Minute Paper 2/7

In today’s class we continued introducing our different emerging issues. I found everyone’s examples to be quite interesting, but the one issue that really caught my attention was about homeless children being admitted to public schools without any type of medical records. I found this to be particularly intriguing because it brings up the question of which is more important, the safety of the group or the protection of the individual. Personally I think public schools should be catering to the safety of tax paying citizens children and teachers before the feelings of those that education is being extended to in charity, but that’s only my opinion, and especially in this particularly case, I can see how others would have very contrasting views. Along with the emerging issue presentations we also look at four potential futures for the Hawaiian Islands which each represented one of Jim Dator’s four generic alternative futures. So far we have looked at three of these alternative futures using examples like the story of Easter Island to look at collapse, population increase to look at growth, and technological changes to look at transformation, but as far as I can tell we have not looked at an actual example of control which I personally think could be quite interesting.

Mark Alexander