"Wallace doesn’t accept the silent social contract between students and professors: He takes apart and analyzes and makes explicit, in a way that is almost painful, all of the tiny conventional unspoken agreