I had the privilege of attending a ribbon cutting event at Saint Paul College in St. Paul, Minnesota last Wednesday. Saint Paul College, a member of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, is a community and technical college that provides career and transfer education opportunities for more than 6,000 students annually. The Sun Center of Excellence just opened will focus on Java development, open technologies and virtual worlds for these students.

Even though Saint Paul is a two year college they have created what must be one of the first degrees in virtual world technology. They call it Metaverse. They define Metaverse as emerging reality or computer gaming simulation programming and multimedia animation skills, all intersecting to create 3D virtual worlds. They created two degree programs around Metaverse including Application Development and Application Design.

The one hour long ceremony was filled with speakers including recent college grads. It was great for the college to demo their product. (Which I'll write about in a future entry.)

This innovative school and program really demonstrated  noted business management teacher and thinker/ writer Peter Drucker's ideas in his book "Management Challenges for the 21st Century" (pages 150 to 152)
"... Any country can, at fairly low-cost, train a substantial number of high knowledge people. India for instance, despite her poverty, has been training fairly large numbers of first-rate physicians and first-rate computer programmers. But only in educating technologists can the developed countries still have a meaningful competitive edge - and for some time to come."

"The United States is the only country that has actually developed this advantage through its unique system of community colleges. The community college was actually designed beginning in the 1920s to educate technologists who both needed theoretical knowledge and manual skill."

"On this I'm convinced rests both the still huge productivity advantage of the American economy and the so far unique American ability to create, almost overnight, new and different industries. Nothing quite like the American community college exists anywhere else so far. Increasing knowledge worker productivity and subsequently increasing the productivity of the technologists, therefore deserves to be given high priority."

My experience at St. Paul College was testimony to Drucker's observations about the innovation and future that comes from Community colleges.  I'll say some more about about Minnesota, their MNSCU system, the PSOE and my experience Curling (It's harder than it looks!).