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[ by Charles Cameron — prescience, edutech, a twitter exchange — Glass Bead Games, Harper’s magazine and Microsoft ]
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Twitter avatars, left to right: Mark Safranski, Enriqueta Turanzas, Lewis Shepherd
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Mark Safranski, whom I like to think of as the Zen of Zen since there are now three of us who blog here, was tweeting with Lewis Shepherd and Enriqueta Turanzas about the future of education the other day, and Shepherd — who blogs at Shepherd’s Pi and is, as far as I know, Director of the Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments — tweeted a phrase that caught my eye:

Education’s future = MMPORG

My friend Mike Sellers had released the path-breaking game Meridian 59 in 1996, and Richard Garriott coined the term MMORPG (for massively multiplayer online role-playing game) in 1997 — so the tech side of things was just swinging into view in 1996-97, though it would be another five years before MIT began offering courseware (2001), and eight years before Games for Change was founded (2004).

Back in 1996 and 1997 I was writing up my ideas on education and games for the Magister-L mailing list, and pushing them on anyone who would listen at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference — now renamed the GDC, since it has since become obvious that games and computers are a match… and to shorten a long story, my ideas back then seemed to me to rhyme with Shepherd’s tweet this week.

And rhymes between ideas are important to me.

I tweeted back to Shepherd, offering a link to a piece I’d written in 1996 titled Myst-like Universities, Oxford-like Games? — and along with the link, my tweet said, ee cummings style:

if i wrote this in 1997 i was prescient, eh?

To which Enriqueta, bless her, quickly agreed, while Shepherd responded:

Prescient, yes. And if you patented it in ’97. you should get a call from Sebastian Thrun : )

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So.

That got me thinking, and I went back to look a little more carefully at what I’d written back then, and decided I should re-up it here on Zenpundit, which I will do in a follow up post to this one.

But first I should respond to Lewis Shepherd on the question of patenting.

I am a lot closer to a hermit than a man of business, to be honest – for reasons that Zenpundit regulars will have intuited from my two recent posts about Trevor Huddleston, and which followers of my games will know from my recent biographical sortie on the Sembl pages.

So, no – I didn’t patent my ideas, and indeed am deeply indebted to whoever engraved the words “to give, and not to count the cost, to labour, and not ask for any reward” on my heart early enough for me to be something of a Creative Commons type avant la lettre.

I’m not a purist, some of my writings have that dastardly little © mark attached, and I don’t mind getting paid on occasion – but to be honest, much of what I love about blogging is the free circulation of ideas and the cameraderie of bloggers…

The other thing that’s just a tad ironic about all this, though, is that back in April of 1997, Lewis Lapham, who was then editor-in-chief of Harper’s, wrote an extended editorial called Notebook: The Spanish Armadillo in which he recommended that Microsoft should consult me – publishing my email address for their convenience, no less:

Hesse’s bead game lends itself so obviously to the transcendent aspirations of the Internet that it’s probably only a matter of months before Microsoft buys the rights to his name for one of its software programs. The company’s marketing strategists might first want to consult Charles Cameron, reachable on the Internet at hipbone@earthlink.net, the foremost of 263 correspondents concerned with the implications of Hesse’s novel.

Well, I never got the email from Microsoft. I came to the conclusion they likely didn’t read Harper’s, or not at the requisite level for initiating consultations. And I was busy writing and thinking, thinking and writing, and taking pauses.

I still am.

But perhaps if Microsoft had called on me back then, I’d have blurted my thoughts out to them in greater detail than I was able to in that one HTML 1.0 post, so many years ago.

And perhaps they’d have thought I was prescient — and patented my idea or ideas, back in 1997.

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It’s interesting to compare my thoughts back in 1996-97 with what we’re up to these days with the Sembl project.

Next up, for your amusement: the text of that 1997 post of mine, giving my thoughts on games and education sixteen years ago – when I thought a terabyte was huge, huge.

[ by Charles Cameron — fear, hope, the Egyptian military, the Supreme Court, the Muslim Brotherhood, certainty and roulette ]
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The Apocalypse is a trump card — the Final Trump card if you will.

And because we so often associate “apocalyptic” with devastation and “post-apocalyptic” with a glowing nuclear waste-land, I’d like to establish first the joyous feelings the word “apocalypse” can also evoke. From Handel‘s Messiah, then, the glorious sound of the apocalyptic trumpet:

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That sounds pretty terrific, granted, but as we all know, apocalypse also has a darker side — in fact it is a two-sided business, offering both maximal terror and optimal hope.

On the one hand, as Yeats puts it:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

While on the other, as John of Patmos says, “I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

Utmost disintegration and devastation — and the immaculate hope of a new heaven and a new earth.

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As we watch events unfolding in Egypt, then, there are some specifically apocalyptic themes in the air, both on the Egyptian Islamic side…

… where a vision-swept crowd can chant for the triumph of Islam in Jerusalem … and on the Christian side, where an apocalyptic writer such as Joel Richardson can use that same clip to reinforce a message of the lateness of the hour from the other side of the apocalyptic coin:

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We can, it seems to me, react to the clip of the TV preacher Safwat Hijazi in at least four ways — with jubilation, as the crowd in the video does; with quiet satisfaction, as the politicians of the MB who stand to gain from his support presumably do; with fear, as those of us roused by the video to a vision of the Middle East plunging headlong, unavoidably, into war are likely to do; or with concern — a more temperate approach, and one that await further details, further indicators, further events unfolding.

