So lately I’ve been talking and thinking more and more about this idea of a “performance standard” that reads something like “Students create, grow and navigate online personal learning networks in safe, effective and ethical ways” and what that would mean in a NETS type framework. For instance, students:

• locate, identify and evaluate potential mentors or teachers online
• communicate with co-learners clearly and effectively in a variety of modes
• share work online using a variety of media in appropriate and creative ways
• track, read, evaluate, organize, utilize and share relevant information effectively

And so on. It starts some interesting conversations among those who haven’t yet considered or been much exposed to the idea of online learning networks, and often, those conversations lead to “how do we assess that?” The only obvious answer is that it probably isn’t happening on a test.

I constantly struggle with my own work in this. The last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the nodes in my network, trying to think critically about diversity, reexamining the tools I use to access it, looking at the ways I interact and what I contribute. For all sorts of time-related reasons, I’m not happy with the scope of my work right now either; it feels too text heavy, too comfortable. And, for many of the same reasons and even though I have made some changes of late, my network seems static. I need to come up with some strategies for freshening things up around here.

I know assessing networks takes understanding networks, and that’s why I’m still very much into the “think about this in your own practice first” mode. But at some point, it would be interesting, and hopefully necessary, to think about ways in which we’d assess our students in this undertaking.

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This site provides a free course management system for students and teachers. The courses can be made private or public. LectureShare is very accessible with easy registration steps and easy-to-use course features which include a Gradebook, Announcements, and Lecture Uploading. Use the Available Courses section to search or browse the courses. Consult the recent review of LectureShare in THE Journal. ____JH

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"LectureShare lets instructors post lecture notes to their students, or the world, quickly and easily. Simply create an account, create your course, and in only minutes you can be posting announcements, documents, and media that your students can easily access. There's no frustrating software to learn and no course web page to maintain. We feel instructors time is best spent with students, not struggling with problematic course management software or maintaining their own webpage. We hope to bring a new level of simplicity and flexibility to the course management idea. We currently allow students to aggregate multiple courses under one account and take advantage of course notifications by e-mail, SMS text message, or RSS feed. This is only the beginning and we hope to develop many more features."

Some stories are so bizarre that you have to wonder if they’re true, but this one (via Ewan’s Delicious bookmarks) about a policeman in Cheyenne, Wyoming who was brought in to “teach” kids about MySpace is beyond the pale:

“Officer Gay chose it as an opportunity to take Shaylah’s pictures and her MySpace and use it as an example of what not to do, but then just really publicly humiliate her and mocked her,” said Nordic, who coaches wrestling at the high school and football and track at Windsor Middle School. “She left the auditorium in tears and busted out crying. He told the student body that he took her information from MySpace and showed it to a predator in prison and asked him what he would do with it.”

Nordic said Gay used inappropriate language when describing to the students what the predator would do to Shaylah.

It gets worse.

Anyone with any experience with social Web tools can tell you that INVITING LAW ENFORCEMENT TO AN ASSEMBLY TO SCARE THE BEJEEZUS OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL KIDS FOR POSTING STUFF TO MYSPACE IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST WAY TO “TEACH” THEM ABOUT SOCIAL NETWORKS.

First of all, it’s too late by that point. Second of all, it’s LAZY. Schools do this because they don’t want to do the hard work of understanding what 75% or more of their kids are actually doing online.

Here is a suggestion: Go to your principal or superintendent right now and ask her/him this: Would you really rather have your students learn about safety online from some “authority” figure who drops in and attempts to make them fearful, or from people who they know and trust and see every day in their classrooms who over the course of time in appropriate and balanced ways can educate them instead?

Of course, this requires that the teachers in the room have the ability to educate their kids about the dangers AND the potentials of social networks. More often than not, unfortunately, that’s not the case. And I have to say that I’ve been surprised of late in my travels (4,000 miles worth just last week) at the almost palpable fear that a lot of teachers still exhibit when we start talking about putting content online or sharing documents or being transparent. In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re no closer to making social networking a K-12 curricular imperative than we were when I first started doing this four years ago.

Oy.

