Job Trends for this Decade: What are the Implications for Education?

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

A report from Intuit notes that fully 25 to 30% of today’s workforce in the U.S. is already categorized as self-employed or freelancers!
http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/futureofsmallbusiness/intuit_2020_report.pdf

The Intuit report further suggests that through this decade -

“The number of contingent employees will increase worldwide. In the U.S. alone, contingent workers will exceed 40 percent of the workforce by 2020.
• Traditional full-time, full-benefit jobs will be harder to find.
• Small businesses will develop their own collaborative networks of contingent workers, minimizing fixed labor costs and expanding the available talent pool.
• Self-employment, personal and micro business numbers will increase.”

And an article at the Quartz blog site by Jeremy Neuner notes that 40% of the U.S. work force amounts to over 60 million people. Mr Neuner is CEO and co-founder of Next Space, which builds coworking communities.
http://qz.com/65279/40-of-americas-workforce-will-be-freelancers-by-2020/

In 2006 according to a government survey the number was already over 40 million people and around 30% of the workforce. The term “contingent workers” covers contractors, temps and self-employed. Temporary and contract workers represent some 22% of the workforce even at the largest 200 companies.

“The forces behind this sea-change are many: the rapid adoption of mobile technology, ubiquitous internet access, and a general sense of malaise powered by the vague yet nagging notion that we’re just not meant to work all day sitting in a cubicle. Add to that the waste of time, energy and brainpower that commuting engenders, and it becomes apparent that our definition of “workplace” will never be the same. It may seem like a tug of war between companies and workers, but in fact they share common goals: using technology and mobility to maximize productivity, innovation, and well-being.”

Wasted time, energy and brainpower

While the decreasing proportion of traditional jobs may seem like bad news, we are seeing a great resurgence in startup companies, especially in fields like Cloud Computing and Social Media. Thanks to Internet and Cloud computing technologies, starting a new company is much less expensive than before. The genomics revolution is at hand and will generate many new jobs in biotech. And 3-D printing technology will allow a return of manufacturing jobs to the U.S. and increase the opportunity for new small-scale, non-capital intensive, manufacturing companies. These new companies also bring new models of work, a Net-Work model of collaboration via networks of people and the Internet.

The theme of shifting work models was explored in Tom Friedman’s recent article in the N.Y. Times, reporting on his interview withTony Warner, Harvard education specialist and author of the book Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/friedman-need-a-job-invent-it.html?_r=0

Mr. Friedman notes that earning good middle class wages requires a higher level of skill than ever. Skill as used here has a broad context, incorporating critical thinking, creativity, innovation, motivation, communication and teamwork.

Mr. Warner explains that “what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important”.

We know that even full time jobs in large companies are requiring more initiative, creativity, problem solving, teamwork than ever before. Here’s one approach to recommend -

“Finland is one of the most innovative economies in the world,” Warner said, “and it is the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’  They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework, and almost no testing.”

Warner suggests students need to have digital portfolios which they build during their K-12 years and beyond, highlighting critical thinking, communication skills, creativity and initiative. Whether students end up as freelancers or within a large company these skills and the ability to collaborate within real and virtual teams will be vital to success.

Curriki aims to be at the forefront of these education trends by providing free, open source resources that are highly adaptable in support of project-based learning and other methodologies. This is all in support of the goal of helping students develop teamwork and communication skills, creativity and initiative to help them to better succeed in our high-tech world.

Big Data Analytics for K-12 Personalized Learning

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

There is a rush, perhaps a gold rush, underway in efforts to leverage Big Data analytics to improve K-12 educational results.

A story from Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/03/us-education-database-idUSBRE92204W20130303
reports that a new $100 million data warehouse has been built in the U.S. to monitor academic achievements of public school students, from kindergarten through grade 12. The article states that “The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states.”

Already 9 states in the U.S. are participating to some degree, and two of these, New York and Louisiana, are planning to provide all or most of their student records into the data warehouse. The database includes students names and addresses, and other personal information.

A non-profit named inBloom, Inc. (previously called the Shared Learning Collective) has been established to operate the database, which already contains millions of student files. It is a cloud-based data warehouse for student data such as grades, test results, assessments, standards met, behavior and attendance. It is not a repository for digital content, but will contain links to content, leveraging the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative methodology. The stated goal for the data warehouse is to support more personalized learning.

Here you can watch a video that introduces inBloom’s vision for customized teaching and learning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gHjbdpXohk0#!

A very large amount of data is gathered by school districts and states, but resides in many separate databases and is not cross-correlated or well-analyzed. This project aims to change that. See this Mindshift article:
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/07/how-will-student-data-be-used/
Pulling data together in this way is intended not only to make learning more customized, but also to make it easier to track results as students move from district to district or even state to state. In addition, it will allow data analysis on student achievement to be linked to various learning resources, potentially including the 46,000+ resources on Curriki.

Educational software suppliers are excited by the opportunity to mine the database and better determine what educational products to develop, including educational games and other digital learning products, lesson plans, and reports.

