[Ci4cg-announce] How Civically Intelligent is your College or University?

Mon Jul 18 10:22:00 PDT 2016

Doug:

Your proposal is the interest if our Seminar and we invite you in behalf of my colleagues to give a talk in september.
UNAM is the national university of Mexico and our Seminar is oriented to analyze the impact of technology in learning.

Best,

Miguel Angel

Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>

On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 10:23 PM -0500, "Doug Schuler" <douglas at publicsphereproject.org<mailto:douglas at publicsphereproject.org>> wrote:

Hi Todd,

Thanks for taking the time to raise these points! I'd really like to hear from others who disagree with this line of reasoning or find it lacking in other ways. Debating the viability of the concept (of civic intelligence) and possible uses of it is very important.

The first thing I'd say is that I am not trying to come up with something that measures progressive social values. I'm actually trying to understand better how groups of people come up with approaches that are effective and equitable. My basic hypothesis is that they use something like "civic intelligence" to accomplish this. The hope is that this could (1) help us to improve the civic intelligence of people around the world (which, btw, takes different forms in different contexts); and (2) help provide a useful concept for developing and conducting collaborative projects of all types.

The reason that I want to use the term "intelligence" is that it seems to be the best descriptor available for this job. Its main functions — integrating thought and action, the use of reason (etc.), and learning — are all distinct functions of "intelligence." I also want to assert that intelligence in individuals is not only something that's adequately described by IQ tests. THAT is an invention by researchers and to me it does real harm to the richness of human thinking and activity and to the worth of humans.

We developed the five perspectives because we really wanted to get a view of the whole range of ways that a college could be civically intelligent. It's almost the opposite of trying to come up with a single attribute that is the stand-in for the entire institution. (That will also give us ideas as to how to actually improve it!)

We do acknowledge the value of knowing things about social issues ("homelessness, economic inequality, police violence," e.g.). Unfortunately I may have given this short shrift in the blog piece (see below to see the verbiage that we used for this) but in the longer version the topic is covered in more detail.

(2) What does the college do to promote civic intelligence among students?
This includes the classroom and other forms of evaluated teacher / student activities as well as other activities outside the classroom including student groups and activities, informal as well as formal. We also identified interdisciplinary classes, especially those focused on societal problem-solving, as very important, as well as the quantity and quality of student engagement and leadership in educational endeavors.

Finally, one of the reasons I'm so hep on the term is that students (not all of them) seem to respond very positively to it. It allows us to study important things such as how might we address historical wrongdoings and it also allows us to feel that we actually ARE connected to humankind in some sort of real way AND that we have some modicum of power and self-efficacy to possibly help effect some change. I.e. it can be liberatory and it's not always easy to make those claims about education.

Other feedback would also be very appreciated!!

Thanks Todd!!!

— Doug

We will continue our examination of civic intelligence at Evergreen and we encourage other schools to examine theirs. The rankings, of course, aren’t intended to be permanent. They are aspirational and, with work and encouragement, the hope is that colleges and universities will become a critical backbone of social purpose, cooperation and civic intelligence that builds on their deep experience advancing the world’s knowledge and humanity.

On Jul 14, 2016, at 10:43 AM, Todd Davies <davies at stanford.edu<mailto:davies at stanford.edu>> wrote:

I like the overall idea and the outline rubric, Doug. I am somewhat skeptical about trying to adapt the word "intelligence" to measure progressive social values. I realize, however, that you are heavily invested in the term "civic intelligence", and I respect the goals I think are behind that. It sort of reminds me of adaptations of the word "violence" to mean essentially the same thing as "injustice" (e.g. "structural violence", "economic violence", "cultural violence"). To the extent that I admire the hopes here, and I definitely do, I think trying to rank universities according to this rubric is a good way to promote the idea of civic intelligence. Universities tend to be thought of in relation to concepts such as "intelligent" and "smart", so using the word "intelligence" to judge their social values might be effective for that reason.

A challenge I see for this approach is that the concept itself may be so contentious that it will have a hard time getting traction, and may even spark a powerful counter-movement. The experience of trying to identify "peace" with "justice", which has had big names behind it (e.g. Martin Luther King) as well as an academic field of sorts (peace studies), may be instructive in that regard. An alternative approach, although one that would carry the project away from your concept of "civic intelligence", would be to assess universities according to somewhat more conventional (though still problematic) notions of intelligence, i.e. ones that relate to knowledge as opposed to values, and that can be tested objectively. How do students at different universities do, for example, on Simon Baron-Cohen's Reading the Mind in the Eyes test? Or, in the social welfare domain, how much do students know factually about topics like homelessness, economic inequality, police violence, and the effects of war on civilian populations? I bring up these ideas not to say that you should change your focus, but just that there are multiple ways to push back against the dominant and oppressive identification of universities with the ability to solve logic puzzles, and we should probably go at that from multiple angles.

Todd

Todd Davies
Symbolic Systems Program
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, 94305-2150 USA
email: davies at stanford.edu<mailto:davies at stanford.edu>
phone: 1-650-723-4091
office: 460-040C
web: web.stanford.edu/~davies<https://web.stanford.edu/~davies>

________________________________
From: ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org<mailto:ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org> <ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org<mailto:ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org>> on behalf of Peter Day <P.Day at brighton.ac.uk<mailto:P.Day at brighton.ac.uk>>
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2016 3:38 AM
To: Doug Schuler; ci4cg-announce at scn9.scn.org<mailto:ci4cg-announce at scn9.scn.org>
Subject: Re: [Ci4cg-announce] How Civically Intelligent is your College or University?

Thanks for this Doug

I like this a lot.....please feel free to keep me informed of developments......am busy on other projects right now but might like to think about ways in which we could include this in my modules.

Best

Peter
________________________________
From: ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org<mailto:ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org> [ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org<mailto:ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org>] on behalf of Doug Schuler [douglas at publicsphereproject.org<mailto:douglas at publicsphereproject.org>]
Sent: 14 July 2016 05:13
To: ci4cg-announce at scn9.scn.org<mailto:ci4cg-announce at scn9.scn.org>
Subject: [Ci4cg-announce] How Civically Intelligent is your College or University?

Believing that this is relevant to many people on the list I'm pointing people towards an article of mine about ranking institutions of higher education.

I'm trying to make the case that colleges and universities should think about themselves in terms of civic intelligence.

I describe about how my students and I developed the idea and present the skeleton of a rubric. http://www.sigeneration.ca/civic-intelligence-university-college/

We're hoping to go to the next phase: putting more flesh on the rubric and using it to rank some schools.

I'd love to hear your thoughts in relation to this idea. Or if you'd like to help!

— Doug

PS. I sent a (nearly) identical note to the ciresearchers list....

Douglas Schuler
douglas at publicsphereproject.org<mailto:douglas at publicsphereproject.org>
Twitter: @doug_schuler

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Public Sphere Project
     http://www.publicsphereproject.org/

Mailing list ~ Collective Intelligence for the Common Good
      http://scn9.scn.org/mailman/listinfo/ci4cg-announce

Creating the World Citizen Parliament
     http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2013/creating-the-world-citizen-parliament

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (project)
     http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/lv<http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/>

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (book)
 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11601

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