Archived What's New Entries from http://waysofknowing.home.comcast.net

January 2008

Welcome. I hope the new year is starting off well for you.

I’m evaluating AARP’s free Worksearch online assessment tool developed to assist unemployed or underemployed folks over the age of fifty gain insight into their job-related skills. They can use this information to help them make a career-change or seek additional education and training. I found out about this resource talking to Emily Allen from the AARP Foundation at the AAACE (American Association for Adult and Continuing Education) conference I attended at the University of Maryland in June of 2007.

As STC WorkQuest board president, I will attend the annual employment roundtable event in January sponsored along with the STC Pittsburgh chapter. This year’s topics and speakers include:

· A Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Winning Interviews, Robert Bruns-Senior Recruiter with Westinghouse Electric Co.

· Be Confident at Interviews: SHOW it with your Body Language, Dr. Nancy Mramor-Transformedia

· Networking: The FORM Method, Deanna Tucci Schmitt-Executive Director of BNI in Western PA

· Keeping Your Technical Skills Up to Date, Matt Tomsho-MJTomsho Consulting

· Cultural Diversity in the Light of Globalization, Dr. Yuki Lu-Workforce Education and Development at Penn State

Other items worth mentioning:

Is an intellectual the same as an academic? A consideration by Russell Jacoby in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Intel’s abortive attempts to do well by doing good Problems with the One Laptop Per Child program reported in the New York Times. And what guarantees do we have that cheap laptops will help ensure poorer kids learn what they need to know, anyway? See my comments in Students Need More Than Gadgets to Succeed and my input to the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures & Commerce on media literacy, posted on this site previously.

Like the doctor says: If it hurts, maybe you shouldn’t do it. Some Brand-Name Bloggers Say Stress of Posting Is a Hazard to Their Health , in the New York Times

· Texts in early modern philosophy from Jonathon F Bennett, online. Why go to graduate school? You can read and educate yourself to your heart's content for free. I plan to focus on Hobbes, Hume and Spinoza to begin with. I hardly had a nodding acquaintance with any of these guys, despite going to college and getting an MA.

December 2007

Update: I will lead a discussion the evening of December 11^th titled YouTube, Andy Warhol and the Commodification of the Self for a group at the Unitarian Church in Pittsburgh.

I live in the city where the poster child of being famous for the sake of being famous was born and raised. Pittsburgh has a museum dedicated to the work of Andy Warhol (AKA Andrew Warhola) -- filled with soup cans, oxidized canvas and images of Marilyn Monroe.

Was Warhol's success based on what he accomplished artistically -- or simply on his skill at creating and packaging himself as a product onto which others projected their desires (and cash) as consumers? With the growth of the Internet and appearance of social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube, celebrity, the commodification of the self and the incessant search for fifteen minutes of fame that Warhol pioneered and exploited have metastasized into a phenomenon that seems to monopolize our entire society. What does this mean to notions of the self, achievement and competence?

Read:

Kenneth J. Gergen - The Self in the Age of Information in the Washington Monthly

Christine Rosen - Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism, in The New Atlantis

People have tailored their private personae for public consumption for a long time. Charles Dickens wrote about the rising middle class copying the speech, manners and clothing of their "betters" in the 1850s -- 60s. Dale Carnegie wrote about exploiting interpersonal interactions and shaping behavior to win friends and influence people in the 1930s. Christopher Lasch wrote about the bureaucratization of society, interpersonal relations and social services in the 1970s. Today the Internet and online social networking (not to mention mood-altering medications such as Prozac^TM and Zoloft^TM) have accelerated this process, awareness and impulse toward continually re-inventing ourselves and de-personalized the process of adopting identities based on outward appearance and brands -- usually other peoples' (whether Ralph Lauren, LL Bean or LL Cool J). Success in fulfilling our own unique gifts (even figuring out what they are) and gaining mastery and competence as citizens and individuals seems to matter less and less than meeting the expectations and filling a role -- however limiting --set by the market that has none of our interests at heart.

If success is based on appearance only, giving rise to bureaucratized incompetence (making competence superfluous), how will things work when we are faced with real challenges as a society and as individuals? Read How Not to Do It by Theodore Dalrymple in the City Journal and my comments in CIO Magazine on ensuring a capable workforce and the Hurricane Katrina debacle.

If you really groove on Warhol, perhaps you can educate yourself for free on his work:

A Digital Education in The American.

You might as well. College apparently hasn’t been teaching students what they need to know, despite the increasing cost of tuition. Of course, you could ask why it's the colleges' job to teach students life skills such as balancing a checkbook. If you aspire to be rich and enough of a celebrity like Warhol and those who followed him, I suppose you plan to pay someone else to do these things for you.

November 2007

No update.

October 2007

Please see a thoughtful essay by John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, on the economy of ideas and the changing nature of intellectual property in the Internet age. His writing reminded me of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde. Thanks to my colleague John Clark from the STC Pittsburgh chapter for sharing it with me.

