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App Inventor goes to MIT (via Darren Murphy)

Scratch is a programming language for young people to create their own interactive stories, games, music, and art. Scratch was created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. You can find more information and download Scratch for free at scratch.mit.edu

Our goal is to develop and host an open platform for crowd-curated content relevant to K12 STEM education. Our efforts will not only allow us to identify specific and advantageous areas for student work, they will also allow us to create a sense of community around this work, and its effects, among educators and students at every level.

Great Maths book by MIT, and there is a creative commons version too :-)

"Kate Crawford of the MIT Centre for Civic Media goes behind the numbers to debunk five myths about big data."

"At one session here at Davos, the presidents of Harvard, Stanford and MIT all readily acknowledged that the experiments in new models of online learning will soon radically disrupt higher learning. One expert suggested many universities are facing the early days of bankruptcy. Another predicted there may only be 10 universities that survive this transition."

Stumbled upon this when trying to verify the Jobs Wozniac story of inventing their first computer in their garage. Very geeky and long. If you have a spare 45 min let me know how it finishes ;-) 

Google has released a completely visual programming language that lets you build software without typing a single character. Now available on Google Code - the company's site for hosting open source software - the new language is called Google Blockly, and it's reminiscent of Scratch, a platform developed at MIT that seeks to turn even young children into programmers. Like Scratch, Blockly lets you build applications by piecing together small graphical objects in much the same way you'd piece together Legos. Each visual object is also a code object - a variable or a counter or an "if-then" statement or the like - and as you piece them to together, you create simple functions. And as you piece the functions together, you create entire applications - say, a game where you guide a tiny figurine through a maze.

"People in the 3-D printing world have talked for years about the possibility of unauthorized copying and sharing of designs-similar to what the file-sharing program Napster allowed for music. Now the first commercial solution to this as-yet theoretical problem is preparing to launch. It was developed by Authentise, a startup based in Mountain View, California."

"In this episode of the November Learning Podcasts Series, Alan speaks with Dr. Mitch Resnick, Professor of Learning Research and Director of the Scratch Team at MIT. The two discuss why coding is such an important element to bring into the educational process, at all ages, and they exchange their ideas on why global publication through an online community add an important aspect into this online, coding tool. In the end, Dr. Resnick also shares an exciting announcement about upcoming developments."

An occasional paper on digital media and learning. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Panther is a programming language aimed at young users with only a small knowledge of programming. Panther offers you a more advanced version of Scratch, a simple programming language developed at MIT."

Tynker is a new computing platform designed specifically to teach children computational learning and programming skills in a fun and imaginative way. Tynker is inspired by Scratch from MIT. It is a completely browser-based implementation written using Open Web standards such as Javascript, HTML5, CSS3 and does not use Flash.

Animate drawings,create music, build ages, craft ebooks. Browser-based programming designed to teach computational thinking.  Use for science, maths etc.  Lesson plans available.

"15-Year-Old Kelvin Doe is an engineering whiz living in Sierra Leone who scours the trash bins for spare parts, which he uses to build batteries, generators and transmitters. Completely self-taught, Kelvin has created his own radio station where he broadcasts news and plays music under the moniker, DJ Focus. "

We watched this during #motm13 and discussed what is the difference between innovation, creativity etc. An inspiring video.