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"I'm not exactly sure who made being a "personal brand" a thing on the Internet, but I'd really like to sit down with them and ask them why they thought that it was a good idea. You see, an entire ecosystem of people looking to make money have cropped up around this notion of helping people become a "brand." Honestly, it's bull, and I'd like to see it stop. Why is it bull? Because unless you're Kim Kardashian and have a line of clothes or stinky fragrances, you are not a brand. You are a person."

"It's honestly the people who figured out one day that being them was fun who are successful in life. They're weird, odd, loud, quiet, sexy, ugly, bald, rude, or funny and they don't care what other people think. I don't think that Box's CEO Aaron Levie took a class in "personal branding," I just think he's cool with being himself."

"Thinking about what science memes can do, I think there's something interesting in the Biofortified post. I don't think you can transmit Science by meme. It's too messy. But you can hope to transmit some science appreciation, or possibly highlight some scientific problems with viral images and memes."

"Along the way, we should encourage learners who have been raised on a diet of compliance and social control to take a critical mind-set. But that doesn't mean that we should teach them that all arguments are equally valid and that the truth is whatever you decide it is at that moment. Just as we learn to raise our standards when analyzing the claims of others, we also need to apply high standards to our own thinking. That's why critical thinking can be an important part of self-improvement. It can help you get what you want, but it can also help you decide what you want to want."

"Jeannette M. Wing actually phrases it, "computational thinking" in her article on the subject, and writes that "Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability.""

The strategy Think-Pair-Share, along with a variety of twists, is a versatile strategy that can be used before, during or after a reading, viewing or listening activity. It incorporates elements of strategies that are known to increase learning (summarizing, comparing/contrasting, restating an idea, collaboration, think time, and using different learning modalities).

"In my remarks today I'll try to discuss some of the reasons why engagement using digital texts and tools in our classrooms is difficult. One of the main impediments to this work is the fact that the Common Core State Standards make little room for integration of new literacies. My talk will focus on the nature of information on the Internet and its implications for how teachers think about reading comprehension, critical thinking, and learning in a digital information age. In short, we need to embrace all literacies. We will explore how the Internet poses new challenges for global learners that extend beyond traditional reading comprehension skills in order to encompass these new literacies as well as the higher level thinking skills associated with them."

What happens to the printed book in the 1-to-1 classroom? Klein: I think the printed textbook should be given a respectful and decent burial. I think it should be gone... There is no reason you can't give kids a digitized version of the textbook. I actually think the textbook itself is going to become anachronistic. The teaching experience that has curriculum and textbook elements integrated is the way of the future.

What if learning to code weren't actually the most important thing? It turns out that rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do. As the cities that have hosted Code for America teams will tell you, the greatest contribution the young programmers bring isn't the software they write. It's the way they think. It's a principle called "computational thinking," and knowing all of the Java syntax in the world won't help if you can't think of good ways to apply it.

""It seems that, if you just present the correct information, five things happen," he said. "One, students think they know it. Two, they don't pay their utmost attention. Three, they don't recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking. Four, they don't learn a thing. And five, perhaps most troublingly, they get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.""

This concept follows along a PBL or case method ideology, but diverges when it comes to presenting information. Thought provoking information....will lecturers try it?

" it makes sense for Wiley (the publisher, not the dude) to strike a licensing deal with OpenStax. They're OK about not making a lot of money on the books as long as they can sell their WileyPlus software. Which, in turn, is why I think that Wiley (the dude, not the publisher) is not crazy at all when he predicts that "80% of all US general education courses will be using OER instead of publisher materials by 2018." I won't be as bold as he is to pick a number, but I think he could very well be directionally correct. I think many of the larger publishers hope to be winding down their traditional textbook businesses by 2018."

"The frustrations teenagers experience with school are more a case of statistics and lack of experience than that of work ethic or "attitude" problems. These statistics are not tied to socioeconomic status, weight or time spent in a seat; they're genetic and experiential. We have a bell curve of abstraction and experience, and we're only beginning to think about how to honor that."

"As much as I don't want to say this, I don't think there's a chance in hell that MOOCs will die on their own. I can't think of any trend which saved large institutitions money and trouble, then died a natural death. And faculty can't defend against them - we have been made powerless very slowly, over a long period of administrative takeover and public apathy (or even antipathy in our new era of anti-intellectualism). What happened at SJSU and Amherst is the exception  - an exception I applaud, but an exception. The public perceives faculty objections to MOOCs as an issue of job security rather than quality."

"I think it is rather like a shared textbook, though I think the key distinction is you cannot give a textbook to a shared group of students and expect students to learn from it," Koller said. This creates some new ways for Coursera to bring in cash. Right now it is relying on charging for verified completion certificates and revenue from an Amazon.com affiliates program if users buy books suggested by professors.

"The best way of thinking about the grid is as the areas that we think it's important to pay attention to when teaching others how to read, write and participate on the Web."

I refuse to subject students to every ridiculous standardized test that the state and/or district thinks is important. I refuse to have my higher-level and deep thinking lessons disrupted by meaningless assessments (like the EXPLORE test) that do little more than increase stress among children and teachers, and attempt to guide young adolescents into narrow choices.

"When I think about my own definition of a "meaningful assessment," I think the test must meet certain requirements. The assessment must have value other than "because it's on the test." It must intend to impact the world beyond the student "self," whether it is on the school site, in the outlying community, the state, country, world, etc. Additionally, the assessment should incorporate skills that students need for their future. That is, the test must assess skills other than merely content. It must also test how eloquently the students communicate their content."

"The Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators contains the process and methods of design, adapted specifically for the context of education."

Imagine that psychologists are scanning a patients' brain, for some basic research purpose. As they do so, they stumble across a fleeting thought that their equipment is able to decode: The patient has committed a murder, or is thinking of committing one soon. What would the researchers be obliged to do with that information?

Everyone is a futurist. We all think about the future, imagining and evaluating possibilities, making plans, and implementing strategies for realizing our goals. Educators deliberate the future of education, both where it is heading and where we think it should be heading. I will outline here my vision for a preferable future for education, realistically anchored to certain fundamental features of contemporary affairs and human psychology.

"I think there may be a certain type of learner that this works for - someone who is highly motivated and purposeful, who is seeking out specific knowledge. And someone who does not require much human interaction - because in spite of the rhetoric about personalization, lectures are inherently impersonal, and videos of lectures are doubly so.   So if the MOOC is ushering in a golden age, democratizing access to knowledge, it seems to have hit a bit of a bump. I think the bump in the road is the learner."