a thaumaturgical compendium

I’m continuing to only blog the breakout sessions. At least one of the cameras at the plenaries (I counted eight at the last one) belong to C-SPAN (they’ve been broadcasting the sessions it over the last couple of days) and it’s possible to stream a few of those recordings from their website. They are recording some of the breakout sessions, as well, I think, and that is a good thing because especially today, there are a number that I am going to end up having to forgo. There is a session this afternoon on the “Libraries in the Future,” for example, and another on trends in business intelligence. Luckily, they have a crack team of pro bloggers doing a nice job covering things. This morning, I missed a discussion on employing open source in defense of civil rights that I probably should have gone to, since it is one of the areas I am particularly interested in.

The breakout session I did attend this morning was on academic outreach. Several panelists talked a bit about the professionalization of analyst training in the academy. The focus was on the work at Mercyhurst and Johns Hopkins, but there is an effort, both through the DNI and the International Association for Internet Education to establish a baseline description of required capabilities for the analyst, to aid in educating the next wave of intelligence analysts.

I had hoped that there would be more on research articulation. While there was a bit of talk about accessing expertise outside the intelligence community, there was a lot less on the meta-level of studying how intelligence analysts–and intelligence organizations–do their job. I suspect that there is already a lot out there in this regard, however, and I’m just not plugged into that literature very directly.
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It was an interesting session, and I am looking forward to tracking down some of the unclassified documents related to training–particularly the mentioned competency inventory–and maybe some syllabi and other materials from the new programs. I do not see Quinpiac getting into the Intelligence training area any time soon, but many of the analytical frameworks and skills are broadly of interest to business intelligence, user analysis, and market analysis–things our current students need to be able to do better.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 11:21 am and is filed under Intelligence.