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We had a discussion in class a month back or so about standards and international performance versus U.S. One of the talking points was, what can the U.S. learn from other countries (or more appropriate, what is the U.S. willing to learn from other countries). Some people mentioned that the U.S. tends to show an aversion to learning from other countries, but this article notes that the Common Core State Standards is actually based on best practices from other leading countries like Singapore, China, and Finland. So maybe we're not as stubborn as we seem...

November 26, 2012, 11:00 am This month Google's Niantic Labs quietly released a location-based game called Ingress that plays with data on multiple levels. The game, currently in invite-only beta, invites players to join either the Enlightenment or the Resistance and move through the physical world hunting "Exotic Matter", and coincidentally generating data and pictures for Google on the way. This looks similar to EcoMobile!

The City University of New York's Graduate Center has announced a project to expand the social-media reach of academics working on social-justice issues. The project, called JustPublics@365 and supported by a $550,000 grant awarded this month by the Ford Foundation, seeks to train professors and graduate students to use social media to make their social-justice research more visible to a wider audience and to measure its impact.

Not exactly a link re: technology, but really good reading if you intend to IMPLEMENT any of the stuff we have talked about for the last several months. You will need to move people to change habits - Marshal Ganz of HKS describes a process to articulate a vision of change and move people to action.

A study in NZ found that supportive text messages doubled the chance of quitting smoking within six months. Just-in-time learning, indeed.

The Digital Public Library of America will make its public debut next month, with a two-day series of events, to be held April 18-19 at the Boston Public Library; Daniel J. Cohen, a leading digital-humanities scholar, will be the project's founding executive director.

Scott Young, a recent university graduate, writer, programmer, traveler and avid reader of interesting things, decided to finish MIT's entire 4-year computer science program within 12 months with MIT OpenCourseWare.

This is evidence as to why predicting tech trends beyond 12-18 months is a fool's errand. Who could have foreseen the IPhone's rapid ascendancy? And later the IPad?

Building on Maria's link from GeekWire, here is another article about a bubble forming in ed tech...and building on Jason's comment about not wanting to investmenting in ed tech, it seems like a lot of wealthy people aren't worried about it! This article goes into the numbers a little more on trying to show the bubble effect, such as the number of investment rounds and startups. It also talks a bit about Christensen's "innovator" profile and how a lot of the ed tech folks now are mission-driven people who are innovating like Christensen describes. Not sure if what they are doing will work, but trying because they are passionate about it

Can Ed tech start-ups be classified into those driven by a desire to improve education and children's lives or those simply seeking to make a lot of money? Or are motives and intentions always impossible to judge and inextricable from behavior.

Thanks for sharing. I liked the last message of this article. "But as long as we remember that it takes both the tool and the teacher to create success, the mission-driven innovators will outnumber the market-driven copycats. And innovation will outshine the bubbles.". EdSurge is one of my favorite source too. One of my former client at Hedge Fund in HK messaged me earlier this month ''btw u might be spot on on this education stuff. this should offer a sizable business opportunity in coming years u should go grab some" - def. he is one of those guys out there who might contribute to the bubble in the future...

A couple months back Prof. Dede said a change in education was necessary because the status quo was facing collapse. We're see these kinds of decisions all over the country in the past few weeks. I wonder if we're seeing the change.

I enjoyed his talk a couple months ago. He wanted us to arrange a debate between him and Arne Duncan.

A step forward in comprehensive online ed, and also an example of "mashing up" existing offerings by a third party. This guy "thought it would be an interesting exercise to see if it was possible to design a reasonable computer science curriculum using just Coursera courses (a MOOC)."

I think that's a really interesting exercise--especially the one comment about "you could take all these in about six months." Thanks for the link!

Quality education for children in families earning less than $2/day is a huge challenge in developing countries. If tech can help...definitely transformative.

one outcome of the 2010 National Ed Tech Plan

yada

hmmm. interesting. (just testing)

Go Obama Go!

an interesting article on procrastination. Perhaps worth reading to better understand our own behavior and the behavior of future students we attempt to engage. There is a not a direct technology angle here, but it would be important to think about this topic when looking at technologies for the classroom.

This sounds like a disruptive innovation. Zap the brain!

whoa ...