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Gmail Meter is an Apps Script which runs on the first day of every month and sends you an email containing different statistics about your Inbox. In a similar way to how recently introduced Google Account Activity gives key stats about how you’ve used your Google Account, Gmail Meter gives you different types of statistics that will help you analyze your Gmail habits.

In the schools, too, there is no reward for helping others (indeed, it is heavily penalized). Suppose educational achievement was measured at least partially according to how much (and how well) you helped others. The value of the achievement would increase if the person is a stranger (and conversely, decrease to zero if it's just a small clique helping each other) and would be in proportion to the timeliness and utility of the assistance (both of which can be measured).

Suppose instead students were rewarded for cooperation. Not collaboration; this is just the school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations. Cooperation, which is a common and ad hoc creation of interactions and exchanges for mutual value.  Cooperative behaviours include exchanges of goods and services, agreement on open standards and protocols, sharing of resources in common (and open) pools, and similar behaviours. Imagine receiving academic credit for contributing well-received resources into open source repositories, whether as software, art, photography, or educational resources. Imagine receiving credit for long-lasting additions to Wikipedia or similar online resources (we would have to fix Wikipedia, as it is now run by a gang of thugs known as 'Wikipedia editors'). We can have wide-ranging and nuanced evaluations of such contributions, not simple grades, but something based on how the content contributed is used and reused across the net (this would have the interesting result that your assessment could continue to go up over time).

There is, again, no reason why public service cannot be incorporated into individual assessment. Adding value to fire and police services by means of monitoring and reporting (not the piece-work model of something like CrimeStoppers, but actual prevention), supporting environment by counting birds, sampling water, servicing sports events by acting as a timer or umpire - all these can add to a person's assessment. I'm not thinking of the simple sort of tasks grade school students can perform. Indeed, a person hoping to attain a higher level qualification would need to contribute to the public good in a substantial and tangible way. Offering open online courses (that are well-subscribed and positively reviewed by the community) should be a requirement for any graduate-level recognition. The PhD used to be about offering a unique research contribution to the field; now it's about paying tuition and being exploited as a TA. These three things - helping others, being cooperative, contributing to the public good - are obviously not easy to assess. To be sure, it's far easier to ask students simple questions and grade the number of correct responses. But assessing students in this way, far from measuring putative 'content knowledge', is really an exercise in counting without any real interest in what is being counted. It acts as an invitation to cheat, as it places self-interest ahead of the values it is actually trying to measure.

Times are changing. Kathy Sierra features a timeline on her blog which suggests that the 1970s and 80s were about how well we could learn, the 1990s and 2000s focused on how fast and how much we could learn, whilst today's education should be based on how much we can unlearn. And, she says, learning to let go of old and out of date rules is one of the skills we all need to develop. Futurologist Jack Uldrich is applying the same principle to the medical profession, arguing that the key to unlearning is to come to the realisation that 'we are all in a fog', and can't clearly see the future. Unlearning will be a strategy for coping with rapid change and uncertainties, he argues.

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Typical instructional design and pedagogy focus on breaking down a subject into component parts, gaining mastery of those parts, whether they are steps in a process or techniques or parts of the anatomy, and then reassembling them in the learner's mind and in practice so that the result is overall mastery of the broader subject. That may be oversimplified, but this basic approach goes back to Aristotle, at least. It's not debated in education, it's assumed that this is the best approach for learning anything, including complex processes or highly nuanced behaviors in shifting contexts.

Centola's conclusions. He studied positive changes in people's behaviors regarding health care, changes that resulted directly from placing subjects in carefully designed social networks with the goal of improving their health decisions. What he concluded was that smaller, tighter social groups had more success improving health behaviors than larger, looser social groups (ie, the typical Facebook connections). Maybe you already see what it took me a while to notice. Both of them had success. Social networks designed for a specific purpose can do something pretty amazing: They can change people's behaviors. Any educator or trainer whose goal is actually to impact both thinking and behaviors (to change lives!) rather than just getting people to pass a test or check a box, should be paying close attention. And maybe getting a little excited.Researchers in education have long known the power of social groups to alter behavior. Brown, Collins, and Duguid made this case a while back

these three went on to say that highly complex behaviors are picked up, absorbed, through relatively informal social exchange more quickly than they could be if they were "taught" in the usual break-it-down sense. We're talking about complex behaviors. Processes. Highly nuanced interpersonal interactions. Centola's study suggests to me that we now have an online tool, the social network, that is fully capable of carrying the power of culture to shape behaviors and establish norms. And it can be done on purpose.

Today, Google launched a new community on YouTube for Google Docs users to share tips and ideas for using Google Docs in education and other arenas. The community features how-to videos created by Google and by Google Docs users just like you. The video playlists cover everything from the very basics through advanced features of spreadsheets in Google Docs.

Stay connected, even when you are “hands-busy” Dragon Dictation is an easy-to-use voice recognition application powered by Dragon NaturallySpeaking that allows you easily to speak and see your text or email messages on your iPad™, iPhone™ or iPod touch™ instantly. In fact, it’s up to five (5) times faster than typing on the keyboard. With Dragon Dictation, you can text or email your friends, update your Facebook status, send notes and reminders to yourself, or tweet to the world, all using your voice.

Google () announced Wednesday morning that it has begun rolling out mobile editing for Google Docs (). The update isn’t yet available for everyone, but it should be available to all over the next few days.To date, only Google Docs spreadsheets have supported mobile editing. When the the update hits, all Google Docs documents will be editable on devices running Android () 2.2 (and higher) and iOS 3.0+.We’ve not been able to test it out yet, but Google has released a little video — as seen above — showcasing the new mobile editing capabilities of Google Docs.

Scrolling Long Lists Another big problem with iPhone web apps is presenting very long lists efficiently. Digg has this problem with their stories and comments and they work around it by breaking stories into pages of ten and omitting all but the top five comments. Apple solves this problem nicely in their Mail app by loading 25 messages at a time and putting a link to get more at the end. Clicking it loads those messages and appends them to the end of the list, allowing you to use the joyous flick gesture to scroll the complete list at once. In my view, this is nicer than breaking the list up into separate pages. iUI makes it easy for you to use this convention in your own web apps. Simply create a link with target="_replace" and iUI will load the URL it and replace the <a> with the contents of the URL. Again, the URL should not point to a complete HTML document, but only the fragment you want to replace the "Get More" link with. For an example of incrementally loaded lists, look at the Digg demo again. Scroll to the bottom of the stories list and click on the "Get 10 More Stories..." link.

While Angry Birds is still the top paid iPhone game, a game written by an eighth-grader has spent the last few days atop Apple's free charts.

Some months back, a friend suggested that if Nay liked his iPod touch so much, perhaps he should try his hand at programming for it. At first he tried the standard Objective-C programming tools, but found the learning curve a little steep. He tried another tool called GameSalad, but didn't like the results. In the end, he settled on the Corona tools from Ansca Mobile. Corona was easy to use, he said, and also let him write once and publish for both Apple and Android devices.