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Sep 4

Economists: Immigration is great for the U.S.

by Scott McLeod

If you pay attention only to politics, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the current debate about immigration in America is limited to how severely it should be restricted—whether we need only to seal the border or actually change the birthright citizenship clause in the Constitution.

But among economic pundits, the discussion is heading in exactly the opposite direction. Pro-immigration arguments are booming, and reached a zenith this week with the publication of a paper by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, arguing among other things that immigrants, despite popular misconception, do not displace American workers. This has led a number of economic bloggers to make the very rational argument that one of the best things America could do now to fix our sagging economy is to encourage more people to come here and work.

via http://www.slate.com/id/2265974

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Filed under  //  economy   politics   workforce  

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Aug 22

The creativity of the digital world is vastly different from the analog environment

by Scott McLeod

The creativity of the digital world is vastly different from the analog environment. There, creative is typically a static commercial art piece (or a "portfolio" of these). Creativity represented by great copy, an idea that makes a twist on a popular culture or "captures the zeitgeist," or as a piece-of-art logo and print ad, may indeed belong to the same era as those media that defined it.

In the digital world, that approach doesn't cut it. The best creative is the creation of relationships, connections and interactions. It connects tools with behaviors, locations, and objects. It creates networks or systems. To be creative there, you need to be strategic: you need to figure out who connects to whom, when and why and to what result. Simply, you need to plan for a chain reaction. These networks then give way to a collective creativity that becomes visible to all to use it, build upon it, change it, and add to it.

via http://adage.com/digitalnext/post?article_id=145448

Ooohh... I like this!

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Filed under  //  learning   society   teaching   technology   workforce  

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Mar 19

Intel hires the best engineers, regardless of their location

by Scott McLeod
As a global employer, I have the luxury of hiring the best engineers anywhere on earth. If I can’t get them out of M.I.T., I’ll get them out of Tsing Hua” — Beijing’s M.I.T.
Paul Otellini, Intel via http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/opinion/03friedman.html

Found via http://suptherz4generals.blogspot.com/2010/03/us-competitiveness.html

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Filed under  //  talent   workforce  

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Jan 20

Do our schools today teach the ability to rethink one’s assumptions and try again?

by Scott McLeod
[W]e have not begun to rethink our core institutions nor the core standards by which measure the success of those institutions for a new century.  Our emphasis on specialization, on rote memorization, on multiple choice answers to a prescribed curriculum, and even on individual achievement are all products of the late nineteenth century Industrial Age when it was imperative to train an unskilled workforce for the factories.  Whether immigrants coming to the U.S. from many different countries or farmers moving into the cities for work, many of the institutions of what were called “graded schools” were designed to teach the regularity of factory life to those who might do the chore at hand, when the sun was up, on a schedule dictated by what needed to be done.   As many have noted, there is a reason that the school bell became the symbol of public education.  We’ve had over a century to hone the institutions and the forms of assessments that educate children for the workplace of the twentieth century.

What are we doing, on a national level, to educate our kids for a new digital age?  In a world where any knowledge is at your finger tips, is multiple choice really the way to be teaching kids about how to search and how to evaluate what you find?  Is extreme field specialization, so crucial for a segregated and hierarchical workforce, the right way to train kids for a future that might include three to seven career changes? 

Futurist Alvin Toffler has said that, in addition to reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic, the most important “'literacy' for the twenty-first century is the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn.”  Do our schools today teach that ability to rethink one’s assumptions and try again?

via http://dmlcentral.net/blog/cathy-davidson/educating-future-not-past

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Filed under  //  economy   education   workforce  

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Dec 22

We're not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing

by Scott McLeod

Dr. Halamka is the chief information officer at the Harvard Medical School, a practicing emergency-ward physician and an adviser to the Obama administration on electronic health records.

Hybrid careers like Dr. Halamka’s that combine computing with other fields will increasingly be the new American jobs of the future, labor experts say. In other words, the nation’s economy is going to need more cool nerds. But not enough young people are embracing computing — often because they are leery of being branded nerds.

Educators and technologists say two things need to change: the image of computing work, and computer science education in high schools. Teacher groups, professional organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery and the National Science Foundation are pushing for these changes, but so are major technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Intel. One step in their campaign came the week of Dec. 7, National Computer Science Education Week, which was celebrated with events in schools and online.

Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, said Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation. The Advanced Placement curriculum, she added, concentrates narrowly on programming. “We’re not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing,” Ms. Cuny said.

via http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/technology/21nerds.html

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Filed under  //  economy   jobs   technology   workforce  

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Oct 21

Beware the reverse brain drain to India and China

by Scott McLeod

For Silicon Valley, and for the U.S., this is the wrong kind of change. To some degree, these responses reflected the moribund U.S. economy and the rough job prospects facing students. With U.S. unemployment at 10%, who cares if we lose the next generation of geeks? There won’t be jobs for them for years, anyway, until the U.S. job market recovers. And sure, I know the xenophobes are going to cheer my findings. They believe that foreign workers take American jobs away.

But a growing body of evidence indicates that skilled foreign immigrants create jobs for Americans and boost our national competitiveness. More than 52% of Silicon Valley’s startups during the recent tech boom were started by foreign-born entrepreneurs. Foreign-national researchers have contributed to more than 25% of our global patents, developed some of our break-through technologies, and they helped make Silicon Valley the world’s leading tech center. Foreign-born workers comprise almost a quarter of all the U.S. science and engineering workforce and 47% of science and engineering workers who have PhDs. It is very possible that some of the smart Indians who sat in the room with me holding their hand up on Columbus Day will start the next Google or Apple. Many of them will build companies which employ thousands. But the jobs will be in Hyderbad or Pune, not Silicon Valley.

via techcrunch.com

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Filed under  //  China   global   immigration   India   labor   workforce  

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