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The border between our physical world and the digital information surrounding us has been getting thinner and thinner. Designer and engineer Jinha Lee wants to dissolve it altogether. As he demonstrates in this short, gasp-inducing talk, his ideas include a pen that penetrates into a screen to draw 3D models and SpaceTop, a computer desktop prototype that lets you reach through the screen to manipulate digital objects.

"It freely admits the beautiful complexity of the human experience, and thus, by proximity, the sheer craziness of the learning process. This idea, not so much a learning theory as it is a clever and accurate metaphor, describes learning as having no beginning nor an end. It posits that learners have needs so diverse that the "teacher" is essentially off the hook in meeting every need for every student, no matter how noble that sounds."

Today the Getty becomes an even more engaged digital citizen, one that shares its collections, research, and knowledge more openly than ever before. We've launched the Open Content Program to share, freely and without restriction, as many of the Getty's digital resources as possible. The initial focus of the Open Content Program is to make available all images of public domain artworks in the Getty's collections. Today we've taken a first step toward this goal by making roughly 4,600 high-resolution images of the Museum's collection free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose.

In addition to the benefits of using "clickers" (AKA student response systems) in a classroom to foster a more engaged environment (click here for a quick intro), clickers also offer the opportunity to measure how students are understanding and processing information in real time. "Keeping the poll open" and asking students questions while they are listening/watching is a very useful way to find out how they are able to apply theoretical ideas. Although the examples in this essay focus on music, keeping the poll open could be applied to other time-based arts, or even in other disciplines when a teacher wants to observe how students are processing information as it changes.

"I am interested in the role of communities of practice in knowledge sharing. I have been looking at how communities of practice can bridge our social networks with our work teams, helping us get the job done while being open to innovative ideas."

" instead of professors and students, there's facilitators and participants, instead of one-directional lectures, you have discussions, and instead of tests and quizzes you create projects and artifacts. If it all sounds too squishy and feel-good, make no mistake, this is serious learning, tackling the amazingly heady topic of feminism and technology and created by bona fide, longtime professors in their fields. It's rigorous, complex and in San Antonio, you don't need to be a college student (past or present) or even own a computer to access it. That's the new international network FemTechNet in a nutshell, one of those ideas that seems to have suddenly arrived fully formed, like Athena springing out of Zeus' head. Obviously a lot more work went into it than that, but the actual creation timeline for the Network took a little more than a year-and-a-half according to co-creators Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz, Dean of the New School's Media Studies program and professor of media studies at Pitzer College, respectively."

"I don't know who's going to send out transcripts - kids are already appying for rolling admission, so I have no idea. And some schools require a letter from a guidance counselor. So I don't know what we're going to do." "I found this app for their smartphone, which helps them search scholarships, and I got really excited. And then I got really depressed, because I'm trying to replace a guidance counselor with a dollar smartphone app."

"It's time to call these fake open initiatives out for what they really are. It is time for us to stand up for and protect the idea and name that are so critically important to improving the affordability, quality, and equity of education around the world. If you need a handy, slightly derogatory term to use in describing fake open initiatives, I highly recommend the term "fauxpen": Faux in French means "false" or "fake." So fauxpen means "fake open." Examples of how to use this term appropriately would include "Fauxpen Education Alliance.""

"All visionary entrepreneurs must, at some point, find their own sense of romance in the compromises they make to build a profitable business, and the size of the crowd is where Thrun finds his. He's moved by the idea of many, many students from many, many places learning something because of him--even if it's something as mundane as a Salesforce.com API. I have a hard time believing that he really wants his son to get Salesforce certified rather than Stanford educated, but in this one thing Thrun seems entirely earnest."

"One that fits here is, "To an educator with a computer, everything looks like information." And the more prominent we make computers in schools (and in our own lives), the more we see the rapid accumulation, manipulation, and sharing of information as central to the learning process-edging out the contemplation and expression of ideas and the gradual development of meaningful connections to the world."

""Textbooks are expensive," noted Peter Tsigaris, professor of economics at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. "And almost all the information is available online. If something else exists that is almost a perfect substitute, and is much cheaper, why would you buy something that is a lot more expensive and outdated?" The tipping point for Tsigaris came two years ago when he determined that available online material was "just as good" as any textbook. He experimented with the idea, using resources such as MOOC content in place of a required text. "MOOCs help organize the information for you," said Tsigaris. "For the students' textbook, I use the Saylor Organization, which is based on the Creative Commons [license], and you can take the material without any copyright issues. Plus I added the Khan Academy to my lectures, and PowerPoint slides, so the students had quite a bit of information.""

Simply put, yes. Yes they can. And should!

"Who owns a tattoo? The obvious answer is the wearer, who paid for the ink and is now permanently (more or less) attached to it. Yet recent disputes have called into question the easy idea that if you buy a tattoo, you also own it and can display it as you like. Tattoo artists are increasingly claiming that they, like other artists, own the copyright to the images they create. And when those images, attached to living people, appear on the silver screen - or a computer monitor - the artists want to get paid."

"Originally marketed in 1979, the first Sony Walkman turns 35 this year, and it's about as outmoded as a technology can be these days. That's why it's understandable that the kids in this delightful video, none of whom were not alive in the 90s, have no idea how to use the thing. Or what it's for. They can't even conceive a world in which a Walkman is useful."

"The age of knowing is slowing giving way to an age of data navigation, and what students need help with should be adjusted accordingly-even if in ways other than the ideas below."

In short, the company is slowly but surely building out an advertising platform, not much different than what other social networks like Facebook or Twitter have. The company's policy says it will be collecting log data, cookie data, and device information. If Pinterest users don't like the idea of being tracked, they can manage their account settings, though it's not clear to what extent this will be effective.

"Moving beyond improving career prospects, the conversation then turned repeatedly to the idea that literacy means more than using digital technology as a means of consuming things other people make. Digital literacy, Smith said, also is about "how to make it do what you want." Or as Geshner put it: "Are you an iPad or are you a laptop? An iPad is designed for consumption." Literacy, as he described it, means moving beyond a passive relationship with technology. "When you get down to coding, you're creating your own tools.""

"Online learning platforms are increasingly big business in Africa, as innovators look to tackle the lack of access to and poor quality of education on the continent. Governments and large corporates are getting involved in the space, but there are a number of startups across the continent coming up with exciting ideas and getting funded to bring them to scale. Here are five of the best."

"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."

The intersection of copyright and the scale and delivery of MOOCs highlights the enduring tensions between academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and copyright law in higher education. To gain insight into the copyright concerns of MOOC stakeholders, EDUCAUSE talked with CIOs, university general counsel, provosts, copyright experts, and other higher education associations. The consensus opinion was that intellectual property questions for MOOC content merit wide discussion because they affect multiple stakeholders and potentially carry significant consequences. Each MOOC provider, for example, establishes a proprietary claim on material included in its courses, licenses to the user the terms of access and use of that material, and establishes its ownership claim of user-generated content. This conflicts with the common institutional policy approach that grants rights to faculty who develop a course. Fair-use exceptions to traditional copyright protection face challenges as well, given a MOOC's potential for global reach. Nonetheless, fair use and MOOCs are not mutually exclusive ideas. MOOCs remain an experiment. Initiating discussions with a wide range of campus stakeholders will ensure clarity of purpose and a common understanding of copyright issues in a MOOC environment.

"The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse."