Saturday, September 28, 2013

Governor Snyder to proclaim October STEM Awareness Month (Update: Michigan STEM Partnership)

Gov. Rick Snyder to visit SVSU to proclaim October STEM Awareness Month

Gov. Rick Snyder

KOCHVILLE TOWNSHIP, MI — Gov. Rick Snyder will visit Saginaw Valley State University Friday Oct. 4 to promote science, technology, engineering and math education and jobs in Michigan.

The governor will formally name October STEM Awareness Month in Michigan at the Igniting STEM Excellence Summit at SVSU.

The summit is 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Friday. Registration is required.

Other speakers include John Calabrese, vice president of global vehicle engineering for General Motors Co.

There is a projected shortfall of nearly 274,000 STEM professionals by 2018 in Michigan, according to the Michigan STEM Partnership, a public-private, business and education collaboration focused on addressing STEM needs.

The demand for STEM-educated professionals is high while the supply is low, the partnership states.

“Not only do we need to make students aware of the significance of STEM, we need to keep students interested in STEM throughout their schooling,” said Barbara Bolin, the partnership's executive director. “Out of every 100 students in ninth grade, only six graduate college in a STEM field. This is perhaps the single greatest threat to our economic competitiveness in the global market, but one that we can and must overcome.”

Michigan STEM Partnership, nonprofit organizations, universities and employers are hosting events such as the “STEM & Me Contest” for students to show how they are making STEM education part of their lives.

Friday, September 27, 2013

Common Core (Update: Legislation)

State House advances Common Core standards for schools

By Lori Higgins Detroit Free Press Education Writer

The Michigan House easily approved a resolution Thursday that allows the state to move forward with implementing the controversial Common Core State Standards, but the future of an exam that would assess those standards remains iffy.

The resolution passed on an 85-21 vote. It now moves to the Senate.

Missing from the final version was language added earlier in the day that would have required lawmakers, the governor, the state schools superintendent, local superintendents, principals and members of school boards to take state exams. It required the results to be published in the news media.

The language was added during a morning meeting of the House Education Committee. It was removed on the House floor, said Ari Adler, spokesman for House Speaker Jase Bolger, R-Marshall.

“Requiring thousands of adults to take this test would have had a significant cost, and we believe the money would be better spent on educating children,” Adler said in an e-mail.

Further, he said, requiring the news media to print the results “would likely be considered unconstitutional.”

The resolution vote capped months of debate about the standards, a set of expectations of what students should learn in English language arts and math that will prepare them for college or work. The State Board of Education adopted them in 2010 — making Michigan among 45 states that have adopted the standards.

The standards are backed by a wide range of groups and individuals in Michigan, who argue that the standards are rigorous, will prepare students for life after high school and will help them compete internationally. But critics question the overall rigor of the standards and say it takes local decisions about standards out of the hands of teachers and parents.

Lawmakers earlier this year barred the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) from spending any money to continue implementation of the Common Core or the Smarter Balanced Assessment, an exam that the MDE is planning to move to in the next two years that would be based on the core standards. The resolution approved Thursday would allow MDE to begin spending money on the standards and test if the Senate also approves it.

The resolution to move forward with the Common Core standards came after a summer in which a subcommittee chaired by Rep. Tim Kelly, R-Saginaw Township, heard 17 hours of testimony about the standards. “I think we addressed most if not all concerns as far as what can and cannot be done with Common Core,” Kelly said.

The resolution came with conditions — such as allowing local districts to opt out of adopting the standards. Michigan also must be able to add or remove standards as it sees fit, the standards can’t dictate curriculum and local districts must be able to maintain control over curriculum, textbooks, education materials and instructional methods.

A key condition, though, is one requiring the MDE and the State Board of Education to issue a report to the Legislature by Dec. 1 that includes a review of all available student assessment tools, information about how they would be used, and how much they would cost to implement. That could set the stage for the state to back out of its membership in a consortium of nearly two dozen states that have signed on to administer the Smarter Balanced Assessment.

Lawmakers on the committee expressed strong misgivings about the test.

“There’s a lot of red flags” with the exam, Kelly said. “We’re looking for alternatives.”

