| Featured In This Issue |
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| Events Calendar |
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| News Briefs |
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| A new study
from the Center for Work-Life Policy finds that women in science, engineering
and technology (SET) jobs are experiencing discriminative, unsupportive and at
times hostile attitudes. Women in SET careers often drop out of the field in order
to pursue "softer" careers. The full study will be published in the Harvard Business
Review in June, as reported by the New York Times.
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| Legislators in Massachusetts filed a bill that would spend more
than $100 million over five years on green jobs and businesses, including $10
million on jobs training. Similar bills have already passed in Connecticut and California.
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Educators at Britain's Manchester University are concerned that increasing the
number of lower class students in higher education will lower education standards and dilute teaching ability.
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| Japan, now the world's second-largest economy, will lose 70
percent of its workforce by 2050 and economic growth will slow to zero, according
to a report this year by the nonprofit Japan Center for Economic Research. Population
shrinkage began three years ago and is gathering pace. Children currently comprise
13.5 percent of the population. By comparison, the U.S. population has about 20 percent children.
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| Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa are all becoming
increasingly aggressive in their push to compete with India in outsourcing, as
well as with other parts of the world. African countries have a time-zone advantage with Europe, experts note.
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| Stat of the Week |
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The National
Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE)
2008
Graduating Student Survey finds that security ranks high when it comes
to a potential job or employer. The study finds today's grads more conservative
about jobs and employers than those polled in a similar survey conducted in 1982. | |
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| Featured Website |
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Economic Policy Institute
http://www.epi.org
A multifaceted look at the subject of growing middle class prosperity | |
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Harris N. Miller, President, CCA
Bob Cohen, Editor
Tinabeth Burton,
Managing Ed.
Luke Thomas, Contributing Ed. | |
| Disruptive Innovation: Traditional Education
Provides Targets of Opportunity |
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Can disruption in
the classroom be a good thing? Perhaps. Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn have
zeroed in the impact of computers in education in a new book, Disrupting Class:
How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Take the K-12
crowd. Despite all the push to get technology into the classroom, the authors
maintain that computers have been a bit of a dud. Rather than transform how students
learn, information technology has merely paved the educational cow path.
"If
Rip Van Winkle fell asleep 100 years ago and woke up today and walked into a classroom,
he would recognize the classroom...it would not look too different," says Horn.
Horn, a Harvard MBA and executive director, education, of
Innosight
Institute, says even with computers in place, classroom interactions don't
look much different in terms of processes. Teachers, not computers, deliver the actual learning.
"Computers are used as a tool to advance processes that were already in place," Horn says.
In effect, computers are ineffective where students are but could be
effective where students are not.
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| Healthy Demand for Healthcare IT Workers |
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Labor analysts for over a decade have found that the information technology
industry lacks enough highly trained workers. Ditto the healthcare fields, where
nurses, lab technicians, therapists and many other clinical specialists are all in demand. Enter a
new
survey out of the Oregon Health & Science University which finds that the
U.S. healthcare system will require an additional 40,000 health IT professionals
– or almost 40 percent more than U.S. hospitals now are estimated to employ. Indicators
suggest that Health IT will be a growing profession for the next decade.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services touts adopting Health IT. The Department claims broad use will:
- Improve health care quality;
- Prevent medical errors;
- Reduce health care costs;
- Increase administrative efficiencies;
- Decrease paperwork; and
- Expand access to affordable care. (source:
http://www.hhs.gov/healthit/)
"Despite
calls for wider use of health information technology (HIT) to improve health,
health care, public health, and biomedical research, there are many barriers to
its adoption," write William Hersh, M.D., professor and chair of the Department
of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at OHSU and co-author Adam Wright.
"Although barriers of finance and implementation issues are most commonly discussed,
less attention has been paid to the workforce required to develop, implement,
train users of, and evaluate HIT applications."
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| New IM Language: Right for the Business World? |
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Researchers at Kent State University have found that Instant Messaging technology,
or IM, has spawned its own language among young people. The language, also used
in text messaging and to a lesser extent in e-mail, has standardized features
which vary from standard written English.
"Instant messaging, or IM, is
not just bad grammar or a bunch of mistakes," says Dr. Pamela Takayoshi, Kent
State University associate professor of English. "IM is a separate language form
from formal English and has a common set of language features and standards."
Using IM conversations produced by college students, the group analyzed and
identified that what looked like nonstandard features of written language were,
actually, standardized features within the IM language. The language of instant
messaging was found to be informal, explicit, playful, both abbreviated and elaborated,
and to emphasize meaning over form and social relationships over content.
While young people celebrate this new language, Lindsey Pollack, author of Getting
from College to Career: 90 Things to do before You Join the Real World, and
expert on generation Y, says corporations are very concerned about it.
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