I don’t think it’s time, yet, to place any bets. Dr. Hegazi’s statement, and the crowd’s response, certainly concern me. The motif of a victorious march of Islam to retake Jerusalem is and end times motif, and I can think of few things more terrifying than a Mahdist army on the march.

But we are not there yet, Dr Hegazi is articulating a dream, not a party political program. And between that dream — a powerful one, to which many Egyptians are clearly susceptible — and its realization we have the moderating factors of realpolitik, of the Supreme Court rulings just a day or two ago — and of the power and entrenched financial interests of the Egyptian military.

In watching the video of Dr Hegazi it is possible to forget all this and be swept up by fear, just as the crowd was swept up by hope of conquest.

And as I’ve said before, I take comfort also in the fact that Joel Richardson is at pains not only to argue, from his own perspective, for the conversion of Muslims — but also to renounce the use of explicitly Christian force until that Trumpet sounds:

I explained to my host that unless a supernatural man bursts forth from the sky in glory, there is absolutely nothing that the world needs to worry about with regard to Christian end-time beliefs. Christians are called to passively await their defender. They are not attempting to usher in His return. Muslims, on the other hand, are actively pursuing the day when their militaristic leader comes to lead them on into victory. Many believe that they can usher in his coming.

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From my point of view, then, we should be cautious, informed and deliberative. This is not the time to be leaping to conclusions.

I am no expert on Egypt. What I am attempting here is to be aware of the apocalyptic current that was stirring in that Egyptian crowd — and of the apocalyptic currents stirring here, also, in the United States — with calm, with moderation, with an eye to the other influences, some of them both powerful and entrenched, which will themselves tend to divert, moderate, arouse or inflame the situation.

The Supreme Court. The election and whatever comes of it in terms of both power and backlash. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. American dollars. Israeli nukes. The inevitable ebbing away at some point of heightened emotions. The economics of tourism…

The unknowns…

[ by Charles Cameron — religious law espoused in Judaism, Christianity and Islam ]
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I came across this first video, featuring Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement outside Hebron, yesterday, and thought it would be worthwhile to seek out companion pieces proposing divinely sanctioned legal systems in the two other Abrahamic traditions:

There are naturally differences as well as similarities between the three messages and the relative levels of influence of their respective messengers. A scholar of comparative religion might be concerned with their selections of canonical texts to enforce and the techniques of interpretation variously applied to them, an historian might compare our second speaker, the Chalcedon Institute’s (late) RJ Rushdoony‘s view of the applicability of Biblical law with that of Calvin in Geneva, a strategist consider the groundswells of popular opinion attaching to each of these speakers, their political and military potentials…

All three speakers claim that law should be based on a divinely authored and thus authoritative text — but the books so considered differ. Anjem Choudary, the third speaker, brings vividly to mind the impact that such doctrines can have on those who do not share his religious convictions when he proposes that Buckingham Palace could become a mosque…

I think it important to be aware that such men exist, and have followings. There are members of all three religions that I count as friends, events of horrific, divinely sanctioned violence in the histories of all three religions, and figures in the history of each religion from whom I take inspiration. I would not wish to live in a land where any one of these three men wielded power, and I do not believe that any one of them is fully representative of the grand sweep of his own tradition.

My intent in posting these three videos is to inform, not to inflame, and I invite you to view them in that spirit.

Fabius Maximus has a nice round-up on an important book – Decoding Clausewitz by Jon Sumida  

Is Clausewitz Still Relevant? 

1)  Review from the Marine Corps Gazette

Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to On War
by Jon Tetsuro Sumida (2008)

Reviewed by J. Alex Vohr. Originally published in the Marine Corps Gazette, March 2009. Republished here with their generous permission.

Abstract

While primarily a naval historian, Dr. Sumidas decade-long foray into Clausewitz has resulted in a book uncovering issues significant to those whose professional interests involve either the formulation of our national military strategy or the professional education and development of military officers. Current prevailing wisdom holds that Clausewitz was concerned only with nation-state warfare, and modern military theorists like General Sir Rupert Smith, in his book, The Utility of Force (Vintage, 2008, reviewed in the August 2007 Gazette), have asserted that the Western world has seen the end of these types of conflicts. 

Professor Sumida is on my “to be read” list but I have not gotten to it yet. Readers who have are cordially invited to sound off in the comments.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

Recently, several notable posts have continued, or amplified the ideas introduced by Lt. Benjamin Kohlman’s post at Small Wars Journal calling on “disruptive thinkers.” I’ll be sharing five posts: three are serialized and offer a historical example of disruptive thinking in the U.S. Navy and the resultant lessons. The fourth is written by LTG Walter F. Ulmer, Jr. (USA, Ret) and defines a major obstacle to the disruptive thinker, namely, “toxic leaders.” The fifth is an current example of a young active duty officer, Richard Allain (USMC) thinking deeply about his profession and offering ideas on adaptability and innovation.

