"The personal essays, which first appeared in the Voices from the Learning Revolution group blog, include images, clickable links and videos - plus selected comments by readers of the original posts." You may have heard of Will Richardson or seen a TED talk of his. He is the co-founder of Powerful Learning Practice, an organization which does online and blended teacher development. As they launch Powerful Learning Press, they are giving away their first e-book.

If you don't know Clay Shirky, you can find TED talks and books about technology and/or web 2.0. I recommend Cognitive Surplus if you want more.

"In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it's a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs."

This virtual conference is running round-the-clock. All sessions are recorded. Have a look at the extensive list of offerings. "Our free, online conference started Monday, November 12 and runs around the clock for five days. All sessions take place in Blackboard Collaborate webinar rooms linked from our web site. No registration is required but we do encourage you to join this network for email updates and to connect with presenters and participants."

"The few participants who did feel overwhelmed were often those with low Internet skills, who haven't yet mastered social media filters and navigating search engine results, Hargittai noted."

The issue of infrastructure and wireless access is mentioned, but not deeply considered in this article. What challenges do we see if this sort of thing is really going to "enable Datawind to educate every schoolchild in India through the world's cheapest functional tablet computer."?

What happens when online tutoring goes to school?

I just found a current MOOC, highly relevant to the conversation in class today. --free and accepting new participants now. "Weekly Topics: Change pressures: What is influencing higher education? (Oct 8-14) Net pedagogies: New models of teaching and learning (Oct 15-21) Entrepreneurship and commercial activity in education (Oct 22-28) Big data and Analytics (Oct 29-Nov 4) Leadership in Education (Nov 4-11) Distributed Research: new models of inquiry (Nov 12- 18)"

This is the link to a MOOC orchestrated by Stephen Downes, "Change in Formal Education Systems". Unlike the MOOCs that are getting all the press, like Coursera and EdX which are largely replicating a model that pushes content to the learner, this MOOC is actually trying to change the dynamics of teacher-learner interactions. The live session described here is about interaction. "Interaction - The various types and methods by which interaction is supported in formal education, especially student-student, student-content and student-teacher interactions. We look especially at the capacity to substitute one form of interaction for another based on funding, time subject and context."

If you aren't familiar with Steve Hargodon, he is worth checking out. He blogs and facilitates a lot of online conversations about the future of education.

He basically subscribes to all the educational and management journals you want to and should be reading-- and summarizes the "best" articles for educators. It's a subscription service, but it looks at issues from student, teacher, and admin perspective.

Good insights here-- about teacher recruitment, training, ongoing professional learning, and assessment.

This relates to part of the discussion in class today. I've seen him speak about the irony that Chinese schools, which are outperforming US schools on PISA and TIMMS, are actually trying to model their systems more on US pedagogy. See his latest book or look for him on TED.

If you are not familiar with the 21st Century Fluency project, have a look. When I received this week's newsletter, there was a lot of alignment with the conversation we had in Monday's lecture.

http://www.fluency21.com/perspectives/LNE_perspective.pdf This is a great intro to the thinking these guys are doing. Their breakdown of the 5 fluencies is probably one of the most actionable representations of what everyone is calling 21st century skills.

Following up on Chris's comment about how social media is allowing students to create a society. Have a look. The work of this graduate class in anthropology is fascinating.

Teachers rate educational apps. I'm interested in the intersection of crowdsourcing and teacher professional development.

If you are not familiar with connectedlearning.tv ... you should be. They tackle issues related to instructional design--and associated professional learning structures needed to transform education.

This group at connectedlearning.tv is doing interesting work, focusing on very high level learning objectives while departing from the content delivery mode of "teaching".

This is the thing I really wanted people to see related to collective note-taking. See 27:00 to approximately 34 or 35 minute mark. His students take shared notes and create a master exam review sheet.

If you start watching at the 30-minute mark, you can get a peek at how he uses technology in the design of his course and to shape participation during class. At the 34:00 minute mark he is describing a jigsaw reading activity, similar to the study groups we are often encouraged to form. You won't believe where he and his students go with this. I love his statement, "There are no natives here." So true. I can't find the other video where he shows his collaborative notetaking platform that he uses in a 200-student class, but it's very cool. That's where I got the idea for some kind of wiki or google doc that might allow us to manage lecture notes and the backchannel.