Nine Shift

Good News! Boomers Retiring

On the other hand, there's news that older Boomers are actually retiring.

Here's the story, with my friend Sandra Timmerman as the source.

The numbers suggest that Boomers are pretty much retired by age 70.  LERN's own data shows that the oldest person attending our conference this year was age 67, the first (oldest) Boomers. 

So we'll stick with our prediction that 2016 will be the turning point for Gen Xers taking over leadership from Boomers. Again, what do you think?

 

Is BiPartisan Support Coming for Trains?

Is bipartisan support- - i.e. Republican support- - coming for trains? What do you think?

Today, former Republican Governor of Wisconsin Tommy Thompson said on Wisconsin Public Radio "I am very much in favor of developing high speed rail between Milwaukee and Madison."  

Current Tea Party leader and Republican Governor Scott Walker in/famously rejected federal financing for that train route in 2010. Moderate and pro-train Republicans like Tommy Thompson then jumped ship and became anti-train.

But there's a move across America for mainstream Republicans to recapture the Party, and hopefully come together with Democrats on economic issues such as trains. Has that started to happen? What do you think?

Record ridership. Young people waiting in line to board train in Colorado.

Top 10 Stories of the Year 2013

The really big news you didn't hear about from the mass media. News that is changing our work, life and education in the 21st Century.

#10 Colleges now focused on completion rates.  Faced with a 14 million shortage of skilled workers by 2017, colleges finally begin to boost their miserable 55% completion rates.

#9 STEM Camps Fail

NineShift's Julie Coates documents the evidence that STEM camps, and in fact all intervention, fail to increase the numbers of women in STEM occupations.

#8 Boomers Start to Leave Suburbs

Young people are leaving suburbs. 2013 the first year that documents that Boomers are starting to leave too.

#7 Carnegie Unit Collapses

First year even accrediting bodies realize measuring learning by time input is obsolete.

#6 Minimum Wage of $15 Passes

The first city in U.S. passes a $15 an hour minimum wage, another step towards more equality.

#5 Cities with More College Graduates Do Better

A new book by Enrico Moretti documents that communities with more college graduates do better economically.

#4 The Death of Aaron Schwartz

The government, and in this case with the complicity of M.I.T., punishes young people for creating the new century.

#3 The End of Text Based Online Courses

This was the year every online expert endorsed multi-media in online courses.

Online courses are on their way to being 50% of how we learn in this century, from Kindergarten (before actually) through the rest of our lives.  And it's not just about education.  Multi-media now established as a principal way we communicate, with each other, in marketing, in our personal lives.

In 1913 movies made the same shift. Before 1913 movies were just stage plays on film. In 1913 the first action movies were made.  Today, as 100 years ago, we make a big leap forward in the new century.