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As new technologies allow digital lessons to be tailored to various learning styles, a growing number of programs are evolving to enable students with disabilities to take online courses created with their needs in mind.

"People are caught up in a focus on STEM"-science, technology, engineering and math-"but the piece they don't understand is that all of those fields rely on clear, good writing, and we're not getting that," says Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, executive director of the National Writing Project, a nonprofit think tank at the University of California, Berkeley.

So here's an idea for a fresh meme: #GoodWritingIsSexy.

Some useful image repositories

Learning how to draw means learning to see. A good art lesson teaches us not only to create but to look at, think about and understand our world through art.

"Today, innovation is increasingly conflated with hype, disruption for disruption's sake, and outsourcing laced with a dose of austerity-driven downsizing. If any concept should be seen as an uncomplicated good thing in higher education, it's innovation. Defined by a common-sense notion of "doing things better" and burnished by the sheen of dazzling technological advances, what's not to like about innovation?"

"The weird stellar winds of Eta Carinae are hard to visualize -- so astronomers used a Makerbot to create 3D models that they could hold in their hands. "

". In Cape, an interactive fiction story created by Bruno Dias for the ongoing Interactive Fiction Competition, you become one of those shadowy figures trying right wrongs in a crime-ridden city. But since wealth inequality lies at the heart of all the problems you encounter, well... let's just say that it's an uphill battle. "

"When you look around an office, nine times out of 10 you can tell if it was designed for fear. How does fear manifest in space? High walls. No windows. Closed spaces. By extracting management from the doers and makers of the company, there's plausible deniability. When conversation is inhibited by high-walled cubicles, information is controlled. And to effectively instill fear in office culture, you have to control information. You have to make sure teams are segmented into departments, information is transmitted linearly and power is centralized."

An early rough draft of the Hollywood Cemetery data . . .

"This week, the Connected Learning Research Network, a research group that I chair, released a report (PDF) that outlines how connected learning environments are designed and how they can benefit youth in networked society, especially the underprivileged and vulnerable. The report calls for several core changes in education, including: * Close the gap between the no-frills learning that too often happens in-school and the interactive, hands-on learning that usually takes place out of school; * Take advantage of the Internet's ability to help youth develop knowledge, expertise, skills and important new literacies; * Use the benefits of digital technology and social networking to combat the increasing reality of the haves and have-nots in education. "

THIS is how we ought to be thinking about assessment!