Syria's war: A 5-minute history
To understand the bloody, convoluted war happening inside and outside of Syria's borders, you need to watch this:
Posted by Ezra Klein on Wednesday, October 14, 2015
The Best Explanation So Far on Syria
Sustainability & Social Networking
How is networking part of the solution in creating a sustainable context in an urban environment?
This is a question we will address over the course of this week.
Here's how:
Create your group and establish a definition of sustainability. The Brundtland Commission defined it as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
Identify an area of need and interest. The Brundtland model suggests three interesting areas of intersection between Environmental, Social and Economic circles, these include:
(Note: the links embedded in each category below are suggestions for where to start your research, but there's certainly much more to be found.)
Sustainable Natural and Built Environment - This can include living design and urban planning, resource management and environmental interaction.
Sustainable Economic Development - This may include creating environmentally consistent products or sharing communities to reduce consumption, reducing packaging, smarter production of food, renewable energy resources for production and manufacturing, recycling, conservation.
Equitable Social Environment - This includes fostering the equitable treatment of people everywhere, including promoting fair trade goods, boycotting polluters and human exploiters, philanthropy, equitable business and commerce.
Using the above three criteria, take a look at a city known for sustainability - Frankfurt, London, Vancouver, Madrid, and Amsterdam and study how they fare environmentally, economically and socially. How does connection and social networking function in their efforts to be sustainable.
Next, select an American city - Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis, Chicago and Atlanta and determine what issues exist that are problematic to that city's sustainability.
Research, develop and propose a plan of sustainability for your city, based on what you've discovered with your sustainable city, a plan that involves social networking, the internet of things and ideas.
Propose solutions as viable as possible, but don't limit your scope to current technologies and applications - dream a little. This can include the development of new applications, networked communication, and paradigm shifts in how we live.
Integrate your plan with your sources and ideas and propose a sustainable solution that meets any four of the following criteria -
This is a question we will address over the course of this week.
Here's how:
Create your group and establish a definition of sustainability. The Brundtland Commission defined it as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
Identify an area of need and interest. The Brundtland model suggests three interesting areas of intersection between Environmental, Social and Economic circles, these include:
(Note: the links embedded in each category below are suggestions for where to start your research, but there's certainly much more to be found.)
Sustainable Natural and Built Environment - This can include living design and urban planning, resource management and environmental interaction.
Sustainable Economic Development - This may include creating environmentally consistent products or sharing communities to reduce consumption, reducing packaging, smarter production of food, renewable energy resources for production and manufacturing, recycling, conservation.
Equitable Social Environment - This includes fostering the equitable treatment of people everywhere, including promoting fair trade goods, boycotting polluters and human exploiters, philanthropy, equitable business and commerce.
Using the above three criteria, take a look at a city known for sustainability - Frankfurt, London, Vancouver, Madrid, and Amsterdam and study how they fare environmentally, economically and socially. How does connection and social networking function in their efforts to be sustainable.
Next, select an American city - Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis, Chicago and Atlanta and determine what issues exist that are problematic to that city's sustainability.
Research, develop and propose a plan of sustainability for your city, based on what you've discovered with your sustainable city, a plan that involves social networking, the internet of things and ideas.
Propose solutions as viable as possible, but don't limit your scope to current technologies and applications - dream a little. This can include the development of new applications, networked communication, and paradigm shifts in how we live.
Integrate your plan with your sources and ideas and propose a sustainable solution that meets any four of the following criteria -
- Reduced or eliminate carbon-based fuel consumption
- High yield, low natural-resource consumption
- Energy efficiency
- Low waste
- Preventable medicine
- Equitable business
So, your group presentation has three parts: An overview of a sustainable urban center, an analysis of sustainability barriers of the American city your group has been assigned, and your prosed solutions that meet at least four of the above criteria for your city.
Your portion of your group's research and plan should be posted to your blog along with embedded sources from your research.
As a group, present your plan to your peers in class.
Your portion of your group's research and plan should be posted to your blog along with embedded sources from your research.
As a group, present your plan to your peers in class.
