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"Have you been gamified yet? Perhaps not a painful as it sounds, gamification is on its way to becoming THE buzzword of 2011. Social media engagement tools such as badges, points, levels, leaderboards, etc are making their way out of hipster apps to every online engagement you can think of. Yes, it all sounds oddly familiar (green stamps, reward cards, etc.) but of course, it's all NEW NEW NEW, with gurus and pundits claiming that gamification will change the way we live and of course, spend money."

SearchTeam is a collaborative search engine. You start your research by creating a SearchSpace on a topic of interest. From within a SearchSpace, you can search the Web, videos, images, books and more. You can find and save only what you want while you are searching and throw away what you don't want or find irrelevant. You can automatically organize what you save, into folders of your choosing. Everything is automatically saved into your personal account, and you can return to your searches any time and continue from where you left before. What makes SearchTeam unique and valuable is that you can do your searches collaboratively with others you trust, such as friends, colleagues and family members. You can invite any set of people you trust to search with you from within a SearchSpace. An invitation is sent via email to those people you invite to join your search. When they enter your SearchSpace, they see exactly what you've found and saved so far. They can comment on or like your findings. They can chat with you from within the SearchSpace, and do further searches relevant to that topic and save more results into the SearchSpace. All changes made by any collaborator are relayed to all other collaborators in real-time, so everyone is instantly in synch with what others are doing. In addition to finding and saving search results, SearchTeam goes further to enable you to enrich your SearchSpace with knowledge that may come from other sources. You can upload documents to a SearchSpace to share your relevant reports / presentations etc. You can also add links to Web resources that you may have received from others via email or social networks. You can even create new posts to share your knowledge on the topic directly inside the SearchSpace. Together, as a team, you can leverage the collective effort to find good quality information, and benefit from the collective knowledge on any topic efficiently. In effect, SearchTeam is traditional Web searching + Wiki-like editi

"Companies who want to know more about prospective employees can learn a lot by checking their Facebook profiles, according to a new study. Jennifer Golbeck and colleagues at the University of Maryland surveyed the public profiles of nearly 300 Facebook users for information about their favourite activities, TV shows, movies, music, books, quotes, and membership in political or other organisations. They also looked at the "About Me" and "blurb" sections. The work did not include status updates or other data that is only available to users' online friends."

"LOOP SCOOPS are short, funny videos to get YOU thinking about the stuff in your life and what this stuff can do to the environment. Each SCOOP tells the story of something you use or see everyday - a juice box, a magazine, an electronic gadget, a glass of juice, a pile of garbage. We hope the videos will get you thinking in new ways and asking new questions, like: What is this made of? Where did it come from? Who made it? What happens when I throw it away? The SCOOPS are also special sneak peaks into a mysterious Top Secret project. We can't tell you much about this project-it's a surprise-but we can tell you that there are a bunch of kids, a mysterious and powerful video game, and a ton of adventure in a magical world.

Schools are snooping on social networking sites, and googling potential candidates before appointing new staff, teachers have been warned. Skip related content RELATED PHOTOS / VIDEOS Social network warning for teachers Enlarge photo RELATED CONTENT Parents 'fail to support schools' Teachers to ballot for strike on pension reform  UK teachers to ballot for strike on pension reform Related Hot Topic: Education Have your say: Education Teachers should be wary of what they post online and check what information is available about them, a fringe meeting at the National Union of Teachers (NUT) conference in Harrogate heard.

"Scott McLeod, in his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, recently reminded us of a line from Mission Impossible, and we must apply that challenge to all of society. "Your assignment, should you choose to accept it" is to take education truly into the 21st century. It is not enough to say that we are already living there. Technically it is the 21st century, but our schools are not there, and our challenge now is to reinvent schools for the 21st century - for the sake of our children, our students and the welfare of our world. Making such a paradigm shift is not easy. After all, when any of us thinks of education, we usually think of what we knew as school - the way it has always been. That is how parents, policy makers, politicians and many students think of school. But we have to make the paradigm shift to 21st century education. So what is 21st century education? It is bold. It breaks the mold. It is flexible, creative, challenging, and complex. It addresses a rapidly changing world filled with fantastic new problems as well as exciting new possibilities. Fortunately, there is a growing body of research supporting an increasing number of 21st century schools. We have living proof, inspiring examples to follow, in schools across the United States. These schools vary, but are united in the fundamentals of 21st century education - see Critical Attributes of 21st Century Education and Multiple Literacies for the 21st Century. Scott McLeod has issued the challenge of creating a plan to get us from "here" to "there"."

