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Fascinating new school in New York, focusing on Science and teaching entirely through educational gaming.

Online schools benefit who? children or taxpayers, or a company that thrives by squeezing profits from public schools by raising enrollment , increasing teacher load, and lowering standards?

Move toward moving away from filtering web access at New Mexico public schools.

The headline promises more than the article delivers. It mainly identifies the limited effectiveness that the federal government can have. There are no specific "how to's" here and no mention of technology whatsoever, perhaps because that would be too specific a focus for the scope of the article. These are prominent figures in a prominent publication having a conversation that could have taken place in 1980. How do we change that? The absence of real civic engagement on issues about education is the missing link in education reform. I wonder if we can organize public discourse on the internet more effectively to have formal impact on civic activism and administration.

This article talks about the school of one

Nice article on the challenges in school reform - An excerpt from the article - " you simply cannot fix America's schools by "scaling" charter schools. ...... Charter schools offer proof of the concept that great teaching is a huge difference-maker, but charters can only absorb a tiny fraction of the nation's 50 million public schoolchildren. Real reform has to go beyond charters - and it has to include the unions."

Discussing the pros and cons of Stanford's public online classes.

Kind of like Professor Dede's post about McGraw-Hill's interest in e-learning, here is a blog post from Pearson about MOOCs. I think his take (Jeff Borden, one of their VPs) is pretty accurate, in that we need a version 2 where it's not as lecture-based as version 1. I would guess that they are working on their own "version 2" solution (perhaps with Knewton?).

Maria, do you know if this event is open to the public, or more a "sponsor-day" event? I would love to go!

Not sure if it's public event, I only know about it because I will be helping with the App Inventor demo. I'll let you know once I know more info.

Captures the complexities of actually implementing new technologies in school at scale.

A new publication dedicated solely to MOOCs.

'Quest to Learn' is a New York City public middle and high school, supporting collaborative student-led learning: "Quest to Learn has used research in game-based learning to create a rigorous and engaging collaborative learning space where students feel safe taking risks and using their successes and failures to create and apply new knowledge." "Nurturing social and emotional learning (SEL) and 21st century skills like inventiveness, risk taking and collaboration."

"The advent of this so-called "lousy product" - the MOOC - may be triggering a change, however. Indeed, recent survey evidence suggests that the acceptance of online learning among certain constituencies may be plateauing. Is it possible that a backlash against MOOCs could even precipitate a decline in the broader acceptance of online learning?"

More on MOOCs: "One one side, there are those who portray traditional higher education models as enjoying too much immunity from market forces and public demands for greater academic efficiency and productivity; on the other side are faculty groups and others who are struggling against a narrative of disruption that sees higher education as a business while discounting the issues of academic quality, freedom and governance."

ITNews, an Australian business publication, is reporting that the Department of Education of the state of New South Wales is using a variety of management software and techniques 'to roll out 240,000 netbook computers into what CIO Stephen Wilson calls "the most hostile environment you can roll computers into" - the local high school.' Students are offered a netbook in 9th grade through 12th and can keep them if they graduate.

Google Wave, which combines email, instant messaging and wiki-style editing will go on public trial today. The search giant hopes the tool, described as "how e-mail would look if it were invented today", will transform how people communicate online.

Agh! Not another way to communicate! I can't even remember my passwords to all these things! I can't even remember I have a Facebook account until someone "friends" me! What happened to isolation and Transcendentalism? Needing to read Walden in the woods alone right now...

There could be some real potential here for use of grants beyond the television screen. I'd be interested to track how this money is allocated across platforms, especially emerging ones like apps for phones/iPads.

Detroit public schools made its science curriculum digital this school year through a partnership with Discovery Education. They don't mention whether students have access to their own laptop or other mobile devices.

As internet data rates cheapen, throughput for public Wi-fis, such as the California Public Library system, is optimized, bringing the internet to learners hungry for knowledge.