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In the past two decades, E-Rate has helped connect thousands of schools and libraries, but the program is now struggling to meet growing demand. Currently, most of the schools that receive E-Rate funding have connection speeds that are similar to those of the average home broadband user—a far cry from what they need to support large numbers of students using the next generation education applications being developed for classrooms. (It’s an even farther cry from ConnectED’s stated goal of providing 99 percent of America’s schools and libraries with minimum speeds of 100 Mbps per 1,000 students and a target of 1 Gbps by 2018.) In fact, in a survey of E-Rate subsidized schools, nearly 80 percent reported that they did not even have the bandwidth to meet their current needs, let alone to account for future growth. As FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said recently, “The problem now is not connection, it’s capacity.”
One challenge is that the program needs to ensure that schools upgrade to technology that won’t become obsolete in just a few years, like cable or wireless. Fiber is the only option that remains largely future-proof: It’s already capable of gigabit speeds and more readily scalable than other technologies to meet future demands.
The FCC should also carefully consider who would be the best stewards of E-Rate dollars. Large phone companies haven’t always proven themselves reliable in that regard, charging some schools up to 325 percent more than they charged others in the same region for essentially the same services. And the cable companies don’t even think gigabit speeds are necessary (a convenient perspective when your service relies on technology that is incapable of actually achieving those speeds). In reality, projects like Google Fiber and community networks in Chattanooga, Tenn.; Lafayette, La.; and Santa Monica, Calif.; where cities have invested in fiber infrastructure that can then be leveraged by area school districts, tend to have the fastest speeds—and these sorts of alternative models should be supported. E-rate ought to be used primarily to support substantial upgrades to infrastructure—the high investment costs that most broadband providers use to justify what they charge per month—and in return require that the network providers offer free or heavily discounted services to the schools.
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Blame the rising income inequality in the U.S. on the “earnings gap between skilled and unskilled workers,” says Harvard economist and former chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush, N. Gregory Mankiw in a forthcoming article, “Defending the One Percent,” in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, but available on the Internet now.
The increased demand for skilled labor is resulting from the fast changing skill-biased technological changes coursing through the global economy. Mankiw generously credits this conclusion to the views advanced in a 2008 study, ” The Race Between Education and Technology,” by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz.
“Society can offset the effect of this demand shift by increasing the supply of skilled labor at an even faster pace, as it did in the 1950s and 1960s. In this case, the earnings gap need not rise and indeed, can even decline, as in fact occurred,” Mankiw writes. “But when the pace of educational advance slows down, as it did in the 1970s, the increasing demand for skilled labor will naturally cause inequality to rise. The story of rising inequality, therefore, is not primarily about politics and rent-seeking but rather about supply and demand.” That is supply and demand for “STEM” talent, those with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which we are all aware is very tight supply and dominated by foreign students.
In fact, the proof of this income inequality can be pictured in a U-shaped curve, which shows the income share of the top 1 percent falling from the 1950s to the 1970s and then rising from the 1970s to the present. You can see this pattern clearly in the earnings differential trend between skilled and unskilled workers.
“If Goldin and Katz are right that the broad changes in inequality have been driven by the interaction between technology and education… it “seems that changes in technology have allowed a small number of highly educated and exceptionally talented individuals to command superstar incomes in ways that were not possible a generation ago,” writes Mankiw.
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In the 1969 Supreme Court ruling Alexander vs. Holmes County Board of Education, a unanimous court ruled that a Mississippi school district "terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools." The ruling, a mandate for non-compliant segregationists, was supposed to finally reverse the tide of Jim Crow era "separate and unequal" education.
Today, while more students generally attend racially and economically diverse schools, it is no secret that our schools are anything but unitary. According to recent reports by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, concentrations of Blacks and Latinos into resource-deprived schools are at unprecedented levels, reversing years of progress toward integration since the monumental Brown v. Board (1954) and subsequent decisions. But while more recent Supreme Court decisions from Oklahoma City, Louisville, KY and Seattle, WA and policy-level failures such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are rightfully viewed among myriad protagonists of these trends, often overlooked by integration advocates is the reality of "dual school systems" operating at the curricular level, not just at the facility level.