Contact Lori Higgins: 313-222-6651, lhiggins@freepress.com or via

Twitter @LoriAHiggins

Thomas Highers hugs attorney Gabi Silver after the judge said that he and his brother, Raymond, were cleared of murder charges and free to leave.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

FEMA Think Tank Session @ Oak Ridge: Cultivating Innovation in the White Spaces - LIVE - 1:00 - 2:30pm

When is the next FEMA Think Tank Session?

The next FEMA Think Tank Session is Wednesday, September 25 from 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm Eastern Time (10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Pacific Time) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Date: Wednesday, September 25

Time: 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time (10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Pacific Time)

Location: Zach Wamp Auditorium of the New Hope Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Call in Number: 1-800-776-0853

Passcode: 1576066

Captioning: At the start of the event, please click here for access to live captioning.

We encourage you to Tweet during the call using #femathinktank.

The September 25 Think Tank session will focus on how to cultivate innovation in the “white spaces” of emergency management.

The white space can be defined as the space between the boxes in an organization chart—mostly unoccupied territory where rules are vague, authority is fuzzy, budgets are nonexistent, and strategy is unclear. This is often where innovative activities that help reinvent and renew an organization most often take place.

During the call, panelists will share their stories about how they cultivated innovation in the white spaces of their organizations. Participants in the room and on the phone will have an opportunity to share their stories and comment on others.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Live - Time Higher Ed Summit - Reinvention & Research

LIVE STREAM: TIME Summit on Higher Education

By TIME StaffSept. 19, 2013Add a Comment

Leaders in education, government, philanthropy and business gather to discuss the future of the American university. Watch it here live: Sept. 19, 7-9pm and Sept. 20, 8am-4:30pm. See the detailed live stream schedule and session descriptions below. (You can find the full agenda and briefing materials here

The TIME Summit on Higher Education, September 19 and 20, 2013, Time Warner Center, New York City

Co-Sponsored by The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Thursday, September 19

7:00 PM DINNER AND KEYNOTE CONVERSATION

WELCOME
Nancy Gibbs, Deputy Managing Editor, TIME

KEYNOTE
Are we losing the knowledge wars?
Fareed Zakaria, Host, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS; Editor-at-Large, TIME; Columnist, The Washington Post
KEYNOTE PANEL
The knowledge wars and the role of the research university
Norm Augustine, Retired Chairman and CEO, Lockheed Martin Corp.
The Hon. Mitch Daniels, President, Purdue University; Former Governor, State of Indiana; Director, OMB under President George W. Bush
The Hon. John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology; Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Co-chair, President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
The Hon. Condoleezza Rice, 66th U.S. Secretary of State; Professor and Former Provost, Stanford University; Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy, Hoover Institution
Moderator: Fareed Zakaria

9:15 PM PROGRAM CLOSE
Nancy Gibbs, TIME

Friday, September 20th

8:00 AM WELCOME
Ralph Cicerone, President, National Academy of Sciences; Chair, National Research Council
Introduction: Nancy Gibbs, Deputy Managing Editor, TIME

8:05 AM ONE ON TWO
James Duderstadt, President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering, University of Michigan
Charles “Chad” Holliday, Chairman, Bank of America
Authors, National Research Council Report: Research Universities and the Future of America
Interviewer: Judy Woodruff, Co-anchor and Managing Editor, PBS NewsHour

8:30 AM PANEL 1: Basic and Applied Research
Major challenges, new needs, and recommendations
Robert Birgeneau, Chancellor Emeritus, Professor of Physics, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley
Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, Institute for Advanced Study
Susan Hockfield, President Emerita and Professor of Neuroscience, MIT
Robert Tjian, President, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Harold Varmus, Director, National Cancer Institute; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Former Co-chair, President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
Moderator: Subra Suresh, President, Carnegie Mellon University; Former Director, National Science Foundation

9:10 AM PANEL 2: The Cost of Excellence
Can research universities continue to afford the highest quality in research and in teaching?
The Hon. David Boren, President, University of Oklahoma; Former Senator and Governor, State of Oklahoma
Michael McPherson, President, Spencer Foundation; President Emeritus, Macalester College; Economist
Don Randel, Chair, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; President Emeritus, University of Chicago and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
David Skorton, President, Cornell University
Shirley Tilghman, President Emerita, Professor of Molecular Biology, Princeton University
Moderator: The Hon. Thomas Kean, President Emeritus, Drew University; Former Governor, State of New Jersey; Chair, Board of Trustees, Carnegie Corporation of New York

