Cathy Davidson‘s Now You See It argues that the educational system in the US is failing to prepare graduates for the work they will be doing in the 21st century. While I found myself vigorously nodding at the general argument of the book, there were also some places I wished Davidson had developed in greater detail.
The best part of the book for me is the description of the roots of our standard educational approach going back to the early 20th century: Taylorism, the IQ, and standardized testing on a large scale. These approaches made sense when education’s focus was the creation of disciplined, managerial, bureaucratic middle-managers for hierarchical, command-and-control corporations.
Unfortunately, while the workforce is adapting to new realities of globalization, the digital revolution, and commons-based peer production, the educational system has not kept pace.
An oldie but a goodie. The folks at ROFLCON just announced that Miss Teen USA South Carolina will be the emcee at the upcoming SF-ROFL thing (August 29th).
Unfortunately I don’t think I will be able to get to this one – and not because I can’t find San Francisco on my map. Unlike many U.S. Americans I believe in building up our future for our children and that our education here should help the Iraq and the Asian countries. ;)
Now that Miro 1.0 is out, I thought I’d share a few excellent video “channels” I’ve been watching lately – TED Talks, Google Tech Talks and Google engEDU, Pop!Tech, and Ask a Ninja!. Between them all, they may just get you through the writer’s strike.
(To subscribe to any of these in Miro, you can just use the “Add Channel” command in the Channel Menu and put in the RSS url below. Be sure to look at whether you want to download ALL the videos in that feed or just NEW videos added. Read more…
