Norman Matloff wrote a solid paper called Globalization and the American IT Worker, published in the latest issue (Nov. 2004) of Communications of the ACM. Here’s a rather bleak quote:

University computer science departments must be
honest with students regarding career opportunities
in the field. The reduction in programming jobs
open to U.S. citizens and green card holders is per-
manent, not just a dip in the business cycle. Students
who want technological work must have less of a
mindset on programming and put more effort into
understanding computer systems in preparation for
jobs not easily offshored (such as system and data-
base administrators). For instance, how many gradu-
ates can give a cogent explanation of how an OS
boots up?

Here’s what Stephen Downes has to say about the Semantic Web:

RSS is the semantic web. It is not the official semantic web as I said, it is not sanctioned by any standards body or organization whatsoever. But RSS is what has emerged as the de facto description of online content, used by more than four million sites already worldwide, used to describe not only resources, but people, places, objects, calendar entries, and in my way of thinking, learning resources and learning objects.

What makes RSS work is that it approaches search a lot more like Google and a lot less like the Federated search described above. Metadata moves freely about the internet, is aggregated not by one but by many sources, is recombined, and fed forward. RSS is now used to describe the content of blogs, and when aggregated, is the combining of blog posts into new and novel forms. Sites like Technorati and Bloglines, Popdex and Blog Digger are just exploring this potential. RSS is the new syntax, and the people using it have found a voice.

My ex-colleague Yuhong Yan has now taken her own domain name where she wants to publish her results. Here’s what she has to say…

Why do I use commercial service to host my web site? 1) to avoid the complexity and regulations if using NRC resources; 2) to bring the research to the real world in a faster and more controllable way. You are encouraged to use the information, software and send me your suggestions.

I never used by employers’ web hosting services myself, but I find it interesting to see that Yuhong is taking charge of her identity on the Web.

Here’s an interesting paper by Hassan Masum, TOOL: The Open Opinion Layer. Here’s the abstract:

Shared opinions drive society: what we read, how we vote, and where we shop are all heavily influenced by the choices of others. However, the cost in time and money to systematically share opinions remains high, while the actual performance history of opinion generators is often not tracked.

This article explores the development of a distributed open opinion layer, which is given the generic name of TOOL. Similar to the evolution of network protocols as an underlying layer for many computational tasks, we suggest that TOOL has the potential to become a common substrate upon which many scientific, commercial, and social activities will be based.

Valuation decisions are ubiquitous in human interaction and thought itself. Incorporating information valuation into a computational layer will be as significant a step forward as our current communication and information retrieval layers.

In one my previous post commenting on the fact that technology had changed dramatically learning, I predicted that in 5 years, it would be an accepted fact that some university courses are better taught using mostly technology and very little live input from an instructor…

I had one reply from an anonymous Scott (but I know who you are!) which is worth citing in full here:

If you equate learning with time spent in school, then I tend to agree (…) there is a lot of value in the traditional methods, and we would be foolish to replace them with untested modern contrivances (bordering here on the “computers in schools” debate).

But if you view learning as a continuous experience that is not confined to attendance at institutionalized schools, then I wholeheartedly agree (…). I left the research world for five years (1997-2002), and was astounded when I returned at how the process of dissemintation and discovery has been completely transformed by the Internet. Academic discourse these days is utterly dependent on electricity.

And I see elements of the same transformation in schools at every level. I run a couple of historical Web sites, and I receive an endless stream of questions from students doing projects. But I think the more important observation is that students (of all ages) are applying the information discovery skills they learn in school (and on their own) to other activities. Here’s an example. Our 15 year old TV and two 15 year old VCRs all decided to die in October. So we’re now faced with the daunting task of choosing new technology. Buying a TV used to be easy: you chose your size, identified some trusted brands, then picked a cabinet to match your decor. These days, you have to choose between CRT vs LCD vs projection vs plasma, 19:6 vs 4:3, HD capable or not, progressive scan vs interlace, presence of RF/composite/s-video/component connectors, etc. And that’s just the TV. What about a replacement VCR? Really, you want a DVD recorder that plays about a dozen disk formats, and you also have to think about future requirements for networked content delivery throughout the house, and compatibility between all the components. The combinatorial explosion is overwhelming. I know that my father could no longer make a choice of television that was better than a random guess. So I asked the sales guy how much time they have to devote to educating customers these days regarding all the options, expecting to hear that people generally feel as overwhelmed as I do. But the answer was quite the opposite. The guy said that most customers (of all ages – I specifically asked about age) come to the store with a comprehensive understanding of the options. Not only do they understand the choices (often following guides from such places as Consumer Reports), but they come armed with reviews from epinions.com, advice from discussion forums, (wikis and blogs?), etc. The sales guy said that as often as not they learn something from the customer.

If that isn’t a fundamental (and welcome) change in how people learn, I don’t know what is. It suggests to me a process of continuous and pervasive learning that I rarely saw emerge from traditional schools. Yet that’s the culture that today’s children are experiencing. I don’t know if calculus teachers will be obsolete in five years, but neither do I see the pace of change slowing any time soon. If anything, I expect it to accelerate as technologies for continuous social communication and global network access (cell/PDA/SMS/IM/etc) go mainstream.