Q&A: John Seely Brown on Interest-Driven Learning, Mentors and the Importance of Play | Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning:

“Seely Brown is renowned for his pioneering work at Xerox PARC and work on interplay between organizations, technology and people. He is currently the co-chair of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation and a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at University of Southern California. His latest book (with Douglas Thomas) is “A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.””

Op-Ed Columnist – The Medium Is the Medium – NYTimes.com: “Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These”

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TED Talks Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs “childish” thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids’ big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach.

Next Big Thing – Literary Scholars Turn to Science – NYTimes.com: “Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know “

“…This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking €” of mind reading €” is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are equipped with this capacity and what particular brain functions enable them to do it are questions that have occupied primarily cognitive psychologists.”

“Once they were hosts to lively discussions about academic style and substance, but the time of scholarly e-mail lists has passed, meaningful posts slowing to a trickle as professors migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook.” Chronicle of Higher Education

Link to Information Week Article

“Teachers for all levels of students today have so many more teaching aids than even just a few years ago. That’s not just because of greater access to the Internet but also because of the growing number of web applications that they can use. Some applications are specifically geared towards teaching and learning. Other applications can be adapted for these purposes. Here’s a list of some online applications, listed alphabetically, that we feel are excellent for teachers.”

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Birmingham city schools will be the first in the nation to receive laptop computers designed for children in third-world countries under an agreement completed over the weekend, Mayor Larry Langford announced Monday.

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Underwood, J. D. M. (2007). Rethinking the Digital Divide: impacts on studenttutor

relationships. European Journal of Education, 27(2), 213.222.

This paper presents a Marxist analysis of the current function and role of information and communication technology (ICT) in education, with specific reference to schooling in the UK.

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“Ninth graders often have trouble selecting what clothes to wear to school each morning or what to have for lunch. But starting this fall, freshmen at Dwight Morrow High School here in Bergen County must declare a major that will determine what electives they take for four years and be noted on their diplomas.”

Link – New York Times