Life With Alacrity

A blog on social software, collaboration, trust, security, privacy, and internet tools by Christopher Allen.

Tag: bgiedu

Dyads & Triads — The Smallest Teams

(by Christopher Allen with Elyn Andersson and Shannon Appelcline) Two years ago, the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (www.BGI.edu) faculty gathered to radically reinvent their sustainable business curriculum for the next decade. Our goal was not only to update course content, but also to significantly update how the material was taught. We wished to make our teaching process (our pedagogy) more interactive and also more effective for students graduating into a 21st-century work environment, where people increasingly work in teams-both online and offline.

BGIedu Students Post for Blog Action Day on Food

Today is Blog Action Day, where each year a topic is chosen and bloggers and activists worldwide write about that topic in their blogs or post about it on Twitter and Facebook using the tags #FOOD and #BAD11. This year's topic is Food, and this year many of my students of my BGIedu class Using the Social Web for Social Change are using the day to help kick off their "Beat Blog" assignments.

Blog Action Day on Climate Change

Late this evening while catching up on my feeds, I saw for the first time that this year's Blog Action Day is on the topic of Climate Change. This event is sponsored yearly by Change.org. I wish I had known earlier as this would have been a great exercise for my sustainable MBA students at BGI.edu, as they are all creating their blogs this week for my class "Using the Social Web for Social Change".

Facilitating Small Gatherings Using “The Braid”

I was musing as I was preparing for next week's Intensive at BGI that I have 21 students in my class, an uncomfortable size. That's because it lies between a smaller size where good conversations naturally occur, and a larger size where you can take full advantage of different activities that work well for larger groups. I talk about this a bit in my Group Threshold and Dunbar Number posts, where I call the group threshold size of between 10 and 24 people the “Judas Number” nadir, or low point.

Teaching “Using the Social Web for Social Change” at BGI.edu

Starting next week I will be teaching a course at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute on the topic of "Using the Social Web for Social Change". BGI offers an MBA and Certificate program for professionals to learn how to build enterprises that are financially successful, socially responsible and environmentally sustainable. Students have to learn everything that they'd have to learn in an ordinary MBA program — profit and loss, how to read a balance sheet, business plan creation, macroeconomics, quantitative analysis, corporate strategy, how to manage and motivate people, and a basic understanding of all the components of business such as operations, marketing, distribution, sales, etc.