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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.

"Teacher Karl Fisch has flipped teaching on its head - he uploads his lectures to YouTube for his students to watch at home at night, then gets them to apply the concepts in class by day. "

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.

Last month, in a small room on the fifth floor of a high-rise building in San Mateo, Calif., three men sat around a table, thinking. The place was wallpapered with Post-it notes, in a riot of colors, plus column after column of index cards pinned to foam boards. Some of the cards had phrases like "space maximizers" or "stuff trackers" written on them. Many had little three-dimensional ink drawings and titles, like "color-coded Tupperware horizontal stacker." It looked as if these guys had been locked in and told they couldn't leave until they dreamed up 1,000 of the wackiest home-storage items they could imagine.

The Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators contains the process and methods of design, adapted specifically for the context of education. Send comments, stories, movies or photos of your experiences designing new solutions to DT_ed@ideo.com

"Massive Open Online Courses might seem like best way to use the Internet to open up education, but you're thinking too small. Technology can turn our entire lives into learning experiences. 5 Comments "

We live in a complex world with diverse people, firms, and governments whose behaviors aggregate to produce novel, unexpected phenomena. We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense of it?

"In 1991 a Yale professor David Gelernter envisioned a lot of what we now do on the Internet. Future computing, he thinks, may be organized around a concept called 'lifestreams.'"

A PARADOX of American higher education is this: The expectations of leading universities do much to define what secondary schools teach, and much to establish a template for what it means to be an educated man or woman. College campuses are seen as the source for the newest thinking and for the generation of new ideas, as society's cutting edge.

The way we represent, organize and share our knowledge propels us forward. It can either constrain or extend our abilities to think and create. In 1964, in his groundbreaking new media studies, Marshall McLuhan proposed that it is the medium, not just the content it carries, that impacts our lives. This is captured most eloquently in his most famous line: "The medium is the message."

I love the flip. I do. And I realize by saying this I'm making a controversial statement. I believe if used judiciously, in the right context, the flip can free up valuable class time and provide the background knowledge that is fundamental for students to then go forward and wrestle with higher order thinking.

Brain science offers some insight into why infographics are so effective.

"'An obligation to systematise success' Randi Weingarten, attorney, educator and president of the 1.5 million-member American Federation of Teachers spoke with Marilyn Achiron during an afternoon at OECD headquarters. This is a continuation of the conversation that was posted on 30 November 2011."

It took me almost 16 years to retrieve and digitize video footage of the late American graphic designer Paul Rand. As an undergraduate student at Art Center College of Design (Europe)* in Montreux, Switzerland, I got introduced to Paul Rand and his wife Marion during a hot and dry summer in 1994. Since I was studying both the basics of film and graphical user interface design, I was asked to shuttle Paul Rand around and to document his visit on campus and his lecture that included a presentation and video (interview with Steve Jobs) about the creation of the NeXT logo.