But then again, scaring them is so, so much easier…

“You could imagine her sitting there and hearing that,” Nordic said. “He asked everybody there, ‘Is Shaylah Nordic here?’ So she raised her hand and then he went on to post the pictures and talk about it. He said she was likely to be raped and murdered because how easy it was to access this stuff, and how easy it was to get information.”

Nordic said Gay gave the example of a girl in another state who had been targeted on MySpace, and the girl was taken to an empty warehouse, was raped and shot dead.

Nice.

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It's important when the free digital textbooks and free online course materials are covered by the LA Times. The issues surrounding pricey textbooks and digital alternatives are compactly discussed in this news article. ___ JH (Thanks to the blog Free Culture News for this reference.)
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"Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven't looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away -- online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market."
"McAfee is one of a band of would-be reformers who are trying to beat the high cost -- and, they say, the dumbing down -- of college textbooks by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost digital texts. Thus far, their quest has been largely quixotic, but that could be changing. Public colleges and universities in California this past year backed several initiatives to promote online course materials, and publishers and entrepreneurs are stepping up release of electronic textbooks, which typically sell at reduced prices."
"Open educational resources is an amorphous category for publishers, but basically it includes e-textbooks, courses, videos, taped lectures, tests, software and other materials released online free to the public without restriction on use."

Ever since last month when delicious FINALLY did an upgrade, I’ve been digging into it pretty heavily and really liking the result. That’s not to say that there is anything especially new here; there isn’t aside from the 1000 character description upgrade which, to me anyway, is a big deal. But for some reason it’s been working better for me on a number of levels.

In fact, all that new space has made me change some of my delicious habits on both ends of the spectrum. It’s made me sure to add a good deal of annotation to most of the bookmarks I save, and it’s made me start to expect others to do the same. Kudos to Alan Levine, Howard Rheingold and others, who fill up my daily morning newspaper with enough link detail to let me make faster decisions about what they are sharing. Here’s hoping more folks in my network will follow suit. It really has become the place that I start my reading, and I’m finding that it’s making me think even harder about my own organizational structure and how all of this flow of information works best for me. And by the way, the new Google Reader preview extension for Firefox that I just added has really made all of this much easier for me as well. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for anyone interested; the fact that I can comment directly from Reader is chaning that part of my practice as well…more comments.

I’m finding as I experiment with my delicious network that as I tweak it and try to hone it, I’m getting more good information than I used to. More relevant. More thought-provoking, than simply reading through my blogroll of usual suspects. It’s expanding my sources of information, and it’s making even more clear the potentials of user-generated connections. But I’m also finding the process of identifying those who make up my network interesting. I’ve been spending a great deal of time looking at the networks of those in my network, finding others who I might want to add based on the tags that they use (like do they have an “education” tag, or do they have some uniquely formed ones like “mediagoesaway“), the frequency with which they save things (30 a day = not good as does 30 a year), the amount of annotation, and who they might be networked in with.

I still struggle with the organization of all of this, but I’ve pretty much now decided to forego the tagging and sharing features in Reader for attempting to make it all work in just one place in delicious. Not sure why I haven’t caught the Diigo bug as others have, but on some level, it just feels too overwhelming in terms of the amount of stuff you can do, although from a collaborative standpoint, there is no question Diigo has some compelling advantages. delicious just feels more manageable for me at this point.

Anyway, just an update on the evolution of my info management process for anyone that’s interested. Would love to hear others to deconstruct their own processes in similar ways.

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Yesterday, Sheryl and I began what we hope will be a successful process to change teaching in New Jersey on a statewide level. This fall, we’ll be running a Powerful Learning Practice cohort in the state in conjunction with Kean University that will include folks from every level of the education construct, from the assistant state commissioner of education to members of the principals and supervisors association to preservice university professors to classroom teachers. (We still have a couple of slots for 5-person school teams if anyone is interested, btw.) In addition, we’ve got Robin Ellis and Kevin Jarrett participating as well, ready to bring their wealth of knowledge and experience to the discussions.

