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.

Myself, along with many educators and education policymakers, were pleased to receive news that Korea had topped the OECD's Digital Reading Assessment (DRA).  We were even more encouraged by the results showing a significant percentage of students proficient at the highest scale of digital reading, and the small proportion of low-performing students.

Is the discourse about multitasking falling into the fallacy of the excluded middle? Could it be that instead of a stark choice between the frantic pursuit of getting more done in less time at one extreme or demonizing multitasking at the other end of the spectrum that there is an as-yet undocumented literacy in the relatively unexplored middle, a partially mental and partially technical skill at deploying the appropriate attentional style with the appropriate media at the appropriate time?

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.

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.

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

In January, a time when many scientists concentrate on grant proposals, Jennifer D. Calkins and Jennifer M. Gee, both biologists, were busy designing quail T-shirts and trading cards. The T-shirts went for $12 each and the trading cards for $15 in a fund-raising effort resembling an online bake sale. The $4,873 they raised, mostly from small donations, will pay their travel, food, lab and equipment expenses to study the elegant quail this fall in Mexico.

This sixth volume of PISA 2009 results explores students' use of information technologies to learn. . In 2009, students in 19 countries and economies took a PISA test using computers which tested their ability to navigate and evaluate information on line. Students also filled in a background questionnaire providing information on their use of computers both in school and at home.

Over the past decade or so, the Internet has become a huge source of information and education, especially for those who might be short on time, money or other resources. And it's not just crowdsourced data collections like Wikipedia or single-topic blogs that encourage individual learning; huge corporations and nonprofits are making online education and virtual classrooms a very formal affair these days.

There are plenty of business books written about leadership, but not every employee (or CEO) is a great leader. Likewise, although every teacher stands in front of a classroom of students, they're not all leaders in their schools. But they should be. With their newly released Teacher Leader Model Standards, the Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium wants to jump-start the conversation about "the knowledge, skills, and competencies that teachers need to assume leadership roles in their schools, districts, and the profession."

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."

The exploration of human anatomy and conditions using over 3000 3D peer reviewed objects. Utilities for searching, relationships, dissection, bookmarking, cross sections, data integration and exporting images are provided.

Humanities scholars are often perceived in very traditional terms: spending a lot of time working on their own and collaborating only informally through highly-dispersed networks. Unlike most scientists, they have no long tradition of working in formal, close-knit and collaborative research groups. Humanities scholars have also sometimes been presented as "depth" rather than "breadth" researchers, preferring to spend significant amounts of time with a few items, rather than working across a broader frame. In terms of information sources, text and images held in archives and libraries tend to dominate, with less of an association with new web-based technologies (although this is changing with the increasing visibility of digital humanities).

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?

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.

Oliver Burkeman went to Texas to the South by Southwest festival of film, music and technology, in search of the next big idea. After three days he found it: the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared

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."

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.

The Arab Social Media Report (ASMR), produced by the Dubai School of Government's Governance and Innovation Program, is the first in a quarterly series that will highlight and analyze usage trends of online social networking across the Arab region.

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.