Monthly Archives: August 2008

At some point in your surfing escapades you begin to grasp that the profound impact of the internet on learning is not its vast stores of content, but its ability to support the various facets of social learning. You begin to appreciate that knowledge is not just a lump of something that is passed on via various pedagogical tactics, and your attention begins to shift from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interventions around which that content is situated. John Seely Brown identifies this as a shift from "learning about" to "learning to be." And "learning to be" calls for interpersonal skills not easily acquired by textbook learning. It's in this context I found myself reading back issues of In Character, which examines virtues within our communities our families and ourselves. The current issue delves into compassion; this observation from Howard Behar who emphasizes compassion as a vital component of acquiring personal leadership skills caught my attention:

People are not assets. Caring isn’t just about admiring the charismatic leaders, the people that everybody likes, or the in crowd. This is the big caring we do that shows we “care, like we really mean it.” It’s about words and actions that everybody sees and recognizes. There’s an old adage that says, “People don’t care how much you know, they want to know how much you care.”