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Still, and this may be true for many decades to come, most college and university classrooms are designed for teacher presentation; the shape of the room, the acoustical design, control of lighting, lack of sufficient technology in the room, the furniture, security, window treatment, and so on, the space itself screams lecture. Likewise, parent and incoming student expectations have the force of centuries of fixed models about what teaching and learning are supposed to be. Such cultural memes (like physical genes), so ingrained, change ever so slowly.

It is unfortunate that in the 21st century many schools have deemed adolescent socialization among each other or with their teachers as inappropriate. This is the pervasive outlook despite the fact that educators are fully aware that 1) A healthy part of adolescent development includes socialization and 2) Research from those like the National School Board Association indicate that most students use social media to discuss educational topics and other studies (like this one from the CCSE) indicate students who are using social media to discuss schoolwork perform better.

This 10-week course for non-science majors focuses on a single problem: assessing the risk of human-caused climate change. The story ranges from physics to chemistry, biology, geology, fluid mechanics, and quantum mechanics, to economics and social sciences. The class will consider evidence from the distant past and projections into the distant future, keeping the human time scale of the next several centuries as the bottom line. The lectures follow a textbook, "Global Warming, Understanding the Forecast," written for the course. For information about the textbook, interactive models, and more, visit: http://forecast.uchicago.edu/

The Perfect Storm for Classroom Technology With Google, Apple, and Amazon all lining up in the to own a piece of the tablet market, it’s beginning to look like the perfect storm for classroom technology could hit in 2012. Tablets alone should be in the possession of at least 20% of incoming college freshmen, and a big majority will own smartphones. This adds up to a big shift in learning from a centripetal, aggregation model towards one that is centrifugal and distributed. That means evolving pedagogy, new tools, and new requirements for content consumption.

“single best idea for reforming K-12 education”.

Root cause: factory model of management

The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy.

In contrast to all this is the general sentiment among many teachers that "we need more PD!", or the always-amusing "How can they expect us to learn new things if all we get is a few PD days a year?"

That model is no longer sustainable and the days of PD as something that is done "to you" by "experts" a couple of times a year are over.

Learning needs to be ongoing. The world is changing. There are new tools that can help students learn, new ideas about learning, new brain research, new emerging technologies, new social structures, and so on