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Now, with study becoming a lifelong enterprise, and with the advent of a galaxy of new media, “learning” seems once again poised to become all things to all people, be they lay or scholarly.

learning that do not occur automatically, readily, naturally, or by dint of simply living in a certain place at a certain time

we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before

HOW TO CREATE A ONE-MINUTE LECTURE Professors spend a lot of time crafting hourlong lectures. The prospect of boiling them down to 60 seconds — or even five minutes — may seem daunting. David Penrose, a course designer for SunGard Higher Education who developed San Juan College's microlectures, suggests that it can be done in five steps: 1. List the key concepts you are trying to convey in the 60-minute lecture. That series of phrases will form the core of your microlecture. 2. Write a 15 to 30-second introduction and conclusion. They will provide context for your key concepts. 3. Record these three elements using a microphone and Web camera. (The college information-technology department can provide advice and facilities.) If you want to produce an audio-only lecture, no Webcam is necessary. The finished product should be 60 seconds to three minutes long. 4. Design an assignment to follow the lecture that will direct students to readings or activities that allow them to explore the key concepts. Combined with a written assignment, that should allow students to learn the material. 5. Upload the video and assignment to your course-management software.   http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 55, Issue 26, Page A13

Virtual 3-D Healthcare Learning Environments

The author provides a critical overview of three-dimensional (3-D) virtual worlds and “serious gaming” that are currently being developed and used in healthcare professional education and medicine.

Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations Theory

The Firefox add-on that brings Twitter results to your traditional search pages

Have a click on the image just here on the right and once it's bigged itself up, you'll notice it's a Google search page with five Twitter results at the top. That's because some clever soul over on MT-Hacks has created code for the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox which offers a degree of real-time search on Google. Very neat indeed.

Head over to MT-Hacks to get the Twitter search add-on for your browser and see what you make of it.

Tests involving children as young as three months suggest biological differences and not social pressures dictate which toys children like to play with. The U.S. study looked at babies aged three to eight months - before they can identify even the gender of other people.

Researchers placed a doll and truck inside a puppet-theatre style box and showed them to 30 children - 17 boys and 13 girls - for two ten-second intervals.The findings, from researchers at Texas A&M University, overturn conventional wisdom that children's toy preferences are down to social conditioning.

For the study, led by Gerianne Alexander, researchers set up a presentation box similar to a puppet theatre and placed a doll and truck inside.

Story HighlightsChristensen, Horn: Federal spending on schools is set to jumpThey say it would be a big mistake to use money to let failing schools resist changeCo-authors: Federal money should go to innovators challenging traditional waysThey say technology should be used to create new forms of schooling

The most likely result of this stimulus will be to give our schools the luxury of affording not to change.

Fourth, direct more funds for research and development to create student-centric learning software. Just a fraction of 1 percent of the $600 billion in K-12 spending from all levels currently goes toward R&D. The federal government should reallocate funds so we can begin to understand not just what learning opportunities work best on average but also what works for whom and under what circumstance. It is vital to fund learning software that captures data about the student and the efficacy of different approaches so we can connect these dots.

New media demand new literacies. Because of inexpensive, easy-to-use, widely distributed new media tools, being literate now means being able to read and write a number of new media forms, including sound, graphics, and moving images in addition to text.

New media coalesce into a collage. Being literate also means being able to integrate emerging new media forms into a single narrative or "media collage," such as a Web page, blog, or digital story.

New media are largely participatory, social media. Digital literacy requires that students have command of the media collage within the context of a social Web, often referred to as Web 2.0. The social Web provides venues for individual and collaborative narrative construction and publication through blogs and such services as MySpace, Google Docs, and YouTube. As student participation goes public, the pressure to produce high-quality work increases.

This means that youth will produce new thought tools to help them cope with increasing chaos and ambiguity in the modern world.

This means that youth will counter the tyranny of traditional perceptions of clock time through their personal time constructs, including conceptualizations of history, the present and future that can be strategically compressed and stretched.

This means that youth gravitate toward the acquisition of new information, rather than shying away from it; and that the abundance of information will be valued as a socioeconomic resource.

The new classroom is about information, but not just information. It’s also about collaboration, about changing roles of student and teacher, and about challenges to the very idea of traditional authority. It may also be about a new cognitive model for learning that relies heavily on what has come to be called “multitasking.”

Instructional design faculty are frequently criticized for delivering information about innovative new pedagogical methods to their students in the form of traditional lectures - for talking the talk but failing to walk the walk.

On the other hand, the course is a massively multiplayer role-playing game in which students select a character class, develop specialized expertise, complete a series of individual quests, join a Guild, and work with members of their Guild to accomplish quests requiring a greater breadth of skills than any one student can develop during the course.

Despite the impressive work of Constance, JSB, and others, to the best of my knowledge no one has ever designed and implemented a university course as a massively multiplayer role-playing game. In addition to helping students gain a working knowledge of the field of open education (i.e., knowledge they can actually put to work), this course is a design experiment exploring the effectiveness of running a university course as a massively multiplayer role-playing game.

If we want students to become citizens who understand their role as a citizen then we need to teach them to understand and respect the power of questions.

Without the freedom and courage to ask that paradigm shifting question then progress and innovation would cease to exist and we would become slaves to our past and out-dated solutions.

The power of just one word can totally change the meaning of something as intrinsic as national identity.

In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.