The hanging of a census worker is going to be quickly dismissed by the Right as the work of meth-heads or moonshiners.

I'm not sure I'd disagree with that analysis. But what it misses is this: all those ACORN workers that the Right has been demeaning over the past weeks? All those census workers that Bachman has been demonizing?

They work incredibly difficult and dangerous jobs. Like many of the government workers that the Glenn Beck crowd demeans, they serve in areas rural and urban that Glenn Beck would pee himself to drive through.

And lest people think this is too political for an education blog, consider this the next time you hear a middle manager or millionaire pundit dig into teachers as "leeches on the state":

Between 1996 and 2000, 599,000 violent crimes against teachers at school were reported. On average, in each year from 1996 to 2000, about 28 out of every 1,000 teachers were the victims of violent crime at school, and 3 out of every 1,000 were victims of serious violent crime (i.e., rape, sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault). Some teachers are at greater risk for victimization. Male teachers are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crime, and teachers at middle/junior high schools are at greater risk than those in elementary or senior high schools. Violence against teachers is also higher at urban schools.

Additionally, teachers face threats of violence and intimidation. In the 1999-2000 school year, 9 percent of all teachers were threatened with injury by a student from their school, and 4 percent were physically attacked by a student.

I'm furious right now. I can barely keep the string of obscenities in check.

You'll hear a lot of right-wingers talk today about how they are not responsible for Bill Sparkman's death. I can't imagine a lower bar. Census workers, teachers, and social workers deserve more from the Right than an alibi. They deserve respect and support for their work, and I would not lay off the Right until they get it.

David Brooks, last May, on how the "Harlem Miracle" proves that the proles just need more stick and less carrot:

To my mind, the results also vindicate an emerging model for low-income students. Over the past decade, dozens of charter and independent schools, like Promise Academy, have become no excuses schools. The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.

....

Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.

Ravitch and Meier in Education Week, today:

Oh, by the way, the school that saw the biggest drop in its overall score was the Harlem Promise Academy Charter School, the school that David Brooks of The New York Times held up as a national model, claiming that it had closed the achievement gap. Our blog had quite a lively exchange of letters about that school last spring. Seems it dropped from an A to a B; in the present regime of inflated scores, a B in New York City today is nothing to brag about.

And the reason it's nothing to brag about? New York State has dumbed down its tests over the years in order to fake progress:

A few weeks ago, Kolodner reported that city students were able to pass the state tests by guessing. After the article appeared, a city schoolteacher, Diana Senechal, tried an experiment, which she described at gothamschools.org. She took two state tests without reading the questions. She answered the questions at random (checking A, B, C, D) and received enough points to reach Level 2, sufficient for promotion in the city.

Because the state tests have been dumbed down, test scores soared. The number of students at the lowest level - those who are at risk of being held back in their grade - dropped dramatically. In sixth-grade reading, 10.1% (7,019) were at Level 1 in 2006, but by 2009 only 0.2% (146) were. In fifth-grade reading, the proportion of Level 1 students fell from 8.9% in 2006 (6,120) to 1.0% (654) in 2009. In seventh-grade math, the proportion of Level 1 students plummeted from 18.8% (14,231 students) in 2006 to 2.1% (1,457) in 2009.

So all these miracles, are, well, a little suspect. It turns out that miracles in the New York State school system have become a bit of a commodity.

And given that, the real person here that needs a "No Excuses" policy is David Brooks. I eagerly await his reanalysis of the miracle in light of the new data. I'm sure his "middle-class values" of hard work and honesty will compel the correction.

Cross-posted from the new blog you MUST subscribe to -- the Keene State CELT blog...

I'm meeting with a quite a few people doing interesting things around quantitative literacy, and I can't help but be amazed with the audacity of what they are attempting. If any of you are reading this post, know that you all are my heroes.

It occurs to me though that many people developing IQL start building courses from a different direction than I would start. Usually the course is nearly fully developed before the professor begins to try to seek out publicly available data for the students to use to defend or attack quantitative propositions. And very often that data turns out to be spotty, shallow, or not directly manipulable with the tools that students have access to (data, for instance, that is locked up in PDF charts).

This is understandably frustrating -- it's difficult to push students to do real analysis when the data is limited.

That's where the concept of building a course "from the data out" comes in.

When you build a course from the data out, you identify the data sources you will use early in the process of designing your quantitative literacy course. Say you want to teach a quantitative literacy course, and you would like it to be on the general topic of poverty and health. When you design from the data out you start by doing an inventory of public data sources pertaining to the subject.

