Archive - 2021

  Engaging, effective training programs are a mixture of science and art, requiring the right balance of adult learning theory, available technology, intuitive tools, proven practices, creativity, and risk. How does a trainer find the right combination and proportion of these elements? How does a trainer know what’s possible? To answer these questions, Brian Washburn (Paraguay 1998-2000) offers a simple yet elegant periodic table of learning elements modeled on the original periodic table of chemical properties in What’s Your Formula? Combine Learning Elements for Impactful Training . Washburn’s elements — which are organized into solids, liquids, gases, radioactive, and interactive categories similar to their chemical cousins — are metaphors for the tools and strategies of the field of learning design; when they’re combined, and under certain conditions, they have the potential to create amazing learning experiences for participants. They are that impactful. From critical gas-like elements like the air we breathe, . . .

from WFAE 90.7 — Charlotte’s NPR News Source Rob Schmitz (China 1996-98) is NPR’s international correspondent based in Berlin, where he covers the human stories of a vast region reckoning with its past while it tries to guide the world toward a brighter future. From his base in the heart of Europe, Schmitz has covered Germany’s levelheaded management of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of right-wing nationalist politics in Poland and creeping Chinese government influence inside the Czech Republic. Prior to covering Europe, Schmitz provided award-winning coverage of China for a decade, reporting on the country’s economic rise and increasing global influence. His reporting on China’s impact beyond its borders took him to countries such as Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand. Inside China, he’s interviewed elderly revolutionaries, young rappers, and live-streaming celebrity farmers who make up the diverse tapestry of one of the most fascinating countries on the planet. . . .

    By KELSEY HAMMON | Longmont Times-Call June 20, 2021 at 5:45 a.m. • Joshua Berman’s (Nicaragua 1998-2000) career as a writer has been anything but a 9-to-5 desk job. He’s tasted boa constrictor, climbed narrow mountain highways, sat in the back of a truck as he sped by volcanoes in Nicaragua, and blistered his feet on the Colorado Trail. Before he zoned in on writing about Colorado, he used his career to explore the globe and feed his passion for writing and exploring. His excursions today include passing that sense of adventure down to his three daughters, while teaching them how to respect and revel in the nature around them. Berman is an author of six travel books, a Denver Post columnist, an all-around expert adventurer, Longmont resident, and a “tranquilo (calm) traveler.” He uses this term to call on explorers like himself to remain open-minded and inquisitive, as . . .

  It is now difficult to imagine Afghanistan any otherwise than at war. In the early 1970s, however, when Robin Varnum  was serving there as a Peace Corps volunteer (1971–73), the country was enjoying an interlude of peace. Varnum was teaching English in a girls’ school, and since some girls were able to go to school in Afghanistan in those days, she hoped to help her students gain access to the kinds of opportunities that were available to other girls in other parts of the world. She admired the bravery of her students, and she took inspiration from the work of Dr. Khadija Akbar, the Afghan woman doctor who was running her community’s family planning clinic. Afghanistan at a Time of Peace is a memoir of Varnum’s Peace Corps experience. She was stationed in Ghazni, a small city some 85 miles southwest of Kabul, and she served there alongside Mark, . . .

  Speaking Truth to Both the Right and the Left by Emily Bazelon June 14, 2021 The Times Magazine • LAST BEST HOPE: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer THE CONSTITUTION OF KNOWLEDGE: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch Like many public intellectuals who are worth reading, George Packer and Jonathan Rauch don’t toe a predictable line in American political and intellectual debate. They despise Donald Trump and the disinformation-heavy discord he has spawned. But they don’t share all the views of progressives, either, as they’ve come to be defined in many left-leaning spaces. Packer and Rauch are here to defend the liberalism of the Enlightenment — equality and scientific rationality in an unapologetically Western-tradition sense. They see this belief system as the country’s great and unifying strength, and they’re worried about its future. Packer’s slim book, “Last Best Hope,” begins with patriotic despair. “The world’s pity has taken the place of admiration, hostility, awe, . . .