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The Military Industrial Complex

szanne — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:15:42 +0000

It’s commonly thought that the notion of a Military Industrial Complex was the brainchild of Dwight D. Eisenhower. In fact, the establishment of the military academy, West Point, in 1802, birthed the idea. At a time when scientific knowledge was beginning to take center stage in colleges and universities, West Point, the first technical institute in the U.S., became the national center for scientific inquiry. “Under its’ auspices all sciences became pertinent to military purposes (Rudolph, 1962, p. 228).

Rudolph, H. (1962). The american college and university: A history. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Two selves in SL

szanne — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 17:43:18 +0000

As a newcomer to higher education, to teaching and learning in this environment, I’m still working out my “What’s it all about Alfie” stuff, the questions that make you stop and think. There’s always a why question buried in my thinking.
So … what are we supposed to be teaching college students? I ask myself that in my own doctoral studies: What am I supposed to learn here, that I can’t learn somewhere else or in some other context?
It’s an important question and immediately relevant because we are asked to provide evidence and be accountable for what we are doing.
If we say we’re teaching students how to think, is that too broad or is it in fact what we want? We want biology majors to be able to think like and do like biologists.
But what about SL? In the Fall, we’ll be teaching students about Virtualities: Mapping Virtual Worlds onto the Real World. There is no one thinking framework to do that.

The one I’m going to use is the Avatar/embodied experience one.
I spent almost the entire day in SL yesterday, in one or the other of my 2 Avatars. The bulk was spent in my non-professional self. I haven’t quite thought this through, but for now, my thinking about it is in terms of having ‘private’ and ‘public’ selves. In the private one, my first life identity is deliberately ambiguous and opaque.
With my public self comes transparency. My profile links to this blog and pICT’s website. I interact with in world residents who I also know as out-of-world professionals. My SL name (Aurili Oh) is part of my email signature

Courses vs. Content

szanne — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 16:15:32 +0000

What is an online course? What is an online education?

When it was launched in 2002, MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) was emphatically declared to be a limited online offering. “OCW is not about online degree programs. It isn’t even about online courses for which students can audit or enroll,” wrote Phillip D. Long. It was intended to be nothing more than “the content that supports an MIT education.”

The understated message in an initiative such as OCW is that an MIT education is not equivalent to the resources that support the education, that it consists essentially of the contact with the professors and the community that develops among the students.

We talk about learning in terms of design and environments more than in terms of lesson plans and classrooms. The mix of course, content, people and place seem to be shifting dramatically. This has to do with how technology expands complexity, the ways information is co-created and disseminated via Web 2.0, how Web 3.0 (SL) releases us from the dichotomy of real/virtual, and how underneath all this the nature of information and knowledge is changing.

CSU – Reed

szanne — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:57:42 +0000

Reed said he “envisions students becoming more like
telecommuters. They might meet with faculty and peers one day a week
on campus, and then use simulations, virtual worlds and downloaded
information the rest of the week to complete coursework.” Read more
Feels like I’m on the crest of the big Kahuna wave, here….