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I am increasingly of the opinion that we don't have to find "the solution" to "this problem." The question of what students are learning and how they have created the work that they submit is one that is as old as teaching, and the change in technology in many respects introduces only an incremental change in how we must approach this. If we are to be effective as instructors we have to be thinking hard about what students know and how we know it, and these are not things that are dependent on technology.

Richard Saul Wurman, Radical Media, and Esri bring you the Urban Observatory-a live museum with a data pulse. You'll have access to rich datasets for cities around the world that let you simultaneously view answers to the most important questions impacting today's global cities-and you. Compare and contrast visualized information for a greater understanding of life in the 21st century.

""Where's the beef?" was the famous campaign slogan from the 1984 Presidential campaign. For two years, MOOC watchers have been asking the same question, as hundreds of thousands of students participated in free online courses that delivered knowledge but no certification of any real value. The Georgia Institute of Technology recently changed all that: Its May 14 announcement that the school would offer a fully accredited Online Masters of Science in Computer Science (OMS CS) for less than $7,000 suddenly brought the abstract potential of MOOCs into stark relief."

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.

"In the United States-where public universities are hurting for funds, tuition and debt levels are growing, and graduation rates are stagnant-debate has focused on whether MOOCs represent a necessary innovation or the deplorable cheapening of elite university education. The question is: Could the hybrid, small-group model that's evolving abroad also provide a needed alternative for underserved American students?"

""What's the next new thing in strategy?" a senior executive recently asked Phil Rosenzweig, a professor at IMD,1 in Switzerland. His response was surprising for someone whose career is devoted to advancing the state of the art of strategy: "With all respect, I think that's the wrong question. There's always new stuff out there, and most of it's not very good. Rather than looking for the next musing, it's probably better to be thorough about what we know is true and make sure we do that well.""

Two teachers and a few students at Monday's school board meeting questioned the decision, noting the other services provided by Google - such as Google Docs - in some classrooms. One student involved with the National Honor Society said his club uses Google's Gmail to communicate with one another. One teacher said her students use Google Docs to prepare essays. The program, she said, offers students a chance to review each other's papers and she can view students' projects from her computer as they are working on them. "My kids love this," said Laurie Davidson, a seventh-grade language arts teacher.

"One's views about digital technology and "digital people"--even what one identifies as questions, problems, issues, advantages, worries, etc.--will depend upon one's other assumptions and values. Here, I want to talk about two different philosophical systems or stances: humanism and posthumanism."

The White House has suggested that the amount of federal student aid that an institution receives should depend on how well it performs on certain key measures. I wholeheartedly agree with this in concept. The question is what those key measures should be. They should include rates of loan default, retention, and graduation. But not tuition.

"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."

"Virtual worlds promise to deliver the best aspects of both real-world classrooms and online distance learning into a single platform. With tools that provide avatars that represent the educators and the students, voice and video capabilities, powerpoint and other collaborative whiteboard technologies and group and private messaging chat, educators are finding that the newest generation of virtual worlds can simplify the lecture and presentation process, allow students to ask/answers questions to their teacher or each other (without interrupting the lecture), socialize and learn in a very streamlined manner. All of this is done with the convenience and cost efficiency of distance learning."

"The lack of teacher training in education schools has also been borne out recently by a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, entitled "Training Our Future Teachers." The question the group asked was a simple one: Do education schools teach classroom management? The answer was: not very much. The group examined 122 teacher-preparation programs and found that while most programs could say they had classroom management as part of their curriculum, classroom management strategies rarely received "the connected and concentrated focus they deserve." What's more, "instruction is generally divorced from practice (and vice versa) in most programs, with little evidence that what gets taught gets practiced." Education schools, says Kate Walsh, who leads the group, "don't see their job as training teachers. They see their job as creating professional identity.""

"It got me thinking about what types of experiences are best suited for real physical conference events.  Unless we get a chance to interact, ask questions, contribute to conversations, get hands on experience, and do things that require your actual physical presence, then perhaps those other things don't belong in a real physical conference.  I feel a bit cheated when I go to an event (and pay good money to do so) only to feel as though what I experienced could have been just as well communicated virtually through video or some other means.  I feel a bit the same when I go to a real physical conference and find that one of the "keynotes" is being beaming in via satellite on a big screen that we all just sit and watch.  I expect better than that."

Under the supervision of the instructor - there's the rub. I don't mean a kind of aloof, checking-your-Facebook-while-students-work kind of "supervision" but rather the kind of interactive engagement that a coach might have with his or her players while they practice. The coach doesn't do the exercises for the players, but neither does s/he stand off to the side and let them flail around the entire time. There is interaction between the coach and the player, between different players, and between different groups of players. And through that interaction, questions get answered, others get raised - and things get learned, if it's done right.

"I am trying to answer this question that Learning Program Designers ask me, when I propose that we can include blogging as an activity for learners in their program design: 'Why should we invest time in convincing a learner to blog?'."

"A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences addressed this question by conducting the largest and most comprehensive review of the effect of active learning on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Their answer is a resounding yes. According to Scott Freeman, one of the authors of the new study, "The impact of these data should be like the Surgeon General's report on "Smoking and Health" in 1964-they should put to rest any debate about whether active learning is more effective than lecturing.""

"At the same time, MOOCs called into question our basic assumptions about college. Free access to content from prestigious institutions revealed that content didn't need to be proprietary. Without having to waste time re-creating the same lectures and class materials, particularly for lower-division courses, many professors saw the opportunity to be even more connected and hands-on in order to make existing content come alive for students. Despite the intense trepidation that technology would somehow replace teachers, it became clear that MOOCs didn't preempt interaction; instead, they forced more contact and accountability on both the student and the teacher."

"At a recent talk at the University of Colorado Boulder I discussed various definitions of digital scholarship and how we might categorize digital scholarship. My forthcoming essay in the second edition of Blackwell's Companion to Digital Humanities deals with these questions in depth. This chart offers one way to consider a typology for digital scholarship in the humanities. These characteristics are offered as a beginning point. They are not meant to exclude or restrict the definition of digital scholarship. Indeed, I hope these definitions might provoke some further discussion about how to undertake reviews of digital scholarship. "

"As UT-Austin recently replaced its learning management system, it also needed to replace its plagiarism detection software. Schorn therefore conducted the Turnitin test again this March. Out of a total of 37 sources, the software fully identified 15, partially identified six and missed 16. That test featured some word deletions and sentence reshuffling -- common tricks students use to cover up plagiarism."

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.