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"If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking. The old phrase "united we stand, divided we fall" applies equally well to the mechanisms of attention as it does to a patriotic cause. When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when several goals splinter its focus, errors become unavoidable."

"The UK's first massive open online course platform will focus on promoting student discussion and debate in an effort to stand out from the Mooc crowd, according to Simon Nelson, its chief executive. FutureLearn will offer "something fresh, something different", he told Times Higher Education, including being optimised for use on smartphones."

The iJIM journal aims to focus on the exchange of relevant trends and research results as well as the presentation of practical experiences gained while developing and testing elements of interactive mobile technologies. The objective of the journal is to publish and discuss fundamentals, applications and experiences in the field of interactive mobile technologies in learning and teaching as well as in industrial and other applications. iJIM is an Open Access Journal. Readers don't have to pay any fee. Only registration is necessary.

In December of last year, Google released its new Google Earth Engine, an application created specifically with scientific research in mind. This new product provides an unprecedented 25 years of satellite images with the goal of enabling more precise climate modeling, based on change studies and mapping trends of the Earth's environment with a principle focus on identifying areas of deforestation.

The Exploratree web resource has been developed by Futurelab and emerged out of our work on the Enquiring Minds project. It provides a series of ready-made interactive 'thinking guides' or 'frameworks' which can support students' projects and research. Thinking guides support the thinking or working through of an issue, topic or question and help to shape, define and focus an idea and also support the planning required to investigate it further. Exploratree guides can be used as a basis for whole class discussion, or emailed to individuals or groups to complete. They can also be used as a presentation tool to share your findings and thinking with others. As well as providing a set of ready to use thinking guides, which are completely customisable and shareable, Exploratree also enables teachers and students to create their own simply and easily.

Welcome! This course is going to be fun and enriching for those who choose to get involved in doing classwork in new ways. We're going to experiment.  The success of our experiment will depend on our work together as a learning community - in class and online. (Please click and read each link on this page - and ask yourself if you are ready to continue at this level of commitment through the rest of the quarter). Each one of us will be required to work differently than we usually do. Most courses focus on the delivery by a teacher of a specific body of knowledge to students, who are held accountable as individuals for retaining and comprehending that knowledge. In this learning community, we're going to be inquiring and reflecting more than delivering and memorizing, and we're going to be thinking, discussing, learning as a group as well as learning individually -- we're going to be both cooperative (working together on projects) and collaborative (co-responsible for each other's learning). That part alone is going to require more work on your part than you might think.

"Everyone knows a name dropper when they hear one. Buzz names like Gates, Jiwei, Jobs, Nooyi, Zuckerberg and Winfrey can give dramatic pause to a conversation and pique collegial interest. But their mere mention can also throw a name dropper under the credibility bus quicker than they can say "My cousin was college roommates with J.K. Rowling's agent's sister.""

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer - that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others - is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.