Items of Interest 9/29/10 September 29, 2010
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School Board regulates Homeschool – In Westport Connecticut, the local school board has set rules requiring homeschoolers to create a yearly portfolio and meet with the “director of pupil services” (does that sound like the ‘committee of public safety’ to anyone else? 
) “The call to turn these procedures into policy was made to ensure all students in Westport receive a quality education” LOL!
Homeschooling moves Mainstream – From the today show. According to that we (homeschool students) now account for at least 3 percent of the population (up from the last study I saw which listed us at 2 percent) “data shows there’s been an increase of 74 percent in the past 10 years.” Good news is that, like it or not, we’re here to stay. The bad news is that as we continue to absorb more and more of the school age population we become increasingly secular and average. Hopefully we (the Christian homeschool movement) will be a light to such people, and perhaps we can reform them instead of them dragging the movement to a new low. Time will tell. ““It’s hard to know what the root of it all is, but technology now gives parents the opportunity to encourage one another and get resources, making home-schooling more accessible than in the past.”” Welcome to the 21st century! Very similar to what I said in my paper on revolutionizing higher education only applied to secondary education.
Cognitive Slaves September 23, 2010
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Here’s an excellent post by John Robb on his excellent blog “Global Guerrillas” (original post here). Sometimes you have to take what he says with a grain of salt (he’s a visionary) but Mr. Robb is right on the money with this one.
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The companies that have created the most new value in the last decade, are Internet companies like Facebook, Google, etc. They’ve created hundreds of billions in value. Good for them, but bad for us.
Why? IF these companies represent the most valuable new industry of the early 21st Century, where are the jobs that will provide prosperity for millions today, and potentially tens of millions in the future? They don’t exist. These companies create few real jobs.
The distressing part is that in reality these companies actually employ hundreds of millions of people, particularly young and otherwise un or underemployed superusers. People that work for them day in and day out for free: finding, sifting, sorting, connecting, building, etc.
Let’s take Facebook as an example. Currently it’s valued at ~$25 billion by the market. However, it could be argued that ~100,000 superusers out of 500 million part time users, are the reason that Facebook is valuable. They generate the core network that is the backbone of the tool. Their devoted use, high levels of connectivity, and loyalty forms the engine that grows Facebook, year in and year out. They are the materials, labor, and product of Facebook’s assembly line. Yet they aren’t paid for their effort. They aren’t generating wealth for themselves or their families.
How much wealth? If we awarded 4/5 ths of the value of Facebook (and the same exercise could be done with Google at a couple of million superusers) to its superusers, leaving the tool managers $5 billion in value, each superuser would now be worth $200,000 from their contributions to this tool alone. But they aren’t. They haven’t earned a penny for their effort.
One way to look at this is that we are truly in trouble. If the industries of the future are based on cognitive slavery, we all lose. However, as an entrepreneur, an optimist (believe it or not), and a believer in the potential for social/economic improvement, I think this can be corrected. I believe it’s possible to build tools and the companies that manage them, in a way that actually rewards the people that do most of the work. All we need to do is make it possible.
A homeschool family by Tim Hawkins September 20, 2010
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Where were you when the world stopped turning? September 11, 2010
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