Teach for America’s hidden curriculum

Teach for America’s hidden curriculum – http://pulse.me/s/iAL5Q Need to finish reading this. I still don’t see enough of teacher unions working on good reform .

Grab-Bag

Here are a bunch of interesting links I have not had time to fully digest.

“Countdown to a Meltdown” an article from 2005 in which James Fallows of The Atlantic lays out how a third party candidate will win the presidency in 2016 after 8 years of ineffective Democratic presidency.  Interesting use of creativity and focusing on larger political and economic trends.

“Revenge of the Ratings Agencies” a NYT op-ed frames the Stnadard & Por’s downgrade as a political act not in terms of a D-R blame game, but as a threatened industry playing hardball.

The law called for exposing rating agencies to civil liability in securities lawsuits if their ratings were inaccurate. It also challenged the oligopoly’s dominance by calling for the Securities and Exchange Commission to explore the feasibility of having an independent organization select rating agencies for asset-backed securities, instead of having the bond issuers select and pay the agencies, as they now do.

“Serving Shareholders and Democracy” is a NYT editorial about how the SEC should force public firms to disclose to shareholders how and how much money they spend on politics.

Last week, a group of legal scholars sent a petition to the S.E.C. urging it to craft rules requiring companies to disclose to shareholders how they use corporate resources for political activities.

Here, the NYT reports on what seems like a very common-sense idea: have natural gas drillers post funds to a special emergency response fund to cover clean up in case of inevitable accidents.  I man need this for class.

Finally, London and riots.  I saw a link somewhere mentioning this academic paper by Ponticelli and Voth, from a research center (the CEPR) that looks at Europe 1919-2009 and finds that in general, cuts in government expenditures lead to more unrest like riots, strikes, and assassinations.  A free copy can be found here.  While this may seem self-evident, it is useful to have it confirmed empirically.  The results also suggest it is not due to cultural factors, demographics, or lots of “bad people.”  What I also noted is that more media coverage did not seem to matter.

Primordial Ooze of Civil Society?

I always liked the phrase “primordial ooze.”  It is fun to say and the ten year old in me sees a bubbling, steaming goo that seems to defy order and good manners.  I also like it because it captures the idea of how the new emerges from the old, how complexity emerges from sets of interactions that are not supposed to add up to the emergent.

Two items from today made me wonder if we are looking at the primordial ooze of civil society.  Let me say here that by civil society I am not entering into some long-standing debate about what is or isn’t civil society.  I am looking for a term that covers the idea of collective or coordinated action of varying degrees of formality that is centered on common ground of like-minded actors.  Also, this common ground must unite people around some sense of a common good or higher purpose.  In short, human organizing motivated by “ruled” by practices that are not of formal state power nor purely economic rationality.  I am not sure if that holds up, but I’ll leave it there for now.

So, item #1.  Egypt, of course.  Like countless others, I am fascinated, hopeful, fearful, and awe struck by the events unfolding first in Tunisia and now more spectacularly in Egypt.  Through the media I have followed (Democracy Now, KCRW’s To The Point, NY time, Huffingtonpost, BBC, Guardian), there are several elements at work.  In no particular order.

* Youthful, technology-enabled activists.

* The Muslim Brotherhood

* Dissident elites (like El Baradei)

* Neighborhood watch patrols

Some of these groups seem loosely organized or rapidly scaling up and out as they absorb the tens or hundreds of thousands of newly mobilized citizens.  I imagine new organizing, new durable networks of trust and cooperation, and new alliances among the other two are a major part of the fluidity and flux.  This (to me) palpable sense of what could be captures the imagery of the primordial ooze of civil society.

Item #2: The Really Free School.  A random facebook message put me on to this (originating in theory.org.uk, home of theory trading cards).  I have not been able to explore it much, but what struck me is the basic ethos: let’s use a common space, the (Shirky-ean) low cost of coordinating, the ability of people to self-organize, and the cultural scripts of sharing knowledge and delighting in serious play.  Though not as fluid or important as Egypt, it also seems to me to get at the origins,at the primordial ooze,  of civil society in its simplicity and open-endedness.

http://theory.org.uk/

Resources on Internet and Politics

Participating in orgtheory.net thread I whipped up these resources which I thought ought to be useful here also.

Question:

How has the Internet changed political organizations? Is it just one tool in the service of traditional politics? Or is there a new politics associated with online life?

I agree that this is going to be a really important area of study in the future. In talking about how protests get organized with activists, it’s pretty clear that Facebook has turned into the medium of choice given its flexibility and relational scope. If nothing else Facebook helps cut down the coordination costs of collective action, but I suspect there’s an identity element to the story as well.

So why don’t we have very many studies about the impact of the internet on other sorts of organizational decision-making and/or organizing? Most of the studies that look at organizational life and the internet that I’ve seen tend to look at the counterproductive aspects of the internet (e.g., lost hours of productivity due to blog reading). What about the efficiency-enhancing aspects of online coordination? Anyone?

I feel like there is a lot that is at least descriptive or celebratory of lowering the coordination costs for civil society or political organizations.  You mean more rigorous, empirical research?  And do you mean campaign organizations (as oppose to governing or politically engaged?)

A few things I pulled off my shelf-
Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons for Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics Techout, Zephyr and Streeter,Thomas. Has stories from campaign and some framing/theory chapters.

Society Online Edited by Howard, Philip and Jones, Steve. Has a chapter on voting and Internet in politics 1996-2000 (wow! Pre-history!).

Globalization from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks della POrta, Donatella et al. Has a Chapter on Networks and Organizing.

Causewired By Watson, Tom. Whole book is rah-rah on wired activism. HAs chapter on politics (6, I think).

The Media in the Network Society: Browsing, NEws, Filters, and Citizenship Several chapters on politics, political systems, case studies of other countries (East Timor, Portugal e.g)

Is any of this on the mark?

Monkey-wrenching Land Grabs in Utah

A dailyKos diarist put me on to this new form of civil disobedience.

Reminds me of Saul Alinsky and Kodak or Ralph NAder and GM in the 1960s and the birth of shareholder activism.

He didn’t pour sugar into a bulldozer’s gas tank. He didn’t spike a tree or set a billboard on fire. But wielding only a bidder’s paddle, a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won’t be opened to drilling anytime soon.

Tim DeChristopher, 27, faces possible federal charges after winning bids totaling about $1.8 million on more than 10 lease parcels that he admits he has neither the intention nor the money to buy — and he’s not sorry.

“I decided I could be much more effective by an act of civil disobedience,” he said during an impromptu streetside news conference during an afternoon blizzard. “There comes a time to take a stand.”

CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers

CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers – Times Online
Corporate India is in shock after a mob of workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who sacked them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi.

Does this sound like 19th centruy America and labor unrest in the gilded age?

Second Life’s Real-World Problems

A student of mine (Thanks Ellie!) found this article about SL in Time.  Does the SLLA want no commerce?  Or no bricks-and-mortar commerce? Is this anarchy or mercantilism?  And what did Linden do to SLLA?  Any sanctions?

Second Life’s Real-World Problems – TIME
The dilemma for Linden Lab, the company running Second Life, is how to rein in its creation without alienating hard-core users. Fans love the site as a way to meet people and experiment in self-expression. And companies are drawn to these techno-savvy trendsetters who spent 22 million hours on the site last month. But some devotees are so upset by increasing commercialization that a group called the Second Life Liberation Army last year gunned down virtual shoppers at American Apparel. So-called griefing, or on-site harassment, is on the rise. Says Gartner research chief Steve Prentice: “Second Life is moving into a phase of disillusionment.”