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But all the compute power in the world is of little use if the cores can't talk to each other.

Inductive chargers will also make it easier to continually charge devices. Nokia is working on wireless charging. And devices will start harvesting energy from the surroundings. So it looks like the revolution will be fully powered.

. Literally billions of dollars are being invested into developing a giant sensor grids to manage power. Other grids will be set up for water, climate, pollution, terrorist attacks, traffic, and virtually everything else you can think to measure and control.

. Others predict the smart grid could be 1,000 times larger than the Internet.

Clearly this technology has obvious health and medical uses, and it may also figure into consumer and personal entertainment.

What if instead smartphones become the cloud?

In the future compute capacity will be everywhere. This is one of the amazing gifts of computer technology and also why virtualization has become such a hot datacenter trend.

It's out of that collective capacity that an Ambient Cloud can be formed, like a galaxy is formed from interstellar dust. We need to find a more systematic way of putting it to good use.

“We see routines so strong that they run virtually without any involvement from the teacher. In fact, for many highly effective teachers, the measure of a well-executed routine is that it continues in the teacher’s absence.”

On the front wall, Mr. Taylor has posted different hand signals—if you need to go to the bathroom, you raise a closed hand. To ask or answer a question, you raise an open hand. “This way, I have the information before I even call on you,”

Before they leave, all the kids fill out an “exit slip,” which is usually in the form of a problem—one more chance for Mr. Taylor to see how they, and he, are doing.

I make it my business to call the parents—and not just for bad things.”

Giving yourself permission not to know everything will make you relax

preconceptions

binary choice: I could teach about what I already knew, or I could teach about what I would like to learn

My expertise has always been my ignorance, my admission and acceptance of not knowing. My work comes from questions, not from answers.

The focus on bravado and competition in our society has helped breed into us the idea that it is impolitic, or at least impolite, to say, "I don't understand."

Understanding should be thought of as a continuum from data to wisdom

at this end of the spectrum, understanding gets increasingly personal until it is so intimate that it cannot truly be shared with others

"One of the best ways of communicating knowledge is through stories, because good stories are richly textured with details, allowing the narrative to convey a stable ground on which to build the experience."

Without context, information cannot exist, and the context in question must relate not only to the data's environment (where it came from, why it's being communicated, how it's arranged, etc.), but also from the context and intent of the person interpreting it.

rganization creates, or at least, shapes meaning

Technology forms a near-disastrous distraction from real information and knowledge issues.

complexity

education is so notoriously difficult: because one cannot count on one person's knowledge to transfer to another

This is what education should be about, but too often it is only focused on information—and worse, data—simply because those are the only forms that are easy to measure.

experience design

discover processes for creating these experiences

Without the opportunity, willingness, or openness to interact on a personal level, much of the power of these experiences are not made available to us.

Wisdom is as personal as understanding gets—intimate, in fact—and it is a difficult level for many people to reach

sharing of wisdom is next to impossible.

What can only be shared is the experiences that form the building blocks for wisdom, but these need to be communicated with even more understanding of the personal contexts of our audience than with information or knowledge.

We cannot trick ourselves into becoming wise, and we cannot allow someone else to do it.

we need to expose people to the processes of introspection, pattern-matching, contemplation, retrospection, and interpretation so that they will have the beginnings of the tools to create wisdom

once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to

one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so

if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant

our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue

some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation?

The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

district was innovating

there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again

“We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”

$46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.

If we know something works

it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training

“Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.”

Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.

“It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”

creating an impetus to rethink education entirely

“There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”

“They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,”

The 30 students in the classroom held wireless clickers into which they punched their answers. Seconds later, a pie chart appeared on the screen: 23 percent answered “True,” 70 percent “False,” and 6 percent didn’t know.

rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.

engagement is a “fluffy

term” that can slide past critical analysis.

that computers can distract and not instruct.

guide on the side.

Professor Cuban at Stanford

But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint

The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.

Mr. Share bases his buying decisions on two main factors: what his teachers tell him they need, and his experience. For instance, he said he resisted getting the interactive whiteboards sold as Smart Boards until, one day in 2008, he saw a teacher trying to mimic the product with a jury-rigged projector setup. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, leading him to buy Smart Boards, made by a company called Smart Technologies.

This is big business.

“Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”

  I’ve read, listen and thought  more about assessment than most and yet it still baffles me. Mostly because the kind of assessment that makes most sense (immediate and descriptive feedback) isn’t really valued in schools.