Over at Freakonomics an interview with Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, about treating human waste, shows that for every dollar spent on sewage treatment, seven dollars in health care costs are saved. Truly, the best health care invention of the last 200 years is toilets.
I was reading Stephen Downes‘ article on the Future of Online Learning, and ran into a paragraph that hit home more than the rest, about the marketplace for course content.
Today, much of the value derived from the learning marketplace is based on an artificially imposed scarcity – a scarcity of seats in classrooms, a scarcity of credentialing agencies, and a scarcity of educational publications, for example. These scarcities will disappear as governments prefer to fund education directly, and at cost, rather than support such business models.
Government directly supporting learning and bypassing the “business models” of educational institutions. This will cause an incredible upheaval. I guess the best way to weather this change as a learning facilitator, or provider of “knol”s would be to sharpen delivery methods and make sure my content is valid, relevant, and reliable. This will be all about building a reputation and a community of followers, whom we used to call students. Hoo-boy, do most of us have our work cut out for us.
Call up somebody, have them log on to your EtherPad page and you and friends can edit notes together in real time. Simpler than Google Docs, this is something to look into. Definitely.
Over at BoingBoing Cory Doctorow points us to a 3-year multi-million-dollar research effort to discern what the youth of America are doing online, and whether it is good for them or not. 
Two-pager, White paper, Book: Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (download), Digital Youth homepage
There are about 2 million photos up already. Go ahead, browse. Wonderful history. Life magazine was the premier photo magazine in the US for many many years, in the heyday of magazine, when there were only a half dozen really popular ones.
