Category: Academia

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Yoda: Ana Cristina Pratas – Digital Bridges for Learners

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Liberation Technology
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Digital Bridges for Learners

Ana Cristina Pratas

CristinaSkyBox, 27 September 2012

Although I have always tried to reach out individually to students, whether through their preferred learning style, topics which related to their social environment and interests,  or with activities they enjoyed in class, never has there been a point in time when the emphasis of learning was so learner-centred as now.  With the increasing implementation of mobile tech, learning is revolving around the student: with their iPads, they can work calmly through their iBooks or create their own book with materials which they choose and are relevant to both themselves and their course work.

In turn, this also has implications for the teacher – new roles in the classroom and often new approaches and patterns in teaching. However, with all the freedom of learning, there are hiccups which also occur. How willing are students to (initially) take on the responsibility for their learning, particularly when they have grown up in cultures where rote-learning was customary or where they were comfortable in shifting responsibility of their learning outcomes to teachers?

All freedom demands responsibility and accountability – characteristics which students are not always ready to take on board.

Freedom is also a learning process and bridges need to be built, put in place for both learners and teachers.

Full post and two graphics below the line.

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Yoda: Integrating Arts Into Sciences

04 Education, Academia, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Knights know that the arts–especially music–are essential to developing the creative and innovative impulses of entrepreneurs.  Put more directly:  no arts in education – fewer entrepreneurs.

Lesson Plans and Resources for Arts Integration

Dance in science, pop art in Spanish, or photography in math — there’s no end to the ways arts can be integrated into other curricula. Educators from Bates Middle School, in Annapolis, Maryland, share arts-integrated lessons and resources that you can use in your school.

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Chuck Spinney: USGS Intelligence with Integrity on Climate Change

Academia, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Chuck Spinney

Below is a USGS press release describing some fascinating geological research into the effects of climate change — a huge drought — on the demise of Egypt's Middle Kingdom around 4200 years ago.  This is one extreme climate event occurred well before man contributed significant CO2 to the atmosphere.  It is also a interesting example of how one can meld science with contemporary/historical/archaeological accounts in the human record.  

This research may also be a good object lesson for that subset of paleoclimatologists who are more concerned with erasing the effects of the Medieval Warming Period (~1000 AD when temperatures may well have been as warm or warmer than today) followed by the  Little Ice Age (~1600 AD) from human memory, as a means to prove their theory that current temperature increases are unprecedented  and therefore due to mankind's generation of CO2. [see Tony Brown's marvelous essay, “The Long Slow Thaw”]

Histories, archives, and folklore have many contemporary accounts of events suggesting the existence both the MWP (settling of Greenland, growing grapes in Scotland) and the LIA (River Thames freezing).  The MWP/LIA sequence raises a cyclical possibility and suggests recent temperature increases (since somewhere between 1750 and 1850) may be a normal recovery from the LIA [e.g., see Professor's Akasofu's analysis here].

The stakes  of such an hypothesis are huge, because if the MWP/LIA hypothesis is correct, money spent on adaptation would be a far wiser strategy that a huge, and ultimatly futile effort, to reduce CO2 emissions. [1]  That is one reason why the study described below is important — it is an example of the benefits that arise from melding science and history and archaeology.

[1] Ironically, while the US is one of, if not, the largest CO2 emitters, its emissions have leveled off and show signs of declining according to data compiled by the Energy Information Administration. [source: here] The principle sources of CO2 growth since the mid 1990s are in the developing world, especially China and India, and CO2 growth is directly correlated with improvements in their standards of living (which is still very low by western standards). To get developing countries to cut back CO2 emissions is tantamount to asking them to reduce their future standard of living. [source: here]

Chuck Spinney
Gaeta, Italia

Climate and Drought Lessons from Ancient Egypt: Using Fossil Pollen to Augment Historical Records

Released:8/16/2012 10:00:00 AM

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Berto Jongman: Lisa Stamnitzky on Terrorism Research — Neither Scientific nor Legitimate

Academia, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Berto Jongman

Disciplining an Unruly Field: Terrorism Experts and Theories of Scientific/Intellectual Production

