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In this Schools that Work story, we profiled a rural school district in Northwest Georgia using their resources carefully to replicated successful Project-Based Learning. 

Blackmore studies memes: patterns that replicate themselves, which sounds very much like the whole process of education to me.

This seems stuck in the notion of the 'course' as a transferrable, replicable unit of education, without acknowledging all kinds of educational interactions that happen around courses, in one-on-one conversation etc. If a course is a knowledge dump, then it can be replaced with recorded equivalents, it seems to me. But if it is an interactive experience, a conversation among learners with the instructor as lead/expert learner, then reproducing it on a mass scale simply won't work.

Middle-school students across the United States are invited to submit their solutions to environmental problems in their communities. Teams of two to three students from sixth through eighth grade working with a teacher will identify an environmental issue in their community, research the issue using scientific investigation, and create a replicable green solution using Web-based curriculum tools.

New contest for middle school science! Love the website!

It's a Multiphysics World The real world is multiphysics in nature. Consider your mobile phone. The antenna receives electromagnetic waves, the touch screen or buttons are mechanical and electrical components, the battery involves chemical reactions and electrical current, and so on. A single device, but multiphysics. Since it's a multiphysics world, your simulation tool must be multiphysics capable in order to correctly capture the important aspects of your design. The COMSOL Multiphysics approach starts with first principles like transport phenomena, electromagnetic field theory, and solid mechanics as the basic fibers of the software. Then, in an elegant and flexible user interface, you can weave these fibers together in a self-consistent way to solve your particular simulation needs. "COMSOL allows us to couple mechanisms in a very nice and simple way, allowing us to understand their combined effect. This is the true power of simulation." -- Dr Roberto Suarez-Rivera of Schlumberger. COMSOL Multiphysics delivers the ideal tool to build simulations that accurately replicate the important characteristics of your designs. Its unparalleled ability to include all relevant physical effects that exist in the real world is known as multiphysics.

"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo