This looks like the report card of just about any bright-ish student. What made him different?

This short post on the Freakonomics blog got me thinking more about copying, piracy and intellectual property. If you pay attention to the tech world recently, you’ll know that the future of technology innovation is being affected by patents. There are companies whose entire business, literally, is owning intellectual property and suing other [...]

If you live overseas, there is a good chance you enjoy travel. Why would you want to stay at home during a holiday when you can jet off to Bali, Buenos Aires or Budapest? Here are some good reasons for taking a staycation, and some thoughts you should consider when you make the decision to rock the home-base holiday.

“Indeed, the school proved not to be a school at all, but just one big playroom.”

I wonder what would happen if we asked every teacher to take and pass the GRE subject test in their field every three years. Or if we cut teaching loads and began subsidizing advanced degrees for teachers in a particular field – and here I’m talking about fields of study beyond education, such as mathematics, literature, biology, and history. What would schools look like if teachers were required to be students as well? And what would schools look like if administrators were required to be teachers?

Well, not really. I was just hoping that title would entice you read the post, which is about an article I found on Minnesota Public Radio News about the reasons college prices are always rising. The article quotes a 2003 New Yorker article on “Baumol’s cost disease”, which basically says that [...]

People need people, students need teachers. Patricia Kuhl’s research on infant language development touches on the “human” component of learning.

I’m here at The 21st Century Learning Conference, Hong Kong and I recently listened to a presentation arguing that English teachers should use video games as an entry point to engage students in literary analysis. That’s all well and good – any work of art can be criticized as art. Roger Ebert has [...]

XKCD

Me, too.

There are two forms of plagiarism: creative and lazy. Can we as educators let go of the antiquated (and fairly short lived) notion that people “own” ideas? How do we do that? Is it even desirable?

From the recent article in the NY Times on cyberbullying, “As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catch-up”, a really horrifying picture of the cruelty young people are capable of (very “Lord of the Flies”) and parent’s attempts to deal with it:

Should teenagers have the same expectation of privacy from parents in their online accounts that an earlier generation had with their little red diaries and keys?

Software programs that speak to parental fears are manifold. Parents can block Web sites, getting alerts when the child searches for them. They can also monitor cellphones: a program called Mobile Spy promises to let parents see all text messages, track G.P.S. locations and record phone activity without the child knowing.

Parents who never believed they would resort to such tactics find themselves doing so.

I recently had the opportunity to watch “Race to Nowhere“, a documentary-style film that attempts to make a case that there is an epidemic of unhealthy stress in schools in the United States.  It fails to make that case in a manner even close to convincing, and it has [...]