The GoodWork™ Project is a large scale effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work – work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners – and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society.
Everyone is talking about the opportunities and risks of new digital media, especially for young people. Research suggests that young people often lack mentorship in their online lives, especially from adults who are savvy about the ways of the web and can offer them guidance into what it would mean to take an ethical course through their digital lives. Many young people want to do the “right thing” online, even as they are confronted with a range of dilemmas, but may need some help identifying good courses of action.
In an effort to address this gap, researchers at Harvard, MIT and USC spent three years developing a casebook of curricular materials called, Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World. Read More →
[HEFFNER:] Of course, I realized as I read this quite compelling attack on determinism – with its insistence that “Human agency matters enormously” – that today I must first ask my friend whether his new book isn’t in a most fundamental sense a sort of would-be antidote to the despair he and his colleagues in Harvard’s famous “GoodWork Project” must have felt in their discoveries about what really motivates so many of today’s professional workers. Fair … or not, Howard? Read More →
GoodWork is one of the core themes of an upcoming conference hosted by CASIE, Harvard Project Zero, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Title: Educating for Today and Tomorrow: Perspectives and Practices from Project Zero
Dates: April 8-9
Place: New York, New York
Website: http://www.casieonline.org/pz/
What’s Your Calling? explores notions of “calling” from both religious and secular perspectives. It pushes “calling” to explore all of the stuff that makes us human: our values, our passions, our doubts and hopes. Profiling individuals from diverse backgrounds–professional snowboarders, jazz musicians, tug boat captains, academics, improvisers, Muay Thai fighters, religious leaders, social workers, environmental activists, toy inventors–What’s Your Calling? shares what people have been called to do with their lives and how they hope to change the world. What’s Your Calling? is inspired by the PBS miniseries, The Calling.
Based on a set of three lectures given by Howard Gardner at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this book discusses the challenges faced by traditional education in light of two forces: the post modern critique from the humanities and the disruptive potentials of the new digital media. Gardner describes how the core ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness can survive and even be strengthened in education across the life span.
This past summer, Wendy and I reworked the GoodWork Toolkit. Conceived in 2004, piloted and tested for several years afterwards, from what colleagues and teachers told us, the materials were in good shape. But we had lots of ideas, new narratives, and wanted to devote some thinking to the design and structure of our work. We’re very excited by the result – and hope you will be too.
The GoodWork Toolkit now consists of three different components: A Guidebook, a book of Narratives, and a set of Value Sort Cards. The Guidebook is a resource manual that includes narratives, activities, introductory materials that explain our theoretical framework and guiding questions to help teachers bring good work to life in the classroom. The Narrative volume consists of just the GW stories, to be used as a text for classroom use or in a professional development setting. The Value Sort Cards are a hand-held version of the online sort available on this website. Over the years, Wendy and I have witnessed hundreds of people do this value sort. In our own course at Harvard, in high schools, and in many other settings, we’re always impressed with how much reflection is involved with this activity, and with how much enjoyment individuals derive from thinking through what they value.
The new “Meeting of the Minds” report, by Global Kids, CommonSense Media, and the GoodPlay Project, finds that young people need guidance from adults in navigating ethical
issues of online behavior.
From the MacArthur Foundation site announcement (12.3.09): “The report, “Meeting of the Minds,” (PDF) is the result of a series of cross-generational online dialogues about digital ethics involving more than 250 adults and teens around the world. Participants discussed how to behave in a digital world, from illegal downloading and the creativity associated with remixing, to the factors that go into deciding whether to meet an onlineconnection face-to-face”.
