IF celebrated its 30th birthday on September 21st by hosting eleven roundtable discussions about the future of public discourse at the Newseum in Washington DC. The roundtables were organized in partnership with the Newseum Institute and facilitated by eight IF...

Residents of Merrill, Wisconsin are continuing to talk with, and listen to, and increasingly work with each other. As described in our prior April blog post about the “Building Merrill Together” discussion program, these growing citizen-based activities in Merrill...

By Timothy Shaffer, Ph.D. Last week I was presenting to two groups of the Sunflower Foundation’s Advocacy Fellows program here in Kansas in Wichita and Topeka. We had great groups filled with people really interested in learning more about civil discourse and...

What’s the future of public discussion in this time of political polarization, harsh rhetoric, fake news, and spin? What policy possibilities might help revitalize it? And what actions might we take to implement them? The Interactivity Foundation will celebrate its...

One of the most interesting parts of my involvement in the University of Wisconsin Extension’s ThinkWater School has been the opportunity to observe the workings of a system’s engineering approach that accounts for the need for conceptual thinking as a...

The Justice Department has just announced that it plans to start suing universities who give any sort of priority admission to “minority students” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/us/politics/trump-affirmative-action-universities.html).  One concern that came up...

This July IF joined forces with Ballotpedia and USATalk to conduct a series of citizen discussions on the future of the Des Moines, Iowa, public schools.  The aim: enhance voter understanding of school board candidates' stands on the issues as identified by voters...

Since February of 2017, IF has been working with a technology startup to develop an online civic discussion platform that will be known as USATalk.  The goal is to encourage civic discussion in the online environment, an arena in serious need of more thoughtful...

This summer we launched IF’s Learning Circles for Faculty, a series of an hour-long small group online discussions about IF’s teaching method and student-centered classroom discussions courses in general. We invited faculty members who have used or would like to...