tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64171972009-11-21T19:29:26.362-08:00Pragmatic Implications of Religious Like Group Dynamicschris gnoreply@blogger.comBlogger171125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-42017382239816638092009-09-02T14:45:00.000-07:002009-09-02T14:53:09.216-07:00

There was a very good article over at wired about the "Good Enough Revolution". The basic premise is eventually we hit a turning point where quality is sufficiently high people suddenly start opting for cheapness or volume.In education this will be especially significant in terms of student access to computers. In Alberta, as in many other places, the ground work is being sown to prepare the

sigobnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-29665153959438091482009-03-07T06:30:00.000-08:002009-03-07T06:36:12.147-08:00

There is an interesting post over at one of the Wall Street Journal Blogs. It talks about a correlational study between SAT scores and favorite musicians. It also talks about the correlations between SAT scores and favorite books. It is kind of funny. Where does "Ender's Game" and Druss the Legend fit in? As for music, I would have to see where Johnny Cash and John Wort Hannam fit in. For

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-19689012338995834342009-02-18T14:36:00.000-08:002009-02-18T16:25:09.643-08:00

During my vacation this week I have been trying to jot down steps in my conception of systemic change design process. trying to pull in some psychological tools for group dynamics has ended up being more of a minor technical detail than I had originally thought. The piece that I am finding the most challenging is finding a way to include the dissolution of overly matured & top-heavy group

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-72787383538020721372009-02-16T10:32:00.000-08:002009-02-16T10:52:31.895-08:00

Educational reforms have tended to stall out over the last decade. One way of thinking about this is that older "transformational" reforms burned up a lot of human capital with little to show. Authors such as Andy Hargreaves point to the futility and counter-productiveness of standardized state-wide reforms. As systemic change procedures are becoming more formalized, I think deep questions

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-34962608519773335482009-02-15T08:45:00.000-08:002009-02-15T09:10:07.382-08:00

I was just typing up some annotations from a book I had read last year, and thought I would jot down a couple of ideas. One of the challenges of designing for systemic change is how to treat group dynamics? Do you assume that group dynamics have few causal factors that can be controlled? Or do you assume the environments that influence group dynamics can, generally, be perturbed positively or

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-35582055899070989952009-02-05T11:32:00.000-08:002009-02-05T11:34:17.943-08:00

Piccolinno has a good post up at Gene Expression. Let me grab a long quote.Heritability estimates are slippery animals, but this recent PNAS paper is a great illustration of how they can be used to discipline theories of social network formation. The authors start by showing that three building blocks of social networks are heritable, namely the number of friends you have, the number of people

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-47476383095931936862009-02-04T19:35:00.000-08:002009-02-05T11:42:22.796-08:00

It was nice hearing about a piece Scott Atran has up on the NYT talking about the role of religious or quasi-religious like dynamics play in the logic of peace negotiations. Hat-tip Science and Religious News.in general the greater the monetary incentive involved in the deal, the greater the disgust from respondents. Israelis and Palestinians alike often reacted as though we had asked them to

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-70975225870772302762009-02-03T11:30:00.000-08:002009-02-05T11:31:30.791-08:00

As of late I have been going through a number of articles and books on designing for systemic change in education. I think I’ll just spin off on some ideas raised by a foundational paper by Patrick M. Jenlink, Charles M. Reigeluth, Alison A. Carr and Laurie Miller Nelson. The paper is “Guidelines for facilitating systemic change in school districts” and it is found in the 1998 May- June edition

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-46249571773936065362009-01-30T19:48:00.000-08:002009-01-30T19:52:04.735-08:00

This is a follow up to my last post on Duffy's and Reigeluth's School Transformation ProtocolCircular-like Requirements for Concurrent ChangeDuffy does a nice job laying out three paradigm shifts necessary for systemic transformational change in education (see summary above). While the term “paradigm shift”, may stroke many philosophers the wrong way, it gets at complexity theory’s idea of

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-71571163909155912152009-01-17T13:28:00.000-08:002009-01-17T15:28:57.815-08:00

Systemic change is quite a beast to ride. Implementing coherent vision is a moral endeavor that requires confronting both individual and group-level dynamics. Aligning multiple levels simultaneously is a challenging. The spandrelled nature of value systems makes this doubly hard and highly complex. District level change often lacks the deep rooted intentionality inherit with strong

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-56332573372389321652008-12-22T07:27:00.000-08:002008-12-22T07:29:24.313-08:00

Part IIII get the sense that Fox (1994) and other theologically oriented academics try to protect spirit via sacredness. These arguments seem to say awe and mystery are necessary for spirit’s emergence. A collective repudiation of sacrilegious acts are required to maintain a sense of sacredness (Atran, 2002). In a pluralistic society such norms are hard to generate and enforce. Society,

sigobnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-51288771204916116322008-12-22T07:21:00.000-08:002008-12-22T07:26:51.286-08:00

Part IIWhen I look at community building initiatives that may take us in a good direction, but whose promises are usually practically unrealistic in wide implementation, Dufour’s professional learning community (PLC) comes to mind. The last thing the people at the PLC conference I attended wanted to hear was Andy Hargreaves (2008) warnings about the skeletons coming with “silver bullet” PLC

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-7554458286586043362008-12-13T14:00:00.000-08:002008-12-13T14:05:15.105-08:00

To care for the soul within us and outside in the world, we need to recognize that soul is not in our possession, but rather the points of overlap where interior experience and the outer world are joined. – Briskin, 2001, pp. 247I am not an autonomous person. Like all people, my environment affects me. The stimuli I receive, alters some of the weightings behind my thoughts. In turn this

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-77447904663399431312008-11-05T19:54:00.001-08:002008-11-05T19:56:10.898-08:00

A local art teacher showed me this power point presentation on food art. It was fascinating.

