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"In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and, above all, to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world."

I'm going to keep gushing about Glitch some more, and not only because it allows me to finallyt play in the band with Jim and Brian and others. First, try this drum machine, then, have a look at the code, and then, realize that you could clone it and make your own in about as long as it took me to type these words. Upload it to GitHub and share with your friends. Making apps is becoming as simple as making websites was in the 1990s. It took a bit for the idea to catch on, but when it did... (p.s. remember the 'blink' tag and Geocities websites? This home page might be the 21st century equivalent.) Text copied from Stephen Downes OLDaily

Shifting Minds is a made-in-Canada vision and framework for 21st century education that all Canadians should aspire to offer to their learners.

It is tempting to make predictions of the skills that our students will need beyond their time at school. Such wondering can be a useful guide as we contemplate what we shall focus on with our curriculum. Unsurprisingly, there is no shortage of predictions for future skillsets published by educators, economists and analysts. What might we learn from such lists, and how should education systems respond?

"Have you ever considered letting your students listen to hardcore punk while they take their mid-term exam? Decided to do away with Power Point presentations during your lectures? Urged your students to memorize more in order to remember more? If the answer is no, you may want to rethink your notions of psychology and its place in the learning environment. Here are 35 critical thinking strategies, straight from the mind of Sigmund Freud."

"As academic standards shift, technology evolves, and student habits change, schools are being forced to consider new ways of framing curriculum and engaging students in the classroom, and project-based learning is among the most successful and powerful of these possibilities. Of course, content knowledge matters. It's hard to be creative with ideas you don't understand. Academics and their 'content'-organized in the form of 'content areas' like literature, math, and science-are timeless indexes of the way we have come to understand the world around us through stories, patterns, numbers, measurements, and empirical data. The idea here, though, is that we (i.e., the field of public education) have become distracted with academics. Knowledge is only useful insofar as students tend to use that knowledge as they grow into adults that live through doing so. Studying philosophy or physics or poetry but not living through them-that's the difference between knowledge and academics."