The Danger of Critical Thinking
Originally posted on ImNoSaint, December 29, 2013
Our brains defaulted to our own automatic attitudinal responses, in neurological speeds that don’t account for a suspension of bias or any tolerance for ambiguity. We aligned with primary certitudes about gay marriage that have become increasingly cured like hot cement that never had the pressure of a provisional footprint.
Primary certitudes drive our automatic attitudinal responses. We come by these in an interesting and pervasive process as a result of being raised in a strong content culture where we get the same messages and values over and over, becoming so saturated with the content that we surrender any provisional perspective. I’ve written an example of this in Smoking at Legoland where primary certitude resulted in an prejudiced evaluation. In a strong content culture that demonizes cigarette smoking through repetitive messages weekly in religious and cultural gatherings, the outcome tends to result in a relationship between smoking a cigarette and being bad.
I grew up the same way, with the same cultural conditioning about people who smoke, but the primary certitude never cured in my brain because of the paradox I lived with, my parents. As parents do, they established the foundation for my moral compass, built character, instilled in me the golden rule, taught me tolerance, all the while smoking cigarettes.
There is no relationship between smoking and character, a strong content culture created that relationship through the force of repetition. Similar relationships have been established with the concepts of divorce, holidays, chastity, birth control, pork, alcohol, giving blood, as well as charitable donations, going to mass, taking the sacrament, reading scriptures, except on these latter, the relationship is between good and those mentioned actions where, again we abandon a provisional perspective. We’ve all been surprised to find out that a church-going person did something contrary to what we think a church-going person should do. That surprise is an affective result of our primary certitude.
A couple of behavioral tendencies grow out of cultural conditioning. One is hidden presumptions, beliefs that are so ingrained as fact that we do not believe they need to be proven at all. The other is ethnocentrism, the belief that our way of life or our culture is better than all others, the very conditioning from which stemmed the justification for the woman who walked into a train station this morning in Russia and detonated explosives killing sixteen people.
Hidden presumptions not only stem from primary certitude, they come from prejudice, intolerance of ambiguity and defensiveness. Our own prejudices prohibit us from hearing new information or ideas that are different from our own pre-determined standpoint. If messages are unclear or misunderstood, hidden presumption results in an intolerance of ambiguity, no patience with, nor critical attention to the question at hand, just defaulting to a polarized, pre-critical position. This results in the either/or fallacy where there are only two sides given to an issue, where in fact there are many more ways to see that issue. Defensiveness comes from acting on little information, jumping to conclusions on insufficient evidence and responding with our dukes up, ready to fight.
What all three of these have in common in sustaining our hidden presumptions is that they forbid or extinguish critical thinking, the provisional perspective.
Ethnocentrism is the result. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Ethnocentrism is the single most divisive influence in any strong content culture. It’s the reason our political process appears to be in shambles - a default attitudinal response. It’s the reason faith has been replaced by certainty - a primary certitude. It’s the reason why discrimination is justified, it’s why the prestige of the appearance of morality prevails in the intolerance of ambiguity. It’s the reason why we don’t treat others with differing opinions as equal.
This is nothing new. It’s just amplified now through the channels of social media. And that requires us to become more critical than ever, to create a provisional perspective.
Before you stop reading, allow me to assure that to create a provisional perspective does not require you to abandon your belief system. In fact, doing so has as much potential to strengthen your position as it does to reconsider it.
The provisional perspective is cultivated through a practice of critical thinking. This practice includes considering the sources of any position, of any evidence, any argument. Critical thinking identifies assumptions and presumptions, both your own and those of others. It has the ability to defend more than one side of an argument. The provisional perspective asks questions, it experiments and designs, it’s creative and definitional, it’s well informed, and it staves off conclusions until it's satisfied that all the evidence has been considered.
That’s a lot of work. The automatic attitudinal response isn’t, it’s simply a default. The provisional perspective takes time and care. It’s considerate of others. It’s also dangerous, with enough power to jack-hammer away at strong content cultural conditioning, leaving you with your own standpoint.
