Worth Reading

Sharing a few highlights from the cue...

1. Future of Tech and Media (Wolf)- slide show about the future of tech and media.


2. Many Colleges Are Failing to Prepare Students for Their Working Lives (Selingo)- a critical look at the outdated structure of the undergraduate experience

By the time students graduate from college, their brains are hard-wired to the cadence of the daily life laid out by the nine-month academic calendar. They tend to think about their work in terms of 50-minute classes and five courses during 15-week semesters, with plenty of lengthy breaks in between.

But the working world is unstructured, with competing priorities and decisions that need to be made on the fly. College is very task-based: take an exam, finish a paper, attend a club meeting, go to practice. The workplace is more of a mash-up of activities with no scheduled end.

3. Let's Bid Farewell to the Carnegie Unit (Levine)- explores whether the traditional practice of associating credit hours with seat time is still relevant

This evolution is causing two problems. First, both the industrial and information economy models of education are being imposed on our educational institutions at the same time. At the moment, the effect is more apparent in our schools than colleges, but higher education can expect to face the same challenges. Today, schools and colleges are being required to use the fixed-process, fixed-calendar and Carnegie Unit accounting system of the industrial era. They are also being required to achieve the information economy’s fixed outcomes and follow its testing procedures. The former is true of higher education, and government is increasingly asking colleges and universities for the latter.

Doing both is not possible, by definition. Instead, states need to move consciously and systematically to the information economy’s emerging and increasingly dominant model of education, which will prevail in the future. The Carnegie Unit will pass into history.

4. The Future of Work: Navigating the Whitewater (Brown)- talks about the importance of arts and humanities in education

Equally important is the role of the arts and humanities in some kind of complicit relationship with STEM. I do not mean STEAM (the addition of the arts to STEM to ‘‘humanize’’ it). I mean hardcore arts/humanities—the kind of thinking and research that enables us to see differently, learn from the past, become empathic leaders, and understand how meaning and identity—the DNA of culture—are created. Without these we are lost.

5. A High School Where College Is Not the Goal (White)-a look at Randolph Technical High School in Philadelphia where students are earning credit and professional certification before graduating.

The goal is to graduate kids who have options. They can go on to a community college or a four-year degree program. They can also start a career with a marketable skill and three years of training behind them, making them more likely to secure a job and higher wages, instead of floundering out in the job market, where more than 10 percent of young adults with only a high school diploma are unemployed and more than 20 percent live in poverty, according to Pew Research Center.