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Media organizations the world over are currently focusing on the future of their businesses. As audience and viewer attention fragments and the internet fuels a wholly different kind of information consumption there are many siren voices suggesting that traditional media business models are dead, or in some cases on life support. Rising print and distribution costs and flagging advertising are driving even flagship newspapers and magazines to slash their costs, jettison journalists and production staff, and in some cases, go entirely out of business. In Britain, television companies like ITV — once described as having a license to print money — are reconsidering their entire business rationale and, crucially, their future relationship with viewers and consumers. Yet this week the world’s largest multimedia news agency, Reuters, unveils what we believe will be the future of news dissemination — not broadcasting, but narrowcasting.

by Grace Rubenstein AUDIO SLIDE SHOW: Lawrence Township Narrated by Grace Rubenstein It is one thing to create change inside a classroom -- the best teachers, masters of their one-room domains, break from tradition and foster innovative learning environments all the time. A harder task, which a growing number of schools are proving can be done, is to convert an entire school to embrace new practices that fulfill the changing educational demands of our age. Then comes the next -- and the messiest -- frontier, the entity most resistant to cohesive change: the school district. Five years ago, administrators in the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, in the northeast corner of Indianapolis, tackled this challenge. With a $5.9 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, a local philanthropic organization, they set out to transform the prevailing vision of what preK-12 education is for -- as one district official put it, "to meet the needs of the kids' future, and not the teachers' past." They decided that they needed to teach a modern set of skills in a student-centered way. Critical thinking, self-direction, and cultural competency, along with fluency in technology, information resources, and visual and graphic presentations. These were the elements of digital age literacy the district believed its students would need in the twenty-first century. Educating students for the new era demanded not only new content, they believed, but also new teaching methods. Teachers needed to recast themselves as facilitators, and to demand that students take more ownership of their learning. Into Focus Visit classrooms in Lawrence Township -- at least those where the change has caught on -- and you'll see kids inventing their own projects, using computers in daily work, involving themselves in community initiatives, and inquiring on their own about continued . . . 1234567next ›last » This article was also published in Edutopia Magazine, June 2007