Navy Lieutenant Commander Benjamin “BJ” Armstrong wrote a three installment post at the US Naval Institute blog, and his topic was an example of not only disruptive thinking, but of courage, persistence, and what LCDR Armstrong calls (correctly) “grit.” Here is an excerpt from the first installment describing then-Lt. William Sims:

In 1900 he was a Lieutenant, fresh off staff duty in Europe as an intelligence officer.  He had orders to China Station to join the U.S. Navy’s newest and most powerful battleship, the USS KENTUCKY.  He arrived aboard the battleship having studied the early Dreadnaught battleships of Europe and the gunnery practices of both potential allies and potential adversaries alike.

Sims checked onboard and discovered that the Navy’s “newest and most powerful” may have been new, but it certainly wasn’t powerful.  There were a number of problems with the ship.  The hull was armored under the waterline, but the sides and gun turrets were open and un-protected.  The gundecks were so low to the waterline that when the ship was fully loaded and took heavy seas water would pour into the turrets.  And there was no separation of the magazines and the weatherdecks and gundecks, so a hit from an enemy shell could directly access the magazines.

Sims was incensed.  He set about recording the deficiencies.  In a letter to a friend he wrote: “The Kentucky is not a battleship at all.  She is the worst crime in naval construction ever perpetrated by the white race.” 

In the second installment, Lt. Armstrong describes then-Lt. Sims “grit:”

Sims had submitted 13 reports in all, over the span of two years, each one continually improving his method and technique.  When he heard that the Bureau of Ordnance had completed a test and proved that what he claimed was impossible, he finally had enough.  He knew that if the United States Navy went up against a force that was using continuous aim fire it would be decimated.  Destruction of the fleet would open up the U.S. coast to invasion, as the Brits had done in the War of 1812 (a war that was roughly as distant to him as World War I is to us).  He believed that the nation’s security depended on his success.

Lieutenant William Sims did something that he later characterized as “the rankest kind of insubordination.”  He wrote a letter to the President.

Writing the President is is pretty disruptive, and the President read the letter and acted.

LCDR Armstrong, in his final installment called, Voice, Grit, and Listening…A Look at the Possible:

Finally, we all need to learn to listen.  This is especially true as we become more senior.  Today we may be the junior leaders, but that means tomorrow some of us will be the mid-grade leaders, and in the future some of us will be the senior leaders of the Navy.  Sims is proof that when you remember it’s not about you but instead it’s about the idea and about the Service, you can continue to innovate as you are promoted.

These three posts are exceptionally relevant, and highly recommended.

LTG Ulmer’s essay in Army magazine, June 2012 issue, is titled: Toxic Leadership, What Are We Talking About? General Ulmer defines toxic leadership:

Defining toxic leader is the first priority before addressing numbers, impact, cause and solution. Webster’s defines toxic as poisonous, not far from destructive or harmful.

Toxic leaders are a major obstacle, and according to General Ulmer’s essay, make up almost 10% of the Army’s officer corps. General Ulmer goes on to define precisely toxic leaders in the military context, explain how they continue to survive, and offer solutions. His analysis is lucid and spot-on. The other services could learn from the Army’s lesson, and take positive action to separate toxic leaders using indigenous resources—essentially using the personnel system to weed these folks out:

A very good soldier and scientist, LTC Larry Ingraham, now deceased, commented on the dramatic differences among subordinate reputations of senior officers, saying that the personnel system that cannot distinguish between the revered and the despised must have a fundamental flaw.

The final essay comes from today’s Small Wars Journal. The title is Innovation in a Small War, and is truly an exercise in deep thinking on how the Marine Corps plans, adapts, innovates, and fights. On creativity, Allain says:

Current theories of creativity support a process consisting of four key themes.  Creativity results from the invention and bounding of a problem, deconstruction of existing mental concepts, synthesis of these concepts in a new way, and test and development of the novelty to become valuable.

Allain recognizes the institutional obstacles to innovation:

It is clear that we need both innovators and adaptors within the Marine Corps to execute our doctrine.  Without a balance we can stagnate or fluctuate wildly, rapidly finding ourselves unable to cope with structured or unstructured situations.  While Marines are elite, they still have a spread in distribution of natural talents and attributes and exercise a spectrum of adaptive and innovative thought processes.

He concludes:

The field of military innovation studies must expand its orientation and re-examine the interconnectedness of adaptability and innovation, appreciation and leadership, and military effectiveness.  Specific focus should be given to the aforementioned instances of resistance to innovation.  It created stagnation and inhibited learning, a sign of ineffectiveness under this theory, and deserving of analysis.

Allain’s essay, along with the other posts, should be required reading for all are instructive, and all offer examples and solutions—and I would offer, an inspiration to those members on the fence about wading into the debate.

Well done to all!

ADDENDUM to original: Mark Tempest over at EaglesSpeak links to some insightful posts (duplicating a few above), and makes a good point about age (us old guys), illustrating you can teach an old dog new tricks—if the dog is paying attention…

Cross posted at tobeortodo.com