In 1979, GM's U.S. employment peaked at 618,365. Today it's at 75,000 and falling fast. GM's U.S. market share, once about 50%, has fallen to about 20%.That's about an 88% decline in U.S. jobs at GM in 30 years. Interestingly, it's only a 60% decline in market share, which illustrates the automation/productivity portion of the shift.
If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either.Seth Godin, Tribes, p. 132.
You cannot lead strangers, you can only coerce or bribe them.I�m not saying that I necessarily completely agree with this quote (part of what I�m pondering), but it has me thinking about the quote in relation to the following.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether the changes we're attempting will be analogous to Earhart's solo crossing of the Atlantic, or her disappearance over the Pacific . . .Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn't be done.
- Amelia Earhart
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
If the trojan horse had been made of glass, do you think they�d have rolled it through the gate?Now, at that point he was specifically talking about transparency and the security advantages of open source software, but I thought it related very nicely to all the conversations we�ve had about transparency in the education space.
If there is not time to move rooms, students should assume the duck and cover position under tables or desks in the room. If tables or desks are not available, students should hold textbooks over their heads.
For every nine people who denounce innovation, only one will encourage it. For every nine people who do things the way they have always been done, only one will ever wonder if there is a better way. For every nine people who stand in line in front of a locked building, only one will ever come around and check the back door. Our progress as a species rests squarely on the shoulders of that tenth person. The nine are satisfied with things they are told are valuable. Person 10 determines for himself what has value.Makes me think of Will. I think he's peering in my back door right now . . .
We�re living in a world now where consumers are bombarded with thousands of commercial messages � they�re everywhere you look. Unless you cut through that and engage someone, I think you are lost. Consumers are now clearly in control. They control what they hear and see, when, and where. You have to find new ways to allow them to actively engage with you, or the money you spend is wasted.Any parallels for education?
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary numbers and those that don't.
Everyone grows and dies; the same is true of countries. The only question is how long one can postpone the inevitable. In the case of some countries, life spans can be very long, so it is worth asking whether the United States is in adolescence, middle age, or old age. Do science and technology accelerate or offset the demise? And finally, how many stars will be in the U.S. flag in fifty years?
There has yet to be a single U.S. president buried under the same flag he was born under, yet we often take continuity for granted.
- Juan Enriquez, p. 282
What will happen to common knowledge in the future? I do think our ancestors had it easy: Aside from all the juicy bits of unshared gossip and some proprietary trade secrets and the like, people all knew pretty much the same things and knew that they knew the same things. There just wasn't that much to know. Won't people be able to create and exploit illusions of common knowledge in the future, virtual worlds in which people only think they are in touch with their cyberneighbors?
- Daniel C. Dennett, p. 192
If it's no longer necessary to go to MIT for its facilities, then surely the intellectual community is its real resource? But my colleagues and I are always either traveling or overscheduled; the best way for us to see one another is to go somewhere else. Like many people, my closest collaborators are distributed around the world.
The ultimate consequence of the digitization of communications, then computation, and now fabrication is to democratize access to the means of invention.
- Neil Gershenfeld, p. 137
"Left brain is logic, right brain is creativity," he said. "We don't want our kids to compete internationally with half of their brain tied behind their backs."I think this is an excellent quote for the Colorado Legislature to keep in mind as they debate increasing requirements for high school graduation in so-called "core" areas, at the possible expense of - let's see, the opposite of core might be - "peripheral" areas like the arts. Let's don't tie our students' brains behind their backs . . .
- State Representative Rob Eissler commenting on the importance of arts education.
In 1970 the average American had a 7% chance of experiencing a 50% drop in family income; by 2002 it was a 17% chance.Okay, I'm sorry to repeat part of the quote, but how is it possible that we allow this in America?There's more going on here than offshoring - such as jobs being supplanted by technology, the rise of two-income families and divorce, and the decline of unions.
