Monday, September 23, 2002

The Departments of Commerce and Education, and the NSF, have compiled a series of visions, published as 2020 Visions: Transforming Education and Training Through Advanced Technologies, that provide a diverse array of views on how students, workers and life-long learners may learn in the future. The visions are solicited from a broad range of backgrounds (update: while backgrounds may vary, it's also worth noting that all but one author are male and there is virtually no ethnic diversity among the authors). The last vision (of the Last Teacher) presents a cautionary tale to remind us not to take the bubbly optimism of the collection -- many of which are highly techno-centric -- too seriously. Technology alone won't fix education. Didn't we know that already? Press release here; downloadable report here. 12:07:47 PM     Sometimes small, well-focused applications can make a big difference. I'm recently started to use Consistency, a small application for Mac OS X that's designed to help you keep track of regularly recurring tasks that don't have fixed deadlines. In my case, that includes things like updating this blog. I don't have the time or energy to maintain to update this daily, and since it's not a daily habit, it's easy to forget to add pointers to interesting items that come across my desk. Consistency does a great job of helping me track tasks like these and reminding me when I'm overdue. 11:45:42 AM     It's offical: A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that more U.S. college students use the Internet for academic work than use the campus library. 11:40:03 AM

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