Futurist Thomas Frey: How quickly we forget. Events of 20 years ago seem like a distant memory, but 1994 was the year when Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa, O.J. Simpson was arrested for killing his wife, huge massacres were happening in Rwanda and Sarajevo, and China got its first connection to the Internet.
In 2009, over 4 million students were taking some sort of course online.
The insertion of the internet into our daily lives sure has changed the landscape of how distance learning has evolved and is consumed, there was certainly a lot of history that preceded it. The infographic below takes a look at the strides distance learning has made over the years and really highlights how the internet has really helped to expand the offerings to many more people.
When the 1964 World’s Fair was hosted in New York City, the prolific sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, Isaac Asimov, took the opportunity to wonder what the world would look like 50 years from then – assuming the world survived the nuclear threats of the Cold War.Writing in The New York Times, Asimov imagined a world that you might partly recognize today, a world where:
A child born in 2012 is estimated to cost $241,080 to raise.
It’s becoming increasingly expensive to have kids. But it has never been cheaper to clothe and feed them, as well. The total cost of raising a child born in 2012 is estimated at $241,080 – and double that if your child attends college. That’s a 23% increase from 1960. So what is getting more expensive?
Rick Wilking: Covering natural disasters is a strange thing. You get there all in a huff, as fast as you can after the tragedy, and then try to seek out the major damage. You document all that, often busting hump for very long days, for a week or more depending on how bad it is. (Photos)
Futurist Thomas Frey: What images come to mind when you think about the future? Do you think about near-term futures with 3D printers, driverless cars, and robotics, or do you think about more distant futures of space travel, human cloning, and teleportation devices?
High schools, community colleges, and four-year institutions will create early-college/dual-degree courses better aligned to the college curriculum.
The higher education landscape has been profoundly transformed in roughly 50-year intervals. During the early 19th century, the colonial colleges were joined by several hundred more religiously founded institutions. The mid-19th century saw the rise of public colleges, culminating in the Morrill Act of 1862. The turn of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of the modern research university as well as the articulation of the Wisconsin Idea, that public universities should serve the public, as well as the appearance of extension services. The 1960s saw the transformation of normal schools into comprehensive universities, the rapid proliferation of community colleges, the end of legal segregation in higher education, and sharply increased federal aid to colleges and universities.
According to a new poll released by The Atlantic and The Aspen Institute Americans consider themselves to be members of a divided nation. As Bob Cohnnotes, “Every day we hear about how society is splitting apart — a polarized Congress, a fragmented media market, a persistent schism among Americans over social issues.” There is, however, one question from the poll that showed a certain kind of unity among Americans that I found surprising and heartening.
Futurist Thomas Frey: A thousand years from now, what is it that the human race will need to have accomplished?
Yes, I realize that this is a huge question and many of you reading this are living paycheck-to-paycheck worrying about who’s going to win the big game this weekend. But if we don’t begin to frame our role of humanity inside a much bigger picture, we are likely to remain in sputter-mode until we eventually do.
Buzz Aldrin was the second person to walk on the Moon in 1969.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on the surface of the Moon on July 20, 1969, it appeared as though mankind was on the verge of a new age of space exploration. After all, if the moon could be conquered, what could prevent us traveling to other planets, even to other solar systems?
Francis Fukuyama published his book, The End of History in 1992. He argued that, with the cold war over and liberal democracy triumphant, the major historical narrative dialectic of history was over.