The goals of the project are laudable, but not surprisingly, given the sensitive nature of the data, privacy and security concerns are being raised. inBloom states on their web site: “We recognize the sensitivity of storing student data and place the utmost importance on the privacy and security of that data.” Parents in some states are already raising concerns about potential data leakage. While the data warehouse contains essentially the same data already held in school district databases, it now becomes available to a wider audience, including educators in other states than the original source for the data. And educational content vendors are requesting access to test data, for example. Presumably this will be made anonymous when supplied. Ownership of the data is retained by the states and districts that supply it. But some organizations, including the PTA and ACLU, are already asking “What are the remedies if and when data leaks?”.

We’d be interested to hear what you think about this project. What benefits and risks to you see in amassing a well-integrated and analyzable database of K-12 student achievement? How would you want to see this data being used to improve learning outcomes? Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Please provide comments.

Common Core and Open Educational Resources Working Together

By Kim Jones, Curriki CEO

Open Educational Resources are important enablers in support of Common Core standards. An article in Education Week entitled “Common Core Drives Interest in Open Education Resources” can be found here: http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2012/10/17/01open.h06.html

The article notes that Common Core standards are driving increased interest in open digital resources. For example, the state of Utah in the U.S. is creating textbooks made entirely from OER materials, and in the state of South Dakota educators have built a repository of OER content in support of the Common Core. The pilot projects for open textbooks in Utah were highly successful, so the open textbook project was expanded to be statewide during this current school year.

I was interviewed by Katie Ash, who wrote in the article:

“Such projects are exactly what the common core can now make possible”, says Kim Jones, the chairman and chief executive officer of Curriki, a nonprofit K-12 repository for open education resources based in Cupertino, Calif.
“We’re seeing a lot of teachers starting to contribute OER materials that are aligned to common-core standards,” says Jones. “We’re very excited about that and think it’s going to make a huge difference in allowing people across the U.S. to leverage what teachers are doing in other places.”

The article also noted Curriki’s work with the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, which is working to categorize and tag OERs to make them more accessible and easier to search. Also mentioned was Curriki’s launch during 2012 of a free Algebra 1 course aligned to Common Core standards.

“It’s an exciting time for education, between OER really crossing the chasm and common-core standards coming out, and just the work that’s going on around technology,” says Jones, from Curriki. “It’s all coming together at a great time, and it’s really going to have a positive impact on education going forward.”

For more information on how OER supports Common Core standards implementation, we encourage you to read the full article at: http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2012/10/17/01open.h06.html

Our Favorite Open Educational Resources of 2012

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

 

 

Here are a few of our favorite resources from 2012. If you look these over, I’m sure you’ll find at least a couple of them to be interesting and useful! Click on each title to go to that resource at Curriki.

STEMware Zombie Plague 

Why We Like It: STEM and zombies were popular in 2012– this is a great combination of them both! Contributed By: Barbara UCD

Fiction 

Why We Like It: Karen has always contributed a ton of resources. Most recently several free Kindle versions of books. With the increase in e-readers, this is a good collection of free options. Contributed By: Karen Fasimpaur

Investigating Bikes 

Why We Like It: A cross curricula approach using bikes as a starting point for arts math, science. Way cool! Contributed By: Andy Hannaford

Average speed inquiry lab 

Why We Like It:Students will feel like they are playing while learning about concepts such as average speed, data collection, graphing, extrapolation and interpolation of data. Contributed By: Carol Hagen

Reading Lolita in Tehran  

Why We Like It: A full unit on an eye-opening novel that incorporates music, poetry, group activities, current issues AND is aligned to Common Core State Standards. Contributed By: Sue Costagliola 

Rice Elementary Science Curriculum  

Why We Like It:The RESCu.Rice.edu site contains numerous inquiry based lesson plans for K-5 teachers and super engaging activities for kids. Contributed By: Carolyn Nichol

WikiPremed 

Why We Like It: WikiPremed is a comprehensive, creative commons licensed MCAT course, notable in demonstrating a unified curriculum for teaching undergraduate science is a true treasure trove of learning materials and over 100 hours of course video. Contributed By: John Wetzel

Scatter It!  

Why We Like It: Scatterplotting has never been easier to learn! Contributed By: Mary Richardson

Music Lesson Plans  

Why We Like It: Music is an important subject, even if not part of the core curriculum. This collection is a good starting point for teaching music. Contributed By: Nate Merrill

TED (free app)  

Why We Like It: TED talks are known for being some of the most engaging, timely, and progressive presentations. This is amazing access to all of them–free! And there’s no fear of the content getting stale. There are new videos posted every week. Contributed By: Sandy Gade 

Othello 2012 and BEYOND!– 2012-2013  

Why We Like It: Modernize the teaching Othello through the use of news articles, non-fiction pieces, technology, and recent news events, aligned to the CCSSO. Contributed By: Sue Costagliola East Meadow School District

 

Interview with Rob Lucas, Educator and Curriki member

If you could give a TED talk, what would it be about?

The public value of learning. Social media gives students an opportunity to learn while creating knowledge of value to communities outside the school. They can conduct research of public interest, post it to blogs, wikis, and video-sharing sites, and then judge the reception of their work. By doing this, students not only develop knowledge and skills but learn why learning matters. Not everyone thinks about educational technology in these terms, so I’d like a chance to convince them. 