9:50 AM BREAK

10:10 AM ONE ON ONE
Gen. Colin Powell, 65th U.S. Secretary of State; Former Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
Interviewer: Joe Klein, Political Columnist, TIME

10:30 AM PANEL 3: The View From Outside Academe
The impact of basic research on national security, global competitiveness, and training the next generation of scientists and thought leaders
Eli Broad, Founder, The Broad Foundations
The Hon. Mary Fallin, Governor, State of Oklahoma
The Hon. James Hunt, Former Governor, State of North Carolina
Maj. Gen. Gregg Martin, President, National Defense University
Gen. Colin Powell
Roy Vagelos, Chairman, Regeneron; Former Chairman and CEO, Merck & Co., Inc.
Moderator: Amy Gutmann, President, University of Pennsylvania

11:10 AM ONE ON THREE: Governance
There is enormous pressure for change on the part of higher education. Boards want to change more rapidly; faculty members don’t want them to change at all. What is the current state of board/regent university governance and the future of shared governance? How effective is it? How might it be improved? Should a university be run more like a business?
Henry Rosovsky, Dean Emeritus, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Geyser University Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
John Sexton, President, New York University
Mark Yudof, President Emeritus, University of California; Former Chancellor, University of Texas System; Former President, University of Minnesota
Moderator: Lawrence Bacow, President Emeritus, Tufts University

11:40 AM BREAK

12:30 PM LUNCH DISCUSSION

REPORT BACK FROM CONCURRENT PANEL DISCUSSIONS
John DeGioia
Peter McPherson
Hunter Rawlings III
Moderator: Rana Foroohar, Assistant Managing Editor, TIME

KEYNOTE SPEECH, INTERVIEW, AND Q&A
The Hon. Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education
Interviewer: Jon Meacham, Contributor, TIME; Executive Editor, Random House; Pulitzer Prize–winning Author, American Lion

2:15-3:00 PM PANEL 4: Reinvention
Is the modern American university able to change? How can it be transformed to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of the 21st century?
Jonathan Cole, John Mitchell Mason Professor, Former Provost and Dean of Faculties, Columbia University; Author, The Great American University
Michael Crow, President, Arizona State University
Mark Kamlet, Provost and Executive Vice President, Carnegie Mellon University
Steven Mintz, Executive Director, Institute for Transformational Learning, University of Texas System; Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin
Scott Stern, School of Management Distinguished Professor and Chair, Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management Group, Sloan School of Management, MIT
Moderator: Nick Lemann, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Dean Emeritus and Professor of Journalism, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

3:00 PM BREAK

3:45 PM REPORT BACK AND WRAP UP
Rapporteur: Arthur Levine, President, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; Former President and Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

4:00 PM KEYNOTE
Michael Bloomberg, Mayor, City of New York

4:20 PM CLOSING REMARKS
Vartan Gregorian, President, Carnegie Corporation of New York
Introduction: Nancy Gibbs, TIME

4:30 PM PROGRAM CLOSE

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Global STEMx Conference 2013 (Update: LIVE Today! See You On-line)

A message from Steve Hargadon to all members of Presenters - 2013 STEMx Conference on Global STEMx Education Conference!

Dear Presenters!

I'm almost done building all the session presentation rooms for the conference. Within a few hours I will be sending you the special links that you will use to enter your individual session rooms with all privileges.

The public links to your rooms are almost all now listed in the scheduling calendar. Those rooms will go live in about 30 minutes. However, the links in the calendar are for the regular participants, so if you enter using a public link, you will not be able to upload slides or practice. Be patient and you'll get the special links very soon.

We're so excited for the conference, and so glad you are presenting!

Best,

Steve

Steve Hargadon
Co-Chair

Special Report on State of Michigan Teacher Preparation (Update: Center of Michigan Bridge Magazine)

Special report/Talent & education

Michigan fails students with poor teacher prep

19 September 2013

by Ron French
Bridge Magazine

Julie Western looks through a stack of resumes for teacher openings at Croswell-Lexington school district. (Photo by Ron French)

Julie Western slaps a stack of resumes on the desk of Superintendent Kevin Miller. Croswell-Lexington, a rural school district in the thumb, posted a single teacher opening on their website. A week later, they’re swamped with 147 applications.

All of the applicants were graduates of college education programs. All had been student teachers. All had passed at least one – and many more than one – exam that certified they were qualified to be a teacher.