Take for example the case of Southwest Elementary School in Durham, North Carolina. When David Snead began his tenure as principal in 1999, he discovered that 98% of the school's white students and only 7% of black students were identified as "gifted and talented" (G&T), therefore placed in a separate, challenging curriculum. More astonishingly, this was in a school where blacks represented over 70% of the student body, while whites represented only 30%.
Snead, who is white and male, came face to face with one of America's long-embedded institutional-level responses to integration: racialized tracking. And rather than accept internal segregation as an everyday norm, one grounded in the still-prevalent belief that minority students are "cognitively inferior" (or for self-professed non-racists, that they purposely under-perform out of fear of "acting white"), Snead believed otherwise. The principal worked with the school's teachers to alter ways they thought about "giftedness," given that their assessment triggered consideration for subsequent testing into advanced curricula. The results were astounding.
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Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder? The former set of skills are taught in schools, the latter are not.
We have a romantic attachment to skills from the past. Longhand multiplication of numbers using paper and pencil is considered a worthy intellectual achievement. Using a mobile phone to multiply is not. But to the people who invented it, longhand multiplication was just a convenient technology. I don't think they attached any other emotions to it. We do, and it is still taught as a celebration of the human intellect. The algorithms that make Google possible are not taught to children. Instead, they are told: "Google is full of junk."
In school examinations, learners must reproduce facts from memory, solve problems using their minds and paper alone. They must not talk to anyone or look at anyone else's work. They must not use any educational resources, certainly not the internet. When they complete their schooling and start a job, they are told to solve problems in groups, through meetings, using every resource they can think of. They are rewarded for solving problems this way – for not using the methods they were taught in school.
The curriculum lists things that children must learn. There is no list stating why these things are important. A child being taught the history of Vikings in England says to me: "We could have found out all that in five minutes if we ever needed to."
One of the teachers who works with me said to her class of nine-year-olds: "There is something called electromagnetic radiation that we can't see, can you figure out what it is?" The children huddle around a few computers, talking, running around and looking for clues. In about 40 minutes, they figure out the basics of electromagnetism and start relating it to mobile signals. This is called a self-organised learning environment, a Sole. In a Sole, children work in self-organised groups of four or five clustered around an internet connected computer. They can talk, change group, move around, look at other groups' work and so on.
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Northwest Indiana's public libraries have been anything but quiet in recent years.
Gary's library officials verbally brawled last year over one faction's plan to reconvert their downtown library into a museum. The Hammond Public Library was forced in 2011 to close its E.B. Hayward and Howard branches because of financial constraints and was in danger of major layoffs last year.
Merrillville, Crown Point and other suburban libraries have benefited from multimillion-dollar reconstructions. The Porter County Public Library system is planning a new branch of its own.
In the midst of troubled urban reading rooms and burgeoning computer labs of the suburbs are small community systems like the Lowell, Westchester or Whiting public libraries straining to offer the same services without taking on budget-busting debt.
Overall, some 303 librarians and support staff members worked for 27 main and branch facilities with combined expenditures of more than $78 million in Lake and Porter counties last year, according to the Gateway database furnished by the Indiana State Board of Accounts.
That results in a public cost ranging from $45 per person in the Porter County Public Library system, up to $233 per person in Crown Point.
The libraries have racked up a combined debt of of more than $56 million in principal and interest payments to be made over the next six to 18 years.
The chief debtor is the Lake County Public Library, which owes $27.8 million in total payments from now to 2024.
John Brock, business manager for the system, said the money was used for a just-completed remake of its central library and nine branches.
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As we wait for the publication of the white paper on post-school education and training, it is worth asking how much we can expect the new policy document to relieve the funding pressures on universities, especially insofar as they affect academic staffing and lecturer-student ratios.
