04 Education – Page 29 – Public Intelligence Blog

What Can Plato Teach Me That I Can't Find on Wikipedia?

What's the Big Idea?

David Honan

BigThink, 20 November 2011

Do we really need to read the classics in the age of Wikipedia? Aren't these books just historical artifacts or a bunch of pretentious fodder for cocktail party conversation? According to Jeffrey Brenzel, Philosopher and Dean of Undergraduate Admissions at Yale University, the classics will not only enhance your education, but help you live better.

So how do we decide which books qualify? This is, after all, one of the most controversial subjects in academia. In his Floating University lecture Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Essential Value of a Classic Education, Brenzel presents five “rough and ready criteria” for identifying a classic of literature or philosophy or politics. While Brenzel notes that no one or two of these criteria are going to be decisive, he presents them all together as a useful tool. He lists the criteria as follows:

1. A classic addresses permanent concerns about the human condition.
“From a philosophical perspective it has something to say about the way we should live. From a literary perspective, it has something to say about imagining the possibilities for how we could live and from a historical perspective it tells us how we have lived.”

2. A classic has been a game-changer.
“It has created profound shifts in perspective and not only for its earliest readers, but for all the readers who came later as well.”

3. A classic has stimulated or influenced many other important works.
The work has impacted other important works, either directly or indirectly.

4. A classic has received critical acclaim.
Even if they violently disagreed with the work, “many generations of the best readers and the most expert critics have rated the work highly” and one of the best or most important of its kind.

5. A classic requires strenuous intellectual engagement.
Beach reading doesn't qualify. Brenzel says a classic usually requires “a strenuous effort to engage and understand, but it also rewards the hard work strongly and in multiple fashions.”

Watch video, learn more.

2011/11/27

John Steiner: Barefoot College in India

03 India, 04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society

In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men —
many of them illiterate — to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and
doctors in their own villages (and it trains children). It's called the
Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works.

Please click here <http://www.sadroo.com/0089.php> to watch the video

Tip of the Hat to Dennis Bumstead.

2011/11/202011/11/20

DefDog: Law Schools Not Teaching How to Lawyer

04 Education, Academia, Cultural Intelligence

This just doesn't apply to lawyers, but most college grads are ill
prepared to enter the work force….

What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering

DAVID SEGAL

New York Times, November 19, 2011

EXTRACT:

What they did not get, for all that time and money, was much practical training. Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”

So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job. But the downturn in the economy, and long-running efforts to rethink legal fees, have prompted more and more of those clients to send a simple message to law firms: Teach new hires on your own dime.

“The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,” says Jeffrey W. Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, a Houston company that makes oil drilling equipment. “They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The entire US educational system is hosed. From college students who graduate with no more capability than high school graduates to half century ago, to “professional” degrees that do not teach how to “do” only how to take tests, the disconnect from reality is huge. While some intelligence studies have emerged, after the pioneering effort of Mercyhurst under Bob Heibel, they do not actually teach the craft of intelligence or how to do holistic analytics or create workable open source information technology support packages — they simply prepare rounded cogs for the secret intelligence world.

See Also:

Education (General) (128)

Education (Universities) (58)

2011/11/132011/11/13

Howard Rheingold: Crap Detection & Critical Thinking

04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Movies

YouTube Library

Howard Rheingold on essential media literacies [6:09]

Howard Rheingold on Crap Detection (Part 1) [9:59]

Creating a Critical Society – Howard Rheingold on Crap Detection (Part 2) [4:49]

Determining Site Credibility – Howard Rheingold on Crap Detection (Part 3)

TED: Howard Rheingold: The new power of collaboration (19:34)

Selected Books on Thinking by Howard Rheingold

Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (Forthcoming March 2012)

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002)

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (1986)

Howard Rheingold Short Pieces

Howard Rheingold: 10 Online Tools for Better Focus

Howard Rheingold: Mindfulness for Executives

Howard Rheingold: Finding Credible Social Information & Crap Detection

Howard Rheinigold: Cultivating a Personal Learning Network

Howard Rheingold: News Filters for the Future – Technical Services or Human Networks?

