What if universities gave you a certificate for the number of years you completed instead of requiring you to complete a minimum number years before receiving a certificate? Wouldn't we have more people with better self-esteem? Wouldn't we have a workforce with a better quantified record of academic achievement?

It's time to put academics in their place. Enough jumping through hoops taking "core" courses that haven't been revised for twenty years. Stop locking students in for three years for a Bachelor's degree and giving them nothing if they are unable to acquire sufficient credits. Students pay for their education, they deserve certification for every course they complete. Every course should be on their resume. Course naming should be standardized to make names as informative to the employer as possible.

Grades should not be A, B, C, D, F.

Grades should be Instructor, Expert, Intermediate, Novice, Familiar.

Marks should not be on a curve. Either you know the answers or you do not. If the class fails to learn the material the instructor should be sent for retraining. The student's should get a refund.

Students are customers. Students have to be taught this before they even enter university. Academics should be taught this instead of dangling diplomas like carrots. The students are God, not phonies who achieve tenure only to rest on their laurels producing vacuous papers.

So, the next question is obvious. What makes a good academic?

Academia Based on Future Performance

What if we took the academic institution and turned it around? What if instead of resting on laurels academics were measured by their goals--estimates and actuals--each year. What if education became an enterprenurial venture? What if an education plan was based not on whether you could color within the lines and connect the dots, but upon the ability to experiment and the experience more important than success or failure? What if education instead of regurgitating the trodden path involved taking the student express to the bounds of knowledge and revealing all that lies unexplored? What if failure, recovery and final success was a prerequisite? What if every student could have a mentor?

What if we could care and share our ways to academic success and ultimately professional success?

R. Buckminster Fuller said that the tetrahedron was the simplest system. Albert Einstein said that such a system was composed of time, space, energy and matter. S. Raganathan agreed with Einstein when he created his colon classification system saying that a system has four components and a class.




However, John Zachman believed that a computer system had six components. The Zachman Framework contains Time (when), Space (where), Energy (how), Matter (what) and two more components Cause (why) and Observer (who). So let's take Zachman's framework and strip those two components away. We will also reorient the framwork.

Now, let's look at this "framework" in some detail using Zachman's terms.

The framework has four "focuses":

1. Matter
2. Energy
3. Space
4. Time

Using the simplest system, Matter is the datum of the system; Energy is the process; Space is the network; and Time is the event.

The framework also has six "perspectives:

1. Concept
2. Context
3. Logic
4. Physic
5. Construct
6. Instance

Perspectives are the phases of system development. Concept is a listing of each element of each component of the system. Context relates the components to each other. Logic is the ideal design. Physic is the design constrained by available resources. Construct is the assembly of the system. Instance is the system in operation.

You probably have noted that I have added an extra row and an extra column. Expense is the cost of the phase. Revenue is benefit of the components. The bottom right cell contains the cost/benefit ratio.

Interaction

I have been thinking about interaction between two systems and it appears that in non-human systems all interaction has to traverse hierarchies.
The most obvious example I can think of is the OSI Network Model where information has to traverse several levels of translation before reaching the human user



The non-human system communication hierarchies led me to wonder about what hiearchy could be used to reflect human communication
I began to think of Maslow’s hierarchy as level not only of need, but of consciousness
I began to think that human communication has to traverse several levels of consciousness when information is received and sent



With a hierarchy of consciousness in mind I began to think about James Moffett’s concept of the Universe of Discourse
How could traversing consciousness and traversing levels of discourse come into the fold
Did different stimuli have a different level of conscious response by the human organism? Maslow said that the level of human need affected the response to stimuli. Why not functions of discourse.
Moffett also added a dimension of Audience
What about the levels of psychological and social consciousness?
James Moffett believed that there were four levels of human consciousness when it came to audience and discourse
The next several slides will explore this

At first Human Interaction appears to have five distinct categories:
Generalization Supertype – within the individual
Generalization Subtypes - within the individual
Recursion – within the group
Relation – a member and another group
Association – representatives between two groups










Based upon the above analysis there are five audiences of conscious interaction
Intrapersonal Supertype - Physiological
Intrapersonal Subtype - Safety
Interpersonal - Belonging
Intrapublic - Esteem
Interpublic - Self-Actualization

We can also extrapolate that there are five functions of interaction
Sensing - Physiological
Recording - Safety
Reporting - Belonging
Generalizing - Esteem
Theorizing - Self-Actualization



I think if we study how interaction traverses function and audience in the human organism we will have a better understanding of how to cooperate effectively
However, I am not satisfied with the conclusions I have reached as there are more dynamics involved
All we have addressed is who and how

Why platonic Perspectives?

Welcome to my blog.

I've entitled it "platonic perspectives" because the dominant thread of this blog will play with concepts alluding to the platonic solids.

The graphic deals with the triangulated platonic solids of which I am most fond. The two missing are the cube and the duodecahedron.

The reason I am focusing on the triangulated platonic solids is that they are structurally integral--they retain their shape when reduced to being composed of segments representing their edges and joined at the vertices.

The number of possible solids approach the infinite. This I acknowledge, however it is possible to discover patterns among solids and to classify them on the properties the members of a pattern have.