Probably the most significant development since February last year, when the green paper was released, has been the passing of regulations governing Setas' funding of skills development.
Far from scrapping Setas al-together, as delegates at the ANC's 2007 Polokwane congress demanded, regulations that came into effect on April 1 compel them to redirect skills levy funding towards qualifications offered through further education and training colleges and tertiary institutions. Although this will relieve some of the funding pressures in higher education it will not address most of the ongoing problems — at the root of which, I would suggest here, is the corporatisation of higher education.
The most recent official data on universities confirms this trend. Between 2005 and 2010 there was a 40% increase in temporary staff, compared with only a 10% increase in permanent staff; and there was an increase in part-time and full-time (or "headcount") student enrolment of more than 20% — from 735 073 to 892 943.
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Stephen Smalzel's twanging banjo echoes off the old brick as a small crowd gathers in front of his gallery.
Some stroll in and admire his colorful landscapes. Others tap a foot and continue window shopping in Salida's increasingly vibrant downtown. They sip whiskey at Wood's Distillery. They strum handmade guitars or nibble from a food truck. Consignment shops bustle with shoppers, and restaurants sizzle with local fare. Ladies in summer dresses pedal creaking cruisers through downtown, waving at friends. The Arkansas River jostles with boaters.
"This is the Paris of Chaffee County," says Smalzel, a well-known artist who has concentrated a formerly widespread collection of galleries into one studio in Salida.
"Can't you feel the creative vibe? You see it in the painted bicycles, the number of people making beer, wine and whiskey, people making music, filming, making videos. It's all over the place."
Artists began setting up galleries and studios in Salida more than 20 years ago, drawn by the beauty of the area, the bounty of recreation, the historic buildings downtown and the affordability relative to Colorado's resort-anchored, high-country communities. Last year, the art community's decades-old appreciation of Salida was rewarded with the state's first Colorado Creative District designation, a distinction that reverberated well beyond the $15,000 grant from the state.
"That gave us instant credibility and a way for us to get the word out. The money sure helped, but the distinction was by far the biggest thing. We consider it a milestone," said Michael Varnum, the director of the city-owned SteamPlant events center that serves as an anchor for Salida's thriving creative district.
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To boost the flagging graduation rate at T.C. Williams High School, Alexandria leaders decided to open a satellite campus with a more flexible online curriculum tailored to students with complex lives.
Hunting for a location that is open long hours, easily accessible by public transportation and close to job opportunities, they found their destination at Landmark Mall. Since September, Alexandria students have been pursuing high school diplomas down the hall from a nail spa and a dollar store.
And they are graduating.
Out of 51 seniors enrolled at the campus this year, two moved away from Alexandria, and 49 are scheduled to graduate this summer, many of them Saturday with the Class of 2013.
Like a growing number of school districts across the country, Alexandria has been looking for alternatives to brick-and-mortar schools to meet widely different student needs. Virtual schools offer flexibility that can be especially helpful for students with the greatest risk of dropping out: teens who have kids or full-time jobs or who have fallen behind in credits.
Alexandria officials are optimistic about the first year’s results at the mall. Superintendent Morton Sherman said success comes from offering flexibility and lots of support. “Not every student learns the same way, in the same seat, in the same classroom,” he said.
At this school, the principal's office is a bench in the mall, the cafeteria is a pass good for a No. 1 or a No. 5 at Chick-fil-A and the classroom is primarily a laptop.
Alexandria is using a “hybrid” or “blended” approach to virtual learning. The satellite campus offers a full online curriculum through a contract with Herndon-based K12, the country’s largest operator of full-time and blended virtual schools. Students work with online teachers but also have face-to-face time with certified teachers, called mentors. If they get stuck, the mentors sit down with them or conduct small-group lessons in an adjacent conference room.
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Here’s a bit of disappointing but not-so-surprising news: according to a new report from the nonprofit think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), U.S. schools aren’t doing enough to enable technology in the classroom to live up to its potential.
