The invisible nature of great teaching becomes apparent when we try and make some kind of judgement on what we see in the classroom

I think the problem actually goes much deeper than teachers demonstrating teaching for lesson observations and learning walks. I worry that it has permeated the culture and led to teachers focusing on the demonstration of learning too. A culture of doing.

fetishisation of visible signs of teaching and learning that infects our professional culture. The activity becomes the thing. When a teacher cries out “but you did this!” in the face of blank stares a few weeks later, we are seeing this problem played out. “Did” and “learnt” are two very different beasts

While the U.S. Constitution clearly did not take into consideration any tweets by our founding fathers, it is probably safe to assume that Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson would have loved to tweet their opinions as much as they loved to write for the newspapers of their day (sometimes under anonymous pseudonyms similar to today’s twitter user names).  Those men, and countless soldiers in service to this nation, have risked their lives for our right to tweet or to post an article on Facebook; but that is not the same as arguing that those public tweets are protected.  The Constitution gives you the right to post, but as numerous people have learned, there are still consequences for your public posts.  What you give to the public belongs to the public.  What you keep to yourself belongs only to you.

We typically assume that the internet is turning kids into narcissistic, vicious cyber-bullies, but a growing body of research indicates that the opposite is true. New research suggests that spending time emailing, texting, and Facebook-ing might actually help both adults and kids become better friends and people

the more time college students spent on the internet, the more empathetic they were both online and off

Forty-five percent of 3,777 teens surveyed reported being bullied, but fewer than 20 percent of those said it had occurred online or via text messaging or phone. Almost 40 percent said it had happened in person. And two-thirds of those bullied online said they didn't even find the abuse upsetting.

human brain networks represent a balance between high efficiency of information transfer and low connection cost

Members of the audience and other Twitter users were asked to tweet during the lecture about the concepts that were being discussed, using the hashtag #csftwitterbrain. At the end of the talk Professor Bullmore displayed the resulting image showing the interconnectivity of the hashtagged tweets, and explained how Twitter networks can be compared to the human brain network. “We found that the #twitterbrain network was somewhat like the brain network in being small-world and modular with highly connected hub nodes; however the brain network was more clustered and less efficient than the twitter network. So at first sight there were some points in common and some points of difference between these two information processing networks.”

“It has been intriguing to see the spectacle of watching the twitter network grow or evolve over the course of several days. And I have learnt a lot about the power of new media to engage and communicate, and the potential scientific value of using Twitter to map and measure social networks.”