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Meeting the intellectual and creative challenges of the 21st century demands using every ounce of creativity available. That means building and sustaining a creative environment for yourself, your employees and your family. As a knowledge worker, you need time to think. To innovate. To experience. To create. And you can’t do it in offices designed for a bygone era, loaded with stress, distractions and interruptions. The same goes for neighborhoods. That’s why environment is more important than ever, on all fronts.

"Thinking is now distributed," he said, "across minds, tools and media, groups of people, and space and time." It is important, he shared, for people to be fluent in new technologies and literacies because more and more jobs are disappearing that require classical knowledge.

Web 2.0, Dede noted, is "centered around Web-based communities, where the central theme is to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing." It is an environment where knowledge is gained through bottom-up, individual methods, rather than top-down, traditional forms. "Web 2.0," he said, "is a major paradigm shift in the way people think."

In a world where learners are being shaped by the things they do outside of the classroom, he said, how do we prepare students for careers that do not exist yet and that will be driven by these very same methods of learning?

Creativity develops the capacity to imagine the world differently. We all need an ability not just to cope with change, but also to positively thrive on it and engineer it for ourselves.  Therefore, young people need the tools to conceptualise how the world could be different and the inner confidence and motivation to make it happen.  They need to be able to take risks and fail confidently. To do this young people need to enjoy learning, know how to seek out relevant information, apply knowledge and skills in new and imaginative ways and try out ideas in real world situations where they can observe real outcomes and receive generative critical feedback.

Students achieve better test scores and attendance rates at the six smaller Baltimore City high schools where teachers have greater control over lessons and principals have more freedom when hiring staff, a new study shows.

Congress considers additional funding for research and development work focused on applying technology to improve education.

Over 350 innovative projects have been funded through this initiative, which focuses on improving teaching and learning in schools in the areas of science, technology and mathematics.

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it.

Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize -- much less cultivate -- the talents of many brilliant people. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says.