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Individuals are free to learn from OER hosted on the open web. It is, therefore, plausible that we can design and develop an "OER university" that will provide free learning for all students worldwide.

Working with Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand, the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and Athabasca University in Canada as founding anchor partners, we aim to help provide flexible pathways for OER learners to earn formal academic credentials and pay reduced fees for assessment and credit services under the community service mission of modern universities.

The OER Foundation will host an open planning meeting on 23 February to lay the foundations for this significant intervention. With support from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, the meeting will be streamed on the web, and we invite all educational leaders to join us at this meeting in planning for the mainstream adoption of OER in post-secondary institutions.

“We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”

there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again

district was innovating

“Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.”

If we know something works

it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training

The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.

Good teachers, he said, can make Good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.

“It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”

creating an impetus to rethink education entirely

“There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”

“They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,”

The 30 students in the classroom held wireless clickers into which they punched their answers. Seconds later, a pie chart appeared on the screen: 23 percent answered “True,” 70 percent “False,” and 6 percent didn’t know.

rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.

engagement is a “fluffy

term” that can slide past critical analysis.

that computers can distract and not instruct.

guide on the side.

Professor Cuban at Stanford

But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint

$46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.

Mr. Share bases his buying decisions on two main factors: what his teachers tell him they need, and his experience. For instance, he said he resisted getting the interactive whiteboards sold as Smart Boards until, one day in 2008, he saw a teacher trying to mimic the product with a jury-rigged projector setup. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, leading him to buy Smart Boards, made by a company called Smart Technologies.

This is big business.

“Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”