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The site is effectively bilingual, thanks to machine translations, and volunteer editors spruce up the translations afterward. Machine translation is quite good, Weyman says, on fairly standard text such as news stories, but still has difficulties handling comments, which tend to use more conversational language. The site also open-sources all its translation data to help the state of the art of translation to move forward.

“let someone in Nebraska see an event through the eyes of someone in Nablus.”

For instance, Meedan partnered with the United States Institute of Peace, which hosted an online webcast with U.S. Ambassador Christoper Hill last Wednesday. The webcast allowed Iraqis and others from the Middle East to ask questions in Arabic, have them translated immediately and get answers back in just seconds.

communities will become the world’s classrooms. Learning geographies will diversify as some communities become learning deserts barren of learning resources, while others become oases teeming with dynamic learning ecosystems.

These new dimensions of learning geographies will require new core skills. Among them will be navigating new visual cartographies, identifying learning resources in previously unexpected places, leveraging networks to take advantage of learning opportunities, and creating flexible educational infrastructures that can make use of dispersed community resources.

We might talk about the ways that voice-over narrators carry much greater weight in our response to documentaries than the subjects they are drawing upon

We might talk about conversion narratives such as the way Rushkoff deploys his own shifts in thinking to add greater credibility to his current position in the classic "once was lost but now am found" tradition of religious witnessing.

We might talk about notions of juxtaposition -- the ways that each positive claim is followed by a critical perspective, while for the most part, people who are more sympathetic to new media practices are not allowed to interject or challenge claims made in the more critical segments.

As someone who taught at MIT for 20 years, I scarcely recognized the place depicted on the documentary -- I certainly would have no trouble creating a documentary which arrived at the exact opposite conclusion about what was going on when those students used their computers in the classroom.

Critics of new media are allowed to make unqualified statements, while advocates are shown to be more equivocating. The result of such practices over time has served to polarize the conversation -- so we are either for or against digital media, it is either good or bad, rather than allowing a meaningful discussion of its potentials and risks, its benefits and problems, which might allow for us over time to find common ground and act meaningfully in response to a situation none of us fully understand.

I am struck by how consistently the documentary connects new media practices to hot button issues within the demographic which is most apt to watch PBS -- framing digital media in opposition to books, say, or linking it to the military or to corporations.

You had a chance to do so much more than this -- creating a context where serious thinkers with a range of different perspectives can talk through their differences and try to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of a complex situation. I believe the website did this. I believe an online conversation may do this. I don't think the documentary does. What does this tell us about television as a vehicle for serious reflection? What does this suggest about the value of the kinds of social spaces for open ended inquiry and discussion digital media at its best can provide? For example, what does it suggest about the need of television to compress for time and the potential of the web to offer unlimited material?

It is nonsensical to make a judgement about whether the web is good or bad. The web is. How do we use it in a way which maximizes the benefits and lowers the risks?

Mobile device management Wireless application distribution (iTunes sync not required)

According to Duncan, the great sin these colleges have committed in the past few decades is that they have focused too much on theory and not enough on clinical practice; and by theory he means critical pedagogy, or those theories that enable prospective teachers to situate school knowledges, practices and modes of governance within wider critical, historical, social, cultural, economic and political contexts. Duncan wants such colleges to focus on practical methods in order to prepare teachers for an outcome-based education system, which is code for pedagogical methods that are as anti-intellectual as they are politically conservative.

Rather than provide the best means for confronting "difficult truths about the inequality of America's political economy," such a pedagogy produces the swindle of "blaming inequalities on individuals and groups with low test scores."[7] This is a pedagogy that sabotages any attempt at self-reflection and quality education, all the while providing an excuse for producing moral comas and a flight from responsibility.

Duncan's insistence on banishing theory from teacher education programs in favor of promoting narrowly defined skills and practices foreshadows the preparation of teachers as a subaltern class who believe that the purpose of education is only to train students to compete successfully in a global economy. This model of teaching being celebrated here is one in which teachers are constructed as clerks and technicians who have no need for a public vision in which to imagine the democratic role and social responsibility that schools, teachers or pedagogy might assume for the world and future they offer to young people.

Duncan then goes on to praise Louisiana as a model for building longitudinal data systems that track the impact of new teachers on student achievement. For Duncan, Louisiana represents a beacon for how schools should be redefined, largely as sites of management and data collection, and advances the notion that teachers should be trained to operate proficiently in such sites.

the overuse of harsh discipline disproportionately affects some Louisiana school children over others. African American students make up 44% of the statewide public school population, but 68% of suspensions and 72.5% of expulsions. And in school districts with a larger percentage of African American and low-income students, there are higher rates of suspension and expulsion. These districts tend to have fewer resources for positive interventions.

