Pentagon now spending more for war than all 50 States combined spend to run the country

By Sherwood Ross

Last updated:

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 13:38:00 +0000

The U.S. spends more for war annually than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare, and safety of 308 million Americans.

Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C., says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008.

For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for what the Pentagon calls "defense" in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That's more than all the state governments collect.

Henchman says all American local governments combined (cities, counties, etc.) collect about $500 billion in taxes. Add that to total state tax take and you get over $1.3 trillion. This means Uncle Sam's Pentagon is sopping up nearly as much money as all state, county, city, and other governmental units spend to run the country.

That's absolutely insane. Beyond insane.

Hybrid Education 2.0

December 28, 2009

What if you could teach a college course without a classroom or a professor, and lose nothing?

According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, there’s no "what if" about it. Earlier in the decade, Carnegie Mellon set out to design software for independent learners taking courses through the university’s Open Learning Initiative, an effort to make courses freely available to non-enrolled learners. But rather than merely making course materials available to non-students, like MIT's famous OpenCourseware project, Carnegie Mellon wanted to design courses that would respond to the individual needs of each student. It currently has courses in 12 different subjects available on its Web site, mostly in math and science.

In the process of testing the software on Carnegie Mellon students to make sure it would “do no harm” if used, the researchers found that, over a two-semester trial period, students in a traditional classroom introductory statistics course scored no better than similar students who used the open-learning program and skipped the three weekly lectures and lab period.

I think that Dan nailed it. I think that the backchannel is perfectly reasonable as a frontchannel when the speaker is trying to entertain, but when the goal is to convey something with depth, it encourages people to be impatient and frustrated, to feed on the speaker. There's a least common denominator element to it. I was not at Web2.0 Expo to entertain, but to inform. Yes, I can be an entertaining informant, but there's a huge gap between the kind of information that Baratunde tries to convey in his comedic format and what I'm trying to convey in a more standard one. And there's no doubt I packed too much information into a 20 minute talk, but my role is fundamentally to challenge audiences to think. That's the whole point of bringing a scholar to the stage. But if the audience doesn't want to be challenged, they tune out or walk out. Yet, with a Twitter stream, they have a third option: they can take over.

The problem with a public-facing Twitter stream in events like this is that it FORCES the audience to pay attention the backchannel. So even audience members who want to focus on the content get distracted. Most folks can't multitask that well. And even if I had been slower and less dense, my talks are notoriously too content-filled to make multi-tasking possible for the multi-tasking challenged. This is precisely why I use very simplistic slides that evokes images for the visual types in the room without adding another layer of content. But the Twitter stream fundamentally adds another layer of content that the audience can't ignore, that I can't control. And that I cannot even see.

Definitely read the full article, especially if you ever speak at conferences. The author of this article is one brave lady for writing about this so openly...

Mission, principles and projects:
LoveMachine means several different things, some of which you'll have to talk to us to figure out. We believe that the right band of people can work together, have a huge amount of fun, make a bunch of money, and try to save the world.

Dusan called it! Glad to see Philip's still working on saving the world.

The billions of text messages, video calls and postings that are travelling through the world are in fact, seriously subverting the relationship of individuals with the institutions they belong to. They are challenging a number of well rooted conceptions on the need to remove people from their personal social environment in order for them to be productive and effective. The issues at stake are far more complex than “etiquette”  because the conflict is between people’s sense of fundamental emotional wellbeing  and  organizations that for the last 150 years have banned the private sphere from their premises.  Much of society has functioned on the principle that attention, isolation and productivity are strictly interrelated; therefore each minute spent on personal communication is seen as reducing focus and efficiency. But is this really the case?  Or is the problem that the intrusion of the private is suddenly and finally concerning everyone and not everyone is seen as sufficiently trustworthy to handle this new found autonomy?

Gartner publishes 2009 "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies"

Annual report on how far away tech is

While I don't always think Gartner gets it right, I finally took a moment to compare this year's hype cycle for emerging tech with last year's - interesting to see where public virtual worlds are relative to the 2008 chart.

UC Irvine establishes Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds

It will join forces with Institute for Software Research and Game Culture & Technology Laboratory

— Irvine, Calif., September 1, 2009 —

UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences has established the Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds, led by ICS Associate Dean Magda El Zarki and senior research scientist Walt Scacchi of the UCI Institute for Software Research.

The center’s goal is to expand campuswide research activities that draw upon UCI’s strengths spanning the social and technological aspects of games and virtual worlds. More than 20 faculty members from computer science, arts, humanities, social science and education will collaborate in the center.

..I'd love to see the University of Cincinnati establish something similar. And I want to work there. ;)

Testing to see how Posterous imports a clip into a Wordpress blog..

