Decode

More Generational Differences, Few Points of Conflict

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

According to the Pew Research Centre, Americans think think that the generation gap has gotten wider. They just don’t think it’s as big of a deal. Interesting tidbit: pretty much everyone thinks older adults have superiour moral values.

The Youth Recession (cont’d.)

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

More troubling news from the U.K: one out of every six British people aged 18-24 is both out of work and not in school.

The British have a handy acronym for this group: NEET (not in education, employment or training), and it’s been a long-standing public policy concern for both the left and the right. The prescriptions seem easy enough to grasp. Government needs increase access to post-secondary education. Business need to invest more in jobs and training. But as we noted in our article in the Mark News, these are long-term investments that don’t seem to be major public or industrial policy concerns. The irony is that anti-deficit, short-term-growth-at-any-cost logic that prevents countries from treating these issues seriously creates nagging public lags on our economies and societies.

Debt-enabled “investment”

Friday, August 14th, 2009

More grim news on rising student loan applications in Ontario. Applications for provincial government student aid are up almost 6% this year.

The Student Stimulus

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Our thoughts on post-secondary spending in the world of a jobless recovery.

2008 American Time Use Survey

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

The New York Times has a snazzy interactive graphic showing the results of how Americans spend their days. You can track differences between various demographic categories, including age range. What this survey terms “computer use” accounts for a tiny fraction of how people aged 15-24 spend their leisure time.

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom about how youth populations are glued to their computer screens. Is this a case of a flawed survey methodology? Or are our assumptions about the dominant nature of online experiences completely wrong?

News in the Link Economy

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Media guru Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and a plethora of newspapers under his News Corporation mantle) yesterday re-launched a firestorm by announcing that his company will start charging for online access to its news content. It’s a tactic competitor Associated Press has openly considered as well. The New York Times has a helpful roundup of what media watchers are saying.

For young news and media consumers, this remains an interesting moment in time. The easy parallel is that of the music industry’s attempts to fight off online piracy through a variety of online music sales models. Despite the endless speculation, and some notable successes (Itunes), nothing seems to have worked the way the music industry wanted it.

It’s difficult to predict how well Murdoch’s attempts will work, especially with young people. If the music industry has so much trouble convincing people to pay $1 for a song they can listen to over and over again, how will they convince consumers to subscribe to something they’ll likely only read once?

Aside from the general problem about a lack of a viable advertising model for news content creators, our Youth Media DNA studies last year showed that young people didn’t seem to understand the unique function of newspaper-style reporting vs. that of other media. Without that understanding, it’s difficult for newspaper content providers to distinguish themselves, especially online, where the content created by a TV station looks the same as that provided by a newspaper. Compare how CTV covered recent jobless figures with the Canadian Press article on the Toronto Star.

That, coupled with the fact that the objective-style reporting is now easily co-opted and repackaged into snarky forms by aggregators is also problematic, and not only for the newspaper industry.

How then to convince young readers as to necessity of a news gathering organization and the economic model that supports it? News Corp appears to be giving up on this front. We’ll see how strong that arm is.

Why Government Websites Stink

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

A helpful guide from the Usability4Government blog.

The Future of Education

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Tyler Cowen in his new book, “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disorderd World” makes a very insightful assessment of the future of higher education.

Working as a proffessor of Economics at George Mason Univeristy, he poses the question: “Why do my students need me?”

As great an economist Mr. Cowen might be, would the students not benefit from listening instead to a Nobel Prize winner in ecnomics to deliver a lection on options pricing and market elasticity? Or how about someone who is faculty at Harvard, MIT, or Princton?

It wouldn’t take much resources; a video camera, lighthing, a DVD player, and an internet connection. Easily acquriable, to say the least.

There is a lot of buzz around digitized education, and every serious post-secondary institution around the world wants to be leading the innovation in delivering education. Be it distance courses, on-line corresspondance, univeristy created applications for the Blackberry of iPhone, you name it, and someone is trying to add it to their repotoire.

Being an undergrad student potentially thinking of going down the long road of academia, the thought my classrooms might be empty while I deliver the lecture for recording, while students are sitting alone in their dorm rooms viewing my video. With the capacity to rewind, pause, and altogether stop me from speaking about a topic I spent years trying to gain expertise in, scares me a little.

Tyler Cowen notes that the demand for top colleges, and the price of college tuition, has taken off at exactly the same time as the internet revolution. He’s not suggesting that the spread of the internet caused the boom in quality higher education, but he says it does indicate the internet will not displace such education.

Students could technically watch YouTube vidoes on topics related to their study and gain their knowledge that way. But which employer when glancing through a CV would select someone who spent 4 years watching YouTube videos?

The necessity of human interaction in the role of education makes the point that “education” as it is recognized by the larger economy cannot be attained in isolation, but rather it is acquired just as much through face to face communication as through a text book.

So the next time you’re wondering why is that I have to go to class when I can just download the lecture on my computer, keep in mind that the illusion of control a video presents to you will only harm you in the long run when you come to discover that life can’t be fast forwarded, rewound, or paused at the whim of your finger tips.