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A good snapshot of the conversation at the school board level. How informed are the high-stakes decision makers.

The amount of money they are spekaing about to scale their schools into the 21st century is the reason the BYOD option is so attractive. If schools focus on wireless infrastructure then families might be able to forgo soem back to school supplies and video games to get a tablet.

This is a Facebook page started by parents at our local Elementary school about school.

Much of the conversation seems reasonable enough but it will be interesting to see how adults can model public conversation. I'm not comfortable with having adult conversation displayed for kids within the school environment. I think that this is the equivalent of parents fighting in front of their children. Kids don't process it in a healthy manner and adults who do it I think do so for their own convenience and at the peril of kids. I think if adult in this community can be disciplined in their comments and stick strictly to logistical information with the understanding that kids are watching (FB will never replace parent oversight), it may be a useful tool. I also think the only way teachers can influence this page is by jumping on and using it to communicate because it seems to me that is the real "ask" in establishing the page.

"Sunday's New York Times story broke the news that Stanford University, one of the world's most prestigious research institutions, is putting its brand squarely behind a full-time, degree-granting online high school program. It's just one more reason to set aside the silly debate about whether online educationcan possibly be effective for high school students."

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!

Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity, has openly admitted that his company's MOOC courses are a lousy replacement for actual university class and instead will be taking his company to focus more on corporate training. I personally will reserve further judgement until after I finish the readings for next week.

Grif - where did the Stephen Downes quote come from ? I read the Rebecca Schuman article and don't really agree with her. To expand on the Schuman quote you posted - it's really interesting how she says the massive lecture format doesn't work but then provides two examples of massive technology that do work - texting and World of Warcraft. This relates directly to some of what we talked about earlier this semester. I don't think it's the 'massive,' as Schuman implies, that causes the failure of a MOOC. It's part of the design. Once the design is better and more engaging, then MOOCs may find that they have higher retention rates. Schuman: Successful education needs personal interaction and accountability, period. This is, in fact, the same reason students feel annoyed, alienated, and anonymous in large lecture halls and thus justified in sexting and playing World of Warcraft during class-and why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.

The Downes quote was from OLDaily, which is a daily listserve of his that I subscribe too. I think the difference between texting/WoW and MOOCs is that, while both have many many users, the former two have means in which those groups are disaggregated into smaller units that are largely responsible for the UX/individual growth that goes on. I agree with you that massive is not necessarily the failure, in fact, I think it's the best thing they have going for them. However, until the design can leverage meaningful collaboration, like WoW and texting, the massive will remain a burden.

This is an opinion article that talks about immersion and the first-person camera angle in video games. He argues that game developers should re-evaluate the assumption that the first-person viewpoint is inherently more immersive than other gaming experiences.

Good utility since many people will likely be sharing documents via Google Docs while working on projects for coursework.

Hey Chris. Given all the other options we have for creating and sharing documents and information, how do you see this being most useful to you?

The 1-step migration of research content to the host document is very nice, but outside of that, I think I would be inclined to stick with google docs if for no other reason than users (and any collaborators) do not need to download an application to their computer.

"Motivation is weak because more students don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well." Also see Tom Friedman in the NYTimes referring to this article and concluding that "right now the Hindus and Confucians have more Protestant ethics than we do, and as long as that is the case we'll be No. 11!"

Summary: In a shift, professors from prominent colleges (including Harvard) are actually *encouraging* students to use Wikipedia.

Yes! This is a great way to harness a digital resource rather than dismissing it. More or less, everyone uses Wikipedia because if for nothing else, it's usually the first hit in a Google search. I agree with the article in that most students aren't allowed to cite Wikipedia but they do use it as a jumping-off point for their research. So in this sense, it IS valuable. One of the reasons I like it in a pinch is the colloquial tone in the delivery of the information. I usually feel like a buddy is explaining it to me rather than a Phd. If students could capture that tone but provide quality assurance on the facts, there's a real research gem to be had here.

NSTA's Science Teacher must have known we just spent the class with Paul Horowitz. Jan Mokros (TERC) is an author here

"One teacher commented, "It's hard to manage the class when students become 'click happy' without really understanding what they're doing." However, requiring students to verbally explain and justify their reasoning before proceeding to the next screen was an effective solution."