Submitted by jonathan.tarr on Jun 26, 2009, 09:22 AM

As we mentioned on the HASTAC blogs last week, you can now download or purchase a copy of the report entitled The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, co-authored by Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, with assistance from Zoe Marie Jones, our former colleague extraordinaire. Here are the details from MIT Press:

Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg in an abridged version of their book-in-progress, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, argue that traditional institutions must adapt or risk a growing mismatch between how they teach and how this new generation learns. Forms and models of learning have evolved quickly and in fundamentally new directions. Yet how we teach, where we teach, who teaches, and who administers and serves have changed only around the edges. This report was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in connection with its grant making initiative on Digital Media and Learning.

Key Findings

Young people today are learning in new ways that are both collective and egalitarian.
They are contributing to Wikipedia, commenting on blogs, teaching themselves programming and figuring out work-arounds to online video games. They follow links embedded in articles to build a deeper understanding. They comment on papers and ideas in an interactive and immediate exchange ofideas. All these acts are collaborative and democratic, and all occur amid a worldwide community of voices.

Universities must recognize this new way of learning and adapt or risk becoming obsolete.
The university model of teaching and learning relies on a hierarchy of expertise, disciplinary divides, restricted admission to those considered worthy, and a focused, solitary area of expertise. However, with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.

Today?s learning is interactive and without walls.
Individuals learn anywhere, anytime, and with greater ease than ever before. Learning today blurs lines of expertise and tears down barriers to admission. While it has never been confined solely to the academy, today?s opportunities for independent learning have never been easier nor more diverse.

Ten Principles for Redesigning Learning Institutions

The authors offer ten principles that can guide universities and other institutions of learning in adapting to learning in a digital age. They focus on college-aged students, although the recommendations also apply generally for all age groups.

Self-learning: Today?s learners are self-learners. They browse, scan, follow links in mid-paragraph to related material. They look up information and follow new threads. They create their own paths to understanding.

Horizontal structures: Rather than top-down teaching and standardized curriculum, today?s learning is collaborative; learners multitask and work out solutions together on projects. Learning strategy shifts from a focus on information as such to learning to judge reliable information. It shifts from memorizing information to finding reliable sources. In short, it shifts from learning that to learning how.

From presumed authority to collective credibility: Reliance on the knowledge authorities or certified experts is no longer tenable amid the growing complexities of collaborative and interdisciplinary learning. A key challenge in collaborative environments will be fostering and managing levels of trust.

A de-centered pedagogy: To ban or limit collective knowledge sources such as Wikipedia in classrooms is to miss the importance of collaborative knowledge-making. Learning institutions should instead adopt a more inductive, collective pedagogy based on collective checking, inquisitive skepticism, and group assessment.

Networked learning: Learning has traditionally often assumed a winner-take-all competitive form rather than a cooperative form. One cooperates in a classroom only if it maximizes narrow self-interest. Networked learning, in contrast, is committed to a vision of the social that stresses cooperation, interactivity, mutual benefit, and social engagement. The power of ten working interactively will invariably outstrip the power of one looking to beat out the other nine.

Open source education: Traditional learning environments convey knowledge via overwhelmingly copyright-protected publications. Networked learning, contrastingly, is an ?open source? culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.

Learning as connectivity and interactivity: Challenges in a networked learning environment are not an individual?s alone. Digital tools and software make working in isolation on a project unnecessary. Networking through file-sharing, data sharing, and seamless, instant communication is now possible.

Lifelong learning: The speed of change in this digital world requires individuals to learn anew, face novel conditions, and adapt at a record pace. Learning never ends. How we know has changed radically.

Learning institutions as mobilizing networks: Rather than thinking of learning institutions as a bundle of rules, regulations, and norms governing the actions within its structure, new institutions must begin to think of themselves as mobilizing networks. These institutions mobilize flexibility, interactivity, and outcomes. Issues of consideration in these institutions are ones of reliability and predictability alongside flexibility and innovation.

Flexible scalability and simulation: Learning institutions must be open to changing scale. Students may work in small groups on a specific topic or together in an open-ended and open-sourced contribution.

These ten principles, the authors argue, are the first steps in redesigning learning institutions to fit the new digital world. By assessing some of the institutional barriers to change, the authors hope to mobilize institutions to envision formal, higher education as part of a continuum of the networked world that students engage in online today.

The full The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age report is now available for free online from MIT Press. A print version of the report can also be ordered from the Press. For more information please visit the MIT Press website.

To order print copies of this report, visit: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11841
ISBN: 978-0-262-51359-3 | Price: $14.00

To view the report online, visit: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/Future_of_Learning.pdf

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning are available here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=6&serid=178