Saturday, August 18, 2012

Assignment 1


Work:

     After being exposed to my first few classes of the brand new course, Academic Leadership, I have formulated my own understanding of the course's purpose. I believe the concept is instructing students into new ways of exposing their academic development. My understanding is that through new forms of technology and a 21st century method of learning, the course will lead students into academic success.

     During class, we have viewed and commented on the following video:



After watching the video, Mr. Tolley commented on how it felt to have a sophisticated or intellectual understanding of a certain topic. I also have this kind of appreciation for video editing and speaking languages. I believe these things could help generate a major academic project in the future.

       During class we have also learned about how Romney, currently running for president of the United States, dumbed down certain information from James Diamond's book and said that was exactly what the researcher had written. He took this information and completely twisted it to his advantage while making people think that was actually what Diamond wrote. This is an example of abusing academic knowledge to manipulate other people. What Romney did was simplifying Diamond's ideas to make them much more understandable by the US population and help in his campaign. If someone were to do something similar to me, I would be truly devastated considering the amount of work I put into developing good quality material. Also when using my work to manipulate people would mean I am somehow linked to it considering the information, or some of it, once came form me.

Follows an image of jared Diamond's book:




      Creating Academically sophisticated leaders might be a solution for this problem. These are able to recognize when an information is being used for the sole purpose of manipulating and using their skills to communicate this to everyone else. The benefits of this in a democratic society is that, with an academically sophisticated view, people are better aware of what kind of leaders should represent their country and avoid being manipulated.

Unfortunately, the video showed above has recently been removed due to copyright infringment. Therefore, due to the requirement of showing multimedia relevant to the topic we discussed at the time, I chose to present the link to the article mentioning Romney's and Diamond's situation:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/opinion/mitt-romneys-search-for-simple-answers.html?_r=0