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Trip to zoo without leaving classroom! This tool is interactive and students can see and hear rear animals, including multi-touch, multi-user interactive tool. Another interesting aspect is that it never gives negative feedback. "Instead of telling you that it's wrong, it just tells you that it isn't right. So students can work together to find the correct answer, which increases collaboration among students." Similarities with EcoMUVE?

full disclosure: classmate Alex Schoenfeld first shared this with the us in the TIE facebook group :). But it brings an interesting trend in the adoption and pricing of mobile apps: Article outlining what lots of us know when it comes to moblie apps and pricing - free, $1, and $2 are the price-points that sell, and allow us to try out an app with minimal regret. But with the rise of more and more high-quailty, high-profile, and high-budget educatioanl apps, will the pricing structure change? Will parents and educators be willing to spend the prices of traditional computer software ($50 or more?) for really great mobile apps? The article brings up an interesting model that seems to already be coming to life looking at how apps are being sold and updated lately: "Donahoo and Russell propose there's a better way: subscriptions and content expansion packs.  Launchpad Toys follows the latter tact. The initial price the Toontastic app for $3 (though it's currently free). Users can use that fully functioning app, or choose to add additional characters and themes with $.99 expansion packs. This way, they contend, costs are controlled; it's cheap for parents and children to evaluate an app, and the model encourages regular updates."

Moodle 2.0 has just come out. For those of you who don't know, Moodle is an open-source course management system that has been popular for teachers and schools by virtue of being free, but it has lost some steam to more expensive and more refined LMSs like Blackboard in recent years. It will be interesting to see if this new release will be more user friendly and therefore popular

Access to Wikipedia free for all 70 million Orange mobile customers in Africa & Middle East, incurs no mobile data usage, no data plan even required. Access to information seen as a "public good"

Here is a highly populated list of open course offerings at various universities on the internet. This is certainly going to be disruptive to the pay-for-learning model of higher education. Some issues: does it make sense to attach some sort of certification of completion? Is it feasible or desirable to offer complete open courses, or would it be better to make the offerings more granular in nature? Should users be able to remix offerings from various courses to create custom courses?

This is fantastic! Thank, Steve.

First there was Digital Divide.... Now, Mobile Divide!!

"Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit? Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique."

Ning trying to spread it's wings. Let's users create their own social networks-mini facebooks-if you will. Ning is slowly becoming popular in classrooms and institutions of higher learning

Edubuntu is a whole linux operating system built especially for educational users....never thought about this before, but it's a brilliant idea, take a look at the integrated tools it features!

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.

Moving in the other direction of Virtual Reality, this inventor has come up with a machine or 'robot' that actually renders digital designs/artifacts into solid, 3-dimensional objects. Surprisingly the machine is pretty cheap and is sold as a kit that the user has to build on his own before turning a photoshop image of his long lost dog Booger into a 4x4x6 hard plastic idol to wear around neck. I jest, but from a 'learning from the whole' perspective, the entire process could be really engaging and educational.

What can I say, its a smartpen. On the flip side of the user-value, a teacher could use the device to 'capture' student work in a digital log, The ability to program the SmartPaper with unique commands would make for some simple yet scalable adaptive testing designs.

A TV/Web report on the digital revolution and how it's changing our lives, with video stories, interviews, and user-generated video on relationships, information overload, education, the military, parenting, brain development, and more.

This blog posting actually references the book we are reading in class - Disrupting Class, and offers some views and an example on the disruptive technology concept.

An article describing how AR apps for cellphones could provide users with location-based data using barcode tagging.

Internet is certaily playing an incredibly important role in our daily life, no matter in the United States, or China.

Interesting article on why touch screens are dominating in new technologies--and the basis for why they're more attractive to us.

What out for the Android.

Interesting article on Facebook introducing @facebook.com email addresses. I doubt this will replace other e-mail providers for adults, but wonder what impact this will have on younger users of the site.

New York classroom where curriculum is entirely in video games. The program is called "Quest to Learn". Students learn math, english and other core subjects by playing multi user video games. The games are designed by learning games designers and are focused on problem solving.