The Internet may have grown up first in the United States, but it's a global phenomenon now. The same can be said for the fast-growing body of educational content on the web. YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education Channel today and noted that nearly 80% of the viewership of educational content on the site came from outside the United States. Less than 70% of the site's total traffic is International, so the educational content is disproportionately viewed by global audiences.
Both YouTube and iTunes U are serving up huge quantities of educational content to a world already in the throes of a 50 year revolution in global education. In some ways they represent exactly the kind of education that a new world needs, too: learning that augments existing education and fosters life-long development of non-routine analytical and interactive skills. That's a recipe for good times.
Contrary to an Associated Press report implying otherwise, teens are not shutting down their Facebook accounts in favor of Twitter.
Emil Protalinski has a much more thorough analysis of what is happening, which includes the Pew Research report AP used, as well as a July 2011 Pew report that focused solely on teens and social media use. His conclusion? Teens are definitely using Twitter more, but they are not giving up their Facebook accounts to do so.
Apple revolutionizes stuff. It's practically conventional wisdom in the tech world that, even if they're not first in the game or necessarily even the best, the Cupertino-based giant has a tendency to make a noticeable impact. They didn't invent the MP3 player, smartphone or tablet, but they sure have redefined all of those products. Even if this tendency is strong, it's not necessarily always how things play out. For an example, look no further than the Apple TV.
Today, the company set their sights on textbooks, an industry Steve Jobs himself described as being "ripe for digital destruction." True as that may be, is what Apple planning to do in the space really all that disruptive?
Having already done their part to shake up several industries, Apple officially unveiled what the company hopes is the next phase in textbooks. Starting today, iBooks 2 will be available in the iTunes App Store. The update will provide access to Apple's new breed of interactive textbooks, which are aimed at high school students and will cost $14.99 each. To help populate the store, the company is also launching iBooks Author, a self-publishing application for authors.
Apple's new digital textbooks will be available through the iBookstore and will feature much more rich and interactive components than their existing, consumer-focused e-books. In a demo at today's press event in New York City, the company demoed a science textbook complete with video, rich graphics, multitouch support and thumbnail-based navigation.
The unveiling of the third generation of Apple's iPad is still, unofficially, weeks away. That isn't stopping the company from taking a crack at the way tablets and other mobile devices could change the way people learn. Tomorrow, Apple is expected to reveal its latest plans in the education space at an official press conference in New York City.
Exactly what they'll unveil tomorrow isn't yet known, but some hints and leaks have started to paint the picture. That the event is centered around education is no mystery, as the official press invite wasn't shy about making that point. As for which area of education is set to be targeted by Apple, all available evidence points to the textbook.
Tools provide leverage for people to get work done; in many cases they enable us to do new kinds of work. Now consider robots in the workplace. They seem like bad news but do they have to be? What if robots weren't a threat to humanity, only intended to steal human jobs, but were tools that enabled all of us to do new things and live life differently? We may need to start seeing things that way, for our own sake.
The iPhone and iPad tablet manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million human beings around the world. (They produce other electronics as well.) The company said last month that it plans to cut that number in half with the enlistment of 1 million new robot workers, a 100X increase in its robot workforce, over the next 3 to 5 years. "An empire of robots," the company says. Human workers? They will move up the value chain, the company says. How might that actually happen? People say that education is undervalued, what if robots saved us from that?
The joy of learning is among the most valuable ways to find meaning in life. Combine that with the substantial imbalance between supply and demand of skilled labor in the United States, and a period of economic upheaval, and you've got a recipe for for something magical to happen.
While traditional schools struggle to fit the bill, the internet is finally rising the the occasion. Startups like Treehouse, CodeAcademy, Lynda.com and of course Khan Academy are capturing the imagination of learners around the world, of all ages. Can these sites give traditional education the "Wikipedia vs. the encyclopedia" treatment? Why are these new websites aimed at teaching new skills so hot right now? A discussion of those questions leaves me feeling very optimistic, for the future of humanity even.
YouTube has launched a new initiative called YouTube for Schools, which will enable educators to open up classrooms to the wide world of educational content on YouTube without all the junk. Open Internet access in schools is tricky, with all the distractions and time-wasters out there, so Google is taking this step to make educators' lives easier.
Network administrators can turn on YouTube for Schools to give school computers access to the vast library of YouTube EDU content from partners such as the Smithsonian and TED. The content is organized into topical and grade-level playlists. You can view the lists at youtube.com/teachers.
Students, educators and others interested in finding the best published content, events and experts for learning new things will be heartened to learn that a new metadata markup standard is in the works to make discovery of learning materials easier than ever. Perhaps more importantly, it will make those materials easier for machines to find. Once finding the right content is a solved problem, many new things could become possible.
The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), a project co-led by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, today took the next step towards submitting its specification to Schema.org, the collaboration between Google, Yahoo and Bing that maps out 100 different types of content online in a standardized format.
In a world where eligible candidates for Web-related positions range from 14 to 81 years of age, and thousands worldwide may compete for an open position or contract, how can an employer expect to screen them all? In the old days, people used degrees; but in an environment where today's skills become tomorrow's bird cage liners, major players in Web development are suggesting the old system may already be outmoded.
A system proposed earlier this year by the Mozilla Foundation will be the basis of a global competition. As much as $2 million in grants from Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation will be awarded to interested parties, in amounts ranging up to $200,000 apiece, who can propose a technical infrastructure and/or physical appearance for what Mozilla describes as a standard system of verified icons for representing individuals' Web developmental skills.
