Games based learning is one of the most important strategies for 21st Century education. We have enjoyed playing games since time immemorial, and video arcade games such as Asteroids and Space Invaders of the 1970's were just the start of the emergence of digital games. Recently, with the development of handheld controls (such as the Nintendo Wii), 3D screens (Nintendo 3DS) and non touch gestural and voice controls (Microsoft's XBox 360 Kinect) games have become increasingly captivating, and have an immersive quality. Games, whether digital or analogue, have the capability to motivate learners, challenge them to improve their dexterity, problem solving and reasoning skills, encourage teamwork and collaboration (Nemerow, 1996) – especially social games such as World of Warcraft or Call of Duty – and performance is under constant peer review. These match some of the key skills required to succeed in the world of work where digital technology is prevalent. Thiagarajan (1998) believes that games have five major characteristics that are important for learning, These are conflict, control, closure, contrivance, and competency. Clearly, digital games have a great deal to offer the future of learning. So what can we expect of games based learning in the future?
Phi Beta Iota: We continue to believe that Medard Gabel's EarthGame, combined with digital true cost information for every good, service, and behavior, is the foundation for the next big leap that integrates education, intelligence, and research.
While WebRTC is a protocol that allows direct communication between individuals on the internet, using their browser, there is a bottleneck that needs to be resolved. WebRTC does not have a “signaling protocol”, which allows the initial contact, the “handshake” between two computers, to be performed without the assistance of a dedicated server. The trouble is that firewalls are preventing that initial communication from happening. They close your computer within a space that others, on the outside, cannot penetrate. Now there is some important work in progress to establish an open peer-to-peer signaling protocol that will overcome the handshake bottleneck.
Open Peer is peer-to-peer signalling protocol taking advantages of the IETF advances of firewall penetration techniques for moving media and adds a layer to performs the media signalling in a peer-to-peer fashion but does expect that a minimal requirement of rendezvous servers existing. Beyond the initial rendezvous to get past firewalls, the servers should drop out of the protocol flow and are no longer required. Open Peer was designed with these main goals in mind. There is also a reference here to a previous article about WebRTC
President Obama's declared goal of making his “the most transparent Administration in history” generated successive waves of enthusiasm, perplexity, frustration, and mockery as public expectations of increased openness and accountability were lifted sky high and then — often, not always — thwarted.
Every Administration including this one presides over the release of more government information than did its predecessors, if only because more information is created with the passage of time and there is more that can be released. But President Obama seemed to promise more than this. What was it?
Part of the problem is definitional.
“Although there are laws that affect access to government information, there is no single definition for what constitutes transparency– nor is there an agreed upon way to measure it,” observes a new report from the Congressional Research Service.
Make no mistake — the PSC industry in Afghanistan is enormously powerful, having grown from nothing to immense in a decade of war that the invaders wanted to wage with as few uniformed troops as possible. As in Iraq, they are linked to a privatized model of military and development contracting in a highly insecure post-invasion environment.
While it’s only one among many factors bedeviling Afghanistan, its substantial private-security contracting industry warrants attention. It’s made up of tens of thousands of Afghan employees, mostly armed guards.
Bear in mind that 2014 is the deadline for Afghanistan assuming responsibility for its own security. This is a date the whole world has an interest in because either Afghanistan will be a more or less stable country — or it will lapse back into the chaotic and destabilized state it was after the Soviets left in 1989.
I supported the all-volunteer force but I now recognize the wisdom of General Matthew Ridgeway–he warned against relying on all volunteer force.. In combination with a battlefield full of unaccountable contractors — and a military no longer able to go to war without contractors — the failures of our generals are part of a larger picture. Fiasco was the better book, Generalsdoes not cut to the core, the terrible price paid by our youth, with 18 suicides a day among veterans returned home being a strong signal that we have been terribly irresponsible in our training, equipping, and organizing of the US military.
Requiem for the All-Volunteer Force
GI Joe is broken, and is about to be thrown away. Built to be a Transformer; we’ve made him now: an employee.
The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) was America’s gift to itself. It was conceived in the belief that the values of American culture would create the sacrificial willingness on the part of enough of its young to satisfy the requirements of the American People for their defense. Our young people’s willingness to step forward to personal jeopardy consummated their gift to us: their actual sacrifice in nine years of horrific conflict and foreign occupation on our behalf consummated the American Peoples’ obligation to their restoration to full and productive citizenship.
Experience and reason dictate the conclusion that Americans have failed and will continue to fail their restorative obligation to our newest veterans. This is a failure of momentous consequence for the Country. It is the result of the American People’s acquiescence to the moral failures of a generation of its political and military leadership.
In the nearly 40 years of its existence the All-Volunteer Force has been transformed from inchoate policy, to the most robust and successful defense structure the world has known, to a negative influence on the interests of the American people as a wasteland for its young. Those who ostensibly knew American Defense interests best and had the most power to affect its course set in place the preconditions for this debacle during the Administration of George H.W. Bush. Richard Cheney and Colin Powell were is architects, but many have been complicit
How did this happen?
