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as there are many creative ways to cut costs, as well as to free resources that can be used with existing infrastructures.  Schools can utilize cost-effective lease purchase programs for computers, investigate the implementation of a Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) program, or promote the use of a plethora of free Web 2.0 tools.

Schools and classrooms do not, and will not, spiral out of control when we allow teachers the flexibility to take calculated risks to innovate with technology or permit students to learn using social media or their own devices.

One of the most powerful means of professional development is through the use of social media where educators can create their own Personal Learning Network (PLN) based entirely on their unique needs and passions.

Just recently, the French and Belgian authorities cooked up a massive bailout of the French bank Dexia, whose biggest trading partners included, surprise, surprise, Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Here's how the New York Times explained the bailout: To limit damage from Dexia’s collapse, the bailout fashioned by the French and Belgian governments may make these banks and other creditors whole — that is, paid in full for potentially tens of billions of euros they are owed. This would enable Dexia’s creditors and trading partners to avoid losses they might otherwise suffer... When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But that's the reality we live in. When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street. But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.

Control, whether by threats or bribes, amounts to doing things to children rather than working with them. This ultimately frays relationships

The alternative to bribes and threats is to work toward creating a caring community whose members solve problems collaboratively and decide together how they want their classroom to be

grades in particular have been found to have a detrimental effect on creative thinking, long-term retention, interest in learning, and preference for challenging tasks

The Internet is slowly becoming a less anonymous place. YouTube has a new policy encouraging commenters to use their real names, and many news sites have switched to a login system run by Facebook.

News sites that still allow anonymous comments are finding there are legal risks.

But many journalists — even those on the Spokesman-Review staff — aren't so sure a newspaper should go to the mat to protect an anonymous commenter.

Is there a model out there, or an institution/student mix that could effectively utilize MOOCs in such a way as to get around this flaw? It’s hard to tell. Recent articles on Inside Higher Ed have suggested that distance education providers (like the University of Maryland’s University College – UMUC) may opt to certify the MOOCs that come out of these elite schools and bake them into their own online programs. Others suggest that MOOCs could be certified by other schools and embedded in prior learning portfolios.

The fatal flaw that I referred to earlier is pretty apparent:  the very notions of "mass, open" and selectivity just don’t lend themselves to a workable model that benefits both institutions and students. Our higher education system needs MOOCs to provide credentials in order for students to find it worthwhile to invest the effort, yet colleges can’t afford to provide MOOC credentials without sacrificing prestige, giving up control of the quality of the students who take their courses and running the risk of eventually diluting the value of their education brand in the eyes of the labor market.

In other words, as economists tell us, students themselves are an important input to education. The fact that no school uses a lottery system to determine who gets in means that determining who gets in matters a great deal to these schools, because it helps them control quality and head off the adverse effects of unqualified students either dropping out or performing poorly in career positions. For individual institutions, obtaining high quality inputs works to optimize the school’s objective function, which is maximizing prestige.

It used to be that the SAT was distinguished from its competitor the ACT by the fact that the former was seen as measuring aptitude and being effectively un-coachable, while the latter was a gauge of achievement in learning.

At the risk of sounding pejorative, I'd say that I was expecting the test to be a measure of who I was, while some of my fellow students and their parents treated it more as a test of how they could present themselves to admissions officers.  And while I wouldn't suggest that people tend to think of it in these terms, I believe that the latter perception relies on the academically damaging belief that an individual student's capabilities need not matter to what goals he sets for himself.  That perception leads people to believe that there is something inherently unfair about a test that you can't study for.

And if after four years of high school they haven't developed much skill for reasoning, that's okay – they can take preparatory courses to learn how to fake it for an exam, and let that be their stepping stone toward academic accomplishment.  As a society that values the promise of formal education more than the satisfaction of actual learning, we have precipitated the death of aptitude.  We are afraid to acknowledge that it exists, because aptitude, whether the product of inborn talent or effective rearing, makes some people better suited than others for certain goals.

The campaign, now getting under way, is for the University of California, Los Angeles. The campaign proclaims that U.C.L.A. is the home of “the optimists,” people who are risk-takers, rule-breakers and game-changers.

The campaign is the first for U.C.L.A. from an agency named 160 Over 90, which is based in Philadelphia and recently opened an office in Newport Beach, Calif.

That work underscores the growing presence of universities and colleges as advertisers in the media. Their goals include selling themselves to prospective students and the parents of those students, seeking donations from alumni, recruiting faculty members and improving their standings in various surveys.

open education goes across the boundaries of formal and informal, children and adults, across academic disciplines, into professional development and into making and crafting. Universities don’t own the “open education” space any more than any organisation could be said to own “learning”

We need to be digitally literate, but more than that, we need to find ways of doing our work online, to become open practitioners and digital scholars

For educational institutions to thrive, we need to explore models for how we can work in this space, with all its opportunities and risks, all its noise and vibrancy. It is here that we see possibilities for new models of collaboration, peer learning and accreditation.

This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers.

Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.

I’m concerned that most one-to-one implementation strategies are based on the new tool as the focus of the program. Unless we break out of this limited vision that one-to-one computing is about the device, we are doomed to waste our resources.

Then, teachers are instructed to go! But go where?

I believe every student must have 24-7 access to the internet.

It can show emotions such as surprise, happiness and anger, can learn its own name and learns to respond to words that its owner uses frequently.

what the evidence suggests is that, unless it's very carefully planned with an eye to how the brain processes information, multimedia actually impedes learning rather than enhances it

a very balanced approach. Educators need to familiarize themselves with the research and see that in fact one of the most debilitating things you can do to students is distract them.

the risk of using search for online research is that everybody gets led in the same directions to a smaller number of citations which, as they become ever more popular, become the destination for more and more searches. And ... he suggested that simply the act of flipping through paper copies of journals actually may expose researchers to a wider array of evidence.

As part of the push to identify and create catalyst teachers, Hobbs emphasizes three strategies: educating teachers; creating more media and technology partnerships with K-12 schools; and identifying educators who are putting some of these practices in play and learning from their efforts.