My take on the problem with force management is that it has been treated as a complicated problem, suitable for central planning (PPBES) and not as a complex problem, rife with social & political context, in a dynamic state where the variables change parameters far faster than the planned decision cycles. Consequently, we never get […]
Tag: Teaching
Reflections on critiquing the writing of others
Giving feedback about the paper is a way to show who you are and how much you care about the author. Suppose, in your opinion, the author has made a glaring error in logic or has not supported the thesis, or mischaracterized an opposing view, and because you are concerned about hurting their feelings, you […]
A reflection on action research “storytelling”
What follows is a 1st person, stream of consciousness reflection written to my mentor & committee chair. I describe what it was like to record a 10 min video “telling the story” of some preliminary findings emerging from my action research cycles into curriculum and adult learning. The video is hosted at YouTube. It […]
Management games for deep insight
Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) describes the use of models to help us frame questions to ask of the world, and which help us become explicit about our world views, assumptions, frames of reference, theories of cause and effect, values, and desired outcomes. Checkland, P. (2006) Learning for action: A short definitive account of […]
A reflection on mixed methods research in adult education
Introduction The Research Problem The purpose of this paper is to offer one vision of developing a methodological theory of mixed methods research co-equal with that of quantitative and qualitative research. I use a case study of the US Army Command & General Staff College engaged in a redesign of its curriculum, its teaching practices […]
Traders Roundtable: Maximum Compounded Return Versus Fear of Drawdown
In a recent traders roundtable discussion on the subject of balancing maximum gain with risk management the question was posed how to reconcile these two issues. A few definitions for the purposes of this essay are in order. First let’s consider maximum compounded return to be defined as a system that is traded at every […]
Testing the Word 2007 Blog publishing template
This is to see how things come through when written in Word 2007 and pushed to the blog site. Here is a sample picture: Am wondering how tags and categories are handled?
an exercise in “sense-making”: grappling with “design” and “planning”
a number of faculty and officers gathered around a whiteboard to try to create their own practical sense of the distinction and relationship between design and planning. The series of diagrams reflected in the image unfolded over a discussion of several hours as we tried to connect the doctrinal and scholarly terms to our own […]
Lifting our voices: a reflection on Voice in curriculum, in doctoral research, in life
“Lifting our voices” by Ken Long (PAR journal entry J20090724.doc) In this essay I will describe a construct we are calling “Voice”, my background, my research, and some implications for the doctoral research process in general and how it is affecting Dr Alana and me in our mentor-mentee relationship. I am a retired Army officer, […]
Reflecting on theory and practice, and how research questions connect them; part 2
A continuation of the reflection on theory and practice in our doctoral cohhort discussion. Weick (1995) talked about the continuum from mature, accepted dominant theory to the first conjecture arising out of some anomalous observation. There is a continuum between the generalist inquiring into the purest of theoretical distinctions, and the pragmatist seeking to add […]