Sources for this post include; Herrick, James A. (2011). Argumentation: Understanding and Shaping Arguments, Fourth edition. Strata. And Larson, Charles U. Persuasion: Reception and Responsibility, Eleventh edition. Thomson/Wadsworth.
Oligarchy
"Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."
-Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern
Nope, not the Pope
"I think I have no business discussing the accuracy or authenticity of the information presented here because I don't know much else about it besides what I heard in this On the Media podcast or read about on the internet, and isn't that kind of what the problem is with this whole meme sharing thing? People don't know what the heck is going on because they're accepting information to be true which they do not know that validity of." - K. Coolbear
WellInformed Post Rubric
Outcomes
Understand the emergence and progress of social media,
Assess impacts of social media and citizen journalism,
Increase awareness of communication contexts involved in social media.
Increase critical approaches in evaluating social media content.
Activity
Throughout the semester we'll be researching and discussing certain hot spots in social media in an effort to examine what it means to be well informed. As of this writing those topics deal with Politics and Campaigning, Security and Privacy, Law Enforcement and Racism, Learning and Thinking, Radicalization and Religion, Terrorism and Tribalism, and Syria and Immigration.
Choose three of these topics to research and post on. I'm expecting you to be prepared on some level to join and contribute to the discussion, both online and in class. Post on your blog what you've found to be relevant by the Tuesday, beginning of class time, of that week's topic. Check the schedule. Follow up your posts, or those of your peers by continuing the discussion after the class meetings for the week.
Points Possible: 300 Points - Three posts at 100 points each
Rubric
1. You've posted a thorough discussion on the WI topic of discussion on your blog.
/40 Points
Thorough (35-40 points)
The student's posted discussion flushes out all sides of the issue and considers argumentative fallacies therein.
Talking Points (25-34 points)
The student posted talking points on the issue identifying basic clash.
Surface (1-24)
The student posted generalities about the issue.
2. You've researched the veracity of your position and either support or take issue with it, supporting your position with evidence.
/40 Points
Digested (35-40 points)
The student articulates their position on the issue providing an argument supported with evidence.
Identified (25-34 points)
The student identifies their position on the issue with a level of cogent reasoning.
Aware (1-24)
The student is aware of their position and states opinion.
3. You've posted a thoughtful comment on at least one other post from a peer in class.
/20 Points
Surface (3-7)
Assess impacts of social media and citizen journalism,
Increase awareness of communication contexts involved in social media.
Increase critical approaches in evaluating social media content.
Activity
Throughout the semester we'll be researching and discussing certain hot spots in social media in an effort to examine what it means to be well informed. As of this writing those topics deal with Politics and Campaigning, Security and Privacy, Law Enforcement and Racism, Learning and Thinking, Radicalization and Religion, Terrorism and Tribalism, and Syria and Immigration.
Choose three of these topics to research and post on. I'm expecting you to be prepared on some level to join and contribute to the discussion, both online and in class. Post on your blog what you've found to be relevant by the Tuesday, beginning of class time, of that week's topic. Check the schedule. Follow up your posts, or those of your peers by continuing the discussion after the class meetings for the week.
Points Possible: 300 Points - Three posts at 100 points each
Rubric
1. You've posted a thorough discussion on the WI topic of discussion on your blog.
/40 Points
Thorough (35-40 points)
The student's posted discussion flushes out all sides of the issue and considers argumentative fallacies therein.
Talking Points (25-34 points)
The student posted talking points on the issue identifying basic clash.
Surface (1-24)
The student posted generalities about the issue.
2. You've researched the veracity of your position and either support or take issue with it, supporting your position with evidence.
/40 Points
Digested (35-40 points)
The student articulates their position on the issue providing an argument supported with evidence.
Identified (25-34 points)
The student identifies their position on the issue with a level of cogent reasoning.
Aware (1-24)
The student is aware of their position and states opinion.
3. You've posted a thoughtful comment on at least one other post from a peer in class.
/20 Points
Deep (15-20 points)
The student's comment identifies barriers and discusses solutions.
Shallow (8-14 points)
The student's comment discusses the barrier.
Surface (3-7)
The student's comment is meta.