Whatever the reasons, the results are scary: The child poverty rate is about 20% in any given year, but more than half of American children will fall below the poverty line for at least one year, Hacker notes.
These, remember, are the kids we'll all be counting on to keep the economy humming in a more competitive world.
"The child poverty rate is about 20% in any given year, but more than half of American children will fall below the poverty line for at least one year . . . " [emphasis added]I know the statistics are probably just as bad - or much worse - for children in lots of places around the world, but I don't live in lots of places so I can't comment too much on them. But I do live here, and I know we have the resources to combat this - not only here but around the globe. As Mr. Chase suggests:
Mr. Chase, I can see the vision. Pay It Forward meets Web 2.0 meets The World is Flat. Mr. Gates? Mr. Buffett? Edubloggers? Are you listening? Your move.My thinking then becomes intertwined. While I agree the conversation about how learning and educating should be changing, more
importantglobal applications of these tactics are waiting in the wings. Imagine a similar approach to the one Karl suggests - only it's applied to poverty or Darfur or hunger or joblessness.How do you motivate? A stake, right? The thing is, everyday folk do have a stake in solving these problems, but they don't have an urgency behind them. Imagine the Gates Foundation opening a challenge to the globe where they placed all of the important data and resources about a given global or national crisis on a page or wiki or whatever and then facilitated an open forum engaging experts and invested amateurs in solving the problem.
Think of the educational implications of such a challenge. A civics class selects a chunk of data and works collaboratively to analyze and contribute to the cause, an English class utilizes the information to write to governments and other non-civilian change catalysts urging their investigation or - better yet - asking what they can do to help.
Am I thinking too big? Have I said too much? I should pull back? Someone tell me they can see the vision.
A quarter-century ago, blue-collar workers got a nasty shock when they found themselves going head to head with manufacturers in Japan and South Korea. But that's nothing compared with the scale and pace of what's coming."Japan and South Korea are 3% of the global labor force," says Sperling. "China and India make up 40%. There is no precedent for this huge group of workers that through information technology can compete with American workers overnight."
Those new hands aren't all going to be set to building cars and toasters. They'll be engaged in what economists call "tradable services," which include any job that doesn't need to be done in person. New technology will expose more and more jobs, says Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alan Blinder. "I can imagine down the road the technology will be good enough," says Blinder, "that on the stage where I lecture at Princeton there could be a hologram of a professor in India delivering the lecture for a tenth of my pay."
Hmmm . . .
" . . . the scale and pace of what's coming."Interesting, but . . .
"tradable services"
"New technology will expose more and more jobs . . . "
". . . down the road the technology will be good enough . . . "
"delivering the lecture . . ." ????Ouch.
Col. Austin Bay: Iraq war vet, renowned blogger, syndicated columnist, novelist, radio commentator. No writer is more respected on military matters. Now Col. Bay has turned his talents toward creating this first dictionary of �Milspeak�--the soldier's argot that is rich in irony, brutally efficient in conveying the immediacy and dangers of warfare, and can be a shorthand way for separating combat soldiers from fobbits.*I heard this story on NPR this morning and � once again due to the strange way my mind works � immediately thought of education (or, more accurately, my recent angst regarding the challenges we face in education).
*Fobbit: Derogatory term for soldiers who never leave an FOB (Forward Operating Base)
- The 101st had a saying during the initial push into Baghdad - "Embrace the Suck." Which means," Yeah, it's bad, but this is what we do."
- A phrase an officer used to remind his troops that their job is to understand that the suck is supreme and their job is to suck it up and drive on.
- The Operation Iraqi Freedom phrase "embrace the suck" is both an implied order and wise advice couched as a vulgar quip . . . "Embrace the suck" isn't merely a wisecrack; it's a raw epigram based on encyclopedic experience. Face it, soldier. I've been there. This ain't easy. Now let's deal with it . . . "Embrace the suck": Translation: The situation is bad, but deal with it.