Obviously, while this makeup is decidedly different from the other cohorts we’ve run, we’re hoping we have “the right people on the bus” as Jim Collins would say. While the various levels of representation add some complexity to the process, the opportunity to start a conversation and engage in practice with such a diverse group is pretty exciting. And, it’s especially exciting for me since it’s all happening in my home state.

If things work out as planned, we want to help create a workable model for professional development around these technologies that will take root and last here long after Sheryl and I move on. As I told the group yesterday, our expectation is not that everyone become a blogger or a podcaster or a videographer, but we really believe that every educator at least has to understand what’s happening with Web technologies, how they are affecting much of our world, and the implications and potentials for learning. Hopefully, what we create together will go a long way to making that happen.

Just one final note: as I was walking around listening in on some of the discussions, one of the representatives from the state was voicing her frustrations with the way the conversation with her colleagues has been going so far. She said that they were having a hard time squaring the idea of being more creative while maintaining “rigor” in the process, and that rigor is always contextualized in content. “I can teach my five-year old how to do content,” she said, and it was clear what she meant. We have as much to unlearn in this process as we do to learn.

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If this article in Innovate (registration required) didn’t keep hammering the “N-Gen” meme and all the requisite star-struck statistics and high-fallutin description so hard it would have been a lot more fun to read.  But the bottom line thesis is still important for all educators to consider:

Much in the same way that Rudolph Flesch’s 1955 landmark book Why Johnny Can’t Read criticized the American educational system for not teaching phonics, we suggest that today’s instructors are missing an opportunity by not learning to read the texts of the Net Generation. Failing to recognize these texts as valuable tools in the teaching and learning process, professors dismiss an entire constellation of literacy skills.

And here is the crux of the problem:

…while N-Gens interact with the world through multimedia, online social networking, and routine multitasking, their professors tend to approach learning linearly, one task at a time, and as an individual activity that is centered largely around printed text…Not having been raised in the world of the N-Gen student, then, presents some significant challenges for faculty members who must attempt to address the needs of a learning style they have never experienced, may know little about, and may be unable to comprehend fully because of their different skills in processing information.

What I like about the article is that it attempts to make a cultural case for educators to get up to speed, not necessarily an technological one (though, obviously, the two are tied.) Learning cultures have changed:

Many faculty members developed their writing skills in a print world where text took the conventional form of paragraphs on a page or was packaged as a book or an article, a story or a novel; its production was typically conceived of as a solitary act. Consequently, their previous experiences with and understanding of text are quite different from that of the N-Gen student, which may lead to profound misunderstandings. When instructors perceive linear, print-based texts as a benchmark, the N-Gen’s texts may, at first glance, fall quite short. However, these digital texts do not necessarily lack style, coherence, or organization; they simply present meaning in ways unfamiliar to the instructor. For example, a collection of images on Flickr with authorial comments and tags certainly does not resemble the traditional essay, but the time spent on such a project, the motivation for undertaking it, and its ability to communicate meaning can certainly be equal to the investment and motivation required by the traditional essay—and the photos may actually provide more meaningful communication for their intended audience.

Whoa. I can hear the screams now. Essay writing akin to collecting images on Flickr? Even I bristle a bit on that one. But the overall point is clear: We can do this all differently now, and to not get our brains around the shifts has some real implications, specifically in the ways in which it limits us from understanding what our students create and, more importantly, helping them to create and construct with the most effect. And, as has been observed many times here and elsewhere, one of the biggest shifts is the move away from individual knowledge to distributed knowledge built on collaborative and, I would argue, network literacies that are unfamiliar to most of us. (Not to say these kids are born with them, btw.)

Let’s face it, the percentage of educators that Johnny comes into contact with K-16 who are fluent at digital texts is maybe 10%. That doesn’t mean that Johnny won’t be able to figure it out on his own. (You know others have suggested that “literacy is natural,” though I do want to probe that idea bit further at some point.) But it does mean, I think, that we’re missing an opportunity to help Johnny make even more of his digital potential. And I’ll ask you, if you had the chance for your own children to have 100% of their teachers who understand these shifts, wouldn’t you want them to? I know I would. Doesn’t mean that we make everything that happens in the classroom digital or Web 2.0 or whatever else. There are plenty of things worth doing the way we’ve been doing them for a long while. But for my kids to have teachers who don’t have a choice in the matter because they just “don’t get” digital environments is unacceptable.

