As I was preparing another bulletin for you, I stumbled on a very remarkable initiative — a global curriculum reform movement — that I want to share right away. It seems a revolution is brewing in some parts of mainstream higher education. Here is a significant piece:
A “Science Daily” article “Higher Education Curricula Not Keeping Pace With Societal, Tech Changes” describes this “global movement to abolish the archaic disciplinary isolation and static teaching practices of the 19th and 20th centuries, and replace them with pedagogy that addresses the complexity and diversity of perspective of a global community in the 21st century.”
The epicenter of this movement is Curriculum Reform. A group of academics — from college students to university presidents — have created a Manifesto (see below) that has so far been endorsed by two universities in Europe and one in the U.S (Arizona State University, Jacobs University Bremen, and Leuphana Universität Lüneburg). These universities are now testing specific curricula based on the Manifesto's principles.
I am extremely impressed with the principles these academic innovators have come up with. More information is available at their website, including some excellent comments following the Manifesto itself.
If you are concerned about education and the state of the world, take a look, and spread the word…
Coheartedly,
Tom
Phi Beta Iota: Tom Atlee is the minister-mentor to all of us who strive to achieve collective intelligence and evolutionary consciousness. We urge support for his very personal commitment to his calling.
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It's getting to be a recurring problem: jellyfish clogging the water flow that power plants need in order to run. In Scotland less than two weeks ago, they impacted the water intake for cooling at the Torness nuclear power plant. The latest incident is in Israel, where the city of Hadera was left without electricity when the power station's cooling system was flooded with jellyfish.
Australia's The Age reports that at the Orot Rabin Electric Power Station, which uses seawater to cool its reactors, tons of jellyfish clogged the filters.
Phi Beta Iota: Note the word “tons.” Tons of jellyfish. This is an example of self-sustaining replicable bio-scale that cannot be matched by preventive measures, even in those rare instances when forethought is present. Geo-Engineering is a nice concept, but not for a population that is intellectually challenged, lacking the integrity of Buckminster Fuller and Russell Ackoff, to name just two broad minds.
Phi Beta Iota: This really excellent article is highly recommended along with a look at the only book in English out just now, Geo-Engineering Climate Change: Environmental Necessity or Pandora's Box?. The fragmentation of knowledge, the corruption of governments and industry, and the abuse of secrecy to conceal the real dimensions of earthquake and tsunami creating technologies–High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program or HAARP being one set–all suggest that precautionary science has been set aside, and catastrophic initiatives are being undertaken on a foundation of very inadequate understanding. This is the kind of global challenge and response that should be within the purview of a Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) Centre that can be relied upon to produce “The Virgin Truth.”
It is so good to celebrate INdependence Days in the United States and the many other countries that have successfully gained and defended their independence from colonial rule.
For countries as well as individuals, independence is a dramatic move from dependence into a more self-defined, self-created life.
The next developmental step takes us into greater INTERdependence – bringing ourselves into increasingly mutual, peer, give-and-take relationships with others.
(Reuters) – Thrown by a mounting series of extreme events over the past four years, global policymakers and investors are being urged to think long and prepare more systematically for the worst.
. . . . . . .
Part of the problem today is that the latest wave of globalization was led solely by transnational corporations and their interwoven supply chains and by financial markets' 24/7 worldwide blizzard of electronic transactions.
While this greatly facilitated the transmission of shocks worldwide, it was not matched by countervailing global governance and regulation to keep this activity in check or mitigate its most socially- or systemically-threatening aspects.
More information on the OECD’s Future Global Shocks project is available at: www.oecd.org/futures, including case studies on cyber attacks, pandemics, geomagnetic storms, social unrest and financial crises.
