New Cadet Leadership Text - Up For Review

[BuckeyeDEJ]

the other stuff, yah, I'm with you, a little nitpicky.. BTW, I just finished the book about Billy Mitchell's court martial.  MacArthur was a board member, General Charles Summerall was the board president.

My memory can't be nearly as bad as that. Correct, he was ON the court martial board, but not the president. (Egg on face.)

I certainly don't mean to come across as harsh on this new curriculum. I just want to know we're putting the best curriculum out there, and one that's not going to be divisive or lacking for inspiration.

I also have a problem with cadets not getting HARD COPY of the USAF D&C book. The CD's nice, but the PDF just gets glossed over. It's time to include a hard copy. And it certainly wouldn't hurt for each squadron to get copies, as well.

Then again, I miss the days of hard-copy paper regulations, too. If you had a problem, it didn't take forever to find something -- just crack the book open.

But I digress....

[NIN]

I also have a problem with cadets not getting HARD COPY of the USAF D&C book. The CD's nice, but the PDF just gets glossed over. It's time to include a hard copy. And it certainly wouldn't hurt for each squadron to get copies, as well.

Then again, I miss the days of hard-copy paper regulations, too. If you had a problem, it didn't take forever to find something -- just crack the book open.

But I digress....

No, I don't think that an inappropriate digression for the subject at hand. 

The assumption is made that all cadets have ready access to technology such that they can either bone up on their texts via CD-ROM or print the relevant chapters for later reference.

I'm saying thats a LOT further from the ground truth.

I live in a fairly "with it" area.  The state of New Hampshire is rife with technology companies, we can draw from a talent pool just an hour's drive outside of Boston, etc.  We're not all granite cliffs, snowy mountains, and swamp Yankees. 

I have cadets who claim they have an email address.  Yet they never check it because they don't have unfettered (or reasonably regular) access to a computer. 

Cadets ability to access a computer on which they can take the time to view, read, comprehend and print their materials is considerably limited.

I informally surveyed the 14 new cadets we got in our last recruiting cycle. 

• Less than half have "their own" computer (ie. one they can access and call "their own" at home).  It was more like 4.
• About 5 or 6 claimed to have access to a family computer with more or less "unfettered" access to it for school work or CAP work.
• The other 4 either accessed a computer at school or the library or did not have ready access to a computer at all.

By "ready access" I mean to say that they had access to a computer "for their own purposes" at least once a day.  While cadets may have access to school computers, if its only during a class, or their school doesn't allow you to put a CD-ROM into their computers, you're sort of out of luck to study your D&C manual at school.  My definition of "ready access" doesn't take into account things like "Gee, sure would b e nice to study my CAP materials here after dinner."  The ability to access your training materials in an "when and where needed" fashion is key.  You can't wait for that lunch period at school where you *might* be able to access your CD-ROM (if you didn't leave it in the CD-ROM drive the day before) and read Chapter 4 of the leadership lab for the test tonight.

Paper materials and manuals do not require permission to read.
Paper materials and manuals do not run out of juice.
Paper manuals can be carried on the drill floor.
Paper materials and manuals work no matter where you are (except, of course, in a windowless room with  no lights!  )
Paper materials and manuals are not incompatible with the Mk I, Mod 0 eyeball (U/I: pr, Qty: 1).

And we wonder why a lot of our cadets are "slipping" and not advancing.

[NIN]

BTW, I have it on good authority that the "take the chapters in whatever order" concept has, as I surmised, fallen out of the consideration between March 2007 and now.

The more current background paper suggests that the chapters are taken in order, as they are now.

re: my aforementioned "survey" of my newbie cadets.  I think that also speaks to the initial efficacy of online testing.  I've been pushing this online OPSEC training on my cadets almost since it was first announced in December or November.   How many have completed it?  Zero.  Why?  Not sure, I need to find out, but I'm sure that a substantial part of the hold up is: a) cadets don't check their email with near the regularity that we think they do; b) even if they do, its "in the future" so they don't care; c) if they're sitting in front of a computer, its not for OPSEC training. 

If we made the OPSEC training a Facebook application, our completion rate would go up .... 

[BuckeyeDEJ]

How true, Nin. The only way we can seem to get cadets to do OPSEC is by forcing the issue when the unit meets. And then, we have to try to get them in front of a computer in a building that (right now) has flaky Internet access.

Maybe if NHQ will shell out the money for Internet access for units and more laptops, we can consider online testing at unit meetings.... 

[ßτε]

How true, Nin. The only way we can seem to get cadets to do OPSEC is by forcing the issue when the unit meets. And then, we have to try to get them in front of a computer in a building that (right now) has flaky Internet access.

Maybe if NHQ will shell out the money for Internet access for units and more laptops, we can consider online testing at unit meetings.... 

There is no need to do it online. See paragraph 2: https://tests.cap.af.mil/opsec/getfile.cfm?did=96

[Tim Medeiros]

Maybe if NHQ will shell out the money for Internet access for units and more laptops, we can consider online testing at unit meetings.... 

Please see Commanders Corner for details on NHQ providing internet access to units, it is available, but the details are there.  Unfortunately I don't have access to the info as I'm not a commander, but I noticed there was info when a friend was logged in, as well it was mentioned at the NB in Atlanta.

[NIN]

Still, Internet access is NOT ubiquitous for all units.  My unit, for example, meets in a National Guard armory. We've already been told "no" for NIPR access, we can't get a phone line, so we're reduced to carrier pigeons (and it takes a LOT of carrier pigeons to carry those data packets.  Unfortunately our first batch of pigeons were not compliant with the TCP standard and they flew off to the bit bucket..)

[dwb]

I told you not to buy UDP pigeons.  They're so unreliable!

[NIN]

I told you not to buy UDP pigeons.  They're so unreliable!

Yeah, but they were cheap and the Asian guy who sold 'em to me said they were a drop in replacement and WAY better than the NETBIOS parakeets I had, which of course were not routable.

[BuckeyeDEJ]

NHQ will shell out for Earthlink dial-up access... which is fine, but my squadron's building has a DSL that's all fouled up at the moment. (Wonder if we can still get the money....)

I'm OK with online tests, as long as they can be under supervision. And open-book tests for cadet achievements is just plain wrong. They're supposed to learn, not regurgitate, and that open book makes it far too easy to just spew out facts without internalizing.

Anyway....