(or "meh" if you prefer)
This Changes Everything
I mentioned that we'll be talking about Race 2.0 when we get back from break, but I'm inserting this to introduce Climate 2.0 instead. Please watch and start your research on how social networking impacts both barriers and solutions to a situation whose ramifications might just be irreversible.
are we getting better
The end of the street I lived on as a kid was the beginning of a forest. At least that’s how I remember it. It’s gone now, the street’s been continued into more suburban sprawl that makes up the west end of Dollard-des-Ormeaux, now it’s own city. When I lived there it was a borough of Montreal.
Another street a block over dead-ended into the same undeveloped wonderland. It was called Butternut. The street I lived on was Braeside and it was that nomenclature that divided the kids that lived there, territorially. The kids on Butternut had their part of the forest and we on Braeside had ours.
Each was fortified with dugouts large enough to seat a hockey team, camouflaged and insulated with the mulch from the forest floor. And in the trees were one-man lookouts and forts big enough to hold the same hockey team. Suburban development kept us all in materials and our forts withstood the harshest winters Quebec ever saw.
We played there. If we weren’t asleep, doing chores, playing hockey, attending school, or eating, we played there and in the field behind my house that we mowed into a baseball diamond in the summer and played hockey on the ice that formed on the pond there in the winter.
It was our space and we interpreted it to fit whatever whim we may be imagining at the time, from fighting Nazis to winning the Stanley Cup. We created stories there, developed vocabulary, created arcs and apexes, calculated angles and trajectories. We made our own luge course, picked wild raspberries, dragged slick-shod three-speed CCM bicycles and beat the Bruins, Blackhawks, Rangers and the Maple Leafs. In that order.
We played. Like crazy. I don’t ever remember not being able to sleep unless the lightning was bouncing off our house in wet sticky nights. We played.
And such was my first thought when I was struck the other day by a statistic broadcast on NPR. Ira Flatow, host of NPR’s Science Friday indicates that today one in about every 110 kids in the US has some sort of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). All kinds of causes have been postulated from vaccinations to twinkies, but one hypothesis caught my attention in my subsequent research; clusters of children diagnosed with autism occur in contexts where parents are older, more educated, and white.
More shocking is that one in seven kids in the States has a developmental disability according to the Nation Health Interview Surveys.
Now all these numbers are skiwampish at best (a term, I believe originated in Emery County, Utah), but the trends are worrying. These numbers didn’t start to escalate until the 70′s. ASD rates escalated in the late 80′s and early 90′s and many are quick to blame that electrically lactating box from which kids watched stupefying content from Gilligan’s Island to Sponge Bob Squarepants, broadcast now 24/7/365 and transported now anywhere one can find at least a couple of bars-worth of signal.
Older, educated whites may have found more convenience in television. They had the means and Sesame Street certainly had the appeal. And that makes me wonder if kid by kid the dugouts and tree houses of my youth were abandoned for a more pragmatic approach in raising kids. Consider the decrease in liabilities alone. Less scraped knees and elbows. Playground equipment would be and has become the next diminishing icons of youth, of play.
It woud be cruel of me to point a finger at parents of children who experience some level of ASD and implicate that too much TV was allowed, or too much complacency tolerated. I’d be angry with anyone who pointed a finger at me and blamed me for the demise of my special needs son. What I am trying to do here is wonder, at the very least, about the connection between play and development.
Dr. Carol Westby in her article Assessment of Cognitive and Language Abilities Through Play, indicates, “In no evaluation has a child’s meaningful use of language been above his/her cognitive play level…Unless the child possesses the cognitive prerequisites for the linguistic structures she/he is learning, she/he will not use them in actual interpersonal situations (1980).”
And so I wonder, if we up the ante on play, develop play concepts that challenge cognitive acquisition of language and culture, even relationships and analysis, would this trend abate? If kids played again in context that reinforced the development of meaningful language would their minds rise to the cognitive occasion?
And if we had a litigious intervention, and turned children loose on frozen ponds and quaking aspens, showed them where we kept our hammers and nails, random wheels and axels, used bicycle inner tubes and scraps of yardage, and read them stories exercising the theaters of their brains, would we go back or forward?