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So this is definitely worth an hour of your time if you haven’t already invested it. (I seem to be about four days late to stuff any more…go figure.) Michael Wesch of Kansas State and the “Machine is Us” fame gave an overview of the cultural significance of You Tube to the LOC, and suffice to say, it’s incredibly interesting stuff.

The really bizarre part for me, at least, is that two of the viral videos that he discusses in the presentation just popped up on my radar thanks to my own kids. Tess, who is turning 11 today, pulled up the “Charlie Bit Me” video on my iPhone the other day and Tucker cranked up the Sponge Bob version of “Crank Dat” just yesterday and started dancing around the house. I felt SO out of it. (”You haven’t seen this, Dad?”) For all that I live and breathe this stuff, I’m such a loser…

Anyway, the best part about this presentation is that it doesn’t try to make any real bold statement other than this is what the YouTube world (and much of the rest of the online world) is like these days: highly networked, highly individualized in terms of content distribution and organization, and incredibly personal. It captures to a large degree the “networked individualism” that Barry Weller talks about and that Wesch refs in the video. (I’ve got some reading to do on that score as well…)

The one concept that really struck me was the idea of “the collapse of context.” I think one of the most difficult things for those who are not familiar with these technologies (and even for some that are) is how different the contexts can be for the content we create. We really don’t know when a video or a blog post or whatever else we create is going to be “read” or how it’s going to be shared or what the response cues might be. And it got me thinking even more about George Siemens’ idea of context and how important it is to be able to identify the immediate circumstances for learning before implementing a tool or a particular pedagogy. My brain is humming…

At any rate, I’d add this to any list of “must views” for this year…

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This informative and provocative video contains a Library of Congress presentation by Dr. Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University, who explores the digital ethnography of YouTube. Wesch and his students conduct their research using "participant observation" on YouTube. Wesch makes very effective use of XML, screen captures, music, pictures, re-mixing, and video presentation techniques to convey his analyses of the cultural significance of Web 2.0 media trends. Wesch's work is a fine example of using a medium to explain a medium--something like Marshall McCluhan using Television to explain the impact of TV on society. See Wesch's other videos, “The Machine is Us/ing Us” and “Information R/evolution,” and consult Mediated Cultures for updates about the Digital Ethnography Working Group's studies. ____JH (Thanks to iThinkEd and openculture for citations of Wesch's work.)
_____
"Web 2.0 is about linking people in ways that we've never been linked before."
"Media mediate human relationships; when media change, human relations change."
"YouTube exhibits a seriously playful participatory media culture."
"Networked individualism."
"The Web is us."

I hadn’t planned on getting my writing life in order today, but then I somehow happened on this post by Michele Martin on using Delicious to create an online portfolio. Since I have a couple of articles due out this fall (and a couple of new books in the works), I decided a good place to start getting my brain around the idea was with all of the off-blog writing I’ve done the past few years, and so, there went a couple of hours. After wading through it all, it turns out I was able to locate online 35 of the 40 or so pieces of published writing I’ve done (at least the ones I can remember.) Anyway, I gave them all a tag, and now when you pull up the associated page in Delicious, you can see them all in one quick swoop.

A couple of observations here: First, while I know there are parents who are choosing their kids names based on whether or not the domains are available, (which is ridiculuous, btw) I’m thinking it may be good to choose a tag early on. I’ve started using tessorichardson and tuckerarichardson for the stuff I post about my own kids, and I’m thinking they might continue to use that tag as they begin creating and posting their own stuff as well. Second, what I like about this is that because of the RSS feed, people who might be interested can track my work and I can repurpose it elsewhere, say on a Pageflakes page (which could also serve as a portfolio, btw.) Third, as Michele says, the easy to update part of this is really intruiging. For instance, I might want to do this whenever I read generous reviews of my book, (forget the bad ones…(0:) or when excerpts of my presentations end up online. Just create a bit of a different tag, like “willrichardsonbookreviews” or “willrichardsonpresentationclips” etc. And then, I could use the bundles function to bring them all together (or, of course, I could just add a catchall tag like “willrichardsonportfolio”.)

