"And here's the thing: we still don't. We never do. We have never been good at predicting the future, and so raising and educating our kids as if we have any idea what the future will hold is not the smartest notion."
Review of book on implementing OLPC in the class. Interesting paragraph on boundary issues - by giving kids a laptop, school was impinging on home life and parental decisions on whether their kids should have alaptop at home.
"Where governments dream up projects like the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), the resistance seeks to grant kids a "Licence to Tinker" - to demystify the technology by providing tools and ideas that enable them to understand how modern networked devices work."
"So what do I tell my kids? Should I urge them to go to university? Should I tell them to jack it all in and run off and join a startup? This is what's occupying my mind now."
Very interesting article highlighting the dramatic change in teenage writing over the years. Nowadays we make no more grammatical errors than we did 100 years ago, but what we write is much longer and more complex.
"Social media and online games have the potential to convey 21st century skills that aren't necessarily part of school curricula - things like time management, leadership, teamwork and creative problem solving that will prepare teens for success in college and beyond. Making the transition between a highly structured environment in high school to a self-driven, unstructured environment in college can prove a huge challenge for many kids.
Educators spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix this problem. The solution doesn't lie solely with games, but a lot of the psychology that motivates teens to play games holds potential. We need to figure out how to tap in."
Hypothesis: Students judge quality of information based on position in Google search results. Intervention: Switch the order. Result: Students "used the (falsely) top-ranked pages".