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"America is shifting from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. Our social institutions, colleges and universities included, were created for the former. Today they all seem to be broken. They work less well than they once did. Through either repair or replacement - more likely a combination - they need to be refitted for a new age."

They chose their rooms and paid for everything online. But their beds were provided by private individuals, rather than a hotel chain. Hosts and guests were matched up by Airbnb, a firm based in San Francisco. Since its launch in 2008 more than 4m people have used it-2.5m of them in 2012 alone. It is the most prominent example of a huge new "sharing economy", in which people rent beds, cars, boats and other assets directly from each other, co-ordinated via the internet.

"Airbnb, Coursera, and Uber: The Rise of the Disruption Economy"

Well I suggest these industries jump on board or become dinosaurs!.

"too many young people are spending years on loan repayment instead of growing personal wealth through investments like real estate and retirement accounts. In the long term, Elliott adds, that can be a drag on the economy - and create a wealth divide between people who have student debt and those who don't."

Especially since the recent economic downturn and in light of the increasingly competitive global economy, employers express concerns about whether the U.S. is producing enough college graduates and whether they have the skills, knowledge, and personal responsibility to contribute to a changing workplace and help companies and organizations succeed and grow. This report provides a detailed analysis of employers' priorities for the kinds of learning today's college students need to succeed in this innovation-fueled economy. It also reports on changes in educational and assessment practices that employers recommend.

"If we can tap into the same network effects that drive the internet economy and bring it into the firm, we have the potential to build businesses that don't just benefit the bottom line but create a culture of participation and learning. And that's when we'll find that machines are far less adept at delivering the imagination, creativity, genuine insight, and emotional and moral intelligence that is uniquely human."

Pioneers like Salesforce popularized SaaS, web-based business applications that were easy to use and even easier to purchase, with a click. With that, they took one of the first swings at the command-and-control business culture that has defined the Industrial Age. A $40 billion SaaS industry followed.

"After 18 months in the darkness of beta world, Mozilla's Open Badges project stepped out into the light recently with the unveiling of Open Badges 1.0. But will the concept of organizations bestowing their own virtual endorsements for the mastery of skills hold up to critical examination from a world that, even in an information economy, demands most of its skilled workers hold a framed degree?"

"How can companies get a better idea of which skills employees and job candidates have? While university degrees and grades have done that job for a long time, they've done it imperfectly. In today's rapidly evolving knowledge economy, badges, nanodegrees, and certificates have aimed to bridge the gap - but also leave a lot to be desired. While HR departments are eager for better "people analytics," that concept is still fuzzy. And simply collecting data is not enough - to be used, data has to be presented usefully."

"in a knowledge-based and innovation-driven economy, in high tech, R&D-oriented industries, the critical factors of business success are often precisely those benefits of decentralized decision making: freedom, flexibility, motivation, creativity."

"In the United States, about half the people who start college don't finish, leaving 37 million Americans with some college credits but no degree. That's more than 20 percent of the working-age population. In an economy that increasingly demands workers with knowledge and skills, it is imperative that more opportunities are provided for individuals to obtain a university degree. By serving as the key link between universities and employers, InStride will facilitate partnerships that will positively impact the lives of thousands of people who will benefit from a high-quality education."

"At Arizona State, Michael Crow has pioneered transdisciplinary structures and algorithm-driven apps to help students hone in on a college and career path. Crow says colleges and universities are too "fixed" and "rigid" and must figure out a way to "be very broadly engaged with society." At Northeastern, Joseph Aoun is attempting to supplement the traditional "human literacy" curriculum with "technological literacy" and "data literacy," and to power this via experiential education - "the most powerful way to learn": internships, co-ops, work study. "

The issue of wealth inequality across the United States is well known, but this video shows you the extent of that imbalance in dramatic and graphic fashion.

The crisis that is about to break out involves student debt and how we finance higher education. Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America's soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down - some to a point even lower than where they began.

Given his calm and reasoned academic demeanor, it is easy to miss just how provocative Erik Brynjolfsson's contention really is. ­Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology-from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services-are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.

Rethink Robotics' new creation is easy to interact with, but the innovations behind the robot show just how hard it is to get along with people.

"The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of the academic workforce are now tenured or tenure-track.  Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses (MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival. "

At one session here at Davos, the presidents of Harvard, Stanford and MIT all readily acknowledged that the experiments in new models of online learning will soon radically disrupt higher learning. One expert suggested many universities are facing the early days of bankruptcy. Another predicted there may only be 10 universities that survive this transition.

"Professors typically don't worry about what price point an online course will sell at, or what amenities might attract a student to pick one course over another. But a new online platform, Professor Direct, lets instructors determine not only how much to charge for such courses, but also how much time they want to devote to services like office hours, online tutorials, and responding to students' e-mails."