getAbstract, Inc. CEO, Michel Koopman recently published an article on HowToLearn.com, a website that helps k-12, college and adult learners as well as the trainers, tutors and teachers that facilitate the learning. He shared the value in considering multiple approaches throughout your learning journey by integrating all three modes of development, including: formal training, coaching and informal learning.

Click here to read the full article.

Rodney King, the figure at the center of the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, has died in an apparent drowning. In 1991, King was pulled over by police for speeding. Four LAPD officers proceeded to attack an unarmed King, kicking him, hitting him with their wooden batons and shooting him with their stun guns. The attack left King with brain damage. A passerby filmed the incident and released the now infamous footage. Despite the video evidence against them, the police officers involved in the attack were acquitted of any wrongdoing in 1992, which subsequently led to days of rioting on the streets of LA, leaving 54 people dead and more than two thousand people injured, and leading to $1 billion of damage to the city.

The attack on King was not an isolated case, but the film offered incontestable evidence for the first time of the LAPD’s brutality against the city’s black community. The incident highlighted that America still had a long road to travel before it achieved civil rights for all. It triggered an overhaul of the LAPD and generated a national debate on race issues.

America has come a long way since the King trial, but discrimination – if more covert – still exists. To understand racial prejudice and wipe it out of your organization, take a look at these titles:

Black Faces in White Places

The Cultural Intelligence Difference

Making Diversity Work

Science fiction and fantasy master Ray Bradbury died Tuesday, June 5, in Los Angeles, but his visions of the future will keep him ever alive in the minds and libraries of his fans. The settings for his fantasies ranged from Mars in The Martian Chronicles to someplace just a block or two from your house in his story collections, notably Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury often used storytelling to reveal the impact of some semimagical hidden side of the human character. Just read I Sing the Body Electric and you’ll understand. Or to see tattooing in a very different way, read The Illustrated Man.

Bradbury’s compelling portrait of a book-banning, book-burning society in Fahrenheit 451 is an engrossing warning against totalitarianism, marked by the loss of autonomy and privacy. It ends with the indelible image of ordinary book lovers hiding in the woods, fugitives from a society where the firefighters are black-booted officers who burn secret libraries full of hidden books. Each person in the forest refuge is responsible for committing one book to memory and teaching it to someone else. If you want an impassioned evening with your friends, just start a conversation about which book each of you would take to Bradbury’s forest of furtive readers.

Fahrenheit 451, which Bradbury wrote in 1953, imagined a home where life centered on a pervasive, wall-sized screen. His obituary in USA Today notes that the book also foresaw “iPods, interactive television, electronic surveillance and live, sensationalized media events, including televised police pursuits.” So perhaps it is appropriate to honor Ray Bradbury, the unbeatable storyteller of a vivid imaginary future, by taking a look at some books about the future’s potential, from Mars to the ways climate, business and science could evolve:

The Case for Mars

Physics of the Future

The New North: Our World in 2050