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"The Internet affords children endless opportunities to get into serious trouble, downloading what they shouldn't download, looking at what they shouldn't be looking at, and getting ideas about what they shouldn't be getting ideas about. But the good news is that if your kids are like mine, they may be doing some or all of those things... but there's another use for the Internet that's attracting their time and attention. It's called teaching."

"The recent news that the Huffington Post surpassed the Washington Post and LA Times in online visitors affirmed what many media professionals already knew: There's real business in aggregation. Whether there are real profits as well remains to be seen."

They've been around for years, but when more than 100,000 people signed up for a Stanford artificial intelligence course it was obvious that MOOCs had arrived. MOOCs and other learning resources are reshaping how people prepare for employment.

"Google, which is based in Mountain View, California, decided to stop censoring its search results in China in 2010. To avoid breaking the country's laws, Google moved the computers for its Chinese search engine from the country's mainland to Hong Kong, where the same censorship requirements aren't imposed. Since Google took its stand against censorship, its search engine and other services have been periodically unavailable."

"What sex education used to be, it's now the `technology talk' we have to have with our kids," said Rebecca Levey, a mother of 10-year-old twin daughters who runs a tween video review site called KidzVuz.com and blogs about technology and educations issues.

"Ditching Facebook has become a new, elitist form of "conspicuous non-consumption," on par with refusing television, argues New York University assistant professor Laura Portwood-Stacer in a recent article published in the Journal of New Media and Society. Once upon a time, being on Facebook meant you were hip. Now, not having a Facebook account is the status symbol -- at least to some."

The letter lays out why, after several decades, Conti believed he had to call it quits. Conti points the blame at legislators who "failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education," a testing company. He argued the New York State United Teachers union failed its members by not mounting an effective campaign against standardized testing, and said there's now a "pervasive atmosphere of distrust" preventing teachers from developing their own tests and quizzes.

As "MOOC mania" completely overshadows the Open Education Resource (OER) initiative of UNESCO and the Hewlett Foundation, a potentially valuable point is being overlooked. The MOOC format, as it exists today, seems especially inappropriate for degree completion by a traditional age student (18-24). It may even be a challenge for the older, post- traditional student as the issue of how learning is to be validated still has most institutions questioning the credit worthiness of such offerings.

While many children's home lives are abuzz with the same platforms and devices as the 21st century workplace, school just hasn't kept pace, and in many classrooms pedagogies are barely more inclusive of new technology than they were in the 1980s. We desperately need to improve on this record, which is why schools need to make hiring educational technology professionals -- whether specially trained classroom teachers or dedicated staffers -- a top priority.

MOOCS at Elite Universities

"Lately, I've become increasingly frustrated with our unwillingness to acknowledge these "elephants in the (class)room," if you will, because the new contexts for modern learning forged by the networked world in which we now live are creating an imperative for new ways of thinking about our work in schools. I've been collecting a list of these "things that we don't really want to talk about in education" in hopes that it might challenge us to bring those elephants out into the open and ignite some much needed conversation about how to deal with them. Here are nine of them:"

"Being consumed in constant judging leaves us with the feeling of being mediocre or, alternately, with narcissistic pride. Both antithetical perceptions absorb us in the vicious cycle of comparison with friends, family and unknown others. What's most important -- which I wish I had realised in my teens -- is to learn to be comfortable in our own skin."

"Twitter and Facebook might soon replace traditional professional development for teachers. Instead of enduring hours-long workshops a few times a year, teachers could reach out to peers on the Internet in real time for advice on things like planning a lesson (or salvaging a lesson that's going wrong), overcoming classroom management problems, or helping students with disabilities."

"Horror stories have been published about employers asking for job applicants' Facebook passwords. Recently, psychologists discovered that employers frown upon applicants without a Facebook presence. The lack of a profile raises many red flags: is this person anti-social? Was once tagged in too many party photos? Is he or she just pretentious?"

"Under the arrangement, the company's POD technology will be made available to retailers who have Kodak Picture Kiosks, currently installed in 105,000 locations according to Publishers Weekly, including drugstores and supermarkets."

"We are using the data from our initial offering of MOOCs to investigate the nuances of course persistence and completion, experiment with ways to measure learning outcomes such as peer-to-peer assessment, and discover and design new low-cost delivery models."

The Hazelwood vs. Kuhlmeier decision, passed in 1988, gives principals and advisors the right to prior restraint of the student press. The justices claimed that the student press was not a "public forum" for expression. Administrators argued that they need to make sure that the school environment is conducive to teaching and learning. They don't want stories that could disrupt the educational atmosphere of the school This was poor judgement on the part of the justices since the purpose of the student press is to encourage students to participate in the public forum.

if curation is done accurately and fairly, it "is of tremendous benefit to the creators of the content, because it brings them many more eyeballs, a lot more traffic, which they can monetize." Now, curation is a common practice among news organizations of all statures.