The successful promise and execution of the AVF was built on the values of the generation of which Ronald Reagan was representative. Those values were founded on the unassailable fact that our military is based on our people, and that our people cannot succeed unless supported with cohesive structure, honorable function and ethical integrity. From those values flowed the belief and policy that the AVF was to be an institution designed not only for the betterment of our volunteers in and for the military, but also for the betterment our society through him or her. Those values and policies were systematically abandoned or corrupted by our political-military leadership since the end of the Cold War. A broken AVF and a broken generation of our most valuable young citizens is the result.
Structure is about how something is put together: its size, its hierarchy, and the interrelationship of its parts. The Reagan generation understood and valued institutional integrity in public and private life, in peace and war. Our Military structures are now in shambles.
Logistics, the most justly celebrated sustainment structure of the American military, is now a contract function for companies flipped on Wall Street along side Waste Management and Burger King. As a result, we now have a military that cannot feed itself in the field or in garrison. It is an Army that cannot maintain or move its equipment; that has marginal capacity to protect itself, or to gather tactical intelligence. This is the sustainment structure that failed our volunteers for the past nine years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Function is about the goals of an institution and whether its mission is understood, accepted, and supported. The Reagan generation understood the scourge of war, the value in its deterrence, and the requirements for the successful societal reintegration of those who sacrificed in fighting if necessary. The post cold war generation of leaders turned our historical commitment to deterrence, or necessary national commitment to rapid victory on its head. We are now a nation willing to commit the honor and bodies of our volunteers to undeclared perpetual imperial wars of occupation; in the Orwellian language of our military industrial intelligencia, to “Sustainable Pre-eminence.”
Ethics concern the manner, in which an institution conducts itself, how it is used, and what image it has of itself. The Reagan generation understood the value and primacy of rule of law, of professionalism and of human life. To that generation, meaning was derived from the pledges of the Atlantic Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the fundamental quest for fairness embodied in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the openness which permitted the heroism of Mauldins, Pyles, and Murrows. Our generation of political military leadership sent our volunteers to Iraq in an undeclared war, unready in training and rationale for occupation, and, for eight years, turned the nation’s back on their ultimate sacrifice.
Americans and their political military leadership will turn their backs on our veterans because they turned their backs on them as volunteers. The broken structures, functions and ethics at the heart of the All-Voluntary Force have obliterated the connection between the soldier and the citizens he sacrificed to represent. Ours is now a Contract Force and our ‘volunteers’ contract-employees. Our volunteers, as “veterans,” continue to die: of broken hearts.
Based on notes from a talk at Ingleside at Rock Creek, June 25, 2012 entitled: “The Defeat of Reagan’s Army.”
Phi Beta Iota: The all-volunteer force disconnected society from the military and allowed unethical and even unprofessional generals and admirals, in collusion with corrupt legislators, corrupt corporate chieftains, and ideologically driven presidents and vice presidents, to sacrifice our blood treasure and spirit precisely because of this disconnect. The all-volunteer force assumed that Washington has intelligence and integrity. Not so. Indeed, this resurfaces the entire concept of ending the election of politicians, and instead adopting the lot system — Members should be like jurors, selected at random and given strict term limits.
The Millennium Project was founded in 1996 after a three-year feasibility study with the United Nations University, Smithsonian Institution, Futures Group International, and the American Council for the UNU. It is now an independent non-profit global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgments from over 2,500 people since the beginning of the project selected by its 40 Nodes around the world. The work is distilled in its annual “State of the Future”, “Futures Research Methodology” series, and special studies.
Attached is an abstract for a talk given today in Vienna, Austria, for the Heinz von Foerster Society. This Society, which has become a leading center for cybernetics research in Europe, celebrates the work of Heinz von Foester, who was born in Vienna and taught for many years at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The abstract is in German and English.
A Constructivist University: Farewell to the Paukmaschine*
Heinz von Foerster Society
Tuesday 13 November 2012, 18:30
Lecture Hall 21, University of Vienna
1010 Vienna, Austria
How can creativity be at home in a perfect imaginary university? How can one conduct seminars and lectures, and in the cafeteria have enthusiastic and joyful play, which is the origin of new knowledge? Bernhard Pörksen, media professor at the University of Tübingen, recalls in his presentation the ideas and approaches to learning of the physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster. Its central thesis is that the constructivist insight leads to a variety of worlds and realities that can be used in university teaching to support intellectual curiosity, fascination and cooperative thinking. Constructivism inspires us to reduce blocking hierarchies of knowledge and encourages a dialogue-based learning. However, the aim of the ongoing Bologna reform among European universities, Poerksen says, takes us in a different direction. It relies on standardization of the learning process, not on personalization. It requires ready-made answers, not open questions, and provides no time for diversions for thinking and confrontations with the unknown and uncertain.
A Constructivist University: Farewell to the Paukmaschine*