Looking at the data you can ask yourself these sort of questions:

• What sort of activities could students do with the available data?


• Are there opportunities here fro original analysis?


• Is the data rich and varied enough to support multiple viewpoints?


• Will the data work with free visualization tools?


• Are there collaboration or crowdsourcing opportunities?

In other words, start by building rich authentic activities and projects around the data, and then start to work backwards to the larger course structure which will help give meaning and relevance to the activities and projects, and provide the scaffolding necessary to student success, and your job will be a lot easier.

I'm sure everyone will be happy to know that Mark Bauerlein has now migrated to his natural habitat: The Wall Street Journal. And, displaying the sort of intellectual rigor that made him an expert on Gen-Y, he manages to write an entire column on Why Gen-Y Johnny Can't Read Nonverbal Cues without citing a single study showing that Gen-Y has trouble with non-verbal cues. Indeed, he pulls the oldest freshman composition trick in the book towards the end of the piece, asserting that the fact we don't know how extensive the "problem" is (or whether it exists) only proves that the problem is more extensive than we imagine:

Nobody knows the extent of the problem. It is too early to assess the effect of digital habits, and the tools change so quickly that research can't keep up with them. By the time investigators design a study, secure funding, collect results and publish them, the technology has changed and the study is outdated.

I wouldn't let even a student get away with mush like that.

As for the rest of the piece, I don't even know where to start. Bauerlein's view of language here is enormously confused. He mentions the work of Edward T. Hall as if it was buried somewhere and linguistics had forgotten about nonverbal cues. In fact, there is an incredibly vibrant literature around the subject. There has been for decades.

Fine. Jumping over a half century of research is a common tactic for those who wish to inflate their importance. But Bauerlein's lack of knowledge of the area (and in fact his lack of any coherent theory of communication) shows in his argument. He takes work talking about cross-cultural differences in nonverbal communication:

This is why, Hall explained, U.S. diplomats could enter a foreign country fully competent in the native language and yet still flounder from one miscommunication to another, having failed to decode the manners, gestures and subtle protocols that go along with words. And how could they, for the "silent language" is acquired through acculturation, not schooling. Not only is it unspoken; it is largely unconscious. The meanings that pass through it remain implicit, more felt than understood.

And then seems to use that to argue that Gen-Y lack non-verbal cues:

We live in a culture where young people—outfitted with iPhone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another—are ever less likely to develop the "silent fluency" that comes from face-to-face interaction. It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish. The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to "read" the behavior of others, they are all thumbs.

You see that, right? He's not even making the dubious (and likely erroneous) claim that Gen-Y is developing a substantially different set of non-verbal cues. Incredibly, he's making the argument that they are not acquiring non-verbal cues at all! In the history of human evolution they will be the first generation with no understanding of non-verbal cues. They will not be fluent in their native language! What a tragedy!

Of course it's absolute nonsense.

If you actually follow this out to its absurd conclusion, this means that were the Gen-Y set to go out to the bar and talk to one another, I could read a typed transcript of the conversation, and it would essentially be information complete. There would be no phrases like "Sorry for going on about this" without someone explicitly saying, "I am losing interest in this story." No one would volunteer to buy the next round after a pause without someone explicitly saying "I've bought the last two rounds, and I'd like you to buy this one." No one would ever say to two obviously enamored people "Well, I guess I'll leave you two alone" -- not without someone verbally evincing love or infatuation first.

In fact, I'm not quite sure how Gen-Y students, under Bauerlein's analysis, would be able to hook up at all. One can imagine the torment (Is she showing interest or not? Does moving closer mean infatuation or rage? Oh, damn, how I wish I'd had more practice with face to face interaction!).

Movies would also be a puzzle to this generation ("Wait -- the character isn't saying anything, the camera is just zoomed in on their face! Dammit, speak! How will I know what you are thinking!"). If Bauerlein is right, we may have to introduce closed-captions for Gen-Y to help them know if Bruce Willis really *is* happy for his wife or not (Caption for Gen-Yers: [facial expression indicates he does not mean what he is saying here.]).

Of course students have non-verbal language, and of course they are fluent in it. Is it comprised of exactly the same set of cues as adults? Is it different from adults, but within historical norms for generational change? Or is the "generation" the wrong division here, and do nonverbal dialects tend to divide more on regional, economic, and ethnic lines? And should the things that Bauerlein is obsessed with -- taking a text message in a conversation, for example -- really be seen as central to "learned" non-verbal communication anyway? Or do they more properly fit into a framework like Relevance Theory which allows that cues can be interpreted according to general principles and assumptions, and does not necessarily require that they be transmitted as explicit vocabularies?

