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"What makes so many of those atrocious singers laughable to us-excepting the ones who put on deliberately bad performances in order to get on camera-turns out to be a problem that plagues many undergraduates, especially the weakest among them: an inability to judge accurately their own level of skill or knowledge in a specific area. Poor metacognition means that some terrible yet hopeful singers on American Idol are unable to assess their own weak vocal talents. And it means that some students have a mistaken sense of confidence in the depth of their learning."

Badges represent a way of acknowledging achievements or skill acquisition more granular than a college degree. The resources below provide an overview of the uses of badges and their implications for how individual accomplishments can be awarded, recognized, and shared.

To award grants to encourage State educational agencies, local educational agencies, and schools to utilize technology to improve student achievement and college and career readiness, the skills of teachers and school leaders, and the efficiency and productivity of education systems at all levels.

"During the second half of the semester, student work outside the classroom is focused primarily on the completion of specialization badges. Students are encouraged to forge their own path through the course material by completing badges from the following categories: coding, industry analysis, graphic design, user experience, power user skills, and entrepreneurship. In order to earn an A grade on the badge component, students must master at least eight specialization badges. To ensure breadth, all students must complete at least one badge in each category in order to pass the course. (Note: Students were also allowed to pitch their own badges if they could make the case for the badge's connection to course themes.)"

"Webmaker Mentors help learners make amazing things on the web -- leveling up their digital skills as they go. We're a global community of techies, instructors, educators and everyday superheroes like you. Our non-profit mission: build a more web literate world. One webmaker at a time."

Turn any book or document into a digital classroom. Subtext is a free iPad app that allows classroom groups to exchange ideas in the pages of digital texts. You can also layer in enrichment materials, assignments and quizzes-opening up almost limitless opportunities to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills.

Especially since the recent economic downturn and in light of the increasingly competitive global economy, employers express concerns about whether the U.S. is producing enough college graduates and whether they have the skills, knowledge, and personal responsibility to contribute to a changing workplace and help companies and organizations succeed and grow. This report provides a detailed analysis of employers' priorities for the kinds of learning today's college students need to succeed in this innovation-fueled economy. It also reports on changes in educational and assessment practices that employers recommend.

"If you want to learn a new skill, a great way to start is to create an outline for exactly what it is you'll learn, why you want to learn it, and how you plan to do so. Consider this your personal learning plan. It is your guide. It keeps you accountable and helps you stay focused. And it only takes a little bit of time to create!"

"Fluidity, flexibility and responsiveness seem like important skills for students to develop as part of their learning. Apart from anything else, it's a great way to bring some additional life into lectures and encourage students to think about their online presence; something they inevitably will have, but which is usually separate from their learning."

in the three years I've been teaching mobile video in a course titled "Information 3.0," even those students who initially say they are very familiar with video later admit that they learned a lot from repeated practice and application of video production skills. In other words, shooting and uploading video to YouTube alone does not a videographer make, at least not in my class of sixty undergraduates who come from any major on campus.

Just in time for Creative Commons' 10th birthday celebration of its license suite, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) announced a 3.5 million dollar grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a new program - Integrated Digital English Acceleration (I-DEA) - that will help adult English language learners improve their language skills while simultaneously providing career and college readiness training through technology-based tools and resources.

"Third, remember that all first year employees out of college (or two year school) have more potential than productivity. Today's US education system is not developing job skills, but it is attracting ambitious, hard-working people. Hire for "potential" not only for "achievement" and remember that over the first few years young people will dramatically improve their contributions to your business if you build the right environment."

"Good practice is made up of work, and thought, and mistakes, and time. Things that look easy in the hands of a skilled professional are often the end result of years of practice and experience: According to Peter Sims's Little Bets, Chris Rock spends as much as a year polishing a new joke in small venues, publicly failing more often than not.   Finding an interesting eLearning treatment for dry content often comes not from a stroke of brilliance but from years of learning to sift through stakeholder requests and experts' war stories and performance issues and case studies."

"To acquire and practice literacy skills today, students and educators in Oklahoma City Public Schools require access to Evernote, Google Docs, Gmail, Edmodo, Posterous, Celebrate Oklahoma Voices, and other educationally appropriate, interactive websites. All these websites are currently (as of February 9, 2012) blocked by OKCPS for student access. OKCPS must stop its "draconian" and unjustified Internet content filtering policies and adopt BALANCED policies. The district must TRUST teachers and empower them to directly bypass the content filter with their login credentials when it is professionally justified for instruction and learning."

As they are acquiring, students take notes, make drawings, make videos of their own, voicethreads, blog posts, Google Docs and sometimes they even use Post-It notes. I may require students to use a particular medium for a follow-up assignment or assessment, but letting them choose what they are going to use gives them more ownership of their learning and naturally moves them on to higher order thinking skills.

A collection of step-by-step tutorials on how to do anything yourself... Something that could be used for manual skills training or simple object manipulation.

We take for granted fundamental knowledge or basic steps that the learner has not mastered. Someone who has recently mastered a skill or a body of knowledge, by contrast, remembers more clearly the challenges he faced, and is less likely to skip or skim over basic steps in the learning process.

"The large majority of faculty who have taught online courses (79%) say the experience has helped them develop skills and practices that have improved their teaching in the classroom as well as online."

"A sinking feeling came over me and I realized that my LinkedIn profile did not portray me as a top notch professional. My LinkedIn profile did not sell my skills or show any differentiation between me and the millions of other LinkedIn users out there. My profile basically said, "This lady doesn't have anything that sets her apart from the crowd.""

"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."