Certainly there is the entertainment element to this service, however I also see a great deal of potential for educational value as well. The Common Craft Show has shown us that hand-drawn explanations – completely devoid of a single on-screen pixel – can be used to effectively explain social media concepts. I think GoAnimate could do much the same.

I’m hoping that there will be a way to download the cartoons you create, and/or upload them to your YouTube account – because I prefer to keep all my digital media stored more or less in the same place.

You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results

older students tend to cheat less frequently than younger students

If you are interested in this topic, look for the interesting edited book called Student Plagiarism in an Online World: http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7031&v=tableOfContentsI wrote a chapter called, "Expect Originality! Using Taxonomies to Structure Assignments that Support Original Work." In it I discuss the complexities of plagiarism in the context of a digital culture of sharing and suggest that it is rarely black and white. I propose a continuum with intentional academic dishonesty on one end and original work on the other, with gradations in between. Based on my own research and teaching experience, I believe the instructional design and style of teaching can either make it easy-- or very difficult-- to cheat.

I have read the President’s speech and I agree with his comments. I am a conservative republican and I did not find any problem with what the President will say in his speech to the students. There is no brainwashing or indoctrination in his comments. We have problems in our schools and that needs to change.

Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered.

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.

a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.

When I started, largely out of exasperation, to investigate the educational research literature for myself, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was some genuinely useful and scholarly work out there, which recognised the demands of different subjects and even admitted that university lecturers aren't all workshy and stupid... It's a shame that this better stuff doesn't seem to have fed through into the generic courses that most institutions offer. My personal advice to anyone starting out as a university teacher: find a few colleagues who take their teaching seriously (there are almost certain to be some in the department) and ask them for advice; sit in on their classes if possible; remember you'll never teach perfectly but you can always teach better; and close your ears to well-meaning interference from anybody who's never actually spent time at the chalkface!

Magueijo's could acknowledge that some people teaching these courses are genuinely concerned about improving teaching, and they need academics' help in designing better courses that do so. Sotto's side should acknowldge that however much they talk about how important teaching is (as if they discovered this, and academics did not know), they are not listening to the people attending their courses if those people feel utterly patronised and frustrated at the waste of their time. If academics treated their students like educationalists treat their student academics they'd be appalling teachers. A simple course allowing us to learn from a video of our own lectures would be immensely useful. Instead whole empires of education have developed that need to justify themselves and grow, so they subject us to educational jargon and make us write essays on the educationalist's pet theory.

I would have preferred that David Pritchard had written it; his comments above are perfect.

He urged other professors and teachers to “realize that in any class you could have a child, a young man or woman, who could do incredibly great things in the world. So teach as well as you can.”

On Intellectual Craftmanship. I was amazed how clearly the reasons why scholars blog were laid out in the opening paragraphs. In what follows I have changed none of Mills’s original language except for replaced ‘journal’ and ‘file’ with ‘website’ and ‘blog’. Clearly Mills didn’t envision the files he advocates as public documents, but other than that the parallels are uncanny