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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. "

"The EdUmatics project aims to provide teachers of secondary mathematics with support to learn to use and integrate technology within their classrooms. The resources for professional development, whilst aimed at teachers, include a range of tasks for students to enable them to use technology within modelling and problem-solving activities. These are available in the different project languages. The resources include links to free and trial software, applications and animations in addition to tasksheets and helpsheets that can be adapted for different scenarios. If you are a teacher trainer, there is additional guidance to support you to use the professional development modules with teachers and trainee teachers."

"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."

"After a decade of teaching at the university level, David Preston decided to stop ignoring the ills we all know haunt those halls and dropped back to high school. He's now trying to reform a place that desperately needs it. I got the chance to participate in a discussion with his literature and composition classes, thanks to David, Ted Newcomb, and Howard Rheingold, all of whom are hacking education in various ways. I can tell you with no reservations that David is making the difference. I want to keep this introduction as brief as possible and just let him tell you about it. Some men just want to watch the world learn. "

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.

"The big theme of Mr. Shirky's talk was openness. Taking advantage of technology, he argued, will require "doing more sharing than we're used to and then learning to live with results." He underscored the power of sharing with an anecdote about what happened when the Smithsonian Institution made a cache of photographs available on Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Users catalogued the archive with tags that reflected an unpredictable range of interests, including facial hair, the history of photography, and the fiction genre known as Steampunk. "There's all kinds of hidden value in our systems which you can't even understand until you open them up to see what people do with them," Mr. Shirky said. "The thing that drives me craziest in conversations with large institutions about large data sets is they want to know in advance what will happen. Why should we open up our data? To which the answer is, you open up your data to see where the value is. It's the value you can't even predict until you try it that you get back.""

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.

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.

"Race To The Top Innovates Backwards, Education Venture Nonprofit Says When U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan opened the Race to the Top competition to individual school districts two weeks ago, he said he wanted to spur innovation "at the classroom level and the all-important relationship among teachers and students." Now, a coalition of 16 education startups and policy organizations, herded by the nonprofit NewSchools Venture Fund, are saying the competition gets innovation wrong. They're planning to send Duncan a letter Friday."

"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?"

"Focus Forward films highlight exceptional people and world-changing ideas that are impacting the course of human development, changing our lives for the better. We are looking for professional quality 3-minute stories about visionaries and thinkers and in some cases everyday folks who have brought a quantum leap to human progress by their efforts and inventions. Your film may encompass anything from jaw-dropping medical advancements to renewable energy breakthroughs; open-source architecture to the development of wireless technologies in Third World countries; computer programming wizardry to sci-fi-worthy robotics; or any other sphere of art and knowledge that inspires you. We're especially interested in the accomplishments of inventors, engineers, educators, surgeons, scientists, techies, artists, programmers, backyard tinkerers-i.e. anyone making a difference, utilizing their skills and vision to innovate, share their work, and help sow the seeds of a brighter future."

"Educational technology companies and entrepreneurs may face the risk of a "tech bubble," similar to the massive boom-and-bust that rocked the technology market in the late 1990s, according to market analysts and a recently released paper. A relatively new focus on K-12 educational technology as an investment vehicle, a surge of investors looking to cash in on the latest innovations, and fewer barriers to developing an ed-tech business have merged in ways that have some market observers wary of what's ahead. The flurry of activity is prompting comparisons to the dot-com crash of the late 1990s, which brought the failure of many technology-related businesses that had drawn huge sums of money from investors. "

"Internet Essentials is not a government program, although that would be difficult to tell from the poster. Instead, it is a two-year-old program run by Comcast, the country's largest Internet and cable provider, meant to bring affordable broadband to low-income homes. Any family that qualifies for the National School Lunch Program is eligible for Internet service at home for $9.95 a month. The families also receive a voucher from Comcast to buy a computer for as little as $150. "

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.

"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."

"He compares traditional teaching to "giving people thousands of rubber mallets and asking them to drill a hole through a mountain." He said, "We need nitroglycerine." His "nitroglycerine" is Saylor.org, a nonprofit online university he backs as sole trustee of the Saylor Foundation. Saylor's model is to offer students a free, one-stop shop for self-paced college courses. Saylor.org aggregates free content offered by open-source providers like MIT OpenCourseWare and Open Yale Courses, and groups it so that students can pursue a continuous sequence of courses in a major. The model takes a different approach than that of high-profile providers of massive open online courses, or MOOC's, mainly in its role as an aggregator of online content into comprehensive courses. Instead of following a professor through a series of video lectures and peer-graded exercises on Coursera, for example, students in Saylor courses read, listen to, and watch material from different sources and grade themselves using answer keys."

"EDMONTON - These days, online literacy is part of classroom learning. However, for one Alberta school division, navigating social media isn't enough. It's making sure students are using the medium for good. In Parkland School Division, teachers and children are encouraged to learn about social media. "As adults, we really need to understand this world, and help the kids navigate it as opposed to just saying, 'hey just do whatever, we're too old to do this,'" explains Division Principal George Couros. "

"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. "

"On Loving (and Leaving) LearnBoost Rafael Corrales, co-founder and CEO of one of my favorite education technology startups, LearnBoost, recently announced that he has stepped down from the helm of the company and has moved on to join a venture capital firm. I admit: I'm fairly devastated by this news. I have long been a supporter of LearnBoost, first covering its official launch back in August 2010 when I was still a tech blogger for ReadWriteWeb. There I covered many of the startup's tech and product updates - including, for example, the development and open-sourcing of its crowdsourced translation interface - even though the editors were always quick to tell me not to cover ed-tech startups. ("Nobody cares, Audrey.") Nevertheless, when I was assigned to write the end-of-year story "Top 10 Startups of 2010," I put LearnBoost on the list alongside other exciting new startups from the year, including Instagram, Flipboard, Quora, Square, and Hipmunk."

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.