Just came across this video, entitled Shift Happens. See it also on YouTube.

It paints a rather shocking picture of how dramatically the competitive global workplace and need for not-yet-even-defined education will change in the next 5-10 years. Makes it impossible to deny the need for equally dramatic changes in the way education is delivered.

Here are some statistics from the video 

China has more honors kids than the US has kids.
More Chinese kids took AP English than American students.

According to former US Secretary of Education,

• top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004
• We are preparing students for jobs that do not yet exist...
• using technologies that haven't even been invented...
• in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet.

The U.S. ranks 20th in the world in broadband internet penetration...Luxembourg just passed us

In 2002 Nintendo invested more than $140 million in R&D... The US Federal Government spent less than half as much on R&D in Education.

Last year, a retired teacher from India became a real-life millionaire by trading virtual real-estate in Second Life.

We are living in exponential times

• There are over 2.9 billion searches on Google every month
• To whom were these questions addressed before Google?
• Today there are about 540,000 words in the English language... 5x more than during Shakespeare's time
• More than 3000 new books are published every day
• It's estimated that a week's worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to encounter in a lifetime in the 18th century
• It's estimated that 40 exabytes of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year... more than during the previous 5,000 years!
• The amount of new technical info is doubling every two years -- For students starting a 4-year technical or college degree, this means that half of what they learning in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year.