What makes good instructional design in the real world? These are the 2011 winners of the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program. Anyone interested in entering the instructional design field would probably be interested in watching some of these videos.

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 a program developed at WPI out in Worcester. It allows teachers to load in questions and create assessments. Pretty useful.

Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning: It's the latest report on the state of online learning that Christenson believes will encompass 50% of high school classes by 2018. Not sure I agree with this, but it's still interesting to see the latest data.

In Disrupting Class, one of the predictions that Clay Christenson makes is that classroom content in the future will not come from traditional textbooks, but from students and teachers who contribute user-generated content for learning. Here is an example of a site that allows users to download free textbooks. This is further proof that once the information is out there for all to see, it is going to be more and more difficult to prevent people from spreading ideas and circumventing the charge-for-information model that is currently out there.

This article is further proof that many of the emerging educational technology initiatives are driven not by student performance but by the desire to earn profits. K12,inc. seems to be a particularly shady (and highly successful) business in this regard.

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

Excellent rundown of the relevant trends in educational technology and some strategies that schools can take to adopt these trends

Check out these old videos from the '80s in which Apple predicts the future of education. First thought is that the technologies they show in these videos seem quite pedestrian in today's world. Second thought is that they got it right- many of these things that they show in these videos have come to fruition. Very cool look back.

Top Educational Apps of the past month. Would love breakdown of educational objectives of some of these apps

Here is a list of the top trends in Ed-TEch for 2011. Some of the highlights include Mobile Learning, BYOD, and text-messaging startups.

States are expanding their offerings of online courses, and in conjunction with this, they are beginning to create policy mandating that students take a set number of online courses in order to graduate from high school. I'm not sure how I feel about this. While I believe that online courses have a way to go and could one day be a solution for all kinds of learners, I believe that right now, online courses are not necessarily for all learners all the time. There are simply some learners who would benefit more from classroom instruction and the built in motivation that face-to-face provides.

An estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools where their instruction and interaction is completely online. There are many benefits to this model: lower overhead, anywhere/anytime learning, meeting students where they are...yet the students in these full-time online schools consistently fall short of their peers in traditional schools. Gives us pause to consider what is lost in the online learning environment and what are the essential parts of face to face learning that cannot be replicated online..

This article talks about the Upside Down Academy, where students do the teaching and in so doing, learn themselves.

This article shows the dark underbelly of the educational policy world as it relates to technology. As schools are increasingly adopting online learning models in classes, companies are predictably lining up to get money from the movement. However, there are many companies who are taking it a step further and lobbying for policies that do not have children's best interests in mind and which operate under the simplistic and misguided assumption that "schools will not need teachers once computers become good enough." It should give us pause to consider what needs to be done in these early stages to prevent the edTech movement from falling into the wrong hands and killing our schools.

This is an expansion of an earlier Tweet. Many of these apps use Augmented Reality in order to bridge the present with the past.

As public funds dry up, more and more school districts will have to take an entrepreneurial approach to bring costs down.

Here is a brand new competitor for iPad, the Jetstream from HTC. This tablet takes advantage of AT&T's 4G data network, but its price tag is a steep $849. However, AS WITH ALL DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES< THE MORE COMPETITORS THERE ARE, THE MORE THE PRICE IS DRIVEN DOWN. So, perhaps this is good news for the future of tablets in schools...

I saw Zhao speak yesterday at the MassCUE conference (with James, Chris McEnroe and Isabel Schwartzman). His message was provocative: the United States did not do well on the TIMSS test, but the US has never done well on this type of testing even way back to the 1950s. Therefore, Zhao thinks that these tests are not good indicators of educational quality, but that the things that the US does right are fostering creativity, building in tolerance and forgiveness into the educational system, and stressing problem-solving and collaborative learning.

Memphis, TN teachers are getting real-time coaching on their teaching performances- by wearing EARBUDS as a coach in the back of the room tells them what to do! This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. This is an example of emerging technology meddling in the mix and enabling a Big Brother style environment for teachers. These are people who are in charge of leading our kids, not coaching a football game!