this is the text of an info paper I wrote for our Deputy Commandant to send to the 3 and 4 star generals in charge of Army leader education and training. It describes the motivation for and purpose of our inquiry into “the education gap of force generation”, and lays out a methodology and strategy […]
Category: Teaching
participatory action research and the “scoping” problem
Some advice for a friend grappling with the difficulty of finding and keeping a tight focus of the issues emerging from his group research into sex discrimination in the workplace. I wish i could foloow my own advice and stay focused Phil: here’s a thought experiment: what would happen if you treated your research inquiry […]
Action research, personal journal entry 20090124
The first time I prepared this for an entry on our doctoral discussion forum , I constructed it inside Moodle (our discussion environment; its horrible), attached the file, pushed the upload button only to lose it in hyperspace when my Internet connection crashed. It was important enough to me to rework the piece, however and […]
Look at the excellence all around you; Where’s yours?
No generation of people has had more things available to get in the way of finding excellence in the moment. We are so busy and distracted by our lifestyle that we are never in the moment. We are always somewhere else. When we are at work, we are thinkiing about dinner. At dinner we are […]
A Reflection on the political process of defense acquisition
In other places , such as this discussion about acquisition reform, and Dr Paparone’s discussion of The Fallacy of Technical Rationality, we have seen commentary on the nature of the acquisition process. There is a strong case for it being political in nature. In any event, politics plays a large role in creating the process, […]
Just what kind of a challenge is military acquisition reform? rhetorical?
We were having a discussion about reforming the military acquisition system around the watercooler today, and the subject came up: what kind of lens should we use to look at the problem? Engineering? Political? Scientific? Metaphorical? As we circled around the politics of reform I observed: “…If acquisition is a political process (and it should […]
Time management: benefitting from the commute
a good friend asked for some advice on how to best use her 30 minutes of mass transit commute time: reading vs meditating vs podcasting etc. I recommend podcasting and/or audio books, because they come in bite size chunks, and there are plenty of them avail for free at the library (i have a ton […]
Hearing the Voiceless- Part 2
In the ongoing conversation re: Action research into an entreprenurial curriculum for middle school and high school age students, one of our fellow students offered a detailed set of interventions based on the initial readout from the first exploratory meeting, a reported by the “insider”. While the ideas were excellent and interesting, I felt moved to […]
Hearing the voiceless
a friend of mine is starting a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project inquiring into an entreprenurial curriculum that has both enabled and disabled students in her classroom. From an email, she said: I met with the students who are disabled, and we had a discussion on their feelings toward working with their counterparts who are […]
Reflecting on unbridled competition: a relic from the Pleistocene?
One of my fellow students posed the following question to me after reviewing some comments I made in the chapter we are co-editting re: socialism and unbridled competition: Ken, Your argument on unbridled competition looks solid, but some may disagree that it is THE cause for disharmony and mutual survival. I not sure if you […]