The Community College Business....

I attended a conference at Scottsdale Community College last Friday (see the liveblogs below)-- Tech Tools '10. Wow! The keynote speaker really got my mind buzzing! She is Maria H. Andersen, math faculty at Muskegon Community College in Michigan. Check her out if you have time -- she is FASCINATING: http://teachingcollegemath.com/. She talked about community colleges and "what we do" for a living. She questioned the sustainability of training for re-careering and how the two year model may not be effective anymore. She used the example of the Newspaper industry and how it has been cut in half....or even more than half because the jobs just don't exist anymore. Soooo.....at the community colleges, are we training them for careers that will eventually go away? Yikes! She made a great point that we need to futuristically look at our higher education model. We need to create 'thinkers' -- not people to do jobs. Creating thinkers is more sustainable --right? She talked about restructuring curriculum so that we don't teach in silos. Instead of teaching Math, Reading, English & History, we teach things like Effective Presentations of Graphical material -- a hybrid of Math & Graphic Design OR Trend Analysis -- a hybrid of history, economics & math. See where I'm going here? The idea is to produce creative and innovative critical thinkers -- and they will never become obsolete! Your thoughts?