The Complete Parent’s List of Education Hashtags on Twitter — from onlinecollege.org
Excerpt:

As a parent, it’s important to be a part of the discussion about education. Informed parents can make a difference, not just in the lives of their own children, but in schools, policy, and more. You can stay in the loop and contribute your opinion by taking part in these chats and using these hashtags. Check out our list, and you’ll find more than 30 of the most relevant and useful hashtags for parents interested in education today.

10 College Business Incubators We’re Most Excited About — from bestcollegesonline.com
Excerpt:

College campuses are ripe with innovation, as students grow through education and experimentation in school. To help foster this innovation, many colleges and universities have opened business incubators, helping students and others in their community to help make their innovative dreams a reality. Whether they’re offering tricked-out labs or incredible funding opportunities, these incubators offer a great opportunity for students who are smart (and lucky!) enough to participate. Follow along as we explore 10 of the most exciting college business incubators around today, and be sure to share your own favorites in the comments.

The 10 Biggest Breakthroughs in the Science of Learning — from Online PHD Programs
Excerpt:

When it comes to human organs, none is quite so mysterious as the brain. For centuries, humans have had numerous misconceptions and misunderstandings about how the organ works, grows, and shapes our ability to learn and develop. While we still have a long way to go before we truly unravel all the mysteries the brain has to offer, scientists have been making some major breakthroughs that have gone a long way in explaining both how the brain functions and how we use it to organize, recall, and acquire new information. Here, we list just a few of the biggest and most impactful of these breakthroughs that have contributed to our understanding of the science of learning.

10 BYOD Classroom Experiments (and What We’ve Learned From Them So Far)” — from onlineuniversities.com
Excerpt:

With budgets tight, many schools are hoping to bring technology into the classroom without having to shell out for a device for each student. A solution for many has been to make classes BYOD (short for “bring your own device”), which allows students to bring laptops, tablets, and smartphones from home and to use them in the classroom and share them with other students. It’s a promising idea, especially for schools that don’t have big tech budgets, but it has met with some criticism from those who don’t think that it’s a viable long-term or truly budget-conscious decision. Whether that’s the case is yet to be seen, but these stories of schools that have tried out BYOD programs seem to be largely positive, allowing educators and students to embrace technology in learning regardless of the limited resources they may have at hand.

The 25 Best Resources For Finding Nonprofit Jobs — from bachelorsdegreeonline.com
Excerpt:

Finding a job that helps you make ends meet is great, but finding one that helps you make a real, lasting difference in the world can be even better, especially for those who have always dreamed of a career in the nonprofit or social services sectors. Luckily, there are a number of incredibly useful sites on the web that can help you network, share your resume, and find nonprofit job openings in your area. We’ve shared 25 of them here so you can get your nonprofit job search started on the right foot and hopefully find a job that lets you make a positive impact on the world and your community.

8 Career Mistakes New Grads Make (and How to Avoid Them) — from onlinedegreeprograms.com
Excerpt:

You’ve crossed the stage, thrown your hat in the air, and entered the real world. You’re probably eager to get your career started and are already thinking ahead 10 years when you’ll be running a company, saving the world, and making wads of cash. But slow down there, new grad. Your career starts with baby steps and avoiding some of the common mistakes young workers make. If you follow these tips and stay away from some pitfalls, you’ll be in that corner office in no time.

15 Libraries Taking Summer Reading to the Next Level — from the Online Education Database
Excerpt:

While not an exhaustive list (there are a lot of amazing libraries out there), here we highlight some of the libraries we think are going above and beyond in their summer reading initiatives, offering programs and activities that help readers spend their summers reading, learning, sharing, and growing.

8 Predictions for the Future of Academic Publishing — from the Online Education Database
Excerpt:

University presses and academic journals may perpetuate the world’s most groundbreaking research, but they tend towards the heavily conservative when it comes to changing anything and everything about their organization. But the inevitable influx of digital and new media ventures has already started trickling into the tightknit institutions, and many scholars are already calling for a dismantling of the old — and often unwieldy and inaccessible! Some of the latest experiments will stick, while others will go all Crystal Pepsi on humanity. Until time decides to tell, the following represent a few things academics are saying about where their research might be headed.

Top 25 Education Blogs for Proactive Parents — from onlinecollege.org
Excerpt:

As a parent, it’s your job to look ahead and plan for the future, whether that means packing lunch or creating a roadmap for college. Perhaps one of the most important things parents can look ahead to is education. School reform, college, and getting involved as a parent are all important topics for parents to stay on top of, and these blogs all offer great ways to do so. We’ve discovered 25 of the best education blogs for proactive parents, and we encourage you to check them out.


The 10 best nonprofits to work for  — from bachelorsdegreeonline.com

Addendum on 8/8/12; also see:

The Avatar Economy– from Technology Review by Matt Beane
Are remote workers the brains inside tomorrow’s robots?

