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Although the goals are different from the Oneville research, folks may be interested in Planned Parenthood's recent demonstration of one of the most successful uses of texting (providing age-appropriate, medically accurate answers to questions). [http://www.plannedparenthoodchat.org/]

At TEDxPSU, Ali Carr-Chellman pinpoints three reasons boys are tuning out of school in droves, and lays out her bold plan to re-engage them: bringing their culture into the classroom, with new rules that let boys be boys, and video games that teach as well as entertain.

In her talk, Ali Carr-Chellman pinpoints three reasons boys are tuning out of school in droves, and lays out her bold plan to re-engage them: bringing their culture into the classroom, with new rules that let boys be boys, and video games that teach as well as entertain.

In her talk, Ali Carr-Chellman pinpoints three reasons boys are tuning out of school in droves, and lays out her bold plan to re-engage them: bringing their culture into the classroom, with new rules that let boys be boys, and video games that teach as well as entertain.

This is a webinar chat that I sat in on today (A few questions I posed are featured in the Q&A at the end.) With the new SimCity release, they have also partnered with a company called GlassLab that has designed a teacher resource hub and also modified game that enables teachers to easily use the game in classrooms. There will be specific inquiry based challenges that allow students to interact in the game environment to investigate community issues (ranging from water shortages, power outages, labor disputes, earthquakes, budget concerns, etc.) and work with citizens and government to solve the issues. There is also an exciting multiplayer format where neighboring cities are controlled by other students and they must work together to solve problems. Glass Lab is partnering with EA Games, Gates Foundation, and ETS to build the teacher hub where educators can design and share best practices, lesson plans, etc. In addition, they will be doing a long term study to measure educational outcomes. It appears as though they are using this game as a pilot opportunity to build the framework for larger commercial game integration into the classroom.

Disney's Connected Learning program has been developing games for 6 years now, the most popular title being Club Penguin. They are currently planning to roll out several pre-school titles and are also capturing data on the games effects on learning outcomes. Interesting to see Disney attracting top talent from the gaming industry to help develop games and also not shying away from doing the research to investigate educational outcomes.

One Laptop per Child- results are still unconvincing.

Newark, Ohio

Where should ATT place its bets? Is engagement the key to stemming dropouts? Can VI be used to design richly affective environments that promote social efficacy (a spoon full of sugar) while succeeding at skill development and knowledge transfer (the medicine)?

An article about computer games in science education using "active prolonged engagement," as opposed to "planned discovery."

"Location data from mobile phones has indicated that 93 per cent of human movement is predictable... the researchers, from Boston, USA and China, believe that it could be useful for mobile networks' data load management, city planning and anticipating the spread of viruses."

Nintendo recently announced new plans for both the DS and the Wii, including plans to release more action-oriented Wii games.

I enjoy a certain closeness with my roomba, while I love my espresso machine and other gadgets just fine, Roomba and I are pals. My fiance and I even plan to name our first dog after our vacuum.

A start-up trying to bring some real world flavor to virtual worlds on the net plans to publicly launch an online real m it calls Project X now.

nintendo, future of learning, handheld

An alternative to free online courses for all (a la Coursera/Udemy/Udacity), Minerva plans to charge ~$20,000 in tuition for an Ivy League - equivalent education. Anyone else think this is a stretch?

Seems like a lot of experimentation in this implementation. Unusual.

Since college recruiters know that only a small percentage of students open email, Ohio State is planning to let prospective students get in touch directly with current students via IM, email or phone.

I am posting two articles: 1) Apple's recent announcement about getting into digital textbooks (article/link below) and 2) the criticism (this link) by Hack Education blogger Audrey Watters. Education needs to rethink the need for textbooks altogether. Digitizing them is not the answer. She states, "You can disassemble, reassemble, unbundle, disrupt, destroy the textbook. It is truly an irrelevant format."

Hi Emily - thanks for your thoughts! Bloggers (especially those who use the name Hack in their title) are going to be provocative (one-sided) in their writing... but it helps raise questions about standard practices. I too agree that eTextbooks or iBooks are going to be tremendously more engaging and up-to-date than the ones that weigh down kids bookbags. But now take a look at the other article I posted: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/flow-digital-textbooks that suggests how publishers are not open to new and niche ideas that might be incredibly beneficial to education. The publishing market has a hold on education. Is it possible that the textbooks will not be available across a range of platforms, but only on a few that the publishers agree to work with? Maybe it is time we push for a more open source model... that could also work towards digitizing textbooks... or would innovate other ways for students to access "textbook"" knowledge.

Thanks for the nudge to read the other article that you posted as well! It was a nice counterpoint to Watters and the FLOW platform seems like a promising stab at digital textbooks from an open-source standpoint.