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60 Second Recap - 15 views
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shared by Deron Durflinger on 03 Nov 11
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Niall Ferguson: How American Civilization Can Avoid Collapse - The Daily Beast - 4 views
www.thedailybeast.com/...zation-can-avoid-collapse.html
History collapse ferguson america US education skills pay vanmeter van meter
shared by Deron Durflinger on 03 Nov 11
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Competition
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The Scientific Revolution
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Modern Medicine
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The Consumer Society
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The Work Ethic
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The Rule of Law and Representative Government.
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these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia
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the great divergence
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They also grew more powerful
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20th century, just a dozen Western empires—-including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world’s land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.
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tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.
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But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the
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Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here. And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans
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Yet life expectancy in the U.S. has risen from 70 to 78 in the past 50 years, compared with leaps from 68 to 83 in Japan and from 43 to 73 in China.
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On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection
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The future belongs not to them but to today’s teenagers
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The latest data on “mathematical literacy” reveal that the gap between the world leaders—the students of Shanghai and Singapore—and their American counterparts is now as big as the gap between U.S. kids and teenagers in Albania and Tunisia.
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Yet statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization show that already more patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., that South Korea overtook Germany to take third place in 2005, and that China is poised to overtake Germany too
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the United States’ average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies. China’s score, meanwhile, has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.
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Perhaps more disturbing is the decline of meaningful competition at home, as the social mobility of the postwar era has given way to an extraordinary social polarization. You don’t have to be an Occupy Wall Street leftist to believe that the American super-rich elite—the 1 percent that collects 20 percent of the income—has become dangerously divorced from the rest of society, especially from the underclass at the bottom of the income distribution.
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Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly.
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What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic
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And finally we need to reboot our whole system.
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If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle
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Western Civilization's Killer Apps
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COMPETITION
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THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
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THE RULE OF LAW
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MODERN MEDICINE
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THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
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THE WORK ETHIC
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Educational Leadership:Literacy 2.0:Orchestrating the Media Collage - 1 views
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Public narrative embraces a number of specialty literacies, including math literacy, research literacy, and even citizenship literacy, to name a few. Understanding the evolving nature of literacy is important because it enables us to understand the emerging nature of illiteracy as well. After all, regardless of the literacy under consideration, the illiterate get left out.
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Modern literacy has always meant being able to both read and write narrative in the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. Just being able to read is not sufficient.
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The act of creating original media forces students to lift the hood, so to speak, and see media's intricate workings that conspire to do one thing above all others: make the final media product appear smooth, effortless, and natural. "Writing media" compels reflection about reading media, which is crucial in an era in which professional media makers view young people largely in terms of market share.
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As part of their own intellectual retooling in the era of the media collage, teachers can begin by experimenting with a wide range of new media to determine how they best serve their own and their students' educational interests. A simple video can demonstrate a science process; a blog can generate an organic, integrated discussion about a piece of literature; new media in the form of games, documentaries, and digital stories can inform the study of complex social issues; and so on. Thus, a corollary to this guideline is simply, "Experiment fearlessly." Although experts may claim to understand the pedagogical implications of media, the reality is that media are evolving so quickly that teachers should trust their instincts as they explore what works. We are all learning together.
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Both essay writing and blog writing are important, and for that reason, they should support rather than conflict with each other. Essays, such as the one you are reading right now, are suited for detailed argument development, whereas blog writing helps with prioritization, brevity, and clarity. The underlying shift here is one of audience: Only a small portion of readers read essays, whereas a large portion of the public reads Web material. Thus, the pressure is on for students to think and write clearly and precisely if they are to be effective contributors to the collective narrative of the Web.
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The demands of digital literacy make clear that both research reports and stories represent important approaches to thinking and communicating; students need to be able to understand and use both forms. One of the more exciting pedagogical frontiers that awaits us is learning how to combine the two, blending the critical thinking of the former with the engagement of the latter. The report–story continuum is rich with opportunity to blend research and storytelling in interesting, effective ways within the domain of new media.
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The new media collage depends on a combination of individual and collective thinking and creative endeavor. It requires all of us to express ourselves clearly as individuals, while merging our expression into the domain of public narrative. This can include everything from expecting students to craft a collaborative media collage project in language arts classes to requiring them to contribute to international wikis and collective research projects about global warming with colleagues they have never seen. What is key here is that these are now "normal" kinds of expression that carry over into the world of work and creative personal expression beyond school.