Not only are students across the country frequently using technology for basic skills (for example, middle school students are mostly using computers for drills and practice exercises, not data analysis or other activities that really take advantage of computing power and sophisticated software), schools aren’t looking at the returns on their technology-related investments. The CAP also found that students from high-poverty areas were less likely to get access to rigorous science and technology learning opportunities.
“In this analysis, it quickly became clear to us that many schools and districts have not taken full advantage of the ways that technology can be used to dramatically improve education-delivery systems,” the report said.
The report comes as investments and innovation in education technology are on the rise. According to Chicago consulting firm GSV Advisors, venture capital spending in K-12 education climbed more than 150 percent between 2010 and 2012 to $334 million. And as we’ve reported previously, accelerator programs for education technology startups are popping up across the country to court a growing class of education entrepreneurs.
Despite increased innovation in ed tech, the CAP report pointed out several obstacles standing in the way of smart approaches to classroom technology. It’s not just that educators have been historically resistant to new technology, it’s that schools often don’t have the resources, right incentives or flexibility to implement pro-technology programs.
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Today, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Digital Literacy Task Force (which is led by the Office for Information Technology Policy) releases its recommendations to advance and sustain library engagement in digital literacy initiatives nationwide. These recommendations build on the January 2013 Task Force report Digital Literacy, Libraries, and Public Policy and constitute a call to action on the part of the ALA, library education programs, front-line librarians, various funding bodies, and the diverse stakeholders who use and support library services.
Libraries of all types – school, academic, and public – play a vital role in ensuring all people have the skills and abilities to succeed in the Digital Age. These conclusions and recommendations culminate the Task Force’s work over 18 months and include comments from several public programs held at ALA conferences, as well as two online virtual public programs and task force meetings that included observers from different stakeholder groups.
One over-arching recommendation is that ALA should continue to have a member body that focuses on digital literacy and libraries. This group should consist of members with broad ALA representation. It would provide library leadership in digital literacy initiatives across and beyond the library community and track progress against these recommendations.
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Geo-literacy is the term that National Geographic has adopted to describe the understanding of how our world works that all members of modern society require. Geo-literacy is the ability to reason about Earth systems and interconnections to make far-reaching decisions.
Whether we are making decisions about where to live or what precautions to take for natural hazards, we all make decisions that require geo-literacy throughout our lives.
This video illustrates what geo-literacy means to individuals and to our global community. Share it with your friends, family, and colleagues, to help spread the word.
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Earlier this year, I hosted an algorithmic finance Meetup, and I met two students who were enrolled as part-time off-campus students. They were taking the bare minimum number of classes required at the university, at the cheapest price they could, and only “spending” those on requirements for their majors. All of their education and enrichment beyond their requirements was through massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs are free non-degree online courses with open global engagement that have exploded in popularity over the last few months. These two students were choosing to build their own education through outside resources both to save money – they said the cost was way less, even though it would take 6 years instead of 4 to earn a degree – and for the material. According to them, the MOOCs had far more options for advanced material. I was blown away by the steel-trap optimization these two students were applying to their own education.
It’s clear that the economic downturn has bred a whole generation of “just-try-to-stop-me” kids, determined to get the knowledge they need for success even if it comes from outside the traditional educational framework. It’s not just this new generation of student that is starting to think this way. Mark Cuban captured it well: “Going to a 4 year school is supposed to be the foundation from which you create a future, not the transaction that crushes everything you had hoped to do because you have more debt than you could possibly pay off in 10 years.” As the most recent Internet Trends Report from Mary Meeker highlights, more and more people are turning to MOOCs for their knowledge fix.
With the skyrocketing costs of higher education and the increasing availability of online resources, smart people around the globe are “hacking their education.” And there are tons of great ways to do that – a few of our favorite sites are outlined below.
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In this blog post, I highlight a model for successful digital inclusion programs. Check back for part two and three of this series, in which I'll recommend the next steps that organizations should take to be successful in closing the digital divide, and I'll describe the "secret sauce" that makes community solutions effective and sustainable.
