Anil Dash shares his views on creating a large research university in New York.

"Learning management systems, authoring tools, and personal learning environments don’t quite get the “it’s the platform, stupid” aspect of the internet. Most of the tools we have available today in education allow us to create content within a system. What a platform enables is very different; it enables the extension of a system."

An intro into the basics of Finland schooling.

"When are universities going to give us a major like that, one that teaches us about the role information has in our society and that enables us to handle bucketloads of data responsibly, using whatever mix of disciplines may help us in that quest? Philosophers with those skills are philosophers the world could use. Instead, we’re churning out experts in Kantian phenomenology and grue and bleen."

"Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence--it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.

Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system."

Skillshare raises a round of funding and sets its targets on the nation.

How to construct experiences to fit the learning process.

"In essence, Khan doesn’t want to change the way institutions teach; he wants to change how people learn"

"With the help of a few knowledgeable friends, family, mentors, and advisors, I’m confident that I could have replaced my college experience with self-directed learning."

"If demand drops, supply should drop to meet it. In fact, many departments are doing the opposite, the job market be damned. More important is maintaining the flow of labor to their domestic sweatshops, the pipeline of graduate students who staff discussion sections and teach introductory and service courses like freshman composition and first-year calculus."

A really interesting app from ProPublica that analyzes data released by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. Even though it hits just a few data points it is fascinating to compare various districts and schools.

Interesting changes are potentially coming down the pipeline with new education funding.

Great advice about how to approach college.

"When I’m learning quickly everything is great. I feel good about myself and my abilities and I throw myself into learning as much as I can.

On the other hand when I’m learning slowly (hitting a “plateau”) I often get frustrated or discouraged. Nothing I try seems to speed up my ascent out of these plateaus. It seems like the only thing that works is time and practice of what I already know.

I think the reason for this is that once I learn a bunch of new concepts my brain needs some time to process them. I can learn the concepts and use them if I concentrate, but it’s not effortless. I think the reason I finally start learning quickly again after some time is that I’ve internalized the previous concepts and now I can move on to more difficult ones which build on the previous ones."

"Imagine if Honda, in order to compete in the American market, had been required by federal law to adopt the preestablished labor practices, management structure, dealer network, and vehicle portfolio of General Motors. Imagine further that Honda could only sell cars through GM dealers. Those are essentially the terms that accreditation forces on potential disruptive innovators in higher education today."

Interesting article on reforming higher education.

Scott Berkun shares some wise words about how to approach the future after college.

"I have a theory, and I may be wrong, but I’m willing to bet that the 15% who do get a job out of college are not necessarily the smartest kids out there; they are the ones who are the most passionate and committed to the life’s work they know in their hearts they were meant to do."

Andrew Sullivan surveys reader opinions about the dearth of gifted programs in public schools.

Kevin Kelly's principles for surviving and thriving in the technological future.

"Maybe “winning” at education is the student learning things without being at the whims of the institution, turning learning into an inquiry of the mind—chasing questions rather than collecting other people’s answers."

The great firewall of internet in American schools.

Phillip Greenspun questions the notion that merit pay in schools would be a feasible solution.

"In the graph below, the Department of Education has concluded that despite only having 12% of total enrollments, for-profit schools disproportionally account for 48% of total student debt defaults."

"In today’s dynamic classrooms, the teaching and learning process is becoming more nuanced, more seamless, and it flows back and forth from students to teachers. Here’s a look at current trends in teaching and learning, their implications, and changes to watch for."

"What we as adults experienced in school, as educators and students, will bear little resemblance to what lies ahead. Here’s a look at current trends, their implications, and changes to watch for."

"This is not ok. You bought and paid for a computer game, but you never got to play it. You bought and paid for a research article, but you never got to read it. This violates the fundamental idea of a market – that if you buy one, you should get one."

It turns out that not all universities are content to view Wikipedia as an inaccurate and untrustworthy knowledge pool. Professors at various east coast schools are having students work in groups to improve entries. Sounds like a great use of all that journal access colleges have.

"A Princeton University student whose Web site revealed the breadth of student information publicly available on Princeton servers has drawn criticism from the university and support from some students who say privacy safeguards should be tightened."

"Education can become about designing the day around discovery of information, connections to real world challenges, discussions digging into our experiences with the world."

An interview with Will Richardson about changing education. Schools should be re-geared to be more about learning and helping students get content on their own. Teachers should become co-learners, supporters, and mentors.

"As schools, we are going to have to “forfeit some control,” as we well should as the learning opportunities outside the classroom become more ubiquitous and effective. But we have to make sure that those opportunities are equitable and open as much as we can."

One school benefits by ditching mass emails and keeping all communication on a staff blog. The information is archived, searchable, and comments beat the heck out of traditional email.

Information about the upcoming changes to the AP exam.

Three problems that need solving in modern education.

"Thankfully, three trends foreshadow a potential breakthrough in global higher education for sustainable development."

Peter Thiel believes education is the next bubble to pop and that college serves as a way to defer thinking about your life.

