"If we've let the fickleness of history and public policy describe the bizarre set of standards (looking at you, Math) and therefore the metrics that we'll measure all students against, you'll end up with a system designed for those metrics. Instead, if you define your own measures, and actually study longitudinally their validity, we'll end up in a place where perhaps we'll value the emotional-intelligence development of a teenager above their ability to comply with outdated curricula. Maybe we'll come to value the nuance of entrepreneurial thought opposed to attempting to cram a line of reasoning they stole wholesale from Reddit into five paragraphs 20 minutes before the paper is due. "

""This is a musical experience, a meditational concentration experience," says Tod Machover, composer and inventor at the MIT Media Lab. He created Vocal Vibrations with architect and designer Neri Oxman and with the help of Al Grodzinsky, a bioengineer at MIT and an expert in biological tissue. "

"Sometimes a mistake is so embarrassing, it cycles all the away around the shame circle and becomes kind of awesome. Today's case in point: Kyrzbekistan, a country accidentally invented by a New York Times piece that meant to reference the Central Asian nation Kyrgyzstan."

To watch web videos without the comments and crap, just drag the button below to your browser's bookmarks bar. On any of the supported video pages, click the bookmark button to watch in peace. You can then make short URLs too, to send the quietube versio

A D3 art animation a day . . . I need to get on something like this.

You have to love the plasticcosmonauts URL and the title.

Choose your own adventure game on Twitter.

This is a collection of courses, students posts etc. (some VCU specific, some from other institutions) that might be useful.

Participatory culture guy who Jon referenced.

Licenses here vary but lots of good stuff.

All of Wikipedia's media. All CC or better.

An interesting place to find/share/interact with audio. You can remix many of the tracks and make audio notes that are associated with specific points in time on the audio track. Easily embed in WordPress using just the URL to the page.

Flickr's creative commons search interface. Lots of photographs, some videos.

A broad spectrum of media that is available under CC licenses.

Here's a brief exploration of the Flickr Commons that details some of the interesting things you can find on Flickr. These photos are all Creative Commons licensed.

Interesting facet based browsing like Simile

"In this portfolio, there are only four pieces so far. I plan on adding to the collection and changing the format of the site around as I get used to blogging like this. I decided the best pieces to showcase how I started out would be the first few things I wrote and then some of the last things I did. So, I posted the first journal we did: Preliminary Self-Analysis. Upon reading it now, I remember how I decided just go for the "type like I talk" format just to see what would happen. It doesn't look too bad, but I can tell I overdid it a little. "

" One of the space-related changes is the seeking of help. The demand for instruction must come from the student. We use our space at Vault as a perpetual conversation that moves from project to project never quite stopping even thought the participants move on to drum line or a traditional course in chemistry."