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Successful technology integration only produces amplified results when in its integration agency is given to the learner, when it becomes a tool to help learners learn, not teachers teach.

I would also like to add that that old belief about teaching and learning has been around for a very long time now and part of that belief, the part about the teacher possessing the knowledge and imparting it to kids, is in direct threat when faced with technology. A teacher who has been taught to believe that they are needed for the knowledge they have and that that knowledge gives them authority in the classroom is threatened by technology. That threat needs to be approached lightly. If one speaks the truth too harshly the faithful will simply label them a blasphemer and ignore the truth in their message.

et me start by saying that I consider teaching among the most important professions on earth, but just as doctors need to be current on medical technology, teachers MUST be current on information and communication technologies. Those are the tools of the trade.

For example, when babies born to native-English-speaking parents played three times a week during that window with a native-Mandarin-speaking tutor, at 12 months, they had progressed in their ability to recognize both English and Mandarin sounds, rather than starting to retrench in the non-native language. By contrast, children exposed only to audio or video recordings of native speakers showed no change in their language trajectory. Brain-imaging of the same children backed up the results of test-based measures of language specialization.

The research may not immediately translate into a new language arts curriculum, but it has already deepened the evidence for something most educators believe instinctively: Social engagement, particularly with speakers of multiple languages, is critical to language learning.

“The key to that series of studies is exposure and live interactions with native speakers,” Ms. Lebedeva said. “The interactions need to be naturalistic: eye contact, gestures, exaggerated phonemes.”

The larger printed books became, the more they needed to offer guidance through their own texts. The tables of contents and alphabetical indexes developed by printers and authors to accompany them are still recognizable today.

More effective to modern eyes, though not as widespread, were tables of contents that outlined layers of subdivisions with successive indentations, as a PowerPoint slide might today (but without the bullet points).

These slips were cut from a full page and soon glued onto a new sheet, but in the mid-17th century for the first time one scholar advocated using the slips themselves as an information-storage system.

A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.

People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.

Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.

Digital and networked production vastly increase three kinds of freedom: freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly. This  perforce increases the freedom of anyone to say anything at any time. This freedom has led to an explosion in novel content, much of it mediocre, but freedom is like that.  Critically, this expansion of freedom has not undermined any of the absolute advantages of expertise; the virtues of mastery remain as they were. What has happened is that the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline. Experts the world over have been shocked to discover that they were consulted not as a direct result of their expertise, but often as a secondary effect — the apparatus of credentialing made finding experts easier than finding amateurs, even when the amateurs knew the same things as the experts.

This improved ability to find both content and people is one of the core virtues of our age. Gorman insists that he was able to find “…the recorded knowledge and information I wanted  [about Goya] in seconds.” This is obviously an impossibility for most of the population; if you wanted detailed printed information on Goya and worked in any environment other than a library, it would take you hours at least. This scholars-eye view is the key to Gorman’s lament: so long as scholars are content with their culture, the inability of most people to enjoy similar access is not even a consideration.

In a world where copies have become cost-free, people who expend their resources to prevent access or sharing are forgoing the principal advantages of the new tools, and this dilemma is common to every institution modeled on the scarcity and fragility of physical copies. Academic libraries, which in earlier days provided a service, have outsourced themselves as bouncers to publishers like Reed-Elsevier; their principal job, in the digital realm, is to prevent interested readers from gaining access to scholarly material.

let me say another word or two about our friend, the student who thinks he can read Romeo and Juliet in 10 minutes. It seems to me that he has a lot in common with educational policy makers who think that the experience of reading the book can be reduced to a small number of items on a standardized test. Both have an instrumental understanding of reading and learning which sees learning as a product and has not respect for the process of really engaging deeply with the literary experience. In many ways, the student's attitude is a byproduct of the current structure of education as much as it is a byproduct of the instant gratification promised by digital culture. As someone who has been involved in the last year with a project which seeks to model ways we can teach Moby-Dick in contemporary schools, I can tell you the resistance we've gotten from some teachers comes at both levels. Yes, some teachers don't think their students have the attention span to deal with a novel of this length and complexity but many more simply say that they don't think they have time to teach a novel of such richness if they are going to stay on track and review all of the content they are supposed to cover under the new national standards. Both push back against a depth of experience and the student may simply trying to act efficiently to give the teachers what they want on the test. As someone who loves literature, both sides of this equation break my heart.

what the gamers are doing in the Korean Bong is better described as intense concentration, entering a state of flow, rather than multitasking per se. A growing body of work has stressed the kinds of active problem solving which surrounds the play of certain kinds of games, the collaboration which occurs through certain forms of participatory culture, etc. as other ways of engaging with the online world. To me, there's something reductive about continuing to return to issues of multitasking when depicting Katie Salen's game school for example. Katie's approach is not about turning students lose on the computer; it is about teaching them to look at the world as a complex system and developing skills as designers. In my White Paper for MacArthur, I identify multitasking as a skill -- but I don't mean by this what young people think they are doing when they talk about multitasking. I mean the ability to manage attention -- sometimes concentrating on a single text or problem, sometimes scanning the environment to form a hazier understanding of the bigger picture, much as a driver needs to keep their eyes on the road in front of them but also needs to scan the rear view mirror. I think schools have a role to play in helping young people sharpen their understanding of which mode of engagement is appropriate for different tasks and contexts.

The goal shouldn't be to decide if computers are good or bad. Our goal should be to identify what a more constructive relationship to this technology might look like and to insure that those skills and practices get transmitted to a broader segment of the population.

While used textbooks are obviously less costly, they often carry another benefit new textbooks don't: highlights, underscores and other annotations by their previous owners. Even though the author of, and rationale for, the annotations may be unknown, the fact that somebody found particular sections of the book important enough to emphasize tends to make the eye linger. Ideally, annotations can make learning and knowledge discovery feel less like a solitary pursuit and more like a collaborative effort.

At first glance, it would seem that the trustworthiness of an unknown individual who has interpreted or appended an author's work would be questionable, but several reasonable assumptions can be made that contribute to the perceived authority of an unknown annotator. At the very least, they read the work and took the time to make the annotations, which may question or clarify certain statements in the text, and create links to other works, authors or ideas. The subsequent reader of an annotated work then has one or more additional perspectives from which to evaluate the usefulness of the text and annotations, and more implied permission to add his or her own interpretations than in an unannotated text. Published scholarly works are objects for discussion in an ongoing conversation among a community of knowledge seekers, and whether via formal citation in later publications or annotations in existing ones, all are designed to advance the generation and exchange of ideas.

Most critically, knowledge discovery and transfer is no longer restricted to a model of one expert creator to many consumers. In Web 2.0, consumers are creators, who can add their voices to both expert and non-expert claims. Users get the benefit of multiple perspectives and can evaluate claims in the best tradition of participative, critical inquiry.