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Loans that change lives.

Fair warning, you could easily eat up a big chunk of your day following the links in this post. Buy hey, you'll be helping out the world a bit in the process.

Fascinating article about upcoming data to be collected on international ICT use in education. So many challenges.

painful reading with the example of Java - but the point remains that all learning objects should be managed and designed with the purpose of being able to use them in the future in ways that are dynamic and reusable. This means de-coupling them and ensuring they are made of distinct pedagogical units.

Creating a lifelong learning network is essential for adults who pursue continuing education as means to advance their professional career or improve their personal life. Regardless of the reason for continuing one's education, an adult's knowledge needs to continually grow. The changing nature of today's society demands the necessity for gaining new skills, new understandings, and new intellectual orientations throughout a person's life.

What happens if you really begin to rethink what your school looks like? No, I'm not talking about rethink from a wildly radical viewpoint - like mine or say, Neil Postman's - but just if a dedicated set of educators stops "tinkering" with little changes and wonders what school might be like...

The only way to truly understand the properties of matter and changes which occur in the properties of matter is to conduct and inquiry-based investigation.

Social network started by Steve Hargadon as part of TEDxActive calling for students to submit videos about changing education.

Vid from Michael Wesch about changing edu paradigms whether "we" like it or not.

Games lab focussed on socially responsible game design for social change.

"August 25, 2011 In the U.S., as recently as last Summer, tablet and eReader owners tended to be male and on the younger side. But according to Nielsen's latest, quarterly survey of mobile connected device owners, this is no longer the case. Back in Q3 2010, for example, 62 percent of tablet owners were under the age of 34 and only 10 percent were over the age of 55. By Q2 2011, only 46 percent of tablet owners were under the age of 34 and the percentage of those over 55 had increased to 19 percent. Looking at the data by gender underlines key changes in the eReader category. Sixty-one percent of all eReader owners are now female, compared to a mere 46 percent in Q3 2010. (Smartphone owners are now evenly split between male and female and tablets remain primarily male.)"

Book: ICT and Changing Mindsets in Education

The pace of technological change has challenged historical notions of what counts as knowledge. Dave Cormier describes an alternative to the traditional notion of knowledge. In place of the expert-centered pedagogical planning and publishing cycle, Cormier suggests a rhizomatic model of learning. In the rhizomatic model, knowledge is negotiated, and the learning experience is a social as well as a personal knowledge creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.

Maggie, no it's not. Learning is a change in long-term memory. These unsubstantiated ideas have led to a disastrous watering-down of standards in Western education. Evidence, not theories, must be the basis of educational practice.

The Earth Observatory has pulled together a special series of NASA satellite images documenting how our world-forests, oceans, human landscapes, even the Sun-has changed during the previous decade.

Teachers are the largest professionally trained group in the world, yet teacher training is often spotty, inconsequential, or missing entirely. We've all had a teacher who made the difference. Teachers Without Borders' founder, Dr. Mednick, will show the connection between excellent teachers and human welfare, on a global level. The message is clear: focus on the teachers as the most viable catalysts for positive change.

Reformers have largely worked within, rather than on, the system of education. Working within the system has resulted in status-quo preservation, even when reformists felt they were being radical. Illich failed to account for how educational institutions are integrated into society. Freire spoke with a humanity and hope that was largely overlooked by a comfortable developed world incapable of seeing the structure and impact of its system. To create and nurture change, a message must not only be true for an era, but it must also resonate with the needs, passions, interests, realities, and hopes of the audience to whom the message is directed.

Love this response, bonus opportunity by Suzie Nestico. When she emailed and asked for a response and the first would get bonus - 5 replies - listen to what DID get them to respond: "I sent a message to my students via our Google Group around 8:00PM on Sunday night. This message said, "Need any more bonus? Respond to this message for two points. If you tweet it, text it, call your friends, post as you FaceBook status, and another student mentions they got word from you, you get FIVE points." Guess what? By 11:00PM on Sunday night, I gave out bonus points to over THIRTY of the ninety students. By 8:00AM today, I gave out bonus to an additional eighteen students. In just changing one thing I did, I just reached nearly half of my students. I could have said, "the first ten students to respond will get bonus," in order to foster competition. But, I tried a bit of that several weeks ago. In Heidi's words, "Competition 0, Collaboration 1." "