Three articles recommended by an administrator in a public school system.

Jobs: haves and have-nots

Tim Mullaney, USA TODAY

11:25AM EDT September 16. 2012 - As USA TODAY celebrates it 30th anniversary, we interviewed some of the USA's greatest visionaries to talk about the world of tomorrow: How we'll live, learn and travel, what we'll do and who we'll be. MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Marc Andreessen made his first fortune writing code. That was long before the wunderkind co-author of the Netscape browser morphed into the 41-year-old founder of Andreessen Horowitz, the fastest-growing venture-capital firm in Silicon Valley. Deep in his thinking about the future of work and jobs, there are still hints of the programmer. Programmers write in binary math, all zeroes and ones. Andreessen says a 20-year-old today will find 2042's job market as binary as, well, code itself. "The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories," Andreessen says. "People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do." VIDEO:The next 30 years Decades of political issues will follow that split, he says. The division between the masters of machines and those who take orders from them will feed even greater income inequality in the years ahead, he says. Success in the 2042 economy also requires big changes in education -- both in how society provides schooling and in how young people should consume it. "It's extremely positive for the people who have the ability to project what they do globally," Andreessen says. "If you tell the computer what to do -- product development, marketing -- the last 30 years have been phenomenal. In the next 30 years, it gets more extreme." Andreessen is in position to know what will create tomorrow's jobs. A 2011 study by IHS Global Insight says 11% of U.S. private-sector jobs are at companies once financed by venture firms. Andreessen has been near VC's epicenter since college: First Netscape, then co-founding cloudcomputing pioneer Opsware, which he and partner Ben Horowitz sold to Hewlett-Packard. His firm was an early Facebook investor, too. In decades to come, insights like these will guide how VCs go about creating jobs, and how people should pursue work, Andreessen says. His vision mixes the hopeful and the hard-to-hear: A vanishing middle class. Globalization already has helped push down wages for people with routine skills, even as incomes at the top have skyrocketed. Expect this gap to widen, Andreessen says. People with unusual gifts will find it ever easier to project them worldwide and get wildly compensated. People who take orders from computers won't. "There's no such thing as median income; there's a curve, and it really matters what side of the curve you're on," he says. "There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing." Liberal arts? Out of luck. It's fashionable to talk about how schools have to be better for U.S. workers to compete. Andreessen would rather talk about how today's 20-year-olds should use the schools they have. In two words, "study STEM" (science, technology, engineering and math), he says. In liberal arts, only

the best of the best will make top dollar a person will have to be good enough that his book is a best seller or her song goes global, or he'll have to be smart enough to apply philosophy to corporate strategic thinking. For people who want to be well-paid employees but not start businesses, he says superior creative talent or exceptional brain power will be essential. "We're in a bubble for people with a non-Ivy League, non-technical education," says Andreessen, who studied computer science at the University of Illinois. "If you have a degree in English from a tier B state school, you're not prepared." An American future? People who lament income inequality often link it to jobs moving offshore, and they fear that skilled office jobs and new company formation will follow routine work in migrating to countries such as China and Brazil. Not so fast, Andreessen says. For budding entrepreneurs, the U.S. looks like the king of the hill for years to come. This nation has all the traits new companies need to succeed: top universities; a consistent rule of law; an entrepreneurial culture; a huge market; and a government that is broadly pro-business, regardless of which party is in power, he says. "China is very entrepreneurial but has no rule of law," Andreessen says. "Europe has rule of law but isn't entrepreneurial. Combine rule of law, entrepreneurialism and a generally pro-business policy, and you have Apple." Who's your real boss? You. Since not everyone is cut out to be an engineer, let alone an inventor, the mere mortals in the workforce will have to get creative to succeed, Andreessen says. "Big companies are not going to take care of you," he says, which means most people spend parts of their careers at big companies and some at small businesses. "You can't let history happen to you." http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2012/09/16/job-market-computers/1566661/ =======

Blur of change

Jon Swartz

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/2012/09/15/technology-communication-future/1567307/ 8:48AM EDT September 15. 2012 - As USA TODAY celebrates it 30th anniversary, we interviewed some of the USA's greatest visionaries about the world of tomorrow: How we'll live, learn and travel, what we'll do and who we'll be. SAN FRANCISCO -- In creating Twitter, Jack Dorsey changed the world of communication. In founding the company Square, he is redefining mobile payments. Yet one of Silicon Valley's brightest stars says he believes the future is all about the past. "Consider history," Dorsey says in his soft-spoken, low-key manner. "Every technology was invented for one purpose: Enable humans to take actions faster." Motioning toward a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, and invoking the power of plumbing in the world-domination plans of the Roman Empire, the 35-year-old Dorsey says water-supply systems played a pivotal role in letting Julius Caesar and others expand their empire. Prognosticating the future of technology is nearly impossible in five years, let alone 30, he says.