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-7694561396666126142008-10-13T20:37:00.000-07:002008-10-14T19:42:19.258-07:00

In their article "Institutions and the story of American religion", Stout and Cormode make a number of interesting points.  I'll limit myself to one for now.  They reference DiMaggio's idea that formal organization structure and informal cultural ties produce taken for granted social norms.  The premise of the article itself is that religious communities and movements need to be seen as 

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-17471712597569748072008-09-27T10:38:00.000-07:002008-09-27T10:47:04.002-07:00

Just a quick link to an interesting post over at Gene Expression.  The main idea is recent academic world views have fallen out of favor.  Fourth, the sudden decline of all the big-shot theories you'd study in a literary theory or critical theory class is certainly behind the recent angst of arts and humanities grad students. Without a big theory, you can't pretend you have specialized training

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-23800539011401492432008-09-23T18:49:00.001-07:002008-09-23T18:52:36.658-07:00

An interesting post over at The frontal cortex on magical thinking.   Clark has a brief commentary up at his blog.

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-36998517537559384592008-09-09T18:12:00.000-07:002008-09-09T18:45:20.651-07:00

I just downloaded quite a few podcasts from Point of Inquiry. I must have been lucky, because Michael Dowd was on the first program. The other 3 or 4 I have listened to haven't been nearly as understanding about their flip positions in the religion / science interface. I did, however, think Dowd captured a nice middle ground.Dowd's views are solidly naturalistic and evidentiary. He uses

sigobnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-90750431458712269392008-09-07T19:07:00.001-07:002008-09-07T19:32:09.452-07:00

A practical way to deal with circularity issues is through iteration.  J. Willis' popular R2D2 instructional design model  gets lots of attention for its rejection of linear solutions.  There are actually a number of standard conventions for diagraming such processes.As mentioned iteration is often a good way to work through circularities.  In educational technology for instance, hardware,

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-61786161318158991122008-09-07T19:05:00.000-07:002008-09-07T19:07:13.942-07:00

Any substantive educational change runs into tremendous roadblocks. Tyack & Cuban’s book Tinkering Toward Utopia is probably the standard text exploring this issue. Michael Fullan’s work is a justifiably popular series of handbooks on this topic. There are a couple of basic perspectives that emerge with substantive educational change. Here’s the range I view myself operating within.1.

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-30995338894563643232008-09-07T18:53:00.000-07:002008-09-07T18:59:30.458-07:00

Educational solutions often seem cyclical in nature. Chances are you aren’t imagining things if you think today’s focus on problem based learning looks a lot like the 50’s focus on lab work. A simple way to view this dynamic is in terms of essential tensions.Essential tension basically means there isn’t a single absolute solution to a problem. Instead there is a dynamical balance that needs to

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-36059388801096480052008-09-07T18:46:00.001-07:002008-09-07T18:46:44.832-07:00

Educational initiatives often seem cyclical. Many current initiatives resemble initiatives pushed 30 years ago, and later seen as inadequate. To many, it is ironic that the system has just gotten over those old failures. The problem is, in education, as in religion static solutions aren’t possible. Educators are generally trying to prepare people for some aspect of life. This is true even of

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-32121142114051871802008-09-07T18:38:00.000-07:002008-09-07T18:39:28.361-07:00

I’m still finishing the last few chapters of Kauffman’s reinventing the sacred. In his chapter “Living into Mystery”, Kauffman gives an interesting description of models that deal with overfitted and underfitted expectations. This tied in nicely with one of my all time favorite papers by Willis (2004) that uses the idea of entropy to model the evolution and degradagation cycles of organizations

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-89010014879216653082008-08-26T10:11:00.000-07:002008-08-26T10:13:50.148-07:00

Not being in a big city, I am not sure how useful this would be for me. However, the Kinder reading device actually seems to have broken most of the hurdles holding back electronic readers.

sigobnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417197.post-43247553577075358032008-08-25T10:36:00.000-07:002008-08-25T11:59:26.596-07:00

A lot of science deals with explanations.  Predictive power comes as a spin effect from this goal.  As expectations of forward precision increase social scientists are confronted with questions of accuracy.  Minimizing error propagation in practical venues often requires a human touch.  As Kauffman states (2008, pp 149);Our incapacity to predict Darwinian preadaptations, when their analogues

sigobnoreply@blogger.com1