Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Shift Happens

This video was the original creation of a school technology guy in Colorado who wanted to stimulate a conversation about the future of schooling, based on the rapid changes in technology and human demographics.

Think: Friedman's The World is Flat

His original title was "Did You Know?" but the "slide show" has been passed around a bit and "improved upon" - even localized for use in some places. And given background music and a catchier title... It runs about 8 minutes.

Eastern Kentucky University's new interim President Doug Whitlock showed it as "food for thought" at EKU's faculty and staff convocation. Despite the fear that everybody is going to show it to their education students - I showed it anyway, with a new course I'm teaching at EKU on Schooling and Society.

One of my students questioned it's authority because the slide show only rarely cites its sources (he gets brownie points for that in my class), but Friedman's book is very well documented and my guess is that the numbers presented are accurate enough...to make its point. As for its implied predictions? Who knows? But that's the point.

Lets talk about it.

Then, let's decide if it's OK with us that Nintendo spends more on R&D for its next product than the sum of money spent on educational research. No wonder high quality research is so rare.

In the competition for kids minds, who do you think is winning?

(Sorry for the link; I couldn't get the embed code to copy properly)

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