But which applicants were really qualified? How could Western and Miller tell?

These same questions get asked every summer across Michigan, by administrators looking to slow the revolving door of teacher resignations and re-hirings, by legislators looking for ways to boost test scores, and by parents just wanting to know why their child can’t read.

“You can give me a bunch of 4.0’s (straight-A college students) and it won’t tell me if they can teach,” Miller said. “Some … ( should) work in a factory and not have an impact on others.”

Michigan is failing its children by failing its beginning teachers, from colleges allowing academically iffy students into education programs, to state certification tests that don’t weed out poorly prepared teacher candidates, to schools where nearly half of educators quit in frustration within five years.

“If this were happening with doctors or airplane pilots, there’d be a revolt,” said Deborah Ball, dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan. “I don’t think the public is alarmed enough.”

This fall, Bridge Magazine will explore the challenges faced by Michigan as it tries to improve an education system that, compared to other states and other countries, is floundering. A Bridge investigation found that problems start early, including:

Teacher prep programs that routinely accept students with high school grade point averages below 3.0 and ACT scores lower than that of students in other majors.

“Wild variability” in the quality of university teacher programs, with parts of several programs shut down by the state because of poor performance.

Certification exams so easy that the pass rates are similar to cosmetology. And the few teacher candidates who do fail? They can take the exam over and over until they pass.

A state-mandated student teaching requirement of just 12 weeks, while the same state government demands plumbers apprentice for three years.

One in eight Michigan teachers have one year or less experience in the classroom, and one in five have less than three years of experience, about the time studies show they are becoming fully competent at their jobs.

“We don’t have a teacher problem, we have a systemic problem,” said Nancy Flanagan, a retired teacher in Hartland and a former Michigan teacher of the year. “We’re going about this all wrong.”

Citizens want teacher prep reform

Michigan residents instinctively understand that the best way to improve student achievement is to improve the skills of the people standing in front of classrooms. In the largest effort ever to collect and analyze public opinion on K-12 education in Michigan, the Center for Michigan found that two of the most popular reforms involved teachers. Among more than 5,000 participants in community conversations across the state, 88 percent considered “strong support for teachers” to be crucial or important; 79 percent supported “improving teacher preparation.”

At the heart of those reform notions are 101,000 public school teachers – one in 100 Michigan residents and one in 36 women between the ages of 22 and 65 – who often shoulder the bulk of public blame for students’ lackluster academic achievement.

Tough times in the classroom

U.S. children score lower on standardized tests than students in many developed countries. The U.S. ranks 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, behind countries such as Slovenia and Poland.

One of the main differences between high-achieving countries and the U.S.: a higher level of difficulty in becoming a teacher.

Within the United States, Michigan students are, at best, average. Take your pick of data:

Education Week ranked Michigan’s k-12 education system 24th
U.S. News & World Report tabs Michigan 28th in the percent of schools earning gold and silver status in the magazine’s annual school rankings
Michigan is 23rd in high school graduation rate and 36th in percent of adults with a college diploma.
Michigan kids are 39th in 4th-grade math and 30th in 8th –grade reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam.

Those numbers didn’t matter as much in past generations when Michigan was known for its low-education, high-wage jobs in the auto industry. But today, those same statistics raise uncomfortable questions: How well are Michigan students prepared for a world where a good education is virtually a prerequisite to enter the middle class?

“People like to blame teachers but bad teachers are probably 5 percent or fewer,” said State Schools Superintendent Mike Flanagan. “It’s rarely the teacher, it’s the system around them.

If a new teacher is not as prepared as she should be, it’s not her fault if the teacher prep institution didn’t do a good job. That’s a system fix. If you’re in a school district, and the district automatically puts the first-year teacher with the toughest kids, that’s a system thing. You’ve just increased the chances the teacher will fail and the kids won’t move.”

Good teachers make a difference

Studies show that factors outside of school actually play a larger role in student test scores than teachers.

But those same studies show that from the time a child steps off a school bus to the time the final bell rings, nothing has a bigger influence inside a school than the quality of the teacher.

The difference in learning in a classroom led by a good teacher and a bad teacher is sobering. A 2003 study found that a student at the 50th percentile of his peers entering a classroom with a highly effective teacher could end the school year scoring at the 96th percentile; in an ineffective teacher’s classroom, the child could leave scoring at the 37th percentile.

