Monthly Archives: January 2020

We just uploaded “Soul (Slow Online and Ubiquitous Learning): Analysis and Regulation of Instructional Time,” which will be presented at the upcoming STEM in education in conference here at UBC.

ABSTRACT: This paper addresses an experimental and innovative pedagogy and philosophy: Slow Online and Ubiquitous Learning (SOUL). Since 2011, the co-authors have implemented SOUL as a pedagogy and philosophy into the online courses they teach at a university level. Pedagogically, SOUL is a pragmatic temporal regulation that limits and paces course commitments for students and instructors. Philosophically, SOUL is an intervention into the conventional wisdom that portrays online learning as a limitless exchange of ideas 24/7. This paper reviews relevant research on time, provides a theoretical framework that underwrites SOUL, and analyzes instructors’ and students’ experiences and self-study data.

Petrina, S. (2019). “Scientific Ammunition to Fire at Congress:” Intelligence, reparations and the US Army Air Forces, 1944-1947. Journal of Military History, 83(3), 795-829.

I recently published a major article on the history of the Air Force: This article synthesizes histories of Operation LUSTY, the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG), and Project PAPERCLIP, and follows the SAG into Germany’s R&D installations, the concentration camp Dora at Mittelwerk, allied interrogation facilities, Japan and the atom bomb, and finally into Congress, 1945. The history of the SAG’s efforts from 1944 to 1947 reveals the intensity with which the AAF and its consultants in the aeronautical sciences pursued Nazi R&D. The fact that an exploitation of this R&D configured into the postwar policies of the AAF and USAF is accepted by historians. This article explains how this was done by describing the coordination of LUSTY, OVERCAST, PAPERCLIP, and the SAG in the AAF’s exploitation of intelligence and reparations for postwar policies and politics.

Although initially cautious about the implications of recruiting personnel for R&D in the US, engineers and scientists in the SAG were anxious to transfer Nazi technologies to the AAF. Whether or not the military “was sold— or sold itself— an expensive bill of goods” by Nazi scientists and technologists, as a reporter concluded at the time, remains a historical question.