustainability conferences that we’d like to share with you: the SIOP
Leading Edge Consortium (LEC), Environmental
Sustainability at Work: Advancing Research, Enhancing Practice; the
Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE);
and Behavior, Energy and Climate Change (BECC). These were packed with sessions
that merit reporting, but we will limit ourselves to 1 highlight per conference
– we’ve included links below to their programs, should you want to peruse them
for more detail. This is a rather long blog – it’s been a busy few months!
More than a thousand lost their lives during the massive flooding
brought about by Typhoon Sendong – the tropical storm that hit the Philippine
cities of Cagayan de Oro (CDO) and Iligan in 2011. It was a few days before
Christmas when the news of Sendong reached those of us living in Manila. With
it came web and TV footage of all forms of suffering imaginable.
Social Scientists Wade Into the Tweet
Stream, an
articlein the September 30, 2011
issue of Science, is
a stimulating read (subscription required. Republished by University of Vermont here). The author shared recent studies that mined Twitter data for
insights into human behavior.
Peter
Dodds and colleagues from the University of Vermont, for
example, applied a novel method to analyze years of tweets from around the
world. The Twitter data suggest a global decay in mood, a decrease in “average
happiness” level, which they determined by comparing the relative usage of common words associated with positive or negative
moods. Their results indicate that the world is not as happy today as it
was in 2009!
In my last 2 posts here and here, I introduced how discussion boards can be used in the classroom
and reviewed some of their advantages.
Now, let’s move on to their disadvantages.
Disadvantage
#1: It’s not REALLY a discussion
Here are some sample
responses from a discussion board where I asked students to define “job success” (click for full image):
This gathering will provide a terrific
opportunity for researchers and practitioners to dialogue about the current
state of research and practice in I-O involvement in supporting/promoting
environmental sustainability initiatives within organizations, and lay the
foundation for meaningful advancements. The small group size and access to
expertise are particularly enticing aspects offered by the LEC!
The news stories in this column have been gathered through the use of a Google News Feed. They are neither filtered nor endorsed by SIOP but aggregated automatically using specific search terms.