Or, when is a million dollars not a million dollars? It’s also a number that will only be going down in coming years

Dave Winer's tips on merging journalism and programming. Great stuff.

The Atlantic surveys a recent study that focuses on how individual states compare in international math score rankings. The results are fairly surprising. It all goes to show that for schools more money brings more problems.

Max Marmer explains why he is leaving Stanford to pursue a fellowship with Peter Thiel.

A thought experiment to try to explain connectivism as a model for learning.

"Channing will spend this year 1,372 hours in school not counting basketball practice or chess club while the average German third-grader will spend 880 1100 hours in school.

What’s the answer? I don’t know. I don’t know if we are really falling behind or not, since it isn’t clear who I can even trust to tell the truth. Are we in a drought or a flood, who knows? All I know for sure is whatever the true situation, we aren’t supposed to feel good about it, no way."

Early-stage research from one initiative is showing that sometimes what works for students in the classroom is also what improves their test scores.

Creating a reliable and persistent data store is a major hurdle to cross for personalized education.

A leading Silicon Valley designer says design schools are broken and not adequately preparing students.

"Sound familiar? That’s exactly what newspaper companies have been like. Now they face competition from startups that can build new products faster than they can because they’re technology companies at the core."

"But everybody should care about the principle of heads, decks, and leads. We're all publishers. We publish in order to be found, to be read, to connect, to have influence. When we're careful about how we package and layer our information, we become more effective publishers."

Great idea for a writing course from Jason Fried. I'd take this course.

"If we care about the future prospects of our nation’s economy and its people’s potential to advance, we must embrace the wide range of degrees our higher education system offers. As a matter of degrees, college really is for everyone."

Interesting story about foreign aid projects done as individual ventures. Blink Now sounds like a particularly interesting project.

Interesting idea to use tablet computing as a way to facilitate bi-directional learning in education.

Thomas Kalil's remarks at Maker Faire.

Animated talk from Sir Ken Robinson's talk at TED.

"Self-organizing teams are the organizational equivalent of “simple systems” -- they evolve to support complex work with extraordinary capacity and adaptability. One key to self-organizing teams is to set goals (or in the language of emergence, "simple rules") that drive positive feedback loops -- such as “be the school everyone wants to transfer to”."

"Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps."

"For me, however, our inability and refusal to contend with the underlying biases of the programs and networks we all use is less a threat to our military or economic superiority than to our experience and autonomy as people. I can't think of a time when we seemed so ready to accept such a passive relationship to a medium or technology."

"It is almost impossible to bridge the barriers that separate us from one another, even when we’re living on top of each other.

This is where the mobile becomes important, because the mobile is the singular social device."

New research on what actually creates productive studying.

Perhaps these tough economic times are what will finally end tenure.

Frank Chimero's advice about what constitutes design.

"The class was a crash course in things that are usually picked up slowly and by accident, like lost coins, over the course of your life. This class was so memorable because it was so little like school, and so much like life. School is basically a way of keeping people occupied — a theatrical set piece designed to take up time and spit out consenting consumers."

Technology, cloud storage, and what it can do for education. First, we need to change ourselves a bit.

Daniel Bachhuber's ideas for integration many collaborative elements into the CUNY Journalism School classroom.

"One day in 1939, Berkeley doctoral candidate George Dantzig arrived late for a statistics class taught by Jerzy Neyman. He copied down the two problems on the blackboard and turned them in a few days later, apologizing for the delay — he’d found them unusually difficult. Distracted, Neyman told him to leave his homework on the desk.

On a Sunday morning six weeks later, Neyman banged on Dantzig’s door. The problems that Dantzig had assumed were homework were actually unproved statistical theorems that Neyman had been discussing with the class — and Dantzig had proved both of them. Both were eventually published, with Dantzig as coauthor.

“When I began to worry about a thesis topic,” he recalled later, “Neyman just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis.”

An atrocious article about a study where students who were promised a higher grade and then asked to what identical lectures broadcast online did more poorly than those in the classroom. So many things wrong.

Cameron Herold discusses why schools and society at large should be raising kids to think like entrepreneurs.

New York's new "School of One" presents an interesting model for individualized education and learning.

"What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences."

Another take on why Harvard kids head to Wall Street in such high numbers.

A Duke University professor turned the grading for a recent course over to the students and claims that work was better and more productive.

Caterina Fake discusses how, perhaps, it's better for software entrepreneurs to drop out of college.

Article argues that higher education is losing its tech influence because "students no longer consider the computer an advantage." Perhaps it is more because students views on technology are being formed at an earlier age than college.

"Through the blog discussion, quiz, and assignment requirements students became more knowledgeable and confident in their studies. This confidence resulted in a cycle of learning success."

"Micro-labs are small learning communities centered around answering a question, not mastering standardized content/skills."

Joel Spolsky argues for a different type of capstone project for universities. The key is projects that reflect real-world working environments.

Jeff Jarvis' notes from his TEDxNYed talk on the irrelevancy of the current education model.

A call for collaborative learning in the 21st-Century university. A much needed change if universities are to stay relevant.