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ideacity is a three-day gathering of minds held each June in Toronto. It's produced and presented by the Canadian media innovator and pioneer, Moses Znaimer. IDEAS features highlights from the conference. This episode deals with the deluge of digital data in our lives with: Don Tapscott, Canadian cyber guru, on generational change;

Code.org is a non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science education by making it available in more schools, and increasing participation by women and underrepresented students of color. Our vision is that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer programming. We believe computer science should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra.

PISA, the OECD's triennial international assessment of 15 year olds in math, reading, and science, has become one of the most destructive forces in education today. It creates illusory models of excellence, romanticizes misery, glorifies educational authoritarianism, and most serious, directs the world's attention to the past instead of pointing to the future. In the coming weeks, I will publish five blog posts detailing each of my "charges," adapted from parts of my book Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education.

"NASA invites you -- and everyone else on the planet -- to take part in a worldwide celebration of Earth Day this year with the agency's #GlobalSelfie event."

"This week on Tech Weekly with games editor Keith Stuart we take a look at an emerging trend in games, where smartphones and cutting-edge robotics are used to create more socially inclusive and dynamic games. Joining Keith is Guardian writer Alex Hern; Iain Simons, director of the GameCity festival; and Jonathan Smith, games producer for Lego. The panel discuss why the screen is only a part of the gaming experience - and why small-scale, cheap robotics will open up a new world for developers. Also this week: Guardian tech writer Samuel Gibbs meets Ian Bernstein, co-creator of the robotic toy ball the Sphero, to find out about the evolution of the robot in gaming."

Interesting discussion about the future of gaming beyond 'the screen'.

"KFC Australia has created its first ever branded mobile gaming app to directly target the young adult market. KFC teamed up with DT - part of Ogilvy Australia and STW - in October last year and released the KFC Snack! In the Face mobile gaming app for android and apple devices. The campaign ran from October 8 to December 2, 2013 where 2,500 free prizes were given away every day of the campaign plus multiple achievement prizes were available. All rewards were mobile-based and redeemable in all 600 KFC stores across Australia."

Emergent is a real-time rumor tracker. It's part of a research project with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University that focuses on how unverified information and rumor are reported in the media. It aims to develop and best practices for debunking misinformation.

No one who is part of this new movement believes all kids should grow up to be programmers. We believe it would be a beautiful outcome if all kids grew up knowing how to use computers to enhance their natural abilities, whatever those are, and grew up with the confidence to be "makers" instead of just consumers. Computer programming is ultimately about problem solving and creating. "Thinking like a computer scientist" really means understanding what problem you are facing and breaking down that problem into solvable chunks. The better you get at recognizing the problem the more efficient your solutions become."

Decoding Spices in the 21st Century Learn this and more by being a part of this initiative, the All India Spices Exporters Forum (AISEF) and the entire Spices Fraternity of India invite you to the first ever International Spice Conference 2016 . AISEF has been working tirelessly in improving the Indian spice industry for the last 25 years. The ISC 2016 will also be a celebration of the 25 years it has devoted and contributed to the industry. http://www.internationalspiceconference.com/overseas-dele-reg.html

Learn this and more by being a part of this initiative, the All India Spices Exporters Forum (AISEF) and the entire Spices Fraternity of India invite you to the first ever International Spice Conference 2016 .

Despite its other challenges and missteps, the Obama administration has made progress in pushing the U.S. government toward becoming more technically-savvy and at least considering technology as part of the solution to a number of the problems the U.S. is currently tackling. President Obama named the nation's first federal CIO as well as its first CTO, became the first president to carry a smartphone, and his IT team opened the government's first cloud computing app store (Apps.gov).

James Paul Gee Answers questions about games in education

"Save Money. Save the Environment. Tired of printing web pages only to find your printout is full of ads, empty space and other junk you don't want? PrintWhatYouLike is a free online editor that lets you format any web page for printing in seconds!"

I use a firefox addon called Aardvark and can vouch for the advantage of being able to trim your webpages on the fly, especially when removing advertising and other junk before preparing a page for students, keeping it child friendly.

"PrintWhatYouLike lets you print the good parts of any web page while skipping ads and other junk."

Foller.me is a Twitter service that can provide you with the most detailed information about a specific Twitter user in the least amount of time! Here's how it works. You input a Twitter name into the searchbox and hit enter. Foller.me gets access to the profile of that user via the Twitter API, scans all the public info and the latest 200 tweets! In general, you'd read those 200 messages to get to know what that specific user is all about, right? Well you don't have to! Foller.me has done that for you already, and provides you only with the most significant parts of those 200 tweets. It builds up three tag clouds: topics, #hashtags and @mentions, all based on the user's recent activity, AND excluding all stop words! Isn't that great?

"Back in August I predicted that newspapers in their current form will be irrelevant in Australia in 2022. That received significant international attention including from The Australian, The Guardian, Editor & Publisher (which called me the 'Wizard of Aussie') and many others. Part of the point I wanted to make was that this date is different for every country. As such I have created a Newspaper Extinction Timeline that maps out the wide diversity in how quickly we can expect newspapers to remain significant around the world."

A cool way of downloading parts of youtube videos.

Minister for Education, Media Release, Friday, 14 November 2008. "Five software companies are vying for the $60.5 million Ultranet project as part of a selective tender process announced today by Education Minister Bronwyn Pike. It follows an announcement earlier this year that the project would be re-tendered with revised specifications to ensure value for money and the best long-term outcomes for Victorian government schools..."

Bad Apple!! Bad! "Apple's iPad delivers on the tablet part of that vision - but the company has blocked a kid-friendly programming language based on Kay's work from getting onto the iPad."

"Scratch is often cited as one of the best introductory languages for teaching kids - or anyone, really - to code. So it's no surprise that a Rutgers University honors class called "Programming for the Masses" would utilize Scratch as part of its goal of making programming a more accessible, everyday skill. What is unique - and if I may say so, pretty fun - is the direction that a research project, an outgrowth of the class, has taken since. The project is called Scratchable Devices, and with it, computer science Professor Michael Littman and some of his students are working to make it easy for anyone to program their household devices by using Scratch."