Why do you use Curriki?

I am inspired by the vision of educational resources that are open to all–and to building an online educational environment where teachers, students, and other citizens can learn bycontributing to the learning commons.

What advice would you give to new teachers?

Cultivate a habit of reading newspapers, magazines, professional journals, websites, and well-written public scholarship. Watch films and documentaries, too, and listen to radio and podcasts, looking for ways in which these give purpose, meaning, and value to your subject matter. Obviously, a new teacher will spend a great deal of time developing basic practices of teaching like managing a classroom–and rightly so! But the more you can remain connected to both your students and to broader public conversations, the more sustaining your work will become.  

What’s the first website you check every day?

Probably Slate.com. I love provocative well-written opinion journalism. Social studies teachers should also check out their new blog of intriguing historical documents, The Vault, written by Rebecca Onion.http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault.html

What would you be doing if you weren’t in your current role today?

Today, I’m a postdoctoral scholar, but I’d also love to be teaching high school AP US History. More and more, though, I find myself interested in documentary photography and film making. There’s no career change in my future, but with luck, I’ll find some way to work that in to my research and teaching.

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.

Spy novels on audiobook. Lately, I’ve been hooked on a mid-twentieth-century writer named Eric Ambler. Try Epitaph for a Spy or A Coffin for Dimitrios.

LRMI will provide better Learning Resource discovery

By Joshua Marks, CTO, Curriki

LRMI? Why should you care? While LRMI, when pronounced like a name (Ler-me), might sound like the lead singer for Motörhead, it is really an acronym for the “Learning Resource Metadata Initiative”. Now you might be more interested in rock trios than educational tech acronyms, but if you are an educator or student, you will find LRMI much more enlightening and helpful — and perhaps you will spend less time banging your head against a wall. This is why you should care.

The World Wide Web is filled with billions of documents, images, media, articles and content of all sorts. Search engines like Google and Bing do a great job of helping you find things you are likely interested in using keywords and phrases. This is particularly true for things you might buy, or people or places you want to learn about. However, anyone who has looked for learning resources on the Web sees that only a small fraction of the documents Google suggests are specifically useful in teaching and learning a topic at a given level. If you narrow your search with terms like “lesson plan” or “textbook” you get more relevant results, but still miss a lot. And you still might find lessons or books that are at the completely wrong level or skill. Recently released research underscores this discovery challenge and highlights the need for a better way to identify and find web based learning resources: http://www.lrmi.net/survey-results-show-need-for-more-targeted-results-when-searching-online-for-learning-resources.

When I was asked to join the Technical Working Group for LRMI, I believed that if LRMI simply gave us a way to search only those sites that contained content intended as learning resources, we would be in a better world. But the real task the group took on was “How can we provide a simple way to identify (tag) all Web pages that contain content intended for instructional use as  ‘Learning resources’ and specifically included information about the subject, topic, how it is to be used and how it might align to local learning standards or the Common Core currently being adopted in the United States?” What if you could search for just those pages that contain activities appropriate for 10-year-olds, videos that illustrate photosynthesis, or some other specific topic?

The technical working group has completed its work and the V1.0 specification (http://www.lrmi.net/the-specification) is being adopted both by Schema.org, which is a project led by all the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.), and the W3C (the group responsible for all Web standards). The next step is to get all the Web masters and publishers in the world to use it. This is where you come in. The more you tell the Web sites you use that you want them to support and tag the content with LRMI tags, the better  job Google, Curriki, Bing and everyone else will do of locating the content you are interested in, without all the frustration and bad matches.

You can see this kind of tagging in action in other domains right now. For example, if you search Google for “chicken salad recipe” then under “More” select “recipes”, and then select “Search tools” you will see a bunch of very specific recipe filters like ingredients, calories, and cooking time. (It is way too hard to find in Google right now, but really helps finding a recipe.) You can image a similar set of filters for Learning Resources. In fact, you can see this functionality right now when you search for content in the Curriki community in Advanced Search, where you can filter results by subject, topic, level, language, instructional component type, rating, reviews and all other Curriki-specific metadata (metadata being information that describes content.) This is what LRMI will standardize for the entire web.

This is just part of the story.LRMI has been used by another project called The Learning Registry (http://www.learningregistry.org/), which in turn is part of a U.S. initiative called the Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI) (http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/tag/shared-learning-infrastructure/). These extensions of LRMI are supported by both the $4.35 Billion Federal Race-to-the-Top grant program and the Gates Foundation. When taken together, these independent but interlinked initiatives are finally creating a critical mass of movement toward common digital material formats and an information infrastructure that enables a full transition to personalized digital instructional delivery. In fact, without these standards and the central role LRMI plays in providing a common way to define the use and target for learning assets, the dream of personalized dynamic learning systems would not be possible.

So stop banging your head looking for the instructional needle in the information haystack known as the World Wide Web. Tell everyone who publishes learning resources we need them to use and support LRMI!