The Apollo Aliance and That Vision Thing

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Residents of Kankakee County, Illinois are ready for the new clean energy economy. Inspired by the calls for more green jobs during the 2008 presidential campaign, a local group of business, education, and government leaders is working to make green-collar jobs a reality in their region. They recognize the potential for green-collar jobs to transform the local economy while also benefitting the country and the environment. They also see investment in wind energy as the wave of Kankakee’s clean energy future.

Vision Energy’s $1 Billion Wind Bet in Illinois, April 21, 2009, Mac Lynch, Apollo News Service

I am really trying not to be Mr. Education-Politics Party-Pooper. These are horrible times for education, with cuts at all levels in every state. Much of that is due to the economic slowdown, although no doubt the right will not let this crisis pass without chipping away at educational autonomy in one way or the other. The real loss will access; tuition is like a tax without regulation.

We are on the verge of a real boom in education, once the economy recovers and the Obama administration gets past the health care debate. (I will avoid the obvious Dickens reference.) The highway robbery of the student loan system will probably end, releasing all sorts of money for education. The worst of the “No Child Behind” debacle is probably over, even if its effects remain.

There’s a close link between the Obama administrations’ economic stimulus package, the greening of energy, and the community colleges, too. It’s hard to complain about that, either. The community college system is probably one of the most accessible educational systems ever created. More of that is always good. But here’s where I start feeling that sharp pinch of liberal limitation.

It’s great that they are putting windmills up in Kankakee (about 2 hours north of here) and it makes sense that the community colleges would work together to try to provide the training. But it bugs me that they feel they have to do this in such a narrowly vocational way. Where’s the vision? The community colleges do much more than just train workers.

We need people who know how to work on windmills, but we also need windmill workers who have the critical and intellectual skills needed to accelerate the ongoing expansion and refinement of democracy here in the U.S. I don’t mean to disparage community college teachers. I bet they will add the critical thinking elements wherever they can. But it should be a part of the rhetoric, too.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Language, Professional

The Nightmare of the Cloud

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Social networking Web site Twitter was unavailable for roughly two hours Thursday morning after being hit by a denial of service attack.

Twitter went down at about 9:30 a.m. ET. It was back up by 11:30 a.m. ET, but access to twitter.com has remained spotty since then, with frequent network timeouts.

“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack,” Twitter Chief Executive Biz Stone told CNNMoney.com in an e-mail. “Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users.”

David Goldman, CNNMoney.com staff writer, Thursday August 6, 2009,Twitter goes down from denial of service attack

I have a lot of experience with computer assisted instruction, and the one sure thing is that the technology is unreliable. Hardware troubles, network troubles, software troubles: if a problem can happen, it will happen. I used to tell my students that it was like driving a car in the 1920s. The technology was just not mature enough to be reliable.

Part of the problem is that administrators and sometimes teachers too often underestimate the need for technical support. Computers are advertised as little miracles that basically run themselves. In real life, network problems, hardware problems, software problems. It’s almost impossible for a teacher to keep up with it all. We need real-time support and knowledgeable human beings.

The latest miracle is the Cloud. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Marketing and hopeful administrators will tell us that this is the solution, and that it requires less money because it requires much less maintenance and very little support. Twtter ought to be a wake up call. It’s not true. It can’t be true.

Educators should resist centralization as another instance of outsourcing and as a further downsizing of the intellectual capabilities of schools. Cloud technology ensures that we won’t have local people around who are experienced and knowledgeable enough to help us out when the system inevitably fails. We’ll have voice mail instead; we won’t make knowledge, we’ll buy it at discount.

Posted in: Writing

Wiki-Wishes

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Having spent the past three years of my life in the Enterprise 2.0 / Collaborative software market, I remain struck by the industry’s continued lack of ability to define a compelling reason for enterprises to adopt new software applications, such as blogs, wikis, microblogs, etc. In the early days of the Enterprise 2.0 movement, much of this software was dismissed as the next wave of Knowledge Management, which was largely viewed as a zero ROI investment (or at least in the eyes of the venture capital community, it did not produce any break out, high return investments). Today, it is largely viewed as a necessary evil because the likes of Facebook and Twitter are impossible for the enterprise to ignore.

Unbundling the 20th Century Mindset, Brian Magierski

This is a piece written for a specific audience– people interested in the ways that businesses are (or are not) adapting new technologies– so it’s a little heavy on jargon. (If you are one of those people, of course, it’s not jargon at all.) But it’s worth reading because we will either find a way to use these technologies for the greater good or they will be used against us.

We could use these technologies (blogs, wikis) to re-create the workplace along more democratic lines, encouraging transparency iand eliminating the need for a lot of supervisory management. This is particularly important in education, which ought to be, among other things, leaders in workplace democratization. Universities ought to be the leaders of the leaders in this area.

If we don’t start figuring out how to use these tools they will likely be used against us. Especially if we stay unorganized, we will do more but someone else will reap the benefits. Kids who “grow up digital” may well find that, like their parents, their productivity isn’t reflected in a rising standard of living. Indeed, if recent history is any evidence, just the opposite is more likely.

Posted in: Writing