Our fearless leader in all his glory...

"The emerging digital media ecology is opening/will open indeterminate capacities for thought and action that will shift (again, in a non-determining way) practices of rhetoric/communication, social institutions, the production of knowledge, and our sense of what it means to be human." PONDER THAT FOR A MOMENT...

love me some serendipitous learning!

"Muller concluded that those "clear," "concise" and "easy to understand" expository videos that abound in science education do not appear to be particularly effective in teaching science. By contrast, videos with dialogue that address the underlying misconceptions students bring to science seem to be more educationally effective."

We've known this stuff for decades, but, still...

"Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines" Really cool digital humanities project

"This represents perhaps the most foundational of all the connections that Stephen Lehmkuhle and his colleagues have been steadily knitting together in Rochester: that between facts and ideas. Traditional college instruction-epitomized by the lecture-is largely a process of orally transmitting facts from the brain of a teacher to a student. It's a tremendously inefficient method-even harmful. UMR chemistry professor Rajeev Muthyala points to research finding that undergraduates often finish lecture-based introductory science classes with less expertise than when they started. They get worse."

"In short, says Stahl, "[infants] take surprising events as special opportunities to learn." This theory, that we're born knowing certain rules of the world, isn't new. We see evidence of it not only in humans but in lots of others species, too. What's new is this idea: that core knowledge seems to motivate babies to explore things that break those rules and, ultimately, to learn new things."

"We would much rather define rigor as the pursuit of solving a really difficult task that you care about solving. And that persistence can be taught in that way as opposed to, "Yeah, let's teach kids persistence by having them do this thing that they couldn't care less about, but it's really hard and just if you can survive it, that's persistence.""

"Links are the connective tissue of the Web. When we suppress them, we prevent users from discovering unanticipated ways of working together."

"But first it is about this question: What is web writing in 2015? * * * You know, web writing - that chatty, affable, ephemeral old thing. The thing that prized personality over pomp, the thing with feathers (and links). What does it look like?"

Slick mapping visualization from our friends at the VCU Libraries. The Internet is going to be big some day...

A nice video done by my friend Ben Grey for the US DoE. Are we prepared for these kids?

Yes, it's MIT, but this is a very interesting report.

Some say Connected Learning, some say Networked Learning... This is an important primer on the topic, from back in 2005