Learn about issues important to you or about what is happening in our city by visiting blogs. These blogs are just a sample of the many that can be found about community issues, professional development and more.
The Pub
The Cultural Connect
Our Time to Act
Richard Florida
YP Commons
Silicon Prairie News
Check back for new blogs of interest. Submit a blog for consideration to Kirsten Case-Penrod.
1/6/2009
We’re already 5 days into 2009 and lots of good things happening! We hope that everyone had a great holiday break and wonderful New Years!
We’re excited to share an upcoming event, this Sunday January 11th, award-winning investigative journalist, political correspondent and activist, Jeff Johnson of BET speak at Word Made Flesh’s Beggars Society, 7PM at 1011 Leavenworth.
From his celebrated conversations with world figures, to his grass-roots trench work to inspire the next generation of leaders; Jeff Johnson is a trailblazing social entrepreneur and authentic voice for change. It’s because of his work and message that we want to share the opporutnity with the SPN community!
Johnson has spent the last decade merging the worlds of politics and popular culture. His role as a political activist have included work as Senior Advisor for Media and Youth Outreach for People for the American Way, National Director of the Youth & College division of the NAACP, and an appointment by Russell Simmons as the Vice President of the Hip Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN).
Johnson is the host of BET Network’s The Truth with Jeff Johnson a hard-hitting, talk show delivering a varied and vibrant view of the news and issues from an editorial, investigative and cultural perspective. Johnson earned a reputation as a positive force among youth and young adults —dubbed the “conscience voice” of Black Entertainment Television—on shows such as “The Jeff Johnson Chronicles”, which he hosted and produced, “Meet the Faith” and “Rap City.”
Johnson consistently challenges audiences to innovatively weigh solutions to resolve historic and systemic social imbalances and inequalities.
Jeff’s visit will no doubt be a great event and we hope to see many of you there!
Related posts:
- Young Entrepreneur - Jeff Milewski
Yet another great article from Stefanie Monge on Omaha’s next... - Omaha Social Capital
Just ran across this information on a group called Omaha... - Omaha Web2.0 / Social Media Conference?
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="260" caption="Warren Buffett at Omaha's 2.0 Conference?"][/caption]...
1/6/2009
Two conservative intellectuals have recently raised questions about the value of college for most students. While they come from different starting points, they make the same basic point. I find the sources mildly interesting but I think the basic concept is long overdue. Just as high school needs to be reinvented, so does the undergraduate college model.
Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute had a piece in the New York Times about a week ago, which is summarized in these first paragraphs.
Barack Obama has two attractive ideas for improving post-secondary education - expanding the use of community colleges and tuition tax credits - but he needs to hitch them to a broader platform. As president, Mr. Obama should use his bully pulpit to undermine the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification. Here’s a suggested battle cry, to be repeated in every speech on the subject: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”
The residential college leading to a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years works fine for the children of parents who have plenty of money. It works fine for top students from all backgrounds who are drawn toward academics. But most 18-year-olds are not from families with plenty of money, not top students, and not drawn toward academics. They want to learn how to get a satisfying job that also pays well. That almost always means education beyond high school, but it need not mean four years on a campus, nor cost a small fortune. It need not mean getting a bachelor’s degree.
Then yesterday George F. Will had a rambling column in the Washington Post about civil rights court cases that included this nugget:
…many employers, fearing endless litigation about multiple uncertainties, threw up their hands and, to avoid legal liability, threw out intelligence and aptitude tests for potential employees. Instead, they began requiring college degrees as indices of applicants’ satisfactory intelligence and diligence.
This is, of course, just one reason college attendance increased from 5.8 million in 1970 to 17.5 million in 2005. But it probably had a, well, disparate impact by making employment more difficult for minorities. O’Keefe and Vedder write:
“Qualified minorities who performed well on an intelligence or aptitude test and would have been offered a job directly 30 or 40 years ago are now compelled to attend a college or university for four years and incur significant costs. For some young people from poorer families, those costs are out of reach.”
Indeed, by turning college degrees into indispensable credentials for many of society’s better jobs, this series of events increased demand for degrees and, O’Keefe and Vedder say, contributed to “an environment of aggressive tuition increases.” Furthermore they reasonably wonder whether this supposed civil rights victory, which erected barriers between high school graduates and high-paying jobs, has exacerbated the widening income disparities between high school and college graduates.
Maybe this rings true to me because it matches my own experience. I never liked school with its emphasis on memorization, and was bored to tears as a college freshman when I dropped out. By the time I went back years later and got a BA, I was able to test out of about two years worth of courses. By then I had started a couple of small businesses, edited and published two newspapers, been a broadcast engineer, managed a radio station, done a lot of political activism, and had many other jobs. None of these required me to have a college degree at the time.
However, I don’t accept Murray’s thesis that this is primarily Obama’s responsibility - everyone under the sun is trying to pile more work on his desk. Instead it should be the basis of a public conversation involving universities, think tanks, unions, and other interested parties.
What do others think?
1/6/2009
1/6/2009
Technology push or technology pull: it’s an age-old question. In his new book, The Venturesome Economy, Columbia University’s Amar Bhide comes down squarely in favor of the technology pull view. The real source of America’s innovative edge is not simply in great universities, research intensive companies, government sponsored innovation efforts, or tech-savvy venture capitalists and Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial companies, but in something much more basic - a large body of “venturesome” consumers ready, willing, and able to try new things. Sometimes I call them the creative class 
Having lived and worked in the technology push world of Washington D.C., this book should be required reading for members of the incoming Obama administration’s economics and science and technology policy teams. The Financial Times has a nice review. A power-point summary is here.