You probably know that I blog several times a week on the www.hastac.org site as “Cat in the Stack.” I co-founded  HASTAC (“haystack”) in 2002, and it has grown from an idea to a network of nearly 5000 individuals and a hundred institutions dedicated to new ways of learning, working, and thinking together in the digital age. I’m very proud of HASTAC but, at the same time, as Founding Mother, I have to maintain a modicum of decorum there.

Now . . . on my own author blog?   I have license if not to kill, certainly to make a joke or two, to tell a story, to compile interesting stories from the worlds of education and business and science and pass them on to my readers, all related to my new book, coming out next summer from Viking Press, called Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Change Our Schools, Workplaces, and Everything Else.   My chief conviction is that we’re doing a great job educating our kids for the twentieth-century.  Most of us also still go to work each day pretty much the way our grandparents did—even though virtually everything about the arrangements of work and home, labor and leisure, have changed drastically in the last 15 years.  We think we know what “school” and “work” are, but actually we only know how learning and labor have been organized for the Industrial Age.  I’m determined to help change that.   Institutions help us through times of change, or they hinder us.  I’m hoping to pitch in on the “helping” side of that equation, and, for Now You See It, I’ve spent time with incredible teachers and managers and workers and great people, old and young, who can help us to figure out this new digital world together.