High School For The Next 15 Years
Projections released today by The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education show that the number of high school graduates in the US will peak at 3,340,000 in 2007-08, decline modestly to 3,189,000 in 2013-14, and then rebound to near its 2007 level (3,362,000) in 2021-22.  But underneath those placid national averages will be rapid changes in the geography and ethnicity of graduates.  The number is projected to increase at least 20 percent over the next decade in six states (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Texas, and Utah), and to decline at least 10 percent in eight states (Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, North and South Dakota,  Vermont, and Wyoming).  The number of non-Hispanic white graduates is projected to decline from 1,903,000 in 2007-08 to 1,588,000 in 2021-22. But the number of Hispanic graduates is expected to increase from 465,000 to 780,000, and the number of Asian graduates from 159,000 to 244,000.

NMC Virtual Campus Turns Two
The New Media Consortium’s virtual campus on SecondLife.com turns two years old this month. Boot up your avatar  and drop by to attend events  at an online amphitheatre or share ideas in a virtual teacher’s lounge.  On March 24 at 11 am Pacific time, the NMC is invited to hear Byron Reeves, a professor at Stanford, co-founder of Media X, and research leader at the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center . LIFE is an NSF-funded interdisciplinary collaboration between learning scientists at the University of Washington, Stanford University, SRI International, and other institutions across the country.

Steve Hargadon’s Ode To Web 2.0
Steve Hargadon, host of the EdTech Live podcasts and director of the Open Technologies project at The Consortium for School Networking, raised a lot of dust with a long blog post on March 4 called “Web 2.0 Is The Future of Education.” “I believe that the read/write web, or what we are calling web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press,” he wrote.  “I believe that we cannot even begin to imagine the changes that are going to take place as the two-way nature of the Internet begins to flower.”  Comments are welcome.