Recently, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) published guides to help community organizations create or expand programs to close the digital divide.
These guides provide an overview of a successful program model, its key elements, and the challenges organizations are likely to face in establishing or growing a digital inclusion program.
Successful digital inclusion programs vary based on the core services provided by the organization running them.
Many of the organizations offer housing assistance as their core service, for example, and are serving thousands of families with limited resources, knowledge, or skills related to technology. Some organizations are based in workforce development, while others offer primarily training and education services.
Over the years, successful programs have developed comprehensive solutions that share much in common. The key elements include:
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Acupuncturist Courtney Wallace was struggling to pay off $60,000 in student debt. Seeking more lucrative work through tapping skills she’d learned as a kid building websites, she went to TrainSignal Inc., which provides web-based computer training for $49 a month. A month later, she was hired as a systems specialist at a consulting company in Chicago.
“It’s becoming less and less about formal education,” said Wallace, 25, who moved to Washington in the middle of last year for a higher-level tech support specialist job at The Public Health Institute. “People just want to know that you can do the job.”
While online courses have been around since the early days of the Internet, job training has remained the purview of community colleges and vocational schools, requiring students to spend thousands of dollars to learn word processing, financial spreadsheets and web development. With unemployment hovering at 7.6 percent, companies like TrainSignal and Lynda.com Inc. are pitching what they call a more efficient and affordable route for people who need retraining on their own schedule.
They’re part of a revival in web education startups. Venture capitalists poured $632.3 million into the market in 2012, up 41 percent from the previous year, and the most since the dot-com bubble’s peak in 2000, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Lynda, based in Carpinteria, California, raised $103 million in January led by Spectrum Equity and Accel Partners, the largest venture funding on record for an education company, based on NVCA data.
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To improve their game and stay in top physical shape, baseball and football players flock to spring and summer training camps for rigorous practices led by specialty coaches. Physical science teachers at secondary schools can also practice their game during the off-season by attending an ASM Materials Camp for teachers. The camps aren’t likely to draw TV crews or adoring fans jockeying for photos and autographs. But they do attract enthusiastic participants who come to hone their science-teaching skills and energetic instructors who make the process educational, rewarding, and fun. “We’re trying to help teachers develop new tools, tricks, and hands-on techniques for teaching basic materials science in ways that will engage their students and make them curious about science,” says Charles Hayes, executive director of the ASM Materials Education Foundation (ASM-MEF). For the U.S. to stay competitive in science and engineering, Hayes asserts, “we need to get youngsters interested and excited about these subjects.” Helping educators step up their science-teaching game with interesting and thought-provoking demonstrations that are safe and inexpensive is a key step in that process.
ASM-MEF is the education arm of ASM International, a northeastern Ohio-based global organization of some 36,000 members that focuses on serving the materials science and engineering profession. The education arm, which was founded in the 1950s to promote science and engineering education among young students, began organizing and hosting educational workshops for teachers in 2002.
The curriculum at these five-day camps, which are held at locations around the country during the summer and are offered at no cost to teachers, “is like Materials Science 101 at the high school level,” Hayes says. ASM discovered years ago that a substantial fraction of teachers knew little about the properties of solids and consequently underemphasized that subject in their teaching. “Yet solids make up so much of the stuff around us and are critically important to many areas of technology,” Hayes says.
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If you’re a librarian you’ve probably heard this one already, but I think it bears retelling to all those who care about their community libraries.
According to an article in the online magazine Smile Politely, the Urbana [Illinois] Free Library conducted a “weeding process [and] discarded thousands of nonfiction books in a hasty, arbitrary way—a way that utilizes only one of the UFL’s stated selection criteria.” The article says that the sole criterion for weeding was age, not use, and that much of the work was done by temporary, untrained help. This was a “unilateral decision” by the Executive Director, and the weeding took place while the Director of Adult Services was out of the country “and was unaware that it was happening at all.”
