PrestonLearning

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.

"I would like to open by paraphrasing Dobzhanzky's well-known title (1973) and assert that nothing in human psyche and society makes sense except in the light of cultural evolution. Having written the paraphrase I must confess that, alas, I cannot affirm it. The study of cultural evolution will not yet support such an assertion. It is too scattered and incomplete. Yet I believe that such a paraphrase indicates the proper scope for a robust investigation of cultural evolution. Accordingly I'll offer a few observations on what we must do to move in that direction."

Influence is normally considered as the ability to affect the thoughts, actions and ideas of others but what if those actions create a feedback loop and thus affect our own behaviour?

Nikolaos Tselios University of Patras, Greece Educational Technology - Human Computer Interaction - e-learning - Social Computing - Web Science Verified email at ece.upatras.gr

The Evolution of Cognition William L. Benzon and David G. Hays Abstract: With cultural evolution new processes of thought appear. Abstraction is universal, but rationalization first appeared in ancient Greece, theorization in Renaissance Italy, and model building in twentieth-century Europe. These processes employ the methods of metaphor, metalingual definition, algorithm, and control, respectively. The intellectual and practical achievements of populations guided by the several processes and exploiting the different mechanisms differ so greatly as to warrant separation into cultural ranks. The fourth rank is not completely formed, while regions of the world and parts of every population continue to operate by the processes of earlier ranks.

The School of Commoning is a growing worldwide community of people participating in the global and local commons. We support the developing commons movement, as well as interested organizations and individuals, with well-organized knowledge resources and educational programs on commoning and the commons.

Jeff Robin, art teacher at High Tech High, outlines a common misunderstanding of project based learning.

Tobler's First Law of Geography: A Big Idea for a Small World

""Educon is both a conversation and a conference." It is an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas - from the very practical to the big dreams."

Grockit, a company that applies social networking and gaming mechanics to studying, just closed another $7 million round of financing to fuel its international growth. Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/17/grockit-raises-7m/#yCtOzoULuGdjfEC3.99

"With Howard and Andrew Gardner Wednesday, November 7 The field of education is undergoing a revolution precipitated not only by the rapid growth of new technologies, but by the demands of an evolving global economy. These changes combined require collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. "What role should a museum play as a place of learning in the 21st century?" and "What unique value will museums add to the field?", "

"David Preston holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy from the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Science. He has taught at universities and graduate institutes and consulted on matters of learning and organizational development for 20 years. For the past seven years, David has also taught English for students of all ability levels in grades 9-12 in Los Angeles and on California's central coast. "

"In 2020, the annual amount of digital data created, replicated and consumed will total more than 5,200 gigabytes for every man, woman and child on the planet, according to a new International Data Corp. report. That's 50 times the amount of per-person data than in 2010. Once it's consumed, almost all of the rough information today effectively vanishes in the overall ocean of data. Yet within the data are tidbits of facts on customers, suppliers and business operations that, if linked, could prove useful or even profitable. Seeing the potential, some businesses are sizing up the trove - the data they control and other's. We are on the cusp of the data wars."

"All Our Ideas is a research project that seeks to develop a new form of social data collection by combining the best features of quantitative and qualitative methods. Using the power of the web, we are creating a data collection tool that has the scale, speed, and quantification of a survey while still allowing for new information to "bubble up" from respondents as happens in interviews, participant observation, and focus groups. "

"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."

"University Ventures (UV) is the premier investment firm focused exclusively on the global higher education sector. UV pursues a differentiated strategy of 'innovation from within'. By partnering with top-tier universities and colleges and then strategically directing private capital to develop programs of exceptional quality that address major economic and social needs, UV expects to set new standards for student outcomes and advance the development of the next generation of colleges and universities on a global scale. "

"A Step Forward? Bertelsmann & Others Back $100 Million Venture Fund For Innovative Education"