Answering those questions would require looking at the wealth of research out there on such things. I haven't done that, so, unlike Bauerlein, I'll stop here.

Former Spellings Commission guy Robert Zemsky talks with University Business this month on the problem with online learning:

One of the big problems is that we’ve gotten the idea that “it’s about the web.” It’s funny—there’s a whole lot of interesting technology on learning, but it’s not on the web. The really interesting stuff is on discs. The web just doesn’t work. We’ve adopted a distribution system that is like trying to run a race in a sack.

The web is very linear, and learning on the web is equally linear. You do the problem, it gives you the answer, and if you get the wrong answer it circles back, and so on. That’s not the way you are going to learn a foreign language, for example. You can use really interesting technology to learn a language. Just don’t do it on the web.

That's right - the future is DVD-ROMs, because learning on the web is too linear.

I knew we were screwed by the Spellings Commission, and I knew they were out of touch. But that statement shocks even me.

From the AFL-CIO's newest report:

The career goals young workers find most important demonstrate a keen desire to move into adulthood—to achieve financial security and, above all, to have the time and resources to support a family. But although they prioritize time with family just as much as older workers, many young workers have to postpone starting families until they are more financially secure. Thirty-one percent worry very or somewhat often about this potential delay.

And:

With the rising cost of education, it’s increasingly difficult for low-income workers to pursue the education that could help them advance. A full 54 percent of these workers worry about paying for education, compared with 24 percent of workers with incomes over $30,000. Even more disquieting, low-income workers are just as likely to live with parents as to live on their own. These results indicate that young people with incomes under $30,000 find even more roadblocks on their path to financial independence and adulthood than do young workers overall.

In fact, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, the greatest decline in employment rates since 2000 has been among those without college diplomas.

The whole report is worth a look. We get in rarefied discussions sometimes about this issues, but access and equity (and the endeavor of public education itself) is so crucial to the lives of so many people. I think that this is where I worry a bit about the "current education does more harm than good" approach. Theoretically yes, but if I had a magic wand that had to choose between instantly instantiating better education or universal access, I would choose universal access in a heartbeat.

Pretty incredible clip. I'm actually a bit speechless.

Thank God the newspapers are keeping everyone honest, right?

Recently, one of our faculty, a leading authority on Autism, shared this amazing video he had found:



This to me is the promise of education writ large: helping kids (and adults!) to find their unique abilities, no matter who they are.

One thing that makes it possible, of course, is that it is free. In a world where SketchUp still costs $500 most of this is unlikely to happen.

So I kind of wanted to hate this project, b/c a) it's a Microsoft Competition, and b) the project is so mired in the bureaucratic context of grade-school that it begins to sound like something out of The Office:



2009 U.S. Innovative Teachers Network: Columbus East High School, Columbus, IN from Carrie Hipsher on Vimeo.

But as I listened to it, what I saw was something different -- a way to introduce some amount of choice in a bureaucratic system that aligns against student choice. A way to build choice into an environment where state standards and testing and the need for far too many documented outcomes pull one in eighty different directions.

I have two daughters in public school right now. Would I love to see a real revolution in education, where we did away completely with the one-size-fits-all curriculum? A thousand times yes. But failing that, would I like them to have the option, even in this strange way, of choosing projects which suit their unique talents better? Absolutely. They'll be well on their way to college before the current idiocy in education is addressed. Whatever helps them in the meantime is welcomed.

I feel like I'm constantly in this spot, hating the reform by increments approach, but painfully aware that the students we have currently need more flexibility right now, if only by degrees.

I still don't know what is right, but I think I have finally decided that these people are my friends, not obstacles in the path to a bigger revolution. We're completely different creatures in some ways, but we can't afford to be enemies.

It's increasingly important to consider how the Good Enough Revolution pertains to education. I'm a fan of educational research, but worry that it focuses too much on marginal differences, in a world that does not value marginal differences in quality anymore.

What does the world care about? The Wired article gets it right -- we want ease of use, accessibility, and continous availability. And education is no different.

One way of looking at it is that the idea of quality has been enlarged, not demeaned. In the manufacturing model, quality was something that pertained to objects, because objects were their own contexts. A dishwasher doesn't need to play well with your clothes dryer or your radio. It can,  for the most part, be evaluated on how well it does its job.

