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One of the astonishing results of our iPad 1:1 deployment has been the dramatic decline in the use of the Mac. Within less than two years, I am the only teacher still using the Mac on a regular basis. This was never part of the plan and I didn't expect that it would happen so soon. I thought it might happen eventually - perhaps in 3-4 years, certainly after one more refresh of our Mac setup. Today, it quite seriously looks like we won't buy more than a handful of Macs again. We’re not cutting our teaching to fit what the iPad can do either - we have never done more with ICT, with better outcomes and deeper learning than we are doing now with iPads in everyone's hands.

academia is just scratching the surface about the implications of social networking and what exactly it is, what it means, and how it happens

scholarly speculation

"Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?"

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households.

little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.

But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.

By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

Fifty years ago, 10 of the 50 "top" colleges mandated a Western Civ course, while students at 31 of them could choose a "Western Civilization" course from among a group of courses that would fulfill general education requirements. The situation is different today, according to the report. None of those "top 50" colleges and only one of the 75 public universities, the University of South Carolina, mandates one semester of "Western Civ." The association did not count Columbia University and Colgate University as offering the traditional "Western Civ" course, even though those institutions require two-semester courses on Western thought, because those courses include non-Western texts. Sixteen of the "Top 50" list Western Civ among several choices for a general education curriculum, as do 44 of the 75 large public institutions.

The "traditional Western Civ course," he said, was especially well suited for the student population of the 1960s. But he said today's student body is radically different and might not be as interested in such courses. He also attributed the change to an increasing specialization among professors, which affects how well they can teach broad survey courses and how much they enjoy doing so.

Whereas many colleges in the 1960s had standard core curriculums, more and more universities have moved to a model where students select from a broad range of courses in thematic areas.

How the brain makes memories: Rhythmically!

"Our work suggests that some problems with learning and memory are caused by synapses not being tuned to the right frequency."

"To our surprise, we found that beyond the optimal frequency, synaptic strengthening actually declined as the frequencies got higher."

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,”

But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.

There’s a sort of proletarian parochialism to be found in Berlin

the parochial attitude of many western Berliners towards eastern Berlin