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"Here's a thought, if you are spending all of your time worrying about a term no one can define, its time to get a different hobby.Thus, step three in Changing Gears 2012 is to stop using the term rigor, and to start to actually define what you want from education for your students."

"On 4 and 5 October 2012 the 6th European Conference on Games-Based Learning took place in Cork (Ireland). The Conference on Games-Based Learning (ECGBL) offers an opportunity for scholars and practitioners interested in the issues related to games based learning (GBL) to share their thinking and research findings. It also presents an opportunity for networking with others in this growing field of research. The  abstracts of all presentations  is available as a downloadable pdf."

In retrospect, 2012 may well be remembered as the year when Internet technology enabled the popularity of MOOCs-or massive open online courses-a form of disruptive or transformative education currently growing at a meteoric rate.

"To acquire and practice literacy skills today, students and educators in Oklahoma City Public Schools require access to Evernote, Google Docs, Gmail, Edmodo, Posterous, Celebrate Oklahoma Voices, and other educationally appropriate, interactive websites. All these websites are currently (as of February 9, 2012) blocked by OKCPS for student access. OKCPS must stop its "draconian" and unjustified Internet content filtering policies and adopt BALANCED policies. The district must TRUST teachers and empower them to directly bypass the content filter with their login credentials when it is professionally justified for instruction and learning."

EverFi, Inc. the leading education technology company for critical skills, today announced that it has built Sash, the first open-source badging platform that enables education companies to use badges to encourage and recognize student achievement. EverFi launched t open-source badging technology across its K-12 learning platform in the 2012-2013 academic year. The technology behind Sash allows organizations to integrate badge creation, management, and display into their own products. The badging platform follows the metadata format established by the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure.

One in every four Americans receives their news digitally from mobile devices, which are helping to expand the consumption of journalism across multiple sources, according to a new report released Monday. The 2012 State of the News Media Report, conducted by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, provides an in-depth examination of how Americans read news as their consumption habits transition from the printed form to the digital.

klout scoring algorithm was changed in August 2012. This discusses the changes

This 12 week course, starting September 10, 2012 will explore openness in education - its roots, its growing influence, and economic and systemic impact. We have adopted an open online format (massive open online courses, sometimes referred to as MOOCs...though we expect this course won't hit that "massive" target achieved by initiatives like Coursera and EDx. For a quick introduction to connectivist courses and how they work, please view the videos below.

Cornell has published a super summary of how you can use woks in Public Domain - January 2012

"Despite the rapid advances in telepresence and distributed working tools, people still brave traffic and go to the office. Business travel is on the rise as people congregate for meetings and conferences. Attendees pay $7,500 for tickets to TED talks when the content is all posted free of charge on their website. And 250 leaders [including John Hagel] will attend Techonomy 2012 in Tucson starting Sunday. Are we just stubborn creatures of habit who are slow to adopt a better solution? Or, is there a fundamental value to the brick-and-mortar, flesh-and-bone world that cannot be replaced?"

"Here's what happened," he continues. "First, when one student has the right answer and the other doesn't, the first one is more likely to convince the second-it's hard to talk someone into the wrong answer when they have the right one. More important, a fellow student is more likely to reach them than Professor Mazur-and this is the crux of the method. You're a student and you've only recently learned this, so you still know where you got hung up, because it's not that long ago that you were hung up on that very same thing. Whereas Professor Mazur got hung up on this point when he was 17, and he no longer remembers how difficult it was back then. He has lost the ability to understand what a beginning learner faces."

"That's the latest number from the Social Media Report, an annual snapshot by Nielsen and NM Incite. The report says that Facebook is still the top social network, though its tally of unique visitors has fallen 4 percent from the same time last year. Blogger, the second-place network, also saw a slight decline (3 percent) while third-place Twitter saw a gain of 13 percent. Wordpress, likewise, saw a 10 percent jump. The break-out social media star of the past year has been Pinterest, the report said, which jumped 1,047 percent from the same time last year. And since its Sept. 2011 debut, Google+ has grown 80 percent."

"Fast-forward to October 2012: OERs have failed to significantly affect the day-to-day teaching of the vast majority of higher education institutions. Traditional textbooks and readings still dominate most teaching venues even though essentially all students are online: Course management systems are used only for the dissemination of syllabi, class notes, general communications, and as a grade book. OERs are out there…somewhere. Why aren't they on campus?"

The college, with the cooperation of faculty and students, made a move toward using OERs. The two-year project began in April 2012 and is supported by student technology fees. The goal was to embed OERs into the 10 classes with the highest enrollments and to save students $250,000. A year later, 39 sections of 19 individual classes-from biology, to English, to computer courses-use digital materials rather than traditional textbooks. Faculty isn't required to participate, but the number of teachers using OERs is growing. To date, the college has saved students $266,000.

The top-ranked schools all focus on engineering, including Harvey Mudd College, California Institute of Technology, Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and SUNY - Maritime College. At the bottom of the rankings was the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, which had an opportunity cost of $155,000 to attend in 2012, including living expenses and lost wages from not working. The school had a graduation rate of 37 percent while its 30-year net return on investment was projected as a loss of $228,000, Payscale.com said.

Smartphone usage continues to climb in the U.S. More than three out of five (61%) mobile subscribers in the U.S. owned a smartphone during the most recent three-month period (March-May 2013), up more than 10 percent since smartphones became the mobile majority in early 2012. When it comes operating system preference, Apple remained the top smartphone manufacturer in the U.S., while the majority of smartphone owners used Android OS handsets. Fifty-three percent of smartphone owners used the Android OS, and 40 percent owned iPhones.

"a mini-MOOC, a meta-MOOC, a MOOC about MOOCs | A small fraction of what we did in August 2012, January 2013, and June 2013. www.moocmooc.com"

In October 2011, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges launched the Open Course Library, a collection of high-quality, low-cost educational materials to correspond with the 81 largest-enrollment courses in the state. The first 42 courses are available immediately, and the remaining 39 are slated for development in 2012 and release in 2013. In conjunction with the release of the first 42 courses, the Student PIRGs conducted this informal study to evaluate just how much the Open Course Library could reduce costs for students. Based on a survey of 22 of the program's 42 course authors, all of whom had agreed to adopt the materials in their own teaching, we have preliminary estimates for the impact of these courses.

They chose their rooms and paid for everything online. But their beds were provided by private individuals, rather than a hotel chain. Hosts and guests were matched up by Airbnb, a firm based in San Francisco. Since its launch in 2008 more than 4m people have used it-2.5m of them in 2012 alone. It is the most prominent example of a huge new "sharing economy", in which people rent beds, cars, boats and other assets directly from each other, co-ordinated via the internet.

In Fall 2011, Stanford announced three, free massively open online courses, or MOOCs. Two of these courses, database and machine learning, corresponded to spring 2012 courses that I would be teaching at Vanderbilt University. I recognized that I could use the lecture materials from these classes to "flip" my own classes by having students view lectures before the class meeting, which then could be used for other learning activities.