VIDEO:The next 30 years Just 30 years ago, the Internet, PCs and smartphones were mere glimmers in the eyes of scientists. Cable TV was in its infancy. Music and movies were on albums, cassettes and videotape. Few could foresee how comprehensively the Web, smartphones and tablets would change the world. Looking forward, personal technology will infuse nearly every facet of American consumer life: retail, transportation, education -- you name it, Dorsey and others say. The impact will be so far and wide that it might be taken for granted as daily life. The full force of tech will be all around us in the form of a growing cashless society, where most transactions are done with smartphones; same-day delivery of goods ordered online or at bricks-andmortar retailers; the elimination of PCs in favor of smartphones and tablets; robots in all forms; the proliferation of data through cloud computing; and more. Change will be rapid and seamless. Ubiquitous technology will continue to blend into the American consciousness, to the point where it will be rarely noticed- -unless it doesn't work. "I bet you only notice (an electrical outlet) when I point it out or it doesn't work," Dorsey says. About the only thing that can blunt tech's influence is distrust in its mind-shifting change. That is anathema to Old World, empire-building thinking -- particularly in industries where change in infrastructure and the use of tech is pricey, Dorsey says. Attitude, not technology, colors people's fears about too much data floating in the clouds and coursing over the Internet. "I'm a big believer in serendipity," he says. "The need to know bubbles up." "Kids become masters of technology and learn from it," Dorsey says. Adopters of Twitter have turned it into a tool to "take the pulse of the planet." From where will future tech spring forth? Dorsey says the San Francisco Bay Area will still be tech's mecca: "California has always had the Go West, can-do spirit of the Gold Rush, Hollywood and Silicon Valley." ==========

Learning without grades

Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/09/14/education-learning-grades/1566689/ 7:18PM EDT September 14. 2012 - As USA TODAY celebrates it 30th anniversary, we interviewed some of the USA's greatest visionaries to talk about the world of tomorrow: How we'll live, learn and travel, what we'll do and who we'll be. PALO ALTO, Calif. -- About a mile from the main quad at Stanford University, one of the nation's bastions of exclusive and expensive higher education, a street-level office building across the street from an Olive Garden houses the makings of an up-and-coming contender. In this version of education, learning will be free and available to anyone who wants it while operating like a whimsical playground: No one is late for class, failure is not an option, and a lesson looks something like Angry Birds, the physics-based puzzle game that has been downloaded more than 1 billion times. "You want learning to be as much fun as it is to play a video game," says Sebastian Thrun, a Google vice president and Stanford research professor best known for his role in building Google's driverless car. VIDEO:The next 30 years

Thrun, 45, is seated in a cramped, soundproof studio at Udacity, the education company he founded in January after teaching a free online artificial-intelligence course that drew more than 160,000 students. So profound was the experience that he announced he could no longer teach in a traditional Stanford classroom. "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill," he famously told an audience in January at the DigitalLife-Design conference in Munich. "And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I've taken the red pill, and I've seen Wonderland." Now, Udacity is one of a rush of online start-ups he oversees. The vision across these ventures: Develop a catalog of free online courses taught by star professors from around the world. In this windowless room, producers create cool special effects, and video cameras capture tight shots of an instructor's hand as it writes diagrams and figures on a white board. In the next room, a dozen or so of Thrun's staff of twentysomethings are at their computers designing and assembling courses such as the just-launched Making Math Matter, in which students rescue the Apollo 13 astronauts, stop the spread of epidemics and fight forest fires. Thrun's Udacity is neither the first nor last high-tech experiment seeking to revolutionize education, an industry that many critics agree is stuck in the last century and in dire need of an overhaul. His friend Sal Kahn has inspired a growing number of schools across the country to "flip" their classrooms, having students study videos at night and complete homework in classrooms by day. Charter schools in Chicago and New York City have created a curriculum built around game-playing. Across Silicon Valley, start-ups such as New Charter University and UniversityNow aim to make an online college education as affordable as a cellphone bill. How, exactly, will education look in 30 years? "I wish I had a crystal ball," Thrun says. But technology is enabling educators -- not to mention Silicon Valley entrepreneurs -- to personalize education and scale it up: Classes will involve a sequence of increasingly more challenging exercises and quizzes aimed at helping students master a particular concept or skill. A single class might enroll tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of students, but "there will be no more one-size-fits-all," Thrun says. "Education will respond to you." Grades -- what Thrun calls "the failure of the education system" -- won't exist. Rather, students will take as much or as little time as they need to demonstrate mastery of a particular skill or concept. Instruction will be free, but related services might involve a fee. Among those are certification and exams, which will be conducted separately from the learning process. Thrun says he's not planning a funeral for brick-and-mortar schools and colleges. Case in point: As film-making grew more sophisticated, did it spell the end of live theater? No, Thrun notes. Nor does film try to -- and this is key -- replicate live theater. Rather, movies became a different form of entertainment, one that could accommodate massively large audiences at relatively low prices. Just as film enabled people all over the world to access movies, the Internet will democratize education, which today reaches a tiny fraction of those who yearn to learn, Thrun says. His vision of the future, he says, offers "a message of hope, of aspiration -- not of destruction." These three articles were compiled in October 2012. Perhaps by October 2020 these items can influence policy in schools. See more ideas at Transform-Education.com and TransformTeaching.org