Despite the state’s imperative to improve student learning, there’s been little concerted effort to change the way we build our teachers’ skills. In fact, the colleges that train them, the state that certifies them, and the schools that hire them don’t even have a good sense of what a highly effective teacher looks like, said Amber Arellano, executive director of Education Trust Midwest and a former teacher.

“A teacher, especially early in their career, needs models of what great (teaching) looks like,” Arellano said. “It’s not like the medical profession, where you go from the Detroit Medical Center to Henry Ford (Medical Center) and the standards and expectations would be the same, with protocols that had been developed over decades to serve patients well.”

State could do more

“Other states are showing great gains … by investing in teachers,” Arellano said. “It’s not about pouring money into it — it’s about building more supports and systems, and building capacities of local schools to do that.”

No one wants to be operated on by an under-trained surgeon. Why would we put the future of our kids in the hands of an under-trained teacher, if we have the ability to improve that training?

“When you think about how important that role (of a teacher) is in lives, it’s kind of scary,” Arellano said. “Teaching is a lever for societal transformation. It’s an incredibly important role. But we don’t treat it that way.”

Senior Writer Ron French joined Bridge in 2011 after having won more than 40 national and state journalism awards since he joined the Detroit News in 1995. French has a long track record of uncovering emerging issues and changing the public policy debate through his work. In 2006, he foretold the coming crisis in the auto industry in a special report detailing how worker health-care costs threatened to bankrupt General Motors.

Techonomy Conference 2013 (Update: More Questions then Answers)

How can tech boom benefit Detroiters?

At this week’s Techonomy conference in Detroit, I led a panel discussion on a provocative question: Would the technology boom now enlivening downtown and Midtown do much, if anything, for Detroit’s neighborhoods?

Put another way, will the new digital entrepreneurs filling up the greater downtown area transfer their skills and expertise to the hundreds of thousands of mostly poor residents of the city? Or are we just creating an elite cadre of mostly young, white specialists downtown? If so, that would just worsen our digital divide, the gulf between middle-class comfort with smart phones and tablets and the virtual absence of smart technology in many of the city’s homes.

Clearly, the need is great. As my fellow panelists — such as Catherine Kelly, publisher of the Michigan Citizen, and Brandon Jessup, CEO of the Michigan Forward public policy consultancy — said, the sort of tech-savvy folks who made up Techonomy’s audience this week contrasted sharply with tech-deprived residents living just a mile or so away from the Wayne State campus where we met.

But we came to no clear conclusion on how to solve the problem, or even what the problem was. Does getting technology into the neighborhoods mean getting tablet devices and smartphones into the hands of all schoolchildren? Or does it mean fitting out Detroit with the latest wireless connectivity (at a great cost, no doubt)?

As Matt Clayson, director of the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, pointed out, sometimes cell phone reception is pretty bad along Detroit’s riverfront. Cell phone operators don’t want to locate cell towers near the international border for fear of serving nonpayers in Canada. So in some places along the river, either there is poor connection or you pay roaming charges for using a Windsor-based cell tower.

We agreed that technology must mean more than just smartphones. Brian Mulloy, a web and software entrepreneur who recently moved back to his hometown of Detroit from the Silicon Valley, is a leader in the maker movement. With other enthusiasts, he tries to create hubs of maker technology — 3-D printers and the like — so that ordinary citizens can create their own tools and technology in the neighborhoods.

Such maker technology can be extremely cheap or cost millions of dollars, depending on the level of sophistication. For Detroit’s burgeoning urban farming movement, the simplest maker hubs can offer a low-cost way to obtain many of the tools that community gardeners need, from digging implements to chicken coops.

The role of education came up throughout the daylong Techonomy conference on Tuesday. Can companies sponsor internships and in-school programs to give students the tech skills they need to get jobs after graduation? Clearly, there’s greater need for that sort of thing, as one statistic offered at Techonomy indicated: Only about 15% of graduates from four-year U.S. colleges get tech jobs, compared to more than 40% in some nations overseas.

Perhaps Detroit’s fastest gain from new investment in technology would simply mean wiring city government so citizens could interact with their government online. Detroit’s city hall is notoriously inefficient when it comes to paying tax bills and the like. Maybe something as simple as getting the latest smart tech into city hall — and training workers to use it — could deliver the most immediate results.

