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MITx will be coupled with an MIT-wide research initiative into online learning that will study ways in which students, whether on campus or part of a virtual community, learn most effectively. To the degree that MITx demonstrates highly effective online learning tools from which campus-based students might benefit, such as self-paced online exercises, those tools will become part of the experience of MIT students. These tools will enable campus faculty to automate some of the more repetitive and less creative tasks, such as grading, thereby liberating more time to devote to innovative ways of teaching the material and to additional contact time with resident students.

As MOOCs cast their eye to the developing world, very minor tweaks matter a great deal, such as the ability to allow students to download, rather than only stream course videos. But even more major ones are coming, including edX’s plans to start open-sourcing its platform in the next few months, which could allow even more universities to post online courses, and software programmers around the world to experiment with customized interfaces.

“We need to make sure we are making tools that make it easy to create new content, so it’s not only someone at MIT or Stanford who creates.” Relevance, as he notes, is one of the biggest motivators for students.

One of the major challenges for MOOCs—which so far mostly come from U.S. universities—is to tailor the content of courses to a diverse worldwide audience with any number of combinations of language, educational, motivational, and cultural backgrounds. Critics fear the rise of big box education from only a few elite institutions in Western nations, and worry these may not fit the different learning styles in different nations.

What new opportunities do you see for apps in the developing world? Nobody focuses on the problem of creating apps for somebody whose monthly income is $200. Those people are not part of the computer age or the Internet age; most of them are not literate. So we run app competitions in India to try to get people thinking from that perspective. The winner of our last competition was a group of students who designed a commerce app for “fruit walas,” the guys who run around with carts selling fruits and vegetables. These students created a graphically intuitive way of running a small vegetable business. There are something like five million fruit walas in India, so if you had an app for them, there could be a lot of money to be made.

A pair of MIT Media Lab alums have come up with a do-it-yourself kit for making smart environments. David Carr and John Kestner, partners in the industrial design firm Supermechanical, have developed a small, durable, inexpensive remote sensor node, and an easy-to-use web app that turns data from the sensor node into timely information. The system, dubbed Twine, lets you tie everyday objects into your digital life.

Twine is a palm-size block of rubber that contains a WiFi node, temperature sensor and accelerometer. It’s powered by two AAA batteries or a mini USB connection. And it has a port where external sensors can connect. The initial external sensors are a magnetic switch, moisture sensor and a breakout board for building your own sensor. Supermechanical is also considering an RFID reader, pressure sensor and current sensor.

Dog, a new programming language, could make it easier and more intuitive to write all sorts of social applications—anything from peer-to-peer question-and-answer sites to online dating. And because Dog incorporates natural language, this may make it easier for newbies to learn to code, too.

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.

LEGOs and Lincoln Logs are for Luddites. Sifteo cubes are the new building blocks. Each cube has a 128-pixel color LCD screen, wireless connectivity, a 32-bit ARM microprocessor, and an accelerometer that responds to tilting and stacking. You can arrange them to create everything from vocabulary puzzles to building challenges, all of which can be enjoyed by as many people as you can crowd around the coffee table.

Sifteo founders Jeevan Kalanithi and David Merrill previewed the cubes at TED 2009 when they were grad students at MIT. The cubes debuted at CES this year. The design marries classic tactility with new hardware and software. “Sifteo cubes are the first gaming solution to deliver truly hands-on play,” Merrill said. “[The cubes combine] the latest in embedded computing and sensing technology with a timeless play style.”