Education
Schools, Universities, ITO's
This looks like a really nice enhancement to the way Google presents its search findings. I like it.
I've been musing this over for a while. While I'm a great fan of Learning Management Systems (LMSs, or VLEs) like Moodle and believe they have huge potential to create engaging, meaningful activities for students while providing excellent data to teachers, but I also believe that most teachers don't use them to anywhere near their potential.
I was lucky enough to catch this interview between RadioNZ's Katherine Ryan and Enrique Penalosa, Colombian politician, and former mayor of Bogota responsible for major changes to the city's transport infrastructure, including a bike paths network and the TranMilenio mass transit system. The thing that struck me most about the interview was how deeply his views on transit issues were grounded in a very clear vision of what democracy is.
I saw this on the O'Reilly Radar blog, and absolutely love it:
In Gabe Zichermann's TED talk 'Games make kids smarter' he mentions Andrea Kuszewski's work on maximising cognitive potential, or the science of learnable intelligence. It's a fascinating subject, rapidly evolving and worth further reading. Here's the TL;DR version:
Gary Stager (for whom I normally have a lot of time) had a shocker when he wrote this piece entitled 'BYOD: Worst idea of the 21st century?'
Good blog post and nice video from Happysteve about 'radical self-direction':
This is a great article from Dr. Keith Devlin which starts with Sun Microsystems' co-founder Vinod Khosla's reading of what is wrong with education:
I wish computers were more portable. I wish they could easily be taken out into context and be used where learning should occur: the real world. Here are three great products that will help free us from the shackles of the desktop computer:
I have over fifteen years experience in systems and network configuration and support. For most of that time I have been working with Open Source Software, and believe that Open Source software provides the best solutions for business, educational and personal use.