Duncan's collusion with the growing corporatization and militarizing of public schools, along with the increased use of harsh disciplinary modes of punishment, surveillance, control and containment, especially in schools inhabited largely by poor minorities of color, reveals his unwillingness to address the degree to which many schools are dominated by a politics of fear, containment and authoritarianism, even as he advances reform as a civil rights issue.[12] Schools are not merely places where potential workers learn the marketable skills and abilities necessary to secure a decent job, they are also, as Martha C. Nussbaum pointed out, key institutions of the public good and are "crucial to both the health of democracy and to the creation of a decent world culture and a robust type of global citizenship."[13]

The diverse range of political, economic, racial and social forces that influence all aspects of schooling need to be critically engaged and rearticulated in the interest of justice, human development, freedom and equal opportunity. These are not merely political issues, they are also pedagogical concerns and the former cannot be separated from the latter, just as equity cannot be separated from matters of excellence. Defining schools exclusively in terms of mathematical coordinates and statistical formulas suggests that Duncan has no language for addressing schools as sites or teachers as engaged intellectuals that mediate, accommodate, reproduce and sometimes challenge the diverse and often anti-democratic forces that bear down on them.

What does it mean to ignore the increasing corporatization, privatization and militarization of schools at a time when all aspects of public life are under siege by corporate and market-driven forces? How can schools fulfill their democratic mission when they are shaped by a social order characterized by massive inequalities in wealth and power?

you write something really important, sign over your rights to a for-profit publisher and then that publisher charges YOUR university (and potentially other subscribers; individual or organizational) a fee to carry that journal. In other words, you are giving your knowledge to a company so they can sell it back to your university

Hypertext is the (not so) new endnote/footnote.

Most print journals STILL cannot handle color graphics. With incredible advances in data visualization technology, there must be a move to publishing to the Web directly.

As a result of her use of various forms of social media, Ravitch has (amazingly) positioned herself as the leading voice of the counter-narrative to the dominant educational policy agenda.

motivated by sharing with others, a blog allows scholars to disseminate content and express opinions to larger audiences than more traditional outlets. Second, needing room for creativity and self-reflection, the blog is a tool for practicing writing and for keeping up-to-date and remembering; it is a space to house early articulations of one’s ideas. Finally, valuing connections, the participants used their blogs for interacting and creating relationships with others.

A recent post about charter schools on Dr. Baker's blog includes 25 comments which, together, comprise a great argument between Bruce, Stuart Buck and Kevin Welner. That conversation happened "in public," not at some exclusive conference or behind some paywall. How can you read that conversation and not recognize the value of blogs as spaces for scholarly communication?

there is a real need for content-area experts who can serve as curators.

One could certainly argue that content curation is not a new kind of authorship. Editing books or journals is about content curation and has traditionally "counted" as authorship for tenure and promotion purposes. However, at the risk of sounding repetitive, our tools for content creation are new.

Social bookmarking tools are also incredibly simple to use and ideal for curating content. Diigo and Delicious are the two most widely adopted free social bookmarking services. Users can "bookmark" sites, aggregate them using tags, and then share their collections publicly.

unlike content curation in a print medium, that collection is dynamic (I can add or delete at any time) and interactive (visitors can comment on any of the items in the collection and start a conversation of sorts). I believe this to be a truly modern and increasingly important form of scholarly activity. 

There are other forms of modern scholarly activity that are well-worth considering, including webinars and podcasting.

Gideon Burton, Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University, who writes: I don't want to be complicit in sustaining a knowledge economy that rewards its participants when they invest in burying and restricting knowledge. This is why Open Access is more than a new model for scholarly publishing, it is the only ethical move available to scholars who take their own work seriously enough to believe its value lies in how well it engages many publics and not just a few peers (para. 7).

At the start of each session, Mr. Campbell gave the 11 students a strange kind of pop quiz. For one thing, it was anonymous, so no grades were given. And rather than ask questions about the content of the homework, he asked students to detail how much time and effort they spent preparing for class. Among the questions: Did you talk to a classmate about the assignment? And how many hours did you spend on the reading?

The scores started low—between 4 and 5, meaning the students did far less than the assigned homework. Something happened as the term progressed, though, as students bought into the concept

"The commenting and linking are crucial," he says, "as those activities are essential parts of being in the real blogosphere."

If the core activity at college shifts away from the classroom and into practical activities, do students even need to come to a campus?

"There is definitely a broader array of options available to students who wish to forgo the commute to class altogether in exchange for online classes that essentially provide the same content that professors regurgitate to students in lecture."

Egyptian secret police can purchase Western technology that allows them to eavesdrop on the Skype calls of dissidents,

Western politicians have proposed new tools for examining Web traffic and changes in the basic architecture of the Internet to simplify surveillance. What they fail to see is that such measures can also affect the fate of dissidents in places like China and Iran. Likewise, how European politicians handle online anonymity will influence the policies of sites like Facebook, which, in turn, will affect the political behavior of those who use social media in the Middle East.

“The idea that you could put up open content at all was risky 10 years ago, and we decided to be very conservative,” he said. “Now the question is how do you move into something that is more interactive and collaborative, and we will see lots and lots of models over the next four or five years.”

role-playing games

enabling learners to “experience” historical events or places instead of reading off a page.

visual representations

of data

One recurring theme in the presentations was the need for “linked open data” — types of research data that are tagged and stored in such a way that they can integrate with other research.

If one researcher had architectural data about New York City, and another had demographic data about the city, and each were able to cross-reference the other’s data with her own, it would deepen the context and understanding for both.

With linked open data on the rise, the same could soon happen with research data

“Linked open data is a very technical infrastructure, but the result of that is information that’s shared widely for free. A lot of scholarly data over the last hundred years or so is locked up in expensive journals that the public could never afford to subscribe to.

That could be the key to winning back support for the humanities