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Students need to be media literate to understand how media technique influences perception and thinking. They also need to understand larger social issues that are inextricably linked to digital citizenship, such as security, environmental degradation, digital equity, and living in a multicultural, networked world. We want our students to use technology not only effectively and creatively, but also wisely, to be concerned with not just how to use digital tools, but also when to use them and why.
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Fluency is the ability to practice literacy at the advanced levels required for sophisticated communication within social and workplace environments. Digital fluency facilitates the language of leadership and innovation that enables us to translate our ideas into compelling professional practice. The fluent will lead, the literate will follow, and the rest will get left behind.
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Digital fluency is much more of a perspective than a technical skill set. Teachers who are truly digitally fluent will blend creativity and innovation into lesson plans, assignments, and projects and understand the role that digital tools can play in creating academic expectations that are authentically connected, both locally and globally, to their students' lives.
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Focus on expression first and technology second—and everything will fall into place.
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How to use Twitter Bookmarks... in 19 seconds - 3 views
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A super quick YouTube video showing you how to use Twitter's new bookmarks.
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Lucy Kellaway: what my students have taught me about race | Financial Times - 1 views
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By the time I left the FT I had spent the best part of six decades associating almost exclusively with people who had been to top universities and did grandish jobs and were all white. I sometimes felt sheepish about this but never thought it was my fault. I was merely a product of class, generation, education and profession.
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this uncomfortable audit began, not with the killing of a black man in Minnesota, but three years earlier, when I started teaching in a school in Hackney. At the age of 58 I was lifted out of a world in which everyone was like me into a world where I was in a minority as a white Brit. My pupils’ families came from all over the place: first-, second- and sometimes third-generation immigrants from Nigeria and Ghana, from the Caribbean, from Turkey and Bangladesh and Vietnam.
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It wasn’t a question of being “politically correct”. The matter was as simple as this: if I say something that causes offence, then I have to learn to stop saying it. Right away.
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I know my heart is in the right place on race, but I also know my heart is an irrelevant organ when it comes to traversing this minefield. I need instruction.
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what things used to be like is an irrelevance to these young women. What matters to them is the present — and their account of it is both important and distressing.
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In the absence of any better ideas, all I think I can do for now is to listen to my students talking about their world, while continuing to talk to them about mine. I am educating them. And they are educating me.
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Bill Maher vs. higher ed | Bryan Alexander - 1 views
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First, Maher gets certain things wrong, and many people share those errors, so addressing them might be beneficial. Second, several of his criticisms point to more broadly held American attitudes. Better understanding them can help higher ed as it tries to navigate an increasingly challenging battle for public support.
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Accurately, he points out that published prices have risen faster than inflation for a generation. However, setting aside the reasons for that inflation, this misses two key points. First, the tuition amounts cited are published prices, not what institutions actually charge most students. Widespread tuition discounting means only the richest tend to pay full price, which subsidizes everyone else, who pay less.
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ignoring the wide range of low cost colleges and universities
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Maher gets some points dead right, like the general – and especially Democratic – idea that everyone should get some post-secondary schooling. This is still the default American idea, with persistent popularity.
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not all of higher ed is about those teenagers, and it’s a mistake to assume it is
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Ignoring these swarms of campuses with low (sticker!) prices in favor of complaining about the most expensive slice of American academia is, alas, a popular mistake.
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He wants the college and university sector to shrink back in size and influence. He advises an end to college for all, wanting instead college for even fewer.
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Maher reminds us of the power of economic populism, and not just in the ways Trump mobilized it. Academia’s sometimes intention of mitigating inequality runs smack into our role in making inequality happen
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to whatever extent Bill Maher is representative, the public has woeful gaps in its understanding of how higher ed works. Our elite institutions stand in for the entire sector too often. Our high tuition, high discount strategy just looks like very high tuition. Adult learners are nowhere near visible enough.
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the cost of today’s education is likely to be somewhat higher than what I paid 30 years ago, but the price is definitely dramatically higher because today’s students aren’t enjoying the taxpayer support that I did. The price went up for sure. How much the cost went up is less clear