Would we, instead, be getting better?
Another street a block over dead-ended into the same undeveloped wonderland. It was called Butternut. The street I lived on was Braeside and it was that nomenclature that divided the kids that lived there, territorially. The kids on Butternut had their part of the forest and we on Braeside had ours.
Each was fortified with dugouts large enough to seat a hockey team, camouflaged and insulated with the mulch from the forest floor. And in the trees were one-man lookouts and forts big enough to hold the same hockey team. Suburban development kept us all in materials and our forts withstood the harshest winters Quebec ever saw.
We played there. If we weren’t asleep, doing chores, playing hockey, attending school, or eating, we played there and in the field behind my house that we mowed into a baseball diamond in the summer and played hockey on the ice that formed on the pond there in the winter.
It was our space and we interpreted it to fit whatever whim we may be imagining at the time, from fighting Nazis to winning the Stanley Cup. We created stories there, developed vocabulary, created arcs and apexes, calculated angles and trajectories. We made our own luge course, picked wild raspberries, dragged slick-shod three-speed CCM bicycles and beat the Bruins, Blackhawks, Rangers and the Maple Leafs. In that order.
We played. Like crazy. I don’t ever remember not being able to sleep unless the lightning was bouncing off our house in wet sticky nights. We played.
And such was my first thought when I was struck the other day by a statistic broadcast on NPR. Ira Flatow, host of NPR’s Science Friday indicates that today one in about every 110 kids in the US has some sort of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). All kinds of causes have been postulated from vaccinations to twinkies, but one hypothesis caught my attention in my subsequent research; clusters of children diagnosed with autism occur in contexts where parents are older, more educated, and white.
More shocking is that one in seven kids in the States has a developmental disability according to the Nation Health Interview Surveys.
Now all these numbers are skiwampish at best (a term, I believe originated in Emery County, Utah), but the trends are worrying. These numbers didn’t start to escalate until the 70′s. ASD rates escalated in the late 80′s and early 90′s and many are quick to blame that electrically lactating box from which kids watched stupefying content from Gilligan’s Island to Sponge Bob Squarepants, broadcast now 24/7/365 and transported now anywhere one can find at least a couple of bars-worth of signal.
Older, educated whites may have found more convenience in television. They had the means and Sesame Street certainly had the appeal. And that makes me wonder if kid by kid the dugouts and tree houses of my youth were abandoned for a more pragmatic approach in raising kids. Consider the decrease in liabilities alone. Less scraped knees and elbows. Playground equipment would be and has become the next diminishing icons of youth, of play.
It woud be cruel of me to point a finger at parents of children who experience some level of ASD and implicate that too much TV was allowed, or too much complacency tolerated. I’d be angry with anyone who pointed a finger at me and blamed me for the demise of my special needs son. What I am trying to do here is wonder, at the very least, about the connection between play and development.
Dr. Carol Westby in her article Assessment of Cognitive and Language Abilities Through Play, indicates, “In no evaluation has a child’s meaningful use of language been above his/her cognitive play level…Unless the child possesses the cognitive prerequisites for the linguistic structures she/he is learning, she/he will not use them in actual interpersonal situations (1980).”
And so I wonder, if we up the ante on play, develop play concepts that challenge cognitive acquisition of language and culture, even relationships and analysis, would this trend abate? If kids played again in context that reinforced the development of meaningful language would their minds rise to the cognitive occasion?
And if we had a litigious intervention, and turned children loose on frozen ponds and quaking aspens, showed them where we kept our hammers and nails, random wheels and axels, used bicycle inner tubes and scraps of yardage, and read them stories exercising the theaters of their brains, would we go back or forward?
Would we, instead, be getting better?
Double Standards
Why is it that most of us have heard all about this...
...and yet nothing about this?
Listen to the story by Brook Gladstone on On the Media, and comment on your blog.
Listen to the story by Brook Gladstone on On the Media, and comment on your blog.
Social Networking and Stabilization
How can or will social media, social networking, shape or even stabilize the world? Post your comments with your research that backs up your position below. I'll be looking for responses and feedback from all of you.
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