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"Empirically, it's not just for other people that you need to start small. You need to for your own sake. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it's a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it's going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you'll get it wrong. I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward. The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one. "

It is not uncommon for true visionaries to perform poorly in the constraints of a classroom. No matter how progressive the teacher, a classroom has a certain level of restriction. Teachers have preconceived notions about what students need to learn and how they should learn it. The most forward-thinking, creative students often tend to be frustrated by those restrictions. As a result, they are limited by instructors who cannot accept, or do not want to accept, new possibilities. Shortly after Sir John Gurdon won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine this year, a report circulated that had been written by one of his high-school biology teachers. The report lambasted the young scientist, stating: "Several times he has been in trouble, because he will not listen, but will insist on doing his work in his own way." This perfectly illustrates how teachers can fail to recognize a new way of thinking. In our most obstinate moments, the mere suggestion that a student can do something contrary to the way we teach it and still become successful is inconceivable.

If Google is to achieve its stated mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible," says Wiley, it must find out about those hidden needs and learn how to serve them. And he says experience sampling-bugging people to share what they want to know right now, whether they took action on it or not-is the best way to do it. "Doing that on a mobile device is a relatively new technology, and it's getting us better information that we really haven't had in the past," he says.

"In his new book To Sell is Human, author Daniel Pink reports that education is one of the fastest growing job categories in the country. And with this growth comes the opportunity to change the way educators envision their roles and their classrooms. Guided by findings in educational research and neuroscience, the emphasis on cognitive skills like computation and memorization is evolving to include less tangible, non-cognitive skills, like collaboration and improvisation. Jobs in education, Pink said in a recent interview, are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder. At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas."

Home Blogs Think Tank Better Than Free: How Lynda.com Made a Pay Wall Pay by Megan Erickson January 26, 2012, 12:00 AM Computer What's the Big Idea? Free is easy. In an age when just about anything can be shared, the hard part is getting people to pay for it. For ten years, content creators have argued that if you want watch, read, or listen to something, you have to support the writing, editing, and production work that has gone into it. Usually, this translates into nothing more than guilt-tripping or flattering an audience into making a donation, since it's widely assumed that putting content behind pay wall is a sure way to kill a site's traffic.

Education Applications (EA) Proposal Due Date: Decemeber 03, 2012 Please all inquiries about this topic to Glenn Larsen (glarsen@nsf.gov) Administrative Information The required 400-word project summary should discuss the intellectual merit and broader impact in two separate ~200 word paragraphs that specifically answer the following questions: Paragraph 1) Intellectual merit: What is the problem to be solved? How will the problem be solved? What is the specific innovation in the proposed approach? Paragraph 2) Broader impacts: Why is your solution better than competitive technologies? Who is going to buy your solution? Who are the other key players? Tools that build real-time information from data-mining on complexity, diversity, and similar types of information to generate knowledge that can be used to revise curricula, teaching, and assessment such as in learning analytics. Gesture-based computing applications that enable collaborative work with multiple students interacting on content simultaneously. Education tools that benefit from objects having their own IP address or location based services for new types of communications, assistive technologies, and new applications of benefit primarily to education.

"Why Not to Go to College Posted on 10 December, 2012 by RRCecil - No Comments ↓ How many times have you been told in life that college is the only answer? Think about that and answer to yourself honestly, it is a lot. Why would you not go to college? Society tells you, your family begs you, but what if that isn't the only answer?"

"A recent blog by Grant Wiggins affirmed what I have long believed about creativity: it is a 21st-century skill we can teach and assess. Creativity fosters deeper learning, builds confidence and creates a student ready for college and career. However, many teachers don't know how to implement the teaching and assessment of creativity in their classrooms. While we may have the tools to teach and assess content, creativity is another matter, especially if we want to be intentional about teaching it as a 21st-century skill. In a PBL project, some teachers focus on just one skill, while others focus on many. Here are some strategies educators can use tomorrow to get started teaching and assessing creativity -- just one more highly necessary skill in that 21st-century toolkit. "

"A simple Google search of "digital citizenship" nets 15,100,000 hits. Fifteen million! How do we make sense out of all that information? How do we separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the ridiculous from the sublime? I've selected these three blog posts because each represents a unique and thoughtful perspective on digital citizenship. You may like them so much you will want to follow these bloggers!"

"Welcome to Starfish Retention Solutions! Never before has helping students cross the finish line been more important. Every day, we work with leading academic institutions around the world to help students complete their academic goals. How? Starfish makes it easy for your institution to enlist your whole community as active participants in your student success initiatives by automating student tracking, early alert, online appointment scheduling, and assessment. The results are powerful. The outcomes are measurable. The impact is personal. "

"As it turns out, its decentralized social media approach is another milestone in the company's history-driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation. IBM lets employees talk-to each other and the public-without intervention. With a culture as diverse and distributed as IBM's, getting employees to collaborate and share makes good business sense. "We're very much a knowledge-based company. It's really the expertise of the employee that we're hitting on," Christensen says. No Policing IBM does have social media guidelines. The employee-created guidelines basically state that IBMers are individually responsible for what they create and prohibit releasing proprietary information."

How can you transform a classroom full of students into a community of learners? Betsy Page Sigman, a distinguished teaching professor in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., has tried over the years to add new types of technology to her database and e-commerce classes to engage her students.

"Subject: Applying for Title IV Eligibility for Direct Assessment (Competency-Based) Programs Summary: This letter provides guidance to institutions1 that wish to have direct assessment (competency-based) programs considered for title IV, Higher Education Act (HEA) program eligibility. The letter outlines how institutions can have competency-based programs approved under the current regulations on direct assessment programs."

"A few weeks ago Seth Godin published "The Circles of Marketing," in which he rightfully opined that marketing is not buzz or followers, but an entire ecosystem surrounding the product itself. Intrigued, I began to consider how The Circles of Marketing could be modified for nonprofit social media marketing. My version, the Circles of Nonprofit Marketing, is the nonprofit marketer's iteration, beginning with The Cause."

"CodeSpells"