My first thought is "why would you want to be friends with your students on facebook?" It depends on the reasons people have a facebook page. If it is, indeed, going to be used as a tool to extend "learning" outside of the classroom, then I believe there are other platforms outside of Facebook. If teachers still want to use this for class, perhaps a better option is having a twitter account for school only where they can update students. I worked for two districts-one told us we were not allowed to be friends with our students and the other just warned against it. Most teachers I know do not add their students because it is a place for their friends where they do not see themselves as some child's teacher, but someone's friend. I know a high school chorus teacher who friends her students, and I think its inappropriate. She posts things about her personal life and they frequently chime in. However, discusses her personal life in class so it may not be that much of a difference than posting it online. I would take action as a teacher if I were disciplined for a facebook post. Ultimately people need to check their privacy settings if they can. There are even issues with friending other teachers. I refused to do this with other teachers, unless we were friends outside of school. I knew of teachers who would tell our principal what was posted on other teachers' pages.

Now Facebook has "Friends" pages, where you can see all the interactions between your friends.

A case for teaching computing to girls.

A professor of logic and metaphysics suggests that IPods, BlackBerrys, and laptops can be seen as extensions of our minds -- "bio-external elements in an extended cognitive process."

Some really interesting stuff here. Vander Ark's prediction about traditional classrooms being replaced by ever-changing groupings of students working on the same thing at the same time sounds feasible to me for some reason. It makes sense to take advantage of computers' ability to foster independent learning as a way to group students who might not share the same classroom location. I also found it interesting that Silversnail believed that the classrooms who used the technology the most in Maine were not necessarily the most successful or educationally sound. It shows you that, with technology, the how and the why are much more important than the what.

Tying into discussions this week about bringing access to mobile devices to all via non-prohibitive costs, while still reaching a set of bare-minmum technical specs for actual use: India's "$35 tablet" has been a pipedream in the tech blog-o-sphere for awhile now, but it's finally available (though for a price of roughly $60). Still though, as an actual Android color touch tablet, with WiFi and cellular data capability - I'm curious to see how it's received and if it's adopted in any sort of large scale

I had heard months ago that India was creating this, but was not going to offer it commercially - rather, just for its own country. Just like the Little Professor (Prof Dede) calculator, when tablets get this affordable, educational systems can afford classroom sets of them and then use them regularly. But to Prof Dede's point - can they do everything that more expensive tablets can do? Or better yet - do they HAVE to?

I think this is what they're aiming to do - all classrooms/students across the country having this particular tablet. They won't be able to do everything today's expensive tablets can do, but I think they'll still be able too to do plenty. This $35 tablet's specs are comparable to the mobile devices we had here in the US in 2008/2009. Even back then, we were able to web browse, check email, use social networking (sharing pics and video too), watching streaming online video, and play basic 2D games. But even beyond those basic features, I think this tablet will be able to do more than we expect from something at this price point and basic hardware, for 2 reasons: 1. Wide-spread adoption of a single hardware. If this thing truly does become THE tablet for India's students, it will have such a massive userbase that software developers and designers who create educational software will have to cater to it. They will have to study this tablet and learn the ins-and-outs of its hardware in order to deliver content for it. "Underpowered" hardware is able to deliver experiences well beyond what would normally be expected from it when developers are able to optimize heavily for that particular set of components. This is why software for Apple's iPhone and iPad, and games for video game consoles (xbox, PS3, wii) are so polished. For the consoles especially, all the users have the same exact hardware, with the same features and components. Developers are able to create software that is very specialized for that hardware- opposed to spending their resources and time making sure the software works on a wide variety of hardware (like in the PC world). With this development style in mind, and with a fixed hardware model remaining widely used in the market for many years- the resultant software is very polished and goes beyond what users expect from it. This is why today's game consoles, which have been around since 2005/6, produce visuals that are still really impressive and sta

Video games can improve cognition and foster positive behavior. (not that we didn't know that already...)

Do videogames boot brain function?

Ha ha. Booting brain function. Got it... I think. Maybe I need to go play a video game.