What the MP3 explosion showed us is that people are willing to trade quality as traditionally defined for portability, shareability, and availability. As the Wired article points out, we've seen this again and again with netbooks, Skype, Google Docs,  and YouTube. The question is not "How good is this?", but "How well does this play with the other parts of my life?"

I've heard people mock the quality of University of Phoenix courses and other online offerings  -- and in traditional terms they may be right As an object, I am sure that any course we are offering on campus is better than a UoP course.

But taking a more holistic view of quality this is not as clear. And as we move from the Manufacturing Age to the Network Age that is where the future of quality is headed.

Google Bundles is likely to be a good thing for classroom use, because it's essentially the OPML idea with a catchy name (in fact, it looks like every bundle also creates an OPML file).

I don't want to get into an argument about why things like Google Bundles and Twitter take off while things like OPML languish (one clue: OPML is a crappy, crappy name). If every Bundle produces an OPML file, I think we should postpone the religious war and promote this.

Google Bundles are a great way to turn sense-making and curating from concept to practice. I can see a teacher in a journalism ethics class selecting out the CJR feed, Jay Rosen's blog, and a couple other sources and asking students to scan these for relevant posts. Bundles can also be used to pull together all the blogs created by students in a class, so that an institution with no internally provisioned Web 2.0 system (like Otago Polytechnic, for example) can reduce the administrative load of providing a way for all the students to see each other's work -- Bundles aren't just for curators, but for peer groups as well.

Finally, I can see a group of people (whether students or staff) divvying up all the things they want to read into different bundles -- Wendy and I will take Bundle A, Jenny and Mel will take Bundle B, Russ and Kim will take Bundle C, etc. Stories of interest that each group finds they can bookmark via delicious with a specific tag (which then flows it back into Google Reader). There's less of this divide and conquer around than I'd like to see -- Bundles might add a level of ease to it.

[And yes, the first person that says "You can do all this with OPML" gets flamed.... I know, you can. That's not the point.]

Most people don't understand the mess the Senate has become in terms of its delaying tactics and the use of filibuster by delay. The press doesn't cover it, because they'd rather film people shouting at town halls than tell us why our system is broken.

The game nowadays, especially for Republicans, is not to vote against popular legislation. It's to try to kill bills through endless amendments that delay or ultimately prohibit votes -- and ultimately the use of the threat of filibuster by amendment to extract concessions from the Democrats that poison the chances of the bills passing.

When the Republicans tried this tactic two years ago to try to block the minimum wage increase by proposing amendment after amendment, and it looked like once again the minimum wage increase would not pass, despite the overwhelming victory the Dems had achieved, Ted flipped his lid, in an absolutely beautiful way, and showed why he will be sorely missed. Please take five minutes to watch it, it will inspire you:



Remember this video as you watch the health care debate, and the talk of reconciliation. When the Republicans say that reconciliation is not fair, they are saying that because of one reason only -- it does not allow these sort of tactics. The best tribute to Kennedy at this point would be to push a good bill through via reconciliation, which will kill the game playing and allow our Senators to focus on the issue that was so close to Kennedy's heart -- how do we protect the weak, the underpaid, the people our society has forgotten. How do we of good fortune help those who have not been as lucky?

We can make that the discussion, or we can have another four weeks of pretend revisions and amendments and centrist posturing by people who are in practical terms obstructionists.

I know what Ted would have done.

...and good riddance. From the NY Times:

Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.

“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.

Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.

In fairness, Digital Native Theory isn't dead, because there was never any such thing. There was talk of Digital Natives in feel-good sessions across academia, but not, at least as far as I can remember, any serious exploration of the concept as something falsifiable. It would be as if I decided that British English was a completely different language than English, and then stood around for a couple hours swapping stories about how those crazy Brits call trucks "lorries" and elevators "lifts". It wouldn't pass muster in linguistics and we were insane to let it spread in education.

Now maybe, finally, we can get to the real questions: How do we teach our students to collaborate, cooperate, and communicate in ways fit for the agile projects the future requires? How do we give them methods to make sense of a world where filters are no longer at the point of production?

These teens that we are teaching are the same ones my wife watched go to McDonald's on their high school Italy tour. Taken as a group, they aren't the most adventurous lot, and that hasn't changed because they have cell phones. It used to be the job of colleges to open up their mind to the possibilities they didn't know about, to expose them to the opportunities they weren't exploring, to get them to rethink how they approach problems. Now that this digital native nonsense is finally dying, maybe we can start addressing that.