If we reached no firm conclusions, we did agree Detroit’s tech boom has a long way to go before it benefits everybody, rich and poor alike.

It called to mind a remark made by a British economic development official a couple years ago during a visit I made to Manchester, England. Manchester, too, was trying to upgrade its tech profile, including wiring the entire city for 4G technology so that entrepreneurs could connect to the world. Using a quaint British expression, the official told me that if Manchester failed to achieve that goal of total tech connectivity, “we’re stuffed.”

Likewise Detroit.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freerpess.com . Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.com .

JOHN GALLAGHER REIMAGINING DETROIT

Techonomy Conference 2013 (Update)

TECHONOMY DETROIT

Gov tells crowd the city is on its way back already

Snyder says he pitches Detroit as a good investment; Gilbert presses for a focus on razing blighted buildings

By John Gallagher and JC Reindl Detroit Free Press Business Writers

In a day filled with ideas about how technology can boost Detroit’s fortunes, Gov. Rick Snyder and others promoted the city as the nation’s next tech hot spot Tuesday at the annual Techonomy conference.

Back from his third economic development trip to China, Snyder told the annual Techonomy conference in Detroit how he pitched the Chinese on the benefits of investing in the state and city.

One of his selling point: Detroit’s assets are a bargain now, but are poised to rise.

“There’s a huge investment opportunity in terms of large-scale investment,” Snyder told moderator David Kirkpatrick and an audience of several hundred at Wayne State University. Techonomy, held in Detroit for the second straight year, focuses on the role of new technology in job creation and urban revitalization.

“That was part of my pitch to them regarding Detroit. Detroit is the value place in the United States, in Michigan, and potentially the world in terms of a great value opportunity,” Snyder said. “Come in and invest now, because there’s going to be a great upside.”

Snyder returned Friday from his 10-day mission to China and Japan. It was the governor’s third trip to Asia since taking office. He did not offer any specifics on potential deals with the Chinese, or where their areas of interest in Detroit and the state could be.

Snyder said the Chinese asked many questions about Detroit’s bankruptcy. He said he explained that the city’s bankruptcy filing this summer was not about a new problem, but rather a chance to fix 60 years of accumulated problems.

“Often people will say, ‘Well, after the bankruptcy is the city going to come back?’ ” the governor told an audience of more than 500. “That’s back wards. The comeback has already been going on outside of municipal government, outside of the public sector. It’s already been going on in the private sector — you have (Quicken Loans founder and chairman) Dan Gilbert here.”

Chinese companies have already invested about $1 billion in Michigan, he said. “That number has grown a lot, and is on a pace to grow quite a bit more.”

Also during Techonomy, Gilbert told the audience that removing an estimated 70,000 blighted buildings from Detroit’s landscape ought to be the community’s No. 1 job.

“Once we can get that done, you’re going to have open pieces of land and you’re going to have, more importantly, open optimism,” Gilbert said.

“I was at the White House a couple weeks ago. We were talking to several secretaries in the cabinet about this very issue,” he continued. “There is money available to do this. It’s just a matter of getting the infrastructure in place and getting ourselves in a position to make it happen.”

In a typical Gilbert idea-spinning suggestion, he said the city could cre ate a reverse tote board as a countdown clock to show how many vacant structures remained to be razed.

Asked how Detroit could sell itself to investors, Gilbert responded, “Detroit sells itself.” He pointed out that when Quicken hired more than 1,000 interns for summer positions this year, the company had 19,000 applications for those jobs.

“Downtown is the heartbeat, and downtown is where there’s a lot of jobs,” he said.

Joining Gilbert in the discussion was Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and author of the new book “Metropolitan Revolution.” Katz suggested that urban agriculture is one productive use for vacant land in Detroit, but only as part of a broader revitalization strategy.

The Techonomy conference featured multiple panel discussions focusing on various aspects on the technological revolution and how it might help Detroit. For more on the conference, go to Techonomy.com .

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173

Gov. Rick Snyder speaks at Techonomy Detroit on Tuesday at Wayne State University. PHOTOS BY KATHLEEN GALLIGAN/DETROIT FREE PRESS

John Covington, left, chancellor of the Education Achievement Authority of Michigan, appears with Hector Ruiz, chairman of Advanced Nanotechnology Solutions.

Quicken Loans founder and chairman Dan Gilbert, right, shows moderator Edward Luce of the Financial Times his Opportunity Detroit T-shirt.