Lisa Stampnitzky

Qual Sociol DOI 10.1007/s11133-010-9187-4

Abstract

“Terrorism” has proved to be a highly problematic object of expertise. Terrorism studies fails to conform to the most common sociological notions of what a field of intellectual production ought to look like, and has been described by participants and observers alike as a failure. Yet the study of terrorism is a booming field, whether measured in terms of funding, publications, or numbers of aspiring experts. This paper aims to explain, first, the disjuncture between terrorism studies in practice and the sociological literature on fields of intellectual production, and, second, the reasons for experts’ “rhetoric of failure” about their field. I suggest that terrorism studies, rather than conforming to the notion of an ideal-typical profession, discipline, or bounded “intellectual field,” instead represents an interstitial space of knowledge production. I further argue that the “rhetoric of failure” can be understood as a strategy through which terrorism researchers mobilize sociological theories of scientific/cultural fields as both an interpretive resource in their attempts to make sense of the apparent oddness of their field and their situation, and as schemas, or models, in their attempts to reshape the field. I conclude that sociologists ought to expand our vision to incorporate the many arenas of expertise that occupy interstitial spaces, moving and travelling between multiple fields.

Keywords Terrorism . Experts . Knowledge . Boundary work

PDF (19 Pages) Terrorism Mob

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Mini-Me: NCAA fines Penn State $60M, vacates wins from 1998-2011

Academia, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Culture, Ethics, Idiocy
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

NCAA fines Penn State $60M, vacates wins from 1998-2011

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) — The NCAA crippled Penn State football for years to come and practically tore Joe Paterno's name out of the record books Monday, erasing 14 years of victories and imposing an unprecedented $60 million fine and other punishment over the child sexual abuse scandal.

“Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people,” NCAA President Mark Emmert declared in announcing the penalties.

The governing body of college sports shredded what was left of the Hall of Fame coach's legacy – the sanctions cost Paterno 111 wins and his standing as the most successful coach in the history of big-time college football – while dealing a severe blow to the university's gold-plated gridiron program.

The NCAA ordered Penn State to sit out the postseason for four years, slashed the number of scholarships it can award and placed football on probation, all of which will make it difficult for the Nittany Lions to compete at the sport's highest level.

Raising the specter of an exodus of athletes, the NCAA said current or incoming football players at Penn State are free to immediately transfer and compete at another school.

For a university that always claimed to hold itself to a higher standard – for decades, Paterno preached “success with honor” – Monday's announcement completed a stunning fall from grace.

Read full article with video and photos.

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David Swanson: Lisa Savage on Why She Heckled Tony Blair

Academia, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
David Swanson

Why I Heckled Tony Blair, War Criminal, at Colby College Graduation

BY LISA SAVAGE

If you woke on a beautiful spring Sunday in May on a pond in Maine, what would you do? A canoe ride on water as smooth as glass, and breakfast on the deck, perhaps — followed by disrupting international war criminal Tony Blair at Colby College graduation in Waterville!

Who knew our protest would lead news coverage of the ceremony? (Washington Post, WGME, Houston Chronicle, and Daily Mail, to name a few.)

With the BLAIR IS A WAR CRIMINAL sign I scrawled hastily in pink lipstick, we approached the back row of the outdoor ceremony where the former British PM, who lied about WMDs in Iraq and has the blood on his hands of thousands of innocent civilians, was to speak.

Before we even made it off the street we were approached by a man from Vermont who said, “Thank you for being here. I was disgusted that Colby would invite such a slimy speaker for graduation this year.” (More of the disgusted were heard from in Op-Ed News and the local newspapers.)

Click on Image to Enlarge

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As we left the campus I saw an acquaintance who works at Colby, in a pretty dress, standing obediently off to one side.

I feel that the passivity and complicity of US citizens in the dirty dealings of NATO and its member nations, blindly paying federal taxes every year to fund the slaughter of innocents, afraid to protest, afraid to rock the boat for fear of job loss or being seen as impolite, is actually the biggest threat to global security.

And that's why, as my compatriots were protesting the disgusting spectacle of the NATO summit in Chicago this weekend, I disrupted Colby College's graduation ceremony.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  The unasked questions pertain to the judgment and moral vacuum of the university leadership that invited Blair in the first place, and the empty heads of the graduates that did not think to question the invitation.  We are running short of good people with both intelligence and integrity.  Evil is assuredly in the ascent.