The Library Board Vice President discovered what was happening and called a temporary halt to the weeding. The next day a meeting of the Board was called, and the VP said, “I went back there last night, and … we have given away to Better World Books, thousands of books…. [T]he shelves right now, if you go upstairs, are empty. There are hundreds of books gone, thousands of books gone, and yet we have approved this without … board approval.”
The Director’s “reasons for the weeding [were] to free up space [for book accessibility as well as for electronic resources] and prepare the collection for RFID tag insertion.” RFID is the radio-frequency identification chips used for automatic checkout, a system used in sister-city Champaign’s library, but not yet in Urbana.
Library staff members have said “they were asked to [weed] as quickly as possible, even at the level of going through a range in 30 minutes of 2,000 titles.” As a university library employee pointed out, “that’s less than one second per book.”
A letter from the recently-retired Head of Adult Services at UFL says, “About 70% of art books from 700–740 are gone. The $300 two-volume Art of Florence is gone; the Pritzker prize winners in architecture are gone; the History of Art by Janson is gone. […] On Monday (June 10), the gardening, home repair and remodeling, and foreign language areas went. So we lost lots of international language-English dictionaries as well. The gardening collection was one of the strongest in the state….”
Pictures posted of the empty-looking shelves seem to confirm the loss.
The current Director of Adult Services said at the Board meeting, “I went back and looked at some of those spreadsheets … and I … I almost started crying. They went through these things too fast! And it cost them money I think; we can replace things, but the mistake’s made.”
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Although history may remember this week for the revelations of National Security Agency phone and Internet surveillance, delving any deeper into that story may be beyond Headlines staff’s security clearance. So we focus instead on President Barack Obama’s unveiling of ConnectED, an initiative aimed at connecting 99 percent of America’s students to the Internet through high-speed broadband and high-speed wireless within 5 years.
“This is not connectivity for connectivity’s sake,” noted Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and Gene Sperling, the Director of the National Economic Council. “It is laying the foundation for a vision of classrooms where students are engaged in individualized digital learning and where teachers can assess progress lesson by lesson and day by day. It’s about creating learning environments where students can both succeed and struggle without embarrassment, where barriers for children with disabilities are removed, and where we can bring the most modern, innovative, and up-to-date content into the classroom.”
The White House argues that preparing America’s students with the skills they need to get good jobs and compete with countries around the world will rely increasingly on interactive, individualized learning experiences driven by new technology. But today, millions of students lack high-speed broadband access and fewer than 20 percent of educators say their school’s Internet connection meets their teaching needs. ConnectED would bring high-speed Internet within their reach, with a particular benefit for rural communities that have lagged behind in connectivity.
“We are living in a digital age, and to help our students get ahead, we must make sure they have access to cutting-edge technology,” said President Obama. “So today, I’m issuing a new challenge for America – one that families, businesses, school districts and the federal government can rally around together – to connect virtually every student in America’s classrooms to high-speed broadband Internet within five years, and equip them with the tools to make the most of it.”
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The Mars exploratory project Mars One has invited 'would-be'Mars settlers from anywhere in the world to submit online applications, the first of the four rounds in the selection procedure, says Kurzweil website of Mars One Project.
It discloses that 'Mars One has launched its astronaut selection program for the first humans to set foot on Mars and make it their home'.
It adds, 'Mars One invites would-be Mars settlers from anywhere in the world to submit an online application — the first of the four rounds in the selection procedure.
'Round One will run for over five months and end on 31st August 2013. Applicants selected at the end of this round will include the first crew that will land on Mars in 2023. Mars One selection committees will hone the search for the first crew in three subsequent rounds and further training.
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A group of Bluffton University students found out last month that they’re about as good at fixing old computers as they are at raising money for new ones.
The eight students left May 7 for a three-week cross-cultural experience in Botswana, where they were delivering three new laptop computers and related equipment to provide Internet access to Pitseng, their host village.