"Last week my wife and I told our 13-year-old daughter she could join Facebook. Within a few hours she had accumulated 171 friends, and I felt a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth. I don't mean to be a spoilsport, and I don't think I'm a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that the Web reaches and engages a vast, global audience, that it invites participation and facilitates - up to a point - newsgathering. But before we succumb to digital idolatry, we should consider that innovation often comes at a price. And sometimes I wonder if the price is a piece of ourselves. "

Below is text from Rupert Murdoch's (Chairman and CEO of News Corporation) speech at the G8 Forum in Paris. Education: The Last Frontier

YouTube + Creative Commons = awesome. Starting tomorrow at 9am Pacific time, YouTube will offer the option to license videos with the Creative Commons CC-By-3.0 license, and will introduce new remixing options in YouTube's cloud-based video editor.

"When I was 10 years old I was hitting a digital puck across the screen with a digital paddle playing Pong. My son at age 10 was learning metallurgy and materials management in an online multiplayer game called Runescape! I knew nothing of the game at the time, and he soon showed me how he learned to collect items in the world in order to make new things that he needed to complete quests and gain experience. In particular, he showed me how he needed to collect certain metal ores, take them to a smelter to extract metals, and then take those to a forge to create tools or to a craftsman to make other things. This is one of the reasons that I am still excited about Minecraft."

A neat set of videos from the ABC looking at the Digital World, Mobile and portable devices, New ways to watch TV, Podcasting and Social Media.

"We invite students, teachers, designers, parents, careres, architects, industrial designers, interactive designers, interior designers, gardeners to join in and ideate, design, prototype new possibilities and reinvent the school experience in Australia. This is another ideas@play project."

"We invite students, teachers, designers, parents, careres, architects, industrial designers, interactive designers, interior designers, gardeners to join in and ideate, design, prototype new possibilities and reinvent the school experience in Australia. This is another ideas@play project."

Copyto is a new unique way to bookmark sites by allowing teachers and students to simply select parts of sites they want to have backed up. Like a mix between Diigo or Delicious and Evernote, this site is a great way to clip out pieces of websites, articles, research papers, and more, in order to save it for use later on or to share it out with collegeaues or students. There is also a browser plug-in and a mobile site to access all the links and content on the go. This has a slick interface and easy to use tool.

"Born to Learn is the first animation in a fascinating series aimed to provide easy-access to the exciting new discoveries constantly being made about how humans learn! Narrated by Damian Lewis"

"Being able to solve everyday complex problems through communication and cooporation with others are the skills that students need to learn and practice to prepare for the future. Communicating effectively and efficiently with diverse audiences and solving everyday problems are important in a society that is moving at a rapid pace in a Global Market. The ability to solve everyday complex problems is an important and necessary skill for students today. Problem based learning (PBL) provides a learning environment students require to resolve everyday problems while applying previous and learning new knowledge. Cooperative learning, as a part of PBL, allows students the opportunity to communicate ideas and knowledege. As a teacher it is also important to communicate effectively with students to guide the learning process as well as model how to question and reason through a problem. The web-enhanced 3 part seminar series is designed to review and apply the basics of PBL to allow you to create a PBL unit to use within your own classroom."

"Born to learn is a fun, thought-provoking series of animations that illustrate ground-breaking new discoveries about how humans learn. "

This article reports on a five-year longitudinal study which investigated teachers' use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the classroom. The study, involving five teachers at primary and secondary schools in New South Wales, looked in particular at how ICT was incorporated into the participants' teaching practices over time, and why. The teachers clearly developed their use and understanding of ICT over the five years of the study; however, they did not adopt constructivist styles of practice in their use of ICT, as is often expected of teachers. The teachers largely held to teacher-centred practices, but had nevertheless incorporated ICT into their teaching in ways which reflected knowledge needed for today's society.

"According to a new infographic by Masters in Education, social media may actually help students get better grades. One of the most jaw-dropping figures featured in the image below is that 'heavy' social media users actually got better grades than 'light' social media users. While there is obviously more to this story than this boiled-down infographic, it is both entertaining and informative (just like all infogrpahics, no?)"