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In warehouses, Kiva’s robots do the heavy lifting – from Technology Review by Verne Kopytoff
Fast pace, low margins have online retailers looking to automation to keep up.

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This Week In Bots: Will robots cause even more human unemployment? — from FastCompany.com byKit Eaton

 

The expanding landscape of tech support opportunities — from parksassociates.com

Excerpt:

The connected home phenomenon – where products and services are linked together to share computing resources and information – is reshaping the competitive landscape among service providers, retailers, and consumer electronics companies.

The lines that defined and separated the different roles for each consumer product have blurred. No longer does a service provider remain the sole provider of communications or entertainment services. A retailer or OEM may have been the primary beneficiary of extended warranty revenues; now, some service providers are offering these plans as part of their premium tech support services. These changes are creating new opportunities to provide tech support services to consumers to help manage/support these devices in the home.

The less glamorous careers: Advice and fact — from by Stephanie Brooks — with special thanks to Kelsey Doyle for bringing this to my attention

Excerpt:

Few children tout that they want to be an accountant or a petroleum engineer when they grow up, even if the expertise required by those jobs make them amongst the highest paying careers. Rather, children have big dreams about becoming actors, artists, or writers with a little bit of fame, animal care workers, and firemen, rescuing babies from blazing houses. Such careers seem glamorous to children, as they are fraught with adventure and romanticism. However, as you get older, you realize that some of your childhood career choices are not as glamorous as they originally seemed. The pay in these career paths often leave something to be desired. It can be difficult to find a legitimate job within the field, with lower demand. Some of the jobs that once seemed heroic only seem dangerous and risky. Adult practicality sets in, steering many college students towards business, marketing, and other fruitful majors with relatively high success rates within the job world.

With the recession, new graduates flounder to find jobs, accepting positions that help them pay their bills rather than fulfill their dreams. However, there are still a brave few that pursue their childhood aspirations. These tough career paths require tremendous personal drive, a touch of luck, and in many cases, the ability to handle failure, excessive stress, and potential pay cuts. The following jobs are just a handful of the most popular career choices strived for by children. Upon further examination, many of them may not be all they’re cracked up to be.

 

From DSC:
Some reflections after reading Tech industry job cuts in first half hit 3-year high — from investors.com by Brian Deagon

Two-three years ago, someone who has spent years working in the Computer Science arena within higher education remarked to me that he was seeing far fewer students pursuing a degree in Computer Science.  You’re kidding me, right?  With all that’s happening in the Internet space, tech-based start-ups, etc…are you serious? No, he wasn’t kidding around.

When I asked him why, he mentioned that many high school counselors/advisors were steering high school students away from such a career path. Why? Because, as the article above points out, it’s too unstable. (No doubt the Dot Com crash added to this sentiment.) IT folks are often susceptible to the ax.

That got me to thinking…at a time when corporations are sitting on a trillion+ dollars, why aren’t we re-training people and/or reinventing ourselves? We lay people off way too quickly…answering only to Wall Street and to its shareholders, but not to the greater good of society at large.  Why do we emphasis STEM so  #@*^ much only to then have students take on debt…only to fire them all too quickly once they finally start earning a living?  Oh…and by the way, don’t expect corporations to help train you much.  They can pick from the 100’s of people who have already been laid off and who had to go out and get the marketable skills on their own dime.

(Even though the Tech industry is far more than programming and establishing/running data centers, I’d wager to say such other types of careers get lumped into CS at times.)

Addendums on 7/16/12:

 

Tagged with:  

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From DSC:
Note the job descriptions further on down the page at shapetheworld.frThese are the types of jobs that may likely be in demand in the near future. Are we ready?

See also:

 

From DSC:
The above video reminds me why I posted this one.

 

Tagged with:  

Apple’s revolutionary move into robotic manufacturing — from seekingalpha.com

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Apple (AAPL) is about to become one of the world’s biggest buyers of industrial robots. The company has announced a 78% increase in its non-retail capital expenditure to $7.1bn. Analysts in Asia and America believe that the size of Apple’s robot purchases could tie up the market for several years, making it difficult for companies such as Samsung (SSNLF.PK), Nokia (NOK) and HTC (HTCXF.PK) to compete.

Up to 700,000 people are employed in China, making products like the iPhone and iPad for Apple. It takes 141 steps to make an iPhone and each iPad will, over the course of the 5 days that it takes to build it, pass through 325 pairs of hands. Although labor only represents about 3% of the cost of building these products for Apple, the wages of Chinese factory workers have been rising at about 15% a year for much of the last decade. Problems managing this workforce have also harmed Apple’s image in a region that has become the most important engine of its growth.

