Stephen Downes

Christian Long summarizes, in a much more accessible form, the list of top 10 stories from last year, as seen by eSchool News. Their point of view is rather different from my own - they highlight, in my view, events rather than trends, appearances rather than underlying reality. Sure, Katrina was a big story (so was the tsunami recovery, but it didn't make the list), but it would have been more approriate to talk about the changing environment and its impact on schools generally. Or "globalization drives U.S. school reform efforts." Globaization isn't a unidimensional thing: sure, it's the weaving of the global information matrix (the red pill) but it's also the increasing corporatization of governance and finance (the blue pill). These are driving school reform in opposite directions.