Shaping Network Society

Larry Rohter writes about Mexico and the US in the New York Times today,

Today, like it or not, the two countries are bound together inextricably in ways that would have been unthinkable during my time here. There is an old expression here, originally applied to economics and trade, that says “when the United States sneezes, Mexico catches cold.” The events of the last month suggest that the reverse may also be literally true. Or, as Jorge Castañeda, a former foreign minister who now teaches at New York University, put it: When it comes to living together, “Mexico has no choice, and Washington has no choice, period.”

This seems a fairly obvious point. However, it is underappreciated in policy circles of both countries. Mexican and US policy makers need to push their historical pet grievances to the side, spend more time studying the integration of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other Central and Eastern European countries into the European Union to figure out, how to move foreward. What is really needed to make this possible?

Alberto Bustani, the rector of the campus Monterrey of Tec de Monterrey (full disclosure: he is a facebook friend of mine and I was/am Tec faculty) has just posted on his facebook profile a professionally produced video, where in front of the mural of the Tec rectoria he introduces one of my Tec colleagues from the medicine faculty, who discusses the pandemic and offers advice to the students. After less than 24 hours, it has been seen several hundred times, 126 have “liked” the video and 20 people have commented.

Also on his profile he announced that classes were suspended, however, that the exams would take place in early May. A lively discussion developed on what to do about the knowledge the content that the students were not able to learn, because of the missed classes.

Early last year, when he had hit the magic 5000 friends mark, he started a fan-page, and asked us to un-befriend him, but of course nobody did.

….Think about, what a powerful leadership tool social media has become in the last 24 months, imagine how much we need to learn about holding socially mediated leaders accountable, imagine what types of knowledge platforms we can can create, when we start to re-think the university, and imagine what we can do for life-long-learning. Let us take this seriously.