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"Each year the World Bank helps sponsor an annual global symposium on ICT use in education for senior policymakers and practitioners in Seoul, together with the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) and the Korea Education Research & Information Service (KERIS). This is one important component of a strong multi-year partnership between the World Bank education sector and the Republic of Korea exploring the use of ICTs in the education sector around the world. This year's event, which focused on Benchmarking International Experiences and was about half the size of 2010's Building national ICT/education agencies symposium, brought officials from 23 countries to Korea to explore how technology is being used in schools around the world (previous blog post: Eleven Countries to Watch -- and Learn From), with a special emphasis on learning about and from the Korean experience."

"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 "

"The headquarters of what has rapidly become the largest school in the world, at 10 million students strong, is stuffed into a few large communal rooms in a decaying 1960s office building hard by the commuter rail tracks in Mountain View, Calif. Despite the cramped, dowdy circumstances, youthful optimism at the Khan Academy abounds. At the weekly organization-wide meeting, discussion about translating their offerings into dozens of languages is sandwiched between a video of staffers doing weird dances with their hands and plans for upcoming camping and ski trips."

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?

The Ri Channel is a new online project by the Royal Institution showcasing the very best science videos from the Ri and around the web. Alongside highlights from recent Ri events, the Channel features re-digitised footage from the Ri archive and a range of high-quality videos from filmmakers and scientific institutions across the UK and beyond. The project continues the Royal Institution's charitable mission to "connect people to the world of science".

The evolving world of the Internet - blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networks - offers instructors and students radically new ways to research, communicate, and learn. Integrating these Internet tools into the college classroom, however, is not an easy task. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the role of social networking in education and demonstrate how social network sites (SNS) can be used in a college classroom setting. To do this, existing research relating to SNS and education is discussed, and the primary advantages and disadvantages of using SNS in the classroom are explored. Most importantly, specific instructions and guidelines to follow when implementing SNS (i.e., Facebook) within the college classroom are provided. Specifically, we show that multiple types of Facebook course integration options are available to instructors. It is concluded that SNS, such as Facebook, can be appropriately and effectively used in an academic setting if proper guidelines are established and implemented.

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the "social injustice" of college tuition, here's a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

You can learn a lot about the world from Wikipedia, sometimes without reading the articles. Kalev Leetaru, a researcher at the University of Illinois, has been looking at the capacious volunteer-written encyclopedia as a Big Data resource, concentrating on the connections between cities around the globe over time. To understand these connections, he focuses on the type of language used to talk about a particular place, to see whether the writers have a generally positive or negative sentiment toward the place at that time.

"[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment. Slow hunch: John Snow, who discovered how cholera was spread, had no 'Eureka' moment "But in fact when you go back and you look at the history of innovation it turns out that so often there is this quiet collaborative process that goes on, either in people building on other peoples' ideas, but also in borrowing ideas, or tools or approaches to problems. "The ultimate idea comes from this remixing of various different components. There still are smart people and there still are people that have moments where they see the world differently in a flash. "But for the most part it's a slower and more networked process than we give them credit for."

The Observatory's first project, sponsored by ebrary and Baker & Taylor and undertaken by CIBER, was to quantify the impact of the world-wide recession on libraries. The research received widespread acclaim and was in published in a number of international journals and cited in The Scientist. The topic this year, social media and how they are impacting upon research practice is just as big.The aims of this study are to answer the following questions: * are social media impacting upon researcher workflows?   * if so, how should publishers and librarians respond?* how influential are age and other factors in shaping the demand for social media?

We live in a busy world. Whether you're looking around online or off, there's "stuff" going on all around us. Some of us are trying to keep up and some of us aren't. Either way, both parties are inevitably going to miss out on some of this "stuff" I'm alluding to. And that's because we all need to look at not only why we're missing out, but how we can avoid missing out on as much as we do. This is when levels of personal productivity come into play.

Images are an important form of knowledge that allow us to develop understandings about our world. Flickr is the world's most used and most popular public repository of photographs and currently hosts over five billion images. This map reveals the global geographic distribution of geotagged images on the platform, and thus reveals the density of visual representations and locally depicted knowledge of all places on our planet.

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND - This past year has been a time of signs and wonders for the open educational resources movement, which pushes for the free public access to educational materials.

"Whether it's via the administration, the professors, or the students, serious investments in edtech are coming to major universities. Which startups are going to be called upon to help make the transition?"

How does a school system with poor performance become good? And how does one with good performance become excellent?

Ask Seymour Papert, renowned expert on children and computing, why students are turned off by school, and he quickly offers an example: "We teach numbers, then algebra, then calculus, then physics. Wrong!" exclaims the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. "Start with engineering, and from that abstract out physics, and from that abstract out ideas of calculus, and eventually separate off pure mathematics. So much better to have the first-grade kid or kindergarten kid doing engineering and leave it to the older ones to do pure mathematics than to do it the other way around."