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he rampant cheating in high schools across the United States not only threatens intellectual honesty and integrity, but also the legitimacy of our economy and politics. The cheating epidemic reflects a bizarre and unhealthy obsession with testing and the obsolete industrial-era authoritarianism that takes the joy out of learning. But, ironically, so much group cheating shows us a way out by giving us a glimpse, although in a deformed version, of the cooperative modes of learning that could take over if we ever get beyond the prevalent use of standardized testing and competition-based grading.

Last year, Iowa’s universities launched an effort to share language courses online. The first was in classic Greek, which an ISU student took from a U of I professor in Iowa City. This year, three ISU students enrolled in classic Greek. The universities may expand to Arabic or Chinese, officials said.

“the octopus room.” The classroom’s brain is a motion-sensing camera that follows an instructor around the room. Microphones triangulate the location of a voice so that the camera can focus on the person speaking. Six black arms with video monitors are attached to the “brain” in the center. This allows students in the class and those taking it online to see and hear each other.

They do a very good job of simulating the classroom experience,” he said. “But you have to have the discipline to stay up with it. If you get a week or so behind, it’s hard to catch up

blend of in-person and online instruction. Students taking finals at the U of I’s secure testing rooms, for example, might be enrolled in a daily Spanish language course where two days of class every week are completed online. That allows the instructor to focus classroom time on refining conversation and reading skills, faculty said.

“Part of that land-grant mission is educating the masses, and the masses have changed.”

Offering experienced faculty teachers and classroom space filled with well-equipped laboratories is a key way for Iowa’s universities to differentiate themselves from online-only colleges, officials said.

However, disciplines that don’t require physical space may one day be based mostly or entirely online, said Marcus Haack, a U of I professor who teaches future principals and superintendents in an education leadership program that many participants take online.

In 40 years in this business, I’ve learned we will never put the brakes on technology. It’s always going to expand our opportunities, our thinking and creativity

see their sport as more than a game

vehicle for developing human capacity and learning the skills of life

Great Coaches Know Their Sport

Great Coaches Develop Players' Skills

their capacity to teach others to play the game

transmit their own knowledge and skill to those not yet proficient

believe that each athlete can learn to play the game

individual and team skills, they continually attend to the growth patterns of each team member as well as the group

have their eye on every kid, not just a favored few

analyze what the athletes do and adjust both training and the game plan as a result of what they see

precise feedback along with individualized training that enables athletes to use this feedback productively

provide high-quality practice

Turns out he was teaching me to be a good citizen, a human being who cares

Great Coaches Are Great Motivators

set clear and demanding performance goals for their players

high expectations elicit maximum effort from team members and result in maximum growth.

understand and appreciate human variance

tailor practice drills to the individual, but they also know that individuals are motivated in different ways

study their players to figure out what will encourage each one to persevere

realize that sideline drills are less motivating than the game itself, so they ensure that players grasp the link between drills and the game and that everyone gets to play the game to test their developing skills

fun into hard work

culture of success is more motivating than a culture of winning

invest more heavily in celebrating the more attainable goal of individual growth

Great Coaches Are Team Builders

orient everyone to a common vision

care for one another and play to one another's strengths

respectfully toward each athlete, they inspire respect among team members

address interpersonal problems on a team as vigorously as problems with skills execution or a game pla

They also grew more powerful

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.

tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.

But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the

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

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.

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

The future belongs not to them but to today’s teenagers

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

And finally we need to reboot our whole system.

If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle

Western Civilization's Killer Apps

COMPETITION

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

THE RULE OF LAW

MODERN MEDICINE

THE CONSUMER SOCIETY

THE WORK ETHIC