As it turned out, not only did they present the technology to village leaders, and start training them how to use it, but they also revived several nonworking computers at Pitseng’s elementary school. They went on to install anti-virus and basic educational software and offer technology-aided math instruction to local children, as well as leaving instructions for future use.
Getting the school computers up and running became part of the pilot Pitseng Internet Project. “We ended up putting them together and, by the end of it, we had seven or eight machines that would work,” notes Kathryn Spike, an assistant professor of English and the leader of the Bluffton group.
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Several months ago, on a damp gray afternoon, I found myself sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Racine, Wisconsin, just a few blocks from the Lake Michigan shoreline. That weekend a colleague and I would be conducting a leadership training session with teachers, parents, and community leaders, and I thought I’d get a feel for Racine during my visit. I was the shop’s sole customer. Main Street was nearly deserted. Now and then, a single car or passerby would appear. The city has a busy and curious past: it was a destination for New England Unitarians and record numbers of Danes; residents were staunch opponents of slavery and set up safe stops along the Underground Railroad; reportedly one of the world’s first cars was built there in the early 1870s; malted milk and the garbage disposal were invented and produced there. But signs of that history were nowhere to be found. The city has lost 16,000 occupants since 1970, when 95,000 people lived there.
A few hours later, in a large hall in a Roman Catholic retreat center a few miles up the shore, more than 40 Racine residents were seated in groups of six around large round tables. As part of the session, I circulated a one-pager that we had created as the basis of a drill and asked the group to read it. It began:
"The School District has announced that it has signed an agreement with a major online learning company—Future Success, Inc.—and MIT to produce a world-class math curriculum. Because of private capital raised by Future Success, the entire program—equipment, software, laptops for all district students, and even subsidies to support Internet services for families in need—will be provided at no cost to the District for the first two years. . . . Cost savings will be created due to a shift in staffing patterns. In the traditional approach, 116 teachers were needed to deliver math instruction to the district’s students. . . . Only 42 will be needed under the new arrangement."
As the group concentrated on the page, there was a stirring at one of the tables. A fellow in his 50s spoke up. “Hey, wait a minute. This isn’t a drill,” he said. “I teach at the local technical college, and this has already happened to us.” He described how his job as a teacher had changed. He once related to 20 or 30 students in a classroom several times a day to but now was a technician who sat in front of his computer responding to emails from 200 online students and grading online homework and tests.
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A changing business environment with new employment needs has training providers adjusting to the demands of the marketplace.
The result is the addition of new opportunities for job seekers to add skills or prepare themselves for different occupations.
Coming July 9 is a training program for information technology professionals who want to develop skills with ASP.NET, the application framework becoming the industry standard for web development.
The 15-week course, taught at Tallahassee Community College’s Center for Workforce Development, is for IT professionals with at least one year of recent programming experience. It is a response to the job market and in particular, a profession where people are needed — as of early May, the website EmployFlorida.com listed at least 309 jobs available in this field in the Tallahassee area.
It’s also an example of how providers of training are on the lookout for professions and industries that are growing. As part of tracking the market for workers needed, TCC’s Division of Workforce Development checks employment want-ads every two weeks for patterns or particular vacancies that exist.
In the case of web development using ASP.NET, “We saw that there was a huge need and we wanted to help our area employers meet that need,” said Kimberly Moore, TCC’s vice president for workforce development.
In similar fashion, TCC is rolling out a project management track that has application in numerous fields. “It’s a hot topic,” said Amy Combs, IT training coordinator, especially in work settings where older managers may be retiring and taking that expertise with them.
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The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States.
For instance, where you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you "The Tawny One", derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured, desert”.
The 'True Names' of 3000 cities, countries, rivers, oceans and mountain ranges are displayed on these four fascinating maps, each of which includes a comprehensive index of derivations.
Etymology, (OGr. etymon “true sense” and logos “speech, oration, discourse, word”) is the study of the origin and history of words.
