Will you have the skills necessary to be employed in 2020? (That is only 8 years from now)

If you look at the visual diagram above, you can see how quickly (less than ten years) our workplace readiness skills are changing. This should come of no surprise to anyone given the exponential growth of the global marketplace hastened by the obscenely rapid pace of technological developments that have enabled it over the past 10 years. That said, we in education, have not changed very much during the same time period. While online learning has made huge inroads in higher education, the majority of our K-12 schools (at least in the US) have not adapted to the digital age. Despite Apple's Education announcement to enable the digital revolution in K-12 schools by providing easy to use tools to publish and access eTextbooks to be delivered through it's iPad/iPod mobile device, this is disheartening on many levels. For one, our political leaders and education policy leaders bemoan the fact that US students consistently fail to compete with their counterparts from other countries despite being the wealthiest nation on Earth. Perhaps that is because, unlike other countries, we are stuck in an educational model that is designed to prepare industrial workers on an agrarian calendar while nations like Korea (see: http://bit.ly/AEALxB ) and India (see: http://bit.ly/x3yUtq ) are moving toward a more progressive model that leverages the power of technology for student collaboration, data analysis and adaptive, personalized learning that fosters the workplace readiness skills that will be required for people to make a living in the 21st Century global economy being built and worked in as a I write.