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There is a tendency in universities today to think of teachers as, like sales people and politicians, interested in outcomes. And so there is a tendency for teachers to treat their students in the way sales people treat their clients and politicians treat the voters: without respect. Professors these days, as well as our graduate student assistants, are encouraged to approach the classroom as a social engineer might. We are prodded to think about how most effectively to seat the students, to organize them into working groups; journals, wikis, presentations, and such like, are devices we are told to use to restructure the classroom experience. And we are encouraged to get ourselves videotaped and so, in general, to come to think of ourselves as teaching professionals whose main concern is student outcomes. Now there is nothing wrong with working hard to make the classroom the most exciting place it can be. But we are not social engineers and students are not products we are manufacturing. To think of students that way is to insult them and it is to make genuine teaching and learning impossible. Students, like citizens, are free and equal, and they have the power of reason; they can make up their own minds and can discover and enforce their own conceptions of value and truth and meaning. To view them as any less is to view them the way politicians so often view the public, without respect.

To sum up the Web 2.0 phenomena in a sentence: lower communication costs have led to opportunities for more inclusive, collaborative, democratic online participation.

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. The first report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education.

An introduction and links to a study by the Apollo Research Institute that list 6 cultural shifts and 10 skills that help people handle those shifts as productively as possible.

Reflection is the hallmark of many thoughtfully developed portfolios. Reflections on the products within a portfolio allow the audience to understand why these items were chosen to represent the student and his / her capacities and can provide some of the best indicators of student growth. However many students often have a difficult time thinking about their own learning when confronted by teachers to do so without guidance or support. When asked to reflect on their learning, students often don't know quite what to say or write - as much of the thinking that has gone on has been either subconscious or nonverbal.

Our knowledge, our intelligence, must be based on something emergent from the connective activity of many individual neurons, can't be based on the content of a neuron, has to be based on the pattern of connectivity of these neurons. We replicate that in connectivist teaching.

Our question is whether IT staff in academic environments might not aspire to a vital mission: to being something more than consumers and cheerleaders for commercial products.

This course, with 36 undergraduates, was one of twenty-five new interdisciplinary courses approved by my institution to address "new problems" facing society and to experiment with new teaching and learning strategies. The goals of the class are to use and evaluate various social media in the contexts of information production, sharing, consumption, teaching, and learning. Since the course is open to all majors, one of my goals as a journalism professor is to tap a diverse group of students to gain a better understanding of how digital information and social media are utilized in different disciplines. This "hybrid" course combines class meetings with the use of more than ten different social media tools during the 12-week semester. Some tools take the place of more traditional teaching methods such as papers and written exams.

Shows how online games create 4 characteristics (blissful productivity, strong social fabric, an urgent optimism, and epic meaning) in gamers that uniquely equip gamers to solve the world's problems.

Currently, we have a mass production model of education. But until we personalize things and require each student to learn. Until we do things in creative ways that make sure kids each learn and have to think and process, we will continue to have the select few do the thinking. It is human nature. Education shouldn't be one size fits all. I don't think that getting outside the standardized work we do in education should be considered jailbreaking. But for now, in most schools it is.

Scores can be a surprisingly good way to help learners enter the class learning environment at their own level of expertise.

Scores can be a surprisingly good way to help learners enter the class learning environment at their own level of expertise.

But how is creative or critical thought defined and taught? And by what assessment can we measure it, if at all?

E-portfolio efforts at Stanford have focused on capturing and documenting students' learning and engaging in reflection, rationale building, or planning, contributing to a culture of folio thinking. In fall 2010, Stanford initiated a pilot introducing e-portfolios to assist with the advising of students in their first two years prior to declaring a major, to learn from students and advisors how e-portfolios and folio thinking can enhance their face-to-face interactions. The pilot will explore the possibility that persistence can be improved through the active involvement of others (mentors, alumni, family, peers) in the lives of students as facilitated through the medium of e-portfolios.

The tools we discuss below can be embedded into any open source LMS and down the road we plan to revisit other platforms.