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The effective use of technology to improve learning processes turns out to be a far greater "change problem" than most leaders and practitioners appreciate and one that is inconsistent with the rigid and powerful cultural aspects (i.e., assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors) of education. Among the key reasons for this limited success are (a) the all too common "cultural paralysis" in education, (b) the lack of adequate transformational leadership for providing the necessary "learning vision," "change sponsorship," and relevant "circumstances and rewards," and (c) few proactive professional faculty development programs that meaningfully prepare faculty change methods, "change creation," that provide approaches for long-term improvement.

By Claude Almansi and Jan Schwartz October 3rd, 2011 "Scoop.it is a new application that is still in beta, although it's fairly easy to get an invite to join. Claude Almansi found the app, sent an email about it to a list serv, which prompted Jan Schwartz to join. We've only been at it for a month or so, but already both of us have found some good information that we otherwise would have missed, and we are helping to spread the good work about education technology and change. First, some information about Scoop.it that Claude dug up. The web service was conceived in France, launched in December 2010 and its web site is in English. It's a social site for sharing news events and articles via subscription. Even if you don't subscribe, Scoop.it can be used to look for information items selected by others on a given theme via its public search engine. You do need to subscribe if you want to create and curate your own topic on a given theme or subject. For example, Jan was particularly excited to find a blog written as a result of a live chat sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which talked about the topic of Cathy Davidson's recent book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn. There were four panelists and 1500 participants on the chat and one of them, David Palumbo-Liu, wrote a blog about his experience, which was very different than Jan's and so an interesting read for perspective. She would not have found that blog if not for Scoop.it. Claude curates a site for Multimedia Accessibility. Currently Jan is 'scooping' under the title Technology for Teaching and Learning . You can curate as many different topics as you like."

"Created by Gerry Bayne (EDUCAUSE) on October 29, 2007 In this 40 minute podcast, we feature a speech from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference entitled "Tomorrow's Students: Are We Ready for the New 21st-Century Learners?". The presentation is by Julie Evans, Chief Executive Office for Project Tomorrow - NetDay. Video and slides for this speech are also available here. Abstract: The national Speak Up initiative annually collects and reports on the authentic, unfiltered viewpoints of K-12 students, teachers, parents, and school leaders about education technology and 21st-century learning environments. Learn about the expectations of today's K-12 students (the higher ed students of tomorrow) for technology use and their new aspirations for learning as uncovered in the most recent survey data. "

"We do not want to be belligerent about it. It is just that we do not want to project the impression that we want everybody to stop using the technology, or that this technology is too expensive."

ReadWriteWeb is a popular weblog that provides Web Technology news, reviews and analysis. It is the lead blog in the ReadWriteWeb Network, a growing network of blogs about web technology - the other sites are last100 (a blog about Digital Lifestyle), AltSearchEngines (about search) and ReadWriteTalk (a podcasting show about the people behind the Web)

"ETAN provides a forum for educators and others to engage in the political process and project a unified voice in support of a common cause - improving teaching and learning through the systemic use of technology. ETAN's mission is to influence public policy-makers at the federal, state and local levels and to increase public investment in the competitiveness of America's classrooms and students."

"Overview This Flash-based tool was created by Michael Brewer and the Office for Information Technology Policy. It provides information on determining whether or not a particular reproduction or other use of a copyrighted work is covered by Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Code, the Library & Archives exemption. While the interactivity of this tool is not available to those using screen readers, such as JAWS, the following text provides all the information provided by this tool. For the fulltext of Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Code, go to: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108. Please provide any feedback or address any questions on this tool to Michael Brewer, or to Carrie Russell at the Office for Information Technology Policy."

A piece of technology not much bigger than an adult's finger could help a new generation discover how to programme computers. Games developer David Braben and some colleagues came up with the Raspberry Pi - a whole computer on a tiny circuit board made with not much more than an ARM processor, a USB port, and an HDMI connection.

