Timothy Taylor notes the conflict between Occupational Licensing (Credentialism) and Job Creation.* (more)

aka Huffington Post

aka Ukulele (more)

daily source for local Journalism? (more)

low-human-density area (more)

Charlie Stross anticipates the death of the (SciFi) genre. I'm here to talk about something much more concrete: the likelihood that within another decade, two at most, science fiction as a literary genre category may well die. Book Publishing. I Commented.

MIT is creating an MITx non-profit entity established inside the university that will offer an "MIT-sanctioned certificate" (Credential) for completing various courses or, perhaps eventually, whole course sequences – though MIT emphasized full degrees will not be in the offing.

Europe had a bunch of elections. (more)

book by James Surowiecki, ISBN:0-375-43362-7 (more)

Hugh MacLeod thinks we need to move to a Creative Age (New Economy vs previous 2 ages: PreIndustrial and Industrial Age) of Educating Kids. *Like most stu­dents, I lear­ned how to learn, basi­cally. I don’t think that’s enough any­more... Kids in the future are simply not going to leave school with this big, bum­per crop of plum jobs wai­ting for them to fill, not like they used to. In the future, kids will leave school and inc­rea­singly be expec­ted to create their own via­ble realities. Like David Gergen allu­ded to, these young adults will be expec­ted not just to do the work, but expec­ted to ACTUALLY invent something. Create something, not just obey orders, not just ful­fill some sort of social role... (more)

Someone who tends to avoid Specialization (more)

After trying Django For Simplest Thing, decide to try using Pyramid for Simplest Thing instead... (more)

trading and other commercial activities (including Agriculture). Also science. From Systems Of Survival. (more)

territorial activities - government, religion. From Systems Of Survival. (more)

The Roanoke Colony was the first English colony in the New World (St. John's in Newfoundland was claimed in 1583 by Humphrey Gilbert but no settlement was attempted). It was founded at Roanoke Island in what was then Virginia (now North Carolina). (more)

aka Commune, kibbutz (more)

fluctuation of Econom Ic activity around its long-term trend (more)

Nathan Lewis considers Ken Rogoff's This Time Its Different book about Sovereign Debt defaults. (more)

Microsoft has a School Of The Future program (Educating Kids), and other corporations are doing similar things. (more)

Diane Ravitch opposes trying to teach Critical Thinking (and other "21st Century" (New Economy) Thinking Tools like Creativity and Problem Solving). Inevitably, putting a priority on skills pushes other subjects, including history, literature, and the arts, to the margins. But skill-centered, knowledge-free education has never worked... In 1916, a federal government report scoffed at academic education as lacking relevance. The report's author said black children should "learn to do by doing,'' (Learning By Doing) which he considered to be the modern, scientific approach to education. Just a couple of years later, "the project method'' (Project Based Learning) took the education world by storm. Instead of a sequential curriculum laid out in advance, the program urged that boys and girls engage in hands-on projects of their own choosing, ideally working cooperatively in a group. It required activity, not docility, and awakened student motivation. It's remarkably similar to the model advocated by 21st-century skills enthusiasts... For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on. But they have paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world... We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about. Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned... Until we teach both teachers and students to value knowledge and to love learning, we cannot expect them to use their minds well. (more)