Apple’s move represents an important step in the use of robots in manufacturing. Robots have long been used to build cars, but not so widely used in consumer electronics because these products are more difficult to make.

From DSC:
Some questions that come to my mind:

  • What happens to jobs in this new environment?
  • What needs to happen to people in this new workplace/environment?
  • How do we educate and train students to enter this ever-changing workplace?
  • How can we make STEM-related subjects more approachable and less “weeder” like?

 

 

The 20 best job apps for new grads — from bestcollegesonline.com

 

 

 

 

Kindergarten teacher earns $700,000 by selling lesson plans online — from mashable.com by Zoe Fox

Excerpt:

Teaching isn’t known to be a lucrative profession, but online marketplace Teachers Pay Teachers is changing that for some educators.

Deanna Jump, a kindergarten teacher from Georgia, has made $700,000 selling her lesson plans on Teachers Pay Teachers, an ecommerce startup where teachers offer their lesson plans to fellow educators.

From DSC:
I can just see the dust building in the air now — coming from the trails starting to be paved from a new, electronic version of the Gold Rush!   🙂

 

 

11 best business opportunities by industry — from Inc.com by Darren Dahl
Industries such as residential construction, mobile games, and big data will provide the best business opportunities in 2012.

Excerpt:

Here are 11 industries that the smartest entrepreneurs will be targeting this year:

Top 100 Schools for Animation, Gaming, and Design - May 2012

 

Excerpt:

The animation education industy has never been so competitive, with schools competing for students and students competing for a small number of available industry jobs. The job rate and student employability has dropped to the lowest in years, so a top-notch animation education has never been so critical.

All this has made choosing the right animation school extremely difficult. To help students navigate through the world of animation schools, we’ve put together the Top 100 most highly-regarded and sought after animation schools on the planet. This list of the Top 100 Schools in Animation, Gaming and Design was compiled via a mixture of school reviews, industry-reviewed lists like the Princeton Review, and via a survey of the animation industry professionals and recruiters from companies like Pixar, J.J. Sedelmaier and DreamWorks who were featured in our Interview Series. And without further ado, here are your Top 100 Schools in Animation, Gaming and Design:

 

Virtual career fairs emerging as “next big thing” in recruiting — from HR Web Advisor
Job seeking in the tech age — from Las Vegas Review Journal by Joanna Haugen
MyBrainShark being used for video-based resumes
Jobs few, grads flock to unpaid internships — from The New York Times by Steven Greenhouse
Confronting the worst job market in decades, many college graduates who expected to land paid jobs are turning to unpaid internships to try to get a foot in an employer’s door.
Live and learn, or lose: Five ways to keep from being outdated– from uxmag.com by Cahlan Sharp
The New Networking: Ultimate LinkedIn Guide for 2012 Grads — from onlinecolleges.net

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Addendums:

 

 

 

In Silicon Valley, designers emerge as rock stars — from Reuters.com by Gerry Shih

Excerpt:

The new breed of “user experience” designers – part sketch artist, part programmer, with a dash of behavioral scientist thrown in – are some of the most sought-after employees in technology. Entry-level interactive designers at startups are commanding salaries easily topping $80,000, almost twice the median pay for primarily print designers of about $45,000, according to a recent survey by the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

From DSC:
From my experience with Internet-related work and careers, most people are either gifted in the front end of things (interface design, graphic design, web design, etc.) or in the back end of things (programming, databases, scripting, e-commerce, security, etc.). I have seen individuals who can do both…but it’s rare that someone is deeply versed in both sides of the coin.

What are we doing in higher ed to foster more cross-disciplinary skills/assignments/projects/teams like this?

 

Education 2.0 isn’t coming. It’s here. And the way you’re educated will be changed forever. — from bostinno.com by Dave Balter

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Sometime in late 2010, I sat down with angel investor Josh Abramowitz in NYC.  I asked him to invest in Smarterer, a business whose purpose was to validate people’s digital, social and technical skills.  What I encountered for the next hour wasn’t someone merely evaluating my specific business concept – it was an attack on the entire higher education system.

Josh argued that our higher education system was on the verge of crumbling.  Not because there weren’t marvelous educators or exceptional institutions, but because colleges and universities were charging exorbitant sums that weren’t equal to the return.  Our educators were burying our students with tremendous debt. But increasingly sophisticated learning and credentialing opportunities were emerging online, and they were free or nearly free.  And this disparity would lead to a full-fledged education revolution, he predicted.

What the Universities need to know is that what’s coming for education is something like the shift the music industry failed to see until it was too late.  Things will never be the same again.  Instead of griping about how hard it will be to tap their endowments to pay for education, they should be thinking about how to take advantage of the changes.

To save their universities, here’s the three-pronged ecosystem that every University Leader should start thinking about…

Also see:

smarterer.com -- show what you know

 

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