Dunno if this has any earth shattering significance, and I’m sure many folks are already playing with variations on this theme, but I think the ease of doing this once you have it set up makes it worth a second or third thought.

(Photo “Footprints” by andy 5322.)

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Zaid Ali Alsagoff has organized and edited 69 postings from his weblog Zaidlearn at the ePublishing site Scribd. Zaid's eBook provides many links and many valuable perspectives on the worlds of learning that are available on the Web. ____JH

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After a lot of filtering, I have settled for 69 learning nuggets posted on ZaidLearn, which I believe readers might find useful to their own learning. To make it a bit more convenient to find what you are looking for, I have divided the book into six learning galaxies (or themes), which are:

• Learning
• Teaching
• Stories
• Free e-Learning Tools
• Free Learning Content
• Free EduGames

Ok…so I really am searching for words as to how cool Piclens is. And I know; I shouldn’t get so buzzed by the tools. But I’m giving myself an exception here just because I’ve been fooling around with this thing for about an hour since I downloaded it and it’s like mesmerizingly fun…and useful.

It’s a Firefox add-on for Windows and Mac that finds all sorts of video and images via search from a number of different sources (Flickr, straight Google, Amazon and others) and lets you scan them/watch them through the slickest 3D interface I’ve seen yet. You can also breeze through the latest news and sports photos and videos (among others) and every photo or object that comes up anywhere in the frame is linked to the original online. (With the news stuff, a brief summary of the story comes up as well.)

But it’s the hypnotic way in which all of this works that has me amazed…just check it out.

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Another informative collection of categorized and annotated resource links for self-directed learning--this listing was compiled by Gartheeban Ganeshapillai. I especially like the inclusive scope of this listing. ___JH

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"While you can't get college credit for taking open courseware classes, you can make the most of the information and education they offer both in personal and professional aspects of your life. After all, even if you're not working towards a degree, taking the same courses as those in the ivy league can't possibly hurt you and may even be able to better keep you informed and on the cutting edge of what's going on in your field. So how can you make the most of these free online courses? Here are resources we've collected that can help you search for classes, find information and learn everything you need to know about how open courseware works."

Lately, in order to make a point about how the way we use the Web is changing, I’ve been saying in my presentations something along the likes of “you know, if you took this computer (pointing to my still somewhat shiny MacBookPro) and threw it in the river, it really wouldn’t mess up my life much. There’s almost nothing on here of any importance that isn’t out there on the Web somewhere.” I talk about my extensive use of Google Docs, Flickr, YouTube, Google Notebook and a host of open source software programs that are turning my computer into more of a connection device than a filing cabinet like all my old computers were. (I would miss the beautiful display, however.)

Of course, this raises some eyebrows, and I invariably get questions and comments along the lines of “How do you trust Google to keep your information secure?” or “What if you can’t get on the Web?” These invariably lead to conversations about how mobile devices and Web enabled phones are changing the landscape and how the potential reward of easy collaboration and sharing at this point at least outweigh the risk of losing files.

Between IBM’s recent announcement to build huge data centers to support “cloud computing” for its customers, Kevin Kelly’s recent Ted Talk about the next 5,000 days of the Web, and the continuing discussion on the Fast Forward blog, it’s pretty apparent that we are shifting away from our reliance on one or two devices to hold our information and that our focus is now becoming what devices give us easiest access to that information on the Web.

Few districts get the idea that if they think differently about how they create and store most of their information that there are potentially huge savings in the offing. I keep thinking about the New York City principal who told me she was required to spend $2,000 per laptop at her school because that’s what the bid contract said. Imagine what could happen there in terms of putting technology into kids’ hands with a little bit of re-envisioning right now. (And, obviously, that’s only a first step for many districts.)

Anyway, I’m curious. How much of your work is in the clouds these days? Know any districts who are starting to leverage these potentials?

(Photo: “San Francisco Clouds” by Zerega.)

