By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. L&D's Role in the VUCA World: Part 1
Sahana Chattopadhyay, ID, Other Reflections, 2014/11/19
VUCA stands for 'volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity'. It describes the world we face: "The external conditions and environment are not going to stabilize enough for us to take a step back and come up with a solid plan and blue print of organizational learning. More...
By Gene Wade. While more and more jobs require college degrees, these degrees are becoming increasingly inaccessible and unaffordable for a majority of Americans. In other sectors, technology-driven innovation seems to put everything right at our fingertips at prices we can afford. Why isn’t this the case for higher education and what can we do about it?
By Deborah Nusche. A new OECD working paper on school size policies, published today, shows that there are many ways in which school size may influence learning environments. Small schools make personal contact easy and are often strongly defended by local communities, while larger schools can provide more options to meet a diverse range of interests and needs. Read more...
By Rolf Alter. In order to address this challenge, the OECD established a framework to measure well-being at the local level. “How’s Life in Your Region?” presents an innovative set of tools to help policy makers benchmark the performance of their region in terms of the key indicators that define well-being for citizens. The ability to benchmark the performance of their region against other similar places should help them better target their policies and investments in order to have stronger impact on people’s daily lives. Read more...By Laura Gardiner. It’s clichéd to say that the most certainty you can take from any economist’s prediction is that it will be mistaken, but many got their forecasts for 2014 horribly wrong. At the beginning of this year, commentators were fairly united in hailing the ‘year of the pay rise’, with most expecting the UK’s enduring real wage squeeze to finally turn the corner, and some predicting that pay would bounce back quite rapidly over the course of the year. Two thirds of the way through 2014 this has not come to pass and the outlook has been repeatedly downgraded. For example the Bank of England now doesn’t expect a return to real wage growth until the middle of next year. Looking back, many of us are left wondering why we were all far too optimistic. Read more...
Drawing from its award-winning research in cognitive skills augmentation, the Neuro-Ludus brain training game reveals important discoveries in neuroplasticity, gaming and mobile technology. Neuro-Ludus enables youth and adults to augment their analytical/information processing skills to learn more effectively and achieve peak performance. More...
By Cathy Davidson. On Thursday, Nov 20, at 11 am EST, I will be interviewed on CNN’s @This Hour, with hosts John Berman and Michaela Pereira. Our focus is a new documentary Ivory Tower. I previewed the documentary last night. It is pretty terrifying, even apocalyptic, if you are a student, a professor, a parent, or just a general citizen of the US concerned about your future. I don’t want to “spoil” the movie for anyone so I’ll only give away what is in the Ivory Tower trailer.
Ivory Tower focuses on both economics and on learning. On the economic side the focus is on: the 1 trillion in student loan debt; the even greater debt that colleges and universities have taken on over the last decades making them unstable and unsustainable; the declining state funding of public universities beginning with Governor Reagan’s program of defunding the University of California and vowing, as a presidential candidate, to dismantle the Department of Education. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Fall of the Banner Ad: The Monster That Swallowed the Web
Harhad Manjoo, New York Times, 2014/11/09
The internet was originally a military and academic network designed for the free sharing of information and communications. As it began to be opened in the 1990s to allow commercial participation there was significant opposition to the introduction of advertising to the environment. These fears turned out to be well-founded, in my opinion, as much of what is bad about the web today can be traced back to the need to pursue clicks over content. More...
By David Bannister. Commencement speeches are usually replete with optimism, goodwill and well-intentioned advice affirming not only the university graduates’ efforts and successes, but the estimable sacrifice parents have made for their futures. Read more...
By Eric Schulzke. As good manufacturing jobs disappeared and technological complexity gradually penetrated even seemingly simple jobs, post-secondary education became a near necessity, says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
In the 1970s, Carnevale said, 70 percent of workers had a high school degree or less and most of them were middle class. Most skills were learned on the job. More...
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