Nice summary of Csikszentmihalyi on flow with parallels in Asian philosophy. Contains video link to his TED conference presentation. This site is maintained by M. K. Setton, an authority on eastern philosophy and religion.

A free tool to create and visualize your own tag clouds. Useful to analyze group themes in student writing. Sharing this data and the corpus of students texts, either synchronously or asynchronously, seems to be the key to upping the level of engagement.

Related to the Pew Foundation Study on Tagging we read earlier in the course... Topic models provide a simple way to analyze large volumes of unlabeled text. A "topic" consists of a cluster of words that frequently occur together. Using contextual clues, topic models can connect words with similar meanings and distinguish between uses of words with multiple meanings. Coupling the use of such tools with blogging allows students (plural) to spot trends in their collective writing. The key is to "share-out" their pieces in weekly class review sessions. This "ups" the level of engagement.

This is an interesting piece by Ben Shneiderman, the reigning authority on graphical user-interface design, and Greg Kearsley, an authority on distance education.

This is a great tool for doing mock-ups of engaging user interfaces. The free version is more than adequate. We use it in a course on graphical user interface design at my university.

Good article on the issue of divided attention as a consequence of technology-enhanced multitasking in the classroom.

MSN sponsored site on home schooling topics.

Teachers of students with autism say it's the year of the iPad. It provides motivation. It helps with therapy and handwriting practice. It even models appropriate ways to share toys or take turns.

In this presentation by Cecilia d'Oliveira, MIT OpenCourseWare's Executive Director and Shigeru Miyagawa, Chair of MIT OpenCourseWare's Faculty Advisory Committee and Head of MIT's Foreign Languages and Literatures Department, we'll examine the how open educational resources are changing the educational landscape and meeting the global demands for open knowledge.

Assess students in real time, using open-ended tasks to probe student understanding.

On grit and success.

After dinner, when Tom Beasley is ready to take a break from his day job in the Yale classics department, he busts out the comic books. But it's all in the name of education, with a digital twist. Beasley, a seventh-year graduate student, is writing his dissertation on Thucydides, chronicler of the Peloponnesian War. In his evening project, he turns from history to the mythology of the Trojan War - in particular, the comic book series Age of Bronze, written and illustrated by Eric Shanower. Beasley's task: produce a reader's guide to the richly detailed, 31-part (so far) comic series in preparation for its release as an iPad app, intended for classroom use. The digital version, called Age of Bronze "Seen," launches on October 15 and includes maps, genealogy charts, and other interactive features.

An ebook reader in every student's hand by 2017.

Various definitions of learning objects.