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This Newsletter has many relevant articles on the topic of innovation in education. "Technologies to Watch" and "Game-based Learning" were particularly interesting. "Augmented Reality" is another interesting not-so-futuristic technology that makes me think, "Jetsons here we come!"

An interesting case of the big three search engines striking an agreement on structured markup data on web pages. If you really pay attention, you can watch the Internet evolve before your very eyes. (Internet Evolution sounds like a nice topic, huh?)

Here's a couple or articles/op-eds on the announcement of Schema.org. One posits it may be a movement toward monopolization of markup data by Google: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_schemaorg_really_a_google_land_grab.php ; the other that it's a boost for structured data: http://www.mkbergman.com/962/structured-web-gets-massive-boost/.

Thanks, Rebecca. The first document you listed made my head spin a little bit. I wasn't totally familiar with the importance of a competitor to W3C markup data (I just assumed that Google et al.'s innovation would mean progress), but the polemical suggestions of "land grabs" made me think... wow, this is something to really pay attention to. Now that I'm reading Amanda's latest posts on Google vs. Facebook in a business context, I'm wondering if the big three move to Schema.org represents something like a defensive strategy (maybe even a land grab!) against Facebook jumping into the market. Maybe social media can do a better job of searching the web for relevant documents - an operation, as I'm beginning to understand, depends so much on markup standards (it's news to me that so many different options exist). I'm not sure I really understand what's going on here... but thanks for pointing out the complexities!

In this week's discussion Mary Beth brought up interesting point about Hole in the Wall studies and one laptop per child. This article criticized the program for not designing from the bottom up.