"Kay's dad has got recessive gene that she may have, she doesn't know if she has it has it, so she is genotyping that gene in herself in her closet, and she's going to figure out if she has it...."

If you are thinking of doing some authentic instruction in biology, you MUST, repeat, MUST watch this video on DIYbio and the biohacking movement.

The DIYbio Community - Presented at Ignite Boston 5 (2009) from mac cowell on Vimeo.

I cannot imagine a more compelling way to engage the future biologists of the world than to show them this video and to encourage them to come up with their own projects (or to join up with someone else's project). The "standard" approach to biology (first, memorize some stuff, then do some lab work that has been done one million times before and check your results against the key, then maybe by senior year do some original research) weeds out many of the exact people biology needs -- hackers, creative types, problem solvers. While it might seem that biohacking and institutional education are incompatible, this is by design, not definition. And we can change the design. After all, that's what hackers do, right?

On a related note I came across this while putting together the instructional design sourcebook. I'll talk about the sourcebook more later -- it's a project based on my belief that teachers need a browsable resource that ties networked learning pedagogies to specific classes, organized by discipline (I know for us that might sound ridiculous, but thee is some discipline tunnel vision holding us back, we can either deny it or address it, and denying it is not working). I am desperately in need of some innovative instructors in the sciences who can provide me with syllabi of innovative courses, or descriptions of unique net-enabled, student centered processes or techniques they are using. Please mail me at mcaulfield at keene dot edu. I'd be including them in this beast I am assembling for our faculty.

Downes makes the point repeatedly that we talk too much about collaboration (which is something new technology allows us to do better) and not enough about cooperation (which is something the network allows us to do for the first time on this unprecedented scale).

The neat thing about cooperation is that if you can structure a solution to a problem as a cooperative one rather than a collaborative one you can solve very big problems in a very short amount of time -- because at it's best, cooperation requires simply that you do what you normally do, but in a way that allows cooperation. Which is why I will be watching this project closely:

If you’re a lawyer, and you use the crazy-outmoded PACER system to access federal court documents, check out the new RECAP system launched today by Tim Lee, Harlan Yu, and Steve Schultze with the help of Princeton’s CITP. If you use PACER, you know it’s difficult to use. It also charges citizens to access what are nominally public documents, something that makes little sense online. This combination has resulted in a multi-million dollar surplus for the judiciary’s IT department, and lousy access to data that would be useful not just to lawyers and litigants, but to bloggers, librarians, reporters, and scholars.

Schultze, Lee, and Yu’s scheme to free the documents on PACER is an ingenious one. They have built a Firefox plugin called RECAP that attorneys and other regular users of PACER can install on their computers. When a user downloads a document from PACER, the plugin sends a copy to RECAP’s server, where it is made publicly available. If enough PACER users install RECAP, it will only be a matter of time before the entire database is liberated. Why would lawyers participate? When they search for a document, the plugin first checks the RECAP database to see if a copy has already been liberated. If it has, then the lawyer can retreive it without paying PACER. Like I said: ingenious.

I think we have to teach our students to think about problems in this way. It's a shame that the one area where students have solved problems in this cooperative way, through music file-sharing, has been criminalized. But that just makes it more urgent that we introduce kids to the legitimacy of the cooperative approach.

We are still just at the beginning of understanding what can be accomplished in cooperative frameworks. So one question for any instructional designer has to be whether we not only encourage students to develop collaborative frameworks, but cooperative ones as well. That starts with defaulting to open solutions, providing RSS, using open licensing, etc., but as the above example shows one can go even further in designing such approaches. And the potential impact graduating hundreds of thousands of students who understand how to think in this way -- well, it's huge. It's the sort of thinking that could likely solve global warming, famine, income disparities -- you name it.

(Side note: Is it just me, or is it enraging to think that the actions of the record companies are likely reducing our ability to solve problems that are core to the continued existence of our species -- just because Billy Ray Cyrus needs his royalties for Achy Breaky Heart?)

If anyone has any good examples of encouraging cooperative thinking in a project-based class (beyond a general predilection to openness), please let me know, either through the comments or email to caulfield dot mike at gmail.

We scoff at the ancestor worship of other cultures, and consider divine right and kingship and all that stuff to be anti-American. So can someone explain to me why we will endure any kind of nuttery if it is tied to something one of our Founding Fathers once said?

