The slides ask repeatedly, “Did you know…” and then fill in an answer or analogy. “Did you know… If you’re one in a million in China there are 1,300 people just like you?

That in 2002 Nintendo invested more than $140 million in research but U.S. Government spent less than half as much on Education?

That there are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month. To whom were these questions addressed B.G. (Before Google)?”

I noticed these and similar points in several conference presentations last year. At first I wrote it off as coincidence, then I became curious and recently discovered the source is Karl Fisch, a teacher in Arapaho Basin, CO who prepared a deck PowerPoint slides for a school faculty meeting in early 2006, intending to “start a conversation.” Did he ever. The result shows how deeply his ideas resonate and is an untended lesson in viral marketing.

This background story describes how Dr. Fisch’s slides came to be, have gone viral (”more than 2,000,000 served”) and been posted on YouTube and elsewhere hundreds of times. Click here to view the Flash version (to music from Last of the Mohicans) that juxtaposes a string of disturbing yet ultimately motivating facts about our world, how and what we teach, and the not to distant future.