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This article in the Online Newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology reports on the initiative to establish a new concentration of science and scholarship focused on how the Web functions and how to improve Web operations. ___JH (Thanks to TL Infobits for this reference.)

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"To promote Web Science and explore its emerging agenda, a joint endeavour between the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was set up in 2006, called the Web Science Research Initiative (webscience.org). WSRI’s mission is to foster the fundamental advances required for the Web’s continued growth. In particular, WSRI is focusing on steering the development of the Web Science discipline, running a series of workshops and looking at the lines of an academic curriculum for teaching Web Science. There will be an International Web Science Conference held in Athens, Greece, in 2009 – hopefully the first of many – as well as a new journal Foundations and Trends in Web Science."

"Web Science is not just modelling the current Web. It is about engineering new infrastructure protocols by using scientific and technological tools from many disciplines to understand the human society that uses them, to create beneficial new systems – which may involve extremely radical thinking about both technology and society (Shneiderman 2007). Such new engineering must respect the invariants of the Web experience: decentralisation to avoid bottlenecks and allow increases of scale; serendipitous reuse of information; fairness, openness and trust. In this way, the Web will remain a technology that enhances human society, and supports human aspiration."

For all of its amazing potential for good, here is a sobering reminder of what else the Web is good for, namely preying on people and causing horrible havoc.

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

It’s a pretty unsettling picture of a Web where it seems if anyone really wants to, they can seriously mess with your life for no other reason than simply because they can. It cites the whole Kathy Sierra (who was Tweeting about the article) affair as well as some of the more headline-y stories that have occurred in the past few years. And while the article suggests that this type of behavior is not yet of a degree large enough to threaten the greater good, it is something we need to be cognizant of.

That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with…the possibility of real harm being inflicted on strangers?

And, as I was thinking as I read through the article, can we mitigate the extent of those cases by better teaching about social networks and literacies in our schools? I know that on a basic level, none of these behaviors are new, that we’ve always had the ability and, for some, the desire to terrorize one another. It’s the scale thing, again, and the ways in which it’s so much easier to connect to other people and do the terrorizing with them, together, from afar. But I do wonder if we don’t make it worse as a system when we choose to filter and forget the bad parts (and in many cases, the good parts) of the Web with our students.

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For those who may want to catch the archive, here is my interview yesterday with Indiana University professor Curtis Bonk as we chatted for about an hour about a variety of topics including the effects of technologies in Third World countries, the barriers to change in K-12 schools, and what the future might hold for the Web. We also talked at some length about a book he is looking to publish about how learning can be leveraged by the connections we can now make, and about his other new book titled Empowering Online Learning.  He made the point that a lot of folks are making these days, that many of these ideas have been around for a long time, mentioning Seymour Papert and others from 20 and 30 years ago. When we asked him to pull off a few books from his shelf behind him, he grabbed Mindstorms, Apprenticeship in Thinking and some other older but still relevant titles. All in all, it pushed my thinking in some good ways. Enjoy!

Some session notes: Apologies for the choppy audio in the first half; not sure why it mysteriously cleared up all of a sudden. Thanks to everyone in the chat session (about 30 folks) who offered up some great questions, and to Sheryl who moderated. And last, having some trouble converting to MP4 since the .flv file was so big. UStream won’t do the conversion on files over 100MB.

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New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks writes about the pretty dire state of education in this country in his piece “The Biggest Issue” which ran yesterday, and it cites some interesting research about the relationship between education and technology. Namely, not so great things happen when the pace of educational progress slips behind that of technological progress, which is what is occurring right now.

The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

Now I know that “educational progress” in this instance is being measured by how much of an education most people get, a rate that peaked (in graduation terms) in the late 1960s and continue to decline. But can we really measure educational progress on the basis of graduation rates these days?

Two other points from the essay: First, the bottom line is that family environments, “which have deteriorated over the last 40 years,” have a great deal to do with the potential success of any given student. Second, it appears, at least, that the candidate better positioned to deal with this situation is Obama, given his emphasis on early childhood education.

Here’s another nugget to chew on:

It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.

I’m still doubtful that either campaign will push these conversations to the forefront even though, as Brooks suggests, they represent “the biggest issue facing the country.”

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