The notion of who owns ideas presents a conundrum for artistically- and intellectually-creative folks. Personally, I try to pick and choose the ideas that I share, with whom and how. Writing an occasional article gratis for the STC Pittsburgh Blue Pencil or other publication for example is fine -- especially if it's for an audience or community that I value and where I feel well-regarded. But I suspect people and organizations in a (free?) market economy do not value what they don't pay for.

In our present information glut we increasingly expect things (ideas, content) for free -- because of course folks should feel privileged to have their writing and ideas on a web site somewhere in the public domain. The quality of much public discourse on the web, on television and elsewhere is mediocre at best. A minority is very good and worthwhile. (See Arts & Letters Daily.) But to what extent should we reward someone for enjoying the benefit of their original ideas and mode of expression? In what way? Conversely, I know how much labor writing well takes. I often feel my time and effort to articulate ideas important to me go unappreciated. But how much reward should I expect? In what way?

I guess this is what Barlow is exploring.

If you are interested in free intellectual property and the sharing of knowledge, not to say wisdom, from way back, please see the Internet Classics Archive at MIT

For a different kind of knowledge go to the Pittsburgh OpenMap project. You can engage in some interesting virtual exploration of bicycling routes and other phenomenon around the 'burgh that people have shared.

September 2007

The City of Pittsburgh has recently considered installing an automated video surveillance network downtown to keep residents safer. In 2004 Chicago undertook a similar project.

Several questions occur to me:

Who will monitor the cameras and how are those individuals trained?

If the monitoring process is automated (and even if it’s not), who determines the rules for heuristics and pattern-recognition for interpreting and responding to suspicious behavior and activity?

What resources are available to respond?

What checks and balances exist to prevent inadvertent or deliberate abuse?

Like most things, the merits of this approach depend on how it’s implemented. My concern is that it promotes the notion that more information automatically means more security and 1.) ignores the problem of information overload, 2.) minimizes the challenge of appropriate decision-making, 3.) dismisses the potential for technology to overwhelm common sense and 4.) will reduce everyday vigilance and accountability on the part of citizens and officials. (Please also see deskilling.)

Do you think the innocent have anything to fear from such a scheme in a free society? Please read the commentary by Julian Baggini at Butterflies and Wheels.

July 2007

Our knowledge society depends on more than just educating young people K- 12, and then sending them to college. It depends on adults who continuously learn, update and share their skills throughout their lives. On June 15th I participated in a one-day conference of the AAACE (American Association for Adult Continuing Education)on behalf of STC WorkQuest. The conference took place at the University of Maryland, and was the first of this kind. The purpose was to solicit input on policies to promote continuing education and lifelong learning from interested organizations and individuals across the country. Topics on the agenda included:

Facilitating Transitions from School to Work

Moving from Military Service to the Civilian Workplace

Career Transitions for Mature Workers

Retired Workers and Volunteerism

Organizations represented included universities, government and non-profit organizations (but curiously no business-affiliated groups) such as:

· AARP

· American Society for Training and Development (ASTD)

· Association for Continuing Higher Education (ACHE)

· Commission on Military Education and Training (CMET)

· Commission on Adult Basic Education (COABE)

· Council for College and Military Educators (CCME)

· National Retired Teachers Association (NRTA)

I will be reporting more on the subsequent follow-up from this event. Meanwhile, following are links to three essays by Charles Murray in the Wall Street Opinion Journal I included on my site in February of this year. In them he discusses the limits of learning, intelligence versus wisdom, and why everyone shouldn't necessarily go to college:

Intelligence in the Classroom

Aztecs vs. the Greeks

What's Wrong with Vocational School

You might also find the following of interest this month:

Is happiness just another word for getting everything you want? Author Jean Kazez reflects on how philosophers ancient and modern have explored this question in Philosophy Now.

Speaking of happiness, if people who need people are the luckiest people (as the song goes) what about those who don't? Maybe they're just as happy being misanthropes. Read Frank Furedi on neo-Malthusians’ problem with the human race at Spiked.

Some CPA's (Certified Public Accountants) are people persons too. They care about more than dollars and cents and the bottom-line. Please see an article on the human side of knowledge management in (of all things) the summer 2007 Pennsylvania CPA Journal. I spoke to author Phil Howe and was impressed by his and his co-author Martin C. Levin’s insight and presentation of ideas. (Both are CPAs. Howe teaches and runs the accelerated degree program at the Wescoe School of Muhlenberg College.) Compare their article to mine in the March 2007 issue of CIO Magazine on preparing a capable workforce for the knowledge economy. You will find similar themes and ideas, which I take as a compliment to all three of us.

Speaking of great minds, brainboxes in the 17th and 18th-centuries practiced knowledge management the old-fashioned way hashing out their ideas in the coffee houses of England. One of my favorite sites, Arts & Letters Daily, provides sort of a virtual coffee house on the web today. Read more about it in an article at the National Post of Canada.

For more on the role of coffee houses (as well as stronger drink) in human history, I recommend A History Of The World In Six Glasses by Tom Standage. Standage has also written a very readable book on the evolution and social impact of the telegraph titled The Victorian Internet.