To complete my military training, the next week I attended the Connections Wargaming conference in Rome, New York. This is the 13th year for this Wargaming get-together and it was even more stimulating than I expected, with some first-rate minds and great presentations. In fact, in terms of the brain power and ideas, it rivaled many of the high power business conferences I’ve been to, and this one cost only $95 for three days (plus a $55 a night at the Quality Inn). The conference sparked several thoughts related to learning. Dr. Steven Rinaldi from Sandia National Labs spoke on work he is doing modeling critical systems. I suggested he add the educational system as a critical component of our infrastructure (albeit one with a long time frame to change). Col. John Warden (ret.) spoke on winning wars through massive parallelism – hitting the enemy on several fronts before he has a chance to react on any. I wondered whether we couldn’t do this with learning, assuming the “enemy” is ignorance. I think we are much too linear in pretty much all our educational approaches, especially since video and computer game playing has trained our young people to think much more in parallel. More info about the conference at https://extranet.rl.af.mil/connections/
Posted by Marc at July 28, 2003 02:25 AM