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“We all become our own news wire service, breaking stories and events instantly. Did [tweets from inside Wat Pathum] prevent a massacre? Maybe they did. Who knows?” wrote Andrew Spooner, a London-based journalist who waded deep into the Thailand story from afar, tweeting about events from a decidedly pro-Red Shirt perspective.

That partisanship was the ugly side of Twitter’s role in the Thai crisis. While the social networking site did perhaps save lives in a few specific instances, Twitter – and the opportunity it gives to instantly broadcast whatever is on your mind, often from behind a cloak of near-anonymity – also gave Thais and foreigners living here the chance to broadcast vitriolic, often hateful, thoughts to the world, raising the temperature inside this already volatile country and arguably helping nudge the situation toward its violent end.

“More people will die inside Wat Patum unless we get ceasefire to get to hospital across the road,” I added a few minutes later, as my desperation grew. Within minutes, my pleas had indeed been retweeted hundreds, maybe thousands of times, in English, Thai and other languages. They were posted on the websites of Britain’s The Guardian newspaper and other international media. People I knew only through Twitter started calling me to check on our situation. More helpfully, others started calling embassies, hospitals and the Thai government. Eighty minutes later, I was carrying stretchers out to a row of waiting ambulances. “Twitter may just have done this,” was my next update.

what they had learned in school did not prepare them to face the problems of life, think clearly, be creative, or fulfill their civic duties.

So to give high schools the freedom to try new ways of schooling in a democracy, a small band of reformers convinced the best universities to waive their admission requirements and accept graduates from high schools that designed new programs.

Between 1933-1941, thirty high schools in the country and over 300 universities and colleges joined the experiment sponsored by the Progressive Education Association.

the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry. • The study found that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.

the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. • These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.

“What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies’ experience keeps them open,” said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study. “They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It’s another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain.

In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different.

Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.

It has long been academe's dirty little secret that bad instructors and bad assignments create cheating.

"In today's information age, where a body of information in all but the narrowest of fields is beyond anyone's ability to master, why aren't colleges teaching students how to research, organize and evaluate the information that is out there?"

If, however, processing information is the issue, if creative solutions are being sought, if students are being asked to develop new syntheses, then cheating will be much rarer, and much more difficult, technology use will become essential, and learning will be far more relevant.

One of the best examples I have seen of the flex model was in Morgan Hill, California. This is a district south of San Jose where about a third of its students are Hispanic and I believe over a third of its students are on free-and-reduced price lunch. The school is called the Silicon Valley Flex Academy - Grades 6 through 12. As you walk into the school there are a couple of huge open spaces on either side where every student has his/her own office. In this space, each student has his/her own computer. The students are encouraged to decorate their own space with things they like (in the same way an adult might decorate an office at work). There are break out classrooms around the perimeter of the building. Here teachers are getting the data on how the kids are doing. Teachers can pull students into these break-out classrooms in very small groups. The teacher is then able to focus on a student's individual issues. The teacher's job is totally different in this arrangement. The fascinating thing was how much ownership the students have over their learning. They all knew exactly what was expected of them the entire year. They knew exactly how they were doing at any point. Their job was to learn the material. If they could get the work done during the school day there was no homework. So it was up to the individual students to make those decisions.

The teachers I spoke to explained that they had been trained to do lesson planning, lectures to large groups of students and classroom management -- none of which they were now doing. They explained that the adjustment was difficult. Training has not been built into the formal teacher training system for programs like this, and few are really thinking about it at the moment. Now, the teacher is still doing teaching or tutoring when pulling students out into small groups for project-based work, but instead of this being determined by a pacing guide, this is now being determined by where the students are in their learning. What was so interesting was that in this model, teachers were able to do the tutoring and value enrichment work that teachers really like to do but don't always get time to do in a classroom. One of the challenges the teachers mentioned was staying on top of scheduling. How do you keep track when you have students at different places in the curriculum? Those were tough decisions for teachers to make and they were, as you say, learning on the job.

When students own their learning, they feel responsible for it and motivated to do it. What they also appreciated was that the teacher was no longer there to "punish them" or "grade them down". Instead the teacher was there to help them reach their goal. This is much more of an environment built around success and motivation versus failure.

proponents claim, the methods “work,” as represented by higher test scores.   Because, they add, the methods are efficient, meaning you can produce results with brutal economic efficiency and large classes.  And, in ed policy-speak, the systematized, highly structured methodologies are “scaleable,” easily replicated and exported to other schools. 

Anyone intensely “drilled” in facts or simple algorithms will demonstrate superior performance when tested on short-term retention.   The students in programs like that at Williamsburg Collegiate are being trained to give the “right” answers, but they are learning little or nothing.   Other evidence exposes the folly of these practices, as test score gains among younger students are not holding as the same students move into older grades. But the policy response in most places is reflexive, not reflective.   Drill them more and test ‘em again! 

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of this approach to education is that it disregards, often punishes, the qualities that most characterize real learning.  Children are discouraged from expressing a point of view – no time for that and it isn’t on the test.  Creativity is irrelevant.  Children who are sensitive and poetic are devalued, forced into quick, aggressive responses by a drill sergeant teacher.   Critical thinking is not welcome.  Where is the space for empathy and imagination?  What about the child whose unique intelligence is the ability to visualize something beautiful, to see another possible way to solve a problem, to turn a history assignment into a song?

Mr. Gagnon is the lead developer of a software tool called ARIS, or Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling. ARIS lets designers link text, images, video, or audio to a physical location, making the real world into a map of virtual characters and objects that people can navigate with iPhones, iPads, or iPod Touches.

The open-source tool,

The new Web, or Web 2.0, is a two-way medium, based on contribution, creation, and collaboration--often requiring only access to the Web and a browser.

when people ask me the answer to content overload, I tell them (counter-intuitively) that it is to produce more content. Because it is in the act of our becoming a creator that our relationship with content changes, and we become more engaged and more capable at the same time.

Imagine an electronic book that allows you to comment on a sentence, paragraph, or section of the book, and see the comments from other readers... to then actually be in an electronic dialog with those other readers. It's coming.

textbooks, with or without the bundled DVDs, are what Judy Baker, of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, calls “The Hummer of higher education.” Why should we be content with static, rapidly outdated, heavy print textbooks that can cost community college students as much as their tuition, when professors and students can work together to create dynamic, rich-media learning environments instead using free and open source software tools?

As a first time student enrolled in an online course, I am dismayed by the total lack of the instructor's input. She merely feeds us the publisher's materials, has a teaching assistant grade the homework and pulls her tests from the publisher's test bank. I could teach this course, easily, myself.

There is no "teaching" or explanation, just self study. Silly things are graded like participation in discussions, and homework is often graded despite the fact the solutions manuals are all available online for students. Many online courses are taught by for-profit schools whose key motivation is to never fail students and to keep their tuition dollars flowing in. Even traditional schools' online courses are silly. The teacher has no way to know who is taking the exams. Exams are open book. Let's all start calling it the sham that it really is.

I have to say, from my experience as a student in an Ivy League school on the ground I had experiences like that. You can't judge an entire way of teaching and learning from these experiences.I have been teaching graduate school online since 1999. I engage actively with learners one on one, in small groups and in the class. I use meeting technologies as well as the Blackboard discussion. Learners work independently or collaboratively, depending on the assignment. I review and make detailed comments on their writing in assignments that require them to reasearch and draw on multiple scholarly sources. There is typically not one textbook, so "publisher's materials" or "open book exams" are non-existent. Even discussion assignments are submitted in full APA style and require references to the assigned and other scholarly readings. Higher order critical and creative thinking, original analysis, are required.