Case in point -- at the town hall Obama will be at in New Hampshire today, there is a right-wing freak with a pistol strapped by his side and a big sign that references the Jefferson quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." This quote he is so endeared with is not a public statement of Jefferson -- it's a comment on the Shay's Rebellion made in a letter to a friend in 1787. From a pre-Reign of Terror Jefferson.

In other words, take away the Founding Fathers as Gods myth, and it's just something some guy said to a friend, something that he may not have even believed a couple years later.

And once you realize that, guess what? It turns out you're guy bringing a pistol to an Obama event with a sign that seems to be calling for Obama's assassination. That doesn't make you a hero, and at best it makes you a dick. At best.

Just a short follow up to the last post -- when we talk about efficiency or productivity in education, I know that eyes roll and someone usually starts composing a rant about how kids aren't items on an assembly line and the point isn't to push out twice as many in half the time.

This misses the point that productivity is value neutral. It's an increase in capacity that can be used to do more things at the same level of quality, or do the same amount of things at a higher level of quality.

Given the current funding constraints on higher education, you can't be for quality education and against looking for ways to increase productivity, at least productivity in the sense of finding more efficient uses of limited time and physical resources. If I read the cost disease theory right (and I may not be), without productivity gains a product is either going to have to cost more over time or be produced at a lesser level of quality. And the time where we could continuously charge more for our product is about to end.

I couldn't get at the Chronicle article "College Administrations Are Too Bloated? Compared With What?" from home (no login here),  so I read the paper it looks like it may have been based on instead.

It's well worth a look -- it articulates what I think many of us knew but could not express -- that college is expensive because it is structured as a service industry, and the rise of college prices relative to the rest of the economy is actually in line with how all other labor-intensive service industries have tracked. And it introduces an explanation which is apparently well-known to economists, but is new to me -- cost disease theory. In cost disease theory, gains in productivity in industries benefiting from technological and process enhancements adversely affect costs in service industries, where there are no such gains -- both types of industries compete for the same pool of workers, and the rising wages in the industries experiencing productivity gains force wages in the service industries upward -- even in the absence of productivity gains.

There's really only two solutions to this, according to the authors. The first is not really a solution per se -- it is to see the situation rather like a haircut or a musical concert -- you cannot significantly increase productivity associated with the delivery of the service. You're just going to have to lump the costs. The second is to reconfigure the process of delivery and achieve productivity gains.

But the key point here is that if you do not achieve productivity gains, costs will not remain stable -- they will rise.

[One interesting note -- I probably could have written this in half the time if I could have blockquoted some text from the paper to explain the above concept. But the PDF is locked against copy and paste. If you want to explain why higher education is doomed when it comes to productivity, closed processes like that might make a good start.]

Please discard from your pitch:

• Tom Friedman world-is-flatism


• Kurzweilian Singularities


• Prenskyan Digital Nativism


• Dot-commer "Marginal cost of zero" talk

And please replace it all with this simple observation by Tom Hoffman:

I don't understand why "computers can make it easier to do the difficult, sophisticated things we've been trying to do for years" is a less appealing, or at least less used, argument than "New! Disruptive! Etc."

(Feel free to suggest additions to the discard list).

There's a great post over at Zeroday -- a project to have a mob of us ask, politely, via twitter, what the artists cited in the Sony v. Tenebaum decision think of it. In other words, there are 17 bands or so Joel Tenenbaum was cited for downloading. The plan is to get a comment from each band on what they think of the $675,000 fine.

As part of that activity he's posted a spreadsheet of the bands Joel was sued over. And excuse me if I don't get a whiff of must off of it:

Nine Inch Nails
Radiohead
Aerosmith
Nirvana
Sublime
NOFX
Green Day
Janis Joplin
The Rolling Stones
Pink Floyd
Simon & Garfunkel
Elliot Smith
Buckethead
The Kinks
Beatles
Unity Reggae Band
Creedence Clearwater Revival

Put aside the irony that Reznor released his last work for free, and the most idiotic thing about the list is how old the works must have been (assuming Joel wasn't listening to that hot new CCR record).

Most of this music has to be thirty to forty years old. A lot of the people that made it are dead. (How long do the record companies feel they are entitled to make a living off of Janis Joplin & Elliot Smith?)

In other words, the list tells us the same thing that crappy radio does -- the plan of the record companies has always been to make a living off the short-tail back catalog, first by forcing everyone to rebuy old albums on CD, and then hopefully by selling more of it to a whole new generation.