For the first time, the Atlas of True Names uses etymology to give us an unusual insight into familiar geographical names – with intriguing results...
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The 8th International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training – aka e-Learning Africa – ended in the Namibian capital Windhoek with delegates calling for homegrown, sustainable innovation in e-learning to spur development across Africa.
Namibia’s Prime Minister Dr Hage Geingob officially opened the conference, which was held from 29-31 May and drew nearly 1,500 delegates and more than 300 speakers from 65 countries.
He said Africa was fast adopting and using information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the private and public sectors, changing the way governments and businesses operate. This, he said, was also driving entrepreneurship and economic growth.
Geingob said ICT had an important role to play in stimulating innovation and economic growth by ensuring that the population was made aware of the latest technologies, which would then be transferred to product development and production.
“There is no greater catalyst in stimulating the rapid and sustainable growth rates that government has envisaged through our National Development Plans and ultimately Vision 2030,” he said with reference to Namibia’s development blue print, which aims for a knowledge-based economy by 2030.
While acknowledging the need to preserve tradition, Geingob told the delegates to be wary of traditional practices that thwart development, saying that only societies that innovate would prosper in a rapidly changing world.
“In view of the complexity of [the] environment, technological advances, climate change, world recession, natural and other disasters, we are increasingly being faced with an urgency and necessity to change and to innovate if we are to sustain our economies. The complexities and demands of living in 21st century make change imperative.”
He called for a shift from conservative and traditional approaches to learning and teaching that he said were still prevalent in some education systems on the continent.
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When David Eads looked around for inspiration for FreeGeek Chicago, a group that promotes computer literacy for underprivileged households, he put his finger on an unlikely source: the Apple Store.
True, the sleek retail outlets, decked in soothing design elements with their Genius Bars helmed by furrowed-browed computer professionals, on the surface may feel like an alternate universe compared with FreeGeek's digs: a dark, cluttered basement in a former Woolworth's store, the radio blasting old-school soul tunes, and a hive of workers tearing apart antiquated hard drives with glee.
But Mr. Eads came to understand that he and Apple cofounder Steve Jobs shared a mission: Make computing easy and fun.
"An Apple Store for the rest of us" is how Eads explains his organization.
"We saw the Apple Store and said, 'We want to be that. But really, really grimy.' "
Eads helped found FreeGeek in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood in 2005 after noticing his chosen fields – computer programming, IT, and design – lacked faces and perspectives different from his own.
"In a lot of ways, the professional world I work in is not as diverse as the city I live in," he says. "There's a frustrating lack of nuts and bolts, hands-on education." FreeGeek became "an experiment [to see] if a different model of nonprofit would work."
Not-for-profit FreeGeek is modeled after a similar organization in Portland, Ore. Instead of seeking grants or operating with a rigid hierarchy, the group is decidedly democratic: Costs are paid by recycling donated computer equipment, selling refurbished hardware to low-income buyers, or individual donations.
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Across the country, schools are letting out for summer vacation. But thanks to broadband, a variety of websites and apps are promoting summer reading, making it fun and easy for kids of all ages to stay literarily active over the summer months.
Book publisher Scholastic has created a dedicated website for its “Summer Reading Challenge.” Kids are encouraged to log their daily reading minutes to earn digital rewards – and the handy Scholastic Reading Timer app offers an interactive tracking system to keep kids engaged and motivated. Or check out Start With a Book, a summer-reading focused microsite under the Reading Rockets umbrella. This resource provides lists of reading apps, websites, books, and summer-themed book topics from art to dinosaurs to time travel.
Looking for something even more interactive? The Tikatok website and app gives kids the tools to write and illustrate their own books – which are published under a pen name and then posted for site users to enjoy. And even more broadband-backed summer reading opportunities are in the works. The Public Library Association has an ambitious plan to launch a digital summer reading website application accessible to all libraries nationwide, with a goal of energizing library programs and engage young patrons in a more dynamic way. Click headline to read more--
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