Obi, an open source audio recording tool released by the DAISY Consortium, enables a broader audience to produce accessible, navigable information for people with print disabilities. DAISY audio books created with Obi can be produced with chapters, sections, sub-sections and pages, providing navigation to the content. Obi is fully accessible through assistive technologies such as screen readers. In addition, Obi reduces the time required to work with sophisticated production tools and significantly reduces tool costs that may create barriers for some.

"Fry talking about monopolies in the tech world and how he feels about being one of the most influential names in tech." I love his reflection at the end about the contribution of technology towards the human spirit, open source software etc.

Your technology, your endeavors, your freedoms are all falling to the onslaught of entertainment-industry- funded initiatives that are destroying the future to preserve its dinosauric business models. Get your pitchforks and torches, burn your Sony rootkit-infected CDs, and take to the streets. They've declared war on you and your way of life -- if you don't defend yourself, who will?

Here's the world's shortest, fairest, and simplest licence agreement: "Don't violate copyright law." If I had my way, every digital download from the music in the iTunes and Amazon MP3 store, to the ebooks for the Kindle and Sony Reader, to the games for your Xbox, would bear this - and only this - as its licence agreement. "Don't violate copyright law" has a lot going for it, but the best thing about it is what it signals to the purchaser, namely: "You are not about to get screwed."

Stated more succinctly as a "general theory of learning in the web era," to borrow a phrase from Jim Shimabukuro, computer technology (e.g., $10 computers) + access to the digital storehouse of human knowledge + social computing + cognitive tools + teaching and learning practices consistent with the learning sciences + leadership to catalyze change = transformation of education.

By not supporting medium-sized deployments of, say 30 to 5000 laptops (a typical order from a school or an educational authority) the OLPC Foundation betrays an instinct for paternalism. We have too much paternalism in education already, and the technologies in Sugar were designed to give children democratic access to education.

Informing Science Institute (ISI) is an organization of colleagues helping colleagues. We draw together people who teach, research, and use information technologies to inform clients (regardless of academic discipline) to share their knowledge with others. The Informing Science Institute Learning Object Repository (ISI LOR) is the newest Open Source LOR created by a team of 5 individuals. We are currently Beta testing the ISI OSLOR on this site. Please feel free to browse the site. We strongly encourage you to contribute your LOs to this repository.

it will have a far broader scope, and in particular, will deal with new tools targeting "Internet distribution and information technology"

What is Technology Fluency?

"At a time when we have the technologies to enable global access to and distributed processing of scientific research and data, legal and technical restrictions are making it difficult to connect the dots. Even when research and data is made public, it's often locked up by regimes or contracts that prohibit changing file formats or languages, integrating data, semantic enrichment, text mining and more. These restrictions sharply limit the impact of published research, and prevent us from exploiting the potential of the Web for accelerating scientific discovery. In the Scholar's Copyright Project, Science Commons develops tools and resources for expanding and enhancing open access (OA) to published research and data. We believe that knowledge-sharing systems and formats based on the paper metaphor block innovation, and that open access is prerequisite for finding new ways to reap the value of the vast amounts of public research now being produced. For details on the resources we offer, continue reading below."

We are starting to see objections to the Google Book Search SettlementL2 this month in advance of the May 5th deadline set up by the court. The firstL3 comes from the consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog (foundL4 by way of the American Libraries news feed). They have submitted a letter to the U.S. Justice Department asking the antitrust division to delay the settlement until the "'most favored nation' clause favoring Google is removed and the deal's 'orphan works' provision is extended to cover all who might digitize books, not only Google." The letter in PDFL5 is available on the Consumer Watchdog website. The objections revolve around the provision that require the Books Rights Registry to give Google the same terms as anyone else who enters into agreements with the Registry (noting that more favorable terms might be required by a new party in order to compete with Google) as well as the fact that the copyright infringement protection for digitizing orphan works only extends to Google.