Howard Rheingold: Infotention Skills + Citizen Intel RECAP

Worth a Look: Pierre Levy Interviewed by Howard Rheingold on Collective Intelligence

A slice of life in my virtual community

Rheingold at OSS ’92

Below the Line: Full Text Article and More Links

Continue reading “Howard Rheingold: Crap Detection & Critical Thinking”

2011/10/142011/10/17

Mini-Me: Army of Unemployed Persistent Structural Issue

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 04 Education, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, DoD, Ethics, Government, Legislation, Methods & Process, Military, Policy, Reform

Army of unemployed is now entrenched in U.S.

Commentary: Structural woes in economy creating ‘permanent underclass’

Howard Gold

Wall Street Journal, 14 October 2011

The public knew this much earlier than economists or pundits did, and as for politicians — don’t ask!

. . . . .

Listen to Charles Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, in a speech a couple of weeks ago.

“These numbers are troubling, especially when more than 40% of the unemployed, or some six million people, have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer,” he said.

“Millions of unemployed workers may take longer to find jobs because their skills have depreciated or they may need to seek employment in other sectors. These structural issues will take time to resolve. Jobs and workers will need to be reallocated across the economy, which is a long and slow process.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is in grid-lock, with 1950's mind-sets, 1970's technologies, and 1990's spendthrift ways–in other words, it is completely out of touch with reality and has no idea how to cope with the need to retrain a quarter of the population across all age groups in a year or two. Hint: bail out the public, not the banks and certainly not the multiple complexes of corruption. Start by using military to ingest the entire unemployed population into receiving and retraining centers with full salary for each individual committing to retraining.

2011/09/262011/09/26

Event: NYC Oct 10-16, MobilityShifts – An International Future of Learning Summit

04 Education, Technologies

Mobilityshifts.org

Digital Fluencies for a Mobile World

What are new pedagogic approaches for learning with mobile platforms? What are the limitations of the “digital literacies” paradigm and its first world/third world assumptions?

How do we promulgate digital fluency as an understanding of the particular features of global information flows in which data, attention, capital, and reputation might move both to and from individual actors and communities?

How can mobile media platforms be used for more than the one-way delivery of content? What are new pedagogical approaches for real-time mobile learning that make full use of the potential of mobile phones, iPods, laptops, PDAs, smart phones, Tablet PCs, and netbooks in formal and informal contexts? How can global participants use mobile media to create rich social contexts around important learning tasks? How can such platforms be leveraged to teach digital rights and the value of collaboration across cultures?

How can we dispel the myth of the digital native?

How can mobile networks reshape our experiences of space and place through interactive architecture, locative art, geo-caching games, and real-time object recognition? What opportunities for networked teaching and learning might we find in such media-rich, responsive environments?

Workshop schedule

2011/09/21

Marcus Aurelius: US Intelligence Still Ignorant in Languages

04 Education, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Officers Call

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

Nothing changes….

US spy agencies ‘struggle with post-9/11 languages'

Despite intense focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East in the last decade, U.S. spy agencies are still lacking in language skills needed to talk to locals, translate intercepted intelligence and analyse data, according to top intelligence officials.

Telegraph, 20 September 2011

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted a major push for foreign language skills to track militants and trends in parts of the world that were not a Cold War priority.

But intelligence agencies have had to face the reality that the languages they need cannot be taught quickly, the street slang U.S. operatives and analysts require is not easy, and security concerns make the clearance process lengthy.

As recently as 2008 and 2009, intelligence officials were still issuing new directives and programs in the hopes of ramping up language capability.

“Language will continue to be a challenge for us,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a congressional hearing last week.

“It's something we're working at, and will continue to do so, but we're probably not where we want to be,” he said.

Phi Beta Iota: Languages are not hard–what is hard is the “leadership” culture incapable of leading. US citizens by birth are never going to learn foreign languages as needed. There are just TWO solutions, both executable today, all it takes is integrity at the top, long missing:

1. Exempt case officers and others “on the street” from the idiotic security clearance requirements. Hire to qualifications and manage to risk. This includes restoration of the “principle agent” category as well as the third-country subject-matter expert category. They never see secrets, they just do what they do, very well.

2. Adopt the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) model of regional field stations in which multinational cadres of case officers and analysts are supported by US money and US technology. Again, they never see secrets and are firewalled during active ops.

See Also:

Graphic: Language Basics

Graphic: OSINT Multinational Outreach Network

Graphic: OSINT, We Went Wrong, Leaping Forward

Journal: Secret World Still Short on All Languages

Journal: Military says linguists can’t keep up in Afghanistan