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Harvard and MIT's project to offer online learning to massive numbers of people around the world

The Virtual Assessment Project: Harvard Graduate School of Education -

a full featured web site creation package solely for the academic community. Scholars create web sites in seconds and can easily manage everything for themselves, for free.

The EcoMUVE project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is a recently funded project of the United States Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The goal of EcoMUVE is to develop a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)-based ecosystems science curriculum for middle school, and to conduct feasibility studies on the practicality, integration, and acceptance of the MUVE-based curriculum for student engagement and learning in classroom settings. MUVEs enable multiple participants to access virtual worlds simultaneously, interacting with other students and with computer-based agents to facilitate collaborative learning activities of various types.

Research shows that students have difficulty achieving deep understanding of many fundamental science concepts, for instance, the nature of matter, pressure, density, and electrical circuits to name but a few. After students have presumably learned the scientific explanations, they often revert back to their initial explanations. The Understandings of Consequence Project has demonstrated that part of the problem arises from differences in how students and scientists think about cause and effect. Scientific explanations often require students to structure knowledge in ways that contradict their expectations about the nature of how causes and effects behave. Such explanations can involve: causal mechanisms that are inferred or abstract; causal patterns that extend beyond linear and unidirectional to cyclic, reciprocal, and non-sequential; correspondences between causes and effects that are in various respects probabilistic; and causal agents that are decentralized and involve aspects of emergence. These are ways of thinking that students typically are not familiar with. Thus students attempt to assimilate information about complex concepts into simplistic causal structures which ultimately distort the information. In order to achieve deep understanding of scientific explanations, students need to learn the levels of these dimensions that fit the level of explanation needed. We have developed a taxonomy of causal models to guide these teaching and learning efforts. We have also developed a taxonomy of epistemological "moves", such as comparing more than one model and being alert to possible gaps in one's explanation, that serve scientific inquiry and lead to more complex conceptions.

Fast Company's article (Sept 1, 2009) on EduPunk and its affects on Higher Education

a rather comprehensive list of all the movies with math in them