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"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."

Freelance Professors December 14, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain "Self-employed professor" could soon be an actual job title, thanks to two companies that are helping a small group of college professors market their own online courses, set prices for them and share the tuition revenue. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/14/two-companies-give-faculty-more-control-online-courses#ixzz2J7h5IRxb Inside Higher Ed

Disintermediating students and teachers.

"Can you go to college on your computer? Some say yes, and others respond with a resounding no. But one thing is for sure: there is a boatload of public money to be vacuumed off an overcrowded, underfunded educational establishment desperate for at least the appearance of a quick fix. "

"Andrew Rasiej is a professional doer, futurist, social entrepreneur, and Founder of Personal Democracy Media, which produces Personal Democracy Forum and other events about how the intersection of technology, politics, and civil society is empowering new levels of citizen engagement. Among its offerings are TechPresident an award winning blog and Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference held in New York City in June. He is also the Founder a not for profit organization called MOUSE.org focused on 21st century public education,"

"Digital Devices Invade Campus, and Networks Feel the Strain"

"Opera As a Teaching Tool for Chemistry "

"The Mozilla Foundation has a vision of a web literate planet. We've built some tools to help with this and now we're asking the question: What are the skills, competencies and literacies necessary to read, write and participate in the Web - now and in the future? We've already started the thinking but we want to go further and develop a web literacy standard that we can all align with and teach to. And we need your help. "

The Worst Consequence of Your Best Ideas You have to wonder why desks in rows and textbooks on the desks have survived as long as they have as the dominant instructional model when so few people think that it's actually a good way to teach and learn. And then you realize that while it never goes all that right, it rarely goes all that wrong either. Teachers don't usually get in trouble when administrators walk into their classroom and see kids with books open, doing work, even if the work isn't worth doing. And all those other ideas that we love so much - inquiry, project-based learning, technology, real world application of student work - they get so… messy. And something always seems to go wrong. And we have to face that education is a somewhat reactionary field to work in. The death of so many good ideas is when something goes wrong and someone decides that we should never do that again.

"Basic Technology Advice for Students"

That's really good stuff. Here's the main doc https://docs.google.com/a/nitle.org/document/d/1X074ZTCmZrs591jWM3iaaNPBFBCNqQ45pknHp3MQ43A/edit

Sam Slarskey, principal at East Falmouth Elementary School in East Falmouth, Mass., created a game they call PlinkoBall last fall to bring exercise, math and fun together for students on the playground.

"Spaced Learning is a learning method in which the condensed learning content is repeated three times, with two 10-minute breaks during which distractor activities such as physical activities are performed by the students.[1] It is based on the temporal pattern of stimuli for creating long-term memories reported by R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American in 2005.[2] This 'temporal code' Fields used in his experiments was developed into a learning method and tested by Paul Kelley as reported in Making Minds[3] in 2008."

"Homeschooling is spreading all around the world, but it is also being outlawed-particularly in Sweden and Germany, which use harsh, punitive, authoritarian actions to breakup homeschooling families. It is fascinating to see a common motivation for homeschooling's worldwide growth to be dissatisfaction with conventional school practices and a desire for more personalized learning, though, as Germany proves in particular, religious motivations for homeschooling continue to challenge European policymakers and make news. Here's a roundup of homeschooling news from abroad I'm following; please send me your news or other information to help spread the word about what's happening around the world for homeschoolers."