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"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."

"Would you be shocked if your teacher assigned you to play Minecraft at school? At a few area schools, teachers are doing just that. The Lego-like building game has become a popular tool for classroom lessons as well as life lessons."

The teen sent this message out to friends on the site: "Drivin drunk ... classsic ;) but to whoever's vehicle i hit i am sorry. :P" According to the report, two of Cox-Brown's friends saw the message and sent it along to two separate local police officers. In a statement given to the newspaper, the department said that they received word of the post through a private Facebook message to one of its officers. After receiving the tip, police then went to Cox-Brown's house and were able to match a vehicle there to one that had hit two others in the early hours of the morning.

""It's crazy that in a system that is meant to teach and help the youth there is no voice from the youth at all." That's the opening line in a video called "If students designed their own schools," about The Independent Project, a high school semester designed and implemented entirely by students."

This is a really remarkable project, all student driven and Deweyan in its roots.

"China just began a major education reform effort that is aimed at reducing the importance of standardized testing in determining school quality and including factors such as student engagement, boredom, anxiety, and happiness. It also seeks to cut back on the amount of school work students are given. As scholar Yong Zhao notes in the following post, the approach is the opposite of the education reform path in the United States, which in recent years has increased the importance of test scores for accountability purposes."

Amid continued debate over whether or not Sochi is prepared to host the 2014 Olympics, which begins Thursday, reporters from around the world are starting to check into local hotels - to their apparent grief. Some journalists arriving in Sochi are describing appalling conditions in the housing there, where only six of nine media hotels are ready for guests. Hotels are still under construction. Water, if it's running, isn't drinkable. One German photographer told the AP over the weekend that his hotel still had stray dogs and construction workers wandering in and out of rooms.

Yes, you read that right. The Washington Post Company just announced that it has reached an agreement to sell the Washington Post newspaper to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million.

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.

"one unanticipated consequence has driven me to distraction-and that's the tendency of many people, including persons whom I cherish, to credit me with the notion of 'learning styles' or to collapse 'multiple intelligences' with 'learning styles.' It's high time to relieve my pain and to set the record straight."

"To start college, the typical student must meet admission requirements (if any), enroll and pay tuition. But what if anyone anywhere could try out a prominent university's classes for a small fee and wait until the end to decide whether to pay tuition for credit toward a diploma? That is one of the groundbreaking ideas behind an Arizona State University plan, announced Wednesday, to offer a freshman curriculum online through the nonprofit Web site called edX."

"In 2006, Blackboard held as much as 90 percent of the learning management system market share, according to industry reports. Now Blackboard's market share has dwindled to 44 percent."

"On most four-year college campuses, full-time students don't pay by the credit hour (think by channel on your cable bill). Rather they pay a flat fee for the semester (a programming package on your cable bill) and are typically allowed to take as many courses up to a certain limit."

"The unusual approach is called a "holacracy." Developed by a former software entrepreneur, the idea is to replace the traditional corporate chain of command with a series of overlapping, self-governing "circles." In theory, this gives employees more of a voice in the way the company is run."

"Since most students can type very quickly, laptops encourage them to copy down nearly everything said in the classroom. But when students stare at the screen of their laptops, something is lost. The students shift from being intellectuals, listening to one another, to being customer-service representatives, taking down orders. Class is supposed to be a conversation, not an exercise in dictation. "

""Dude," his friend said, in the message Kyle would listen to the next morning, "I just made you Internet-famous.""

"There's been much debate in recent years about the role of public colleges in an era when students pay for more than half their education in most states. Sure, state funds might make up less than 10 percent of the budget at the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, and Berkeley, but the fact of the matter is that most public colleges couldn't survive if not for their states."

"Every dollar a student can save matters. That is why Virginia recently passed legislation (HB 454) to mandate that every public institution of higher education in the state create a framework to adopt and use open educational resources and low-cost resources across the state."

"That democratization of forgery is just around the corner. "I would say within another 18 to 24 months, that technology is going to get to a point where the human brain may not be able to decipher it," Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, recently told me. Soon, the forger will consistently fool us."

"Point Loma began offering some of its 4,500 students money to pay for college in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings. The model, known as an income share agreement, requires colleges and students to take a chance on each other, a shared responsibility that attracted Point Loma."