Ideas
Education Technology and the Future of Academic Freedom
It was one of the most frequently repeated stories of the year: college students, particularly left-leaning college students, are intolerant… If it sounds like a caricature… well, it is. If nothing else, pundits and politicians seem to forget that the majority of college students do not attend private institutions like Columbia or Middlebury or even…
Read MoreCan a 20-Minute Test Tell Employers What a College Degree Cannot?
When it comes to hiring, many employers still lean toward graduates from name-brand institutions. Yet … too many graduates “don’t get a shot at the high-value jobs they should be getting,” says Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education. “That’s a big deal in a liberal democracy.”… Companies and others spend $1…
Read MoreIntegrative Learning in Higher Education
Integrative learning … which develops the ability to think broadly and connect ideas across disciplines and to the outside world, has become a buzzword among academic managers who see it as a way to make general education meaningful and useful, and to realize the aims of liberal education. Read the story in The Chronicle of…
Read MoreThere is Work in Digital Tech, Regardless of Background
Stephen O’Grady is co-founder of RedMonk, a Maine consulting firm with global clients. They help “companies understand developers better, and to help developers, period.” “I want [kids] to understand that no matter what their background, what their training, there is a place for them in this industry if they enjoy the work and are willing to…
Read MoreWhy Every Tech Worker Needs a Humanities Education
“Many of the builders of technology today haven’t spent enough time thinking about the implications for the world.”
Read MoreThe Parts of America Most Susceptible to Automation
The authors estimate that almost all large American metropolitan areas may lose more than 55 percent of their current jobs because of automation in the next two decades. “We felt it was really stunning, since we are underestimating the probability of automation,” said Johannes Moenius, the director of the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis at…
Read MoreBosses Believe Your Work Skills Will Soon Be Useless
Excerpt from the Washington Post — May 2017 Nearly a third of business leaders and technology analysts express “no confidence” that education and job training in the United States will evolve rapidly enough to match the next decade’s labor market demands, a new report from the Pew Research Center finds. About 30 percent of the executives,…
Read MoreA Skills Gap From College to Career Doesn’t Exist. It’s the Awareness Gap We Need to Fix.
Excerpt from EdSurge — April 2017 A popular narrative in the employment market today is that a “skills gap” exists between the abilities employers seek in candidates and the capabilities that new college graduates gain through postsecondary education. Beyond skills readily demonstrable from college curriculum (primarily cognitive skills and technical skills), employers complain about the lack…
Read MoreDigital Workplace: How HR Will Change In 2017
Excerpt from CactusSoft Analytics — December 2016 20th century organizational structures (classical hierarchies and top-down management and decision making) are dying – giving rise to devolved decision making by cross functional teams who work in sprints of activity, are funded via micro-budgets and able to deliver at unheard of speeds. Digital transformation is not…
Read MoreFast Forward 2030: The Future of Work and the Workplace
People seek a holistic life: they want to work with intelligent people on exciting and rewarding projects where they can be creative and left alone to get the job done; values and purpose are as important as money; working for social good is an option; and they want to be a part of ‘the next…
Read MoreWhere machines could replace humans—and where they can’t (yet)
From McKinsey Quarterly — July 2016 The hardest activities to automate with currently available technologies are those that involve managing and developing people (9 percent automation potential) or that apply expertise to decision making, planning, or creative work (18 percent). These activities, often characterized as knowledge work, can be as varied as coding software, creating…
Read MoreAligning the Organization for its Digital Future
Excerpt from the MIT Sloan Review — July 2016 Many companies are responding to an increasingly digital market environment by adding roles with a digital focus or changing traditional roles to have a digital orientation. The list of “digital” business roles and functions is extensive and growing. There are now digital strategists, chief digital officers,…
Read MoreStar Spangled Geeks: The US Digital Service
he USDS has worked on thirteen major projects involving eleven agencies, and claims to have saved the government many times its $14 million budget. It has charters to place full-blown teams in seven different agencies, with more to come before the end of the year.
Read MoreIDEXX CIO Ken Grady on Nontraditional Career Paths
Ken Grady has always been an animal lover. You can find him traveling across the country to visit farmers and their cows and chickens, or with veterinarians and the puppies, cats, guinea pigs, and all sorts of beloved pets in their care. But while his work involves caring for animals of all shapes and sizes, Grady…
Read MoreHow US Government Workers Collaborate Virtually
From 18F 18F is an office inside the General Services Administration that helps other federal agencies build, buy, and share efficient and easy-to-use digital services. We’re a team of technology experts that work with agencies to diagnose problems and then work alongside agency teams to find the right solutions. Headquartered at 18 and F streets…
Read MoreCivic Tech: Movements, Voices and Values
From Lawrence Grodeska: For a community that fashions itself small but mighty, there was much reflection about just how far civic tech has to go to reach mainstream status. At one point when polled, many in the audience considered themselves part of the environmental movement, but how many in the environmental movement would identify with the…
Read MoreWhy Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers
Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014 The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent…
Read MoreHow to Kickstart Your Data Science Career
If you’re an aspiring data scientist but still processing your data in Excel, you might want to upgrade your toolset. Why? Firstly, while advanced features like Excel Pivot tables can do a lot, they don’t offer nearly the flexibility, control, and power of tools like SQL, or their functional equivalents in Python (Pandas) or R…
Read MoreThese Will Be The Top Jobs In 2025 (And The Skills You’ll Need To Get Them)
It’s no surprise that tech skills will be in demand. However, [Devin Fidler at the Institute of the Future] says that ‘computational thinking’—the ability to manage the massive amounts of data we process individually each day, spot patterns, and make sense out of all of it—will be valued. Related jobs: Software developer jobs will grow…
Read MoreHitchhiker’s Guide to Data Science and Machine Learning
Thousands of articles and tutorials have been written about data science and machine learning. Hundreds of books, courses and conferences are available. You could spend months just figuring out what to do to get started, even to understand what data science is about. In this short contribution, I share what I believe to be the…
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