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It is worth emphasising, in the face of routine dismissals by snobbish commentators, that many of these courses may be intellectually fruitful as well as practical: media studies are often singled out as being the most egregiously valueless, yet there can be few forces in modern societies so obviously in need of more systematic and disinterested understanding than the media themselves

Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 130 university-level institutions in Britain today did not exist as universities as recently as 20 years ago.

Mass education, vocational training and big science are among the dominant realities, and are here to stay.

Kids need first-hand engagement — they need to manipulate objects physically, engage all their senses, and move and interact with the 3-dimensional world.

Play is a remarkably creative process

This is profoundly different from a child having an original idea to make or do something

how can we teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity et al if we’re not practicing those things ourselves? It would be like being asked to teach Physics with only a textbook understanding of it.

Colorado State University offers a useful guide to reading on the web. While it is aimed at college students, much of the information is pertinent to readers of all ages and could easily be part of lessons in the classroom. The following list includes some of the CSU strategies to strengthen reading comprehension, along with my thoughts on how to incorporate them into classroom instruction: Synthesize online reading into meaningful chunks of information. In my classroom, we spend a lot of time talking about how to summarize a text by finding pertinent points and casting them in one’s own words. The same strategy can also work when synthesizing information from a web page. Use a reader’s ability to effectively scan a page, as opposed to reading every word. We often give short shrift to the ability to scan, but it is a valuable skill on may levels. Using one’s eye to sift through key words and phrases allows a reader to focus on what is important. Avoid distractions as much as necessary. Readbility is one tool that can make this possible. Advertising-blocking tools are another effective way to reduce unnecessary, and unwanted, content from a web page. At our school, we use Ad-Block Plus as a Firefox add-on to block ads. Understand the value of a hyperlink before you click the link. This means reading the destination of the link itself. It is easier if the creator of the page puts the hyperlink into context, but if that is not the case, then the reader has to make a judgment about the value, safety, and validity of the link. One important issue to bring into this discussion is the importance of analyzing top-level domains. A URL that ends in .gov, for example, was created by a government entity in the U.S. Ask students what it means for a URL to end in .edu. What about .org? .com? Is a .edu or .org domain necessarily trustworthy? Navigate a path from one page in a way that is clear and logical. This is easier said than done, since few of us create physical paths of our navigation. However, a lesson in the classroom might do just that: draw a map of the path a reader goes on an assignment that uses the web. That visualization of the tangled path might be a valuable insight for young readers.

Whether supervised or not, children in the fourth through sixth grade age group were frequently connecting to social networking sites where some admitted that they shared the following personal information with others online: 16 percent posted personal interests 15 percent posted information about their physical activities 20 percent gave out their real name 5 percent posted information about their school 6 percent posted their home address 6 percent posted their phone number 9 percent posted a photograph of themselves