American Institute for Research reports that U.S. students in 4th and 8th grades perform in mathematics consistently below most of their peers in industrialized countries around the world and continue that trend into high school. “We believe the narrower focus of this study more accurately reflects the state of education in the United States in relation to a common set of industrialized nations because we are comparing apples to apples,” says Steven Leinwand, principal research analyst at AIR and one of the report’s authors. Overall differences within countries between boys’ and girls’ mathematics performance are not large.
A new Gartner study shows that the job market for IT specialists will shrink by 40 percent by 2010. ”Let’s just say it’s no longer going to be a question of just having good technical ability — of having a specialty,” says Diane Morello vice president of research at Gartner. ”If you’re just maintaining a specialization without raising their caliber, it’s not going to be enough… Companies will need people who are broader. The people I’m talking about are ‘versatilists’.” Sharon Gaudin of Datamation offers a useful summary of the report.
The new Gartner Blog Predicts 2006 consists of Gartner predictions and reader comments. Here’re interesting sample predictions: 10 percent of companies will require employee-purchased notebooks; the job market for IT specialists will shrink 40 percent by 2010; and a 50 percent growth in healthcare software investment will halve preventable deaths by 2013, saving more than 20,000 lives in the United States alone. Nothing yet about education, Tablet PCs, or digital ink. But it’s worth teachers monitoring it for speculation about the future in which our students may live.
Comments about Microsoft’s Next-Generation Platform Will Move Beyond the Desktop and Microsoft on open sourcing are available by Gartner analysts.
Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005 states that higher education institutions offer an increasing number of online courses.
Tablet PC2.com posts its 2005 List for Santa. Cute page. This list is an interesting juxtaposition to Charlie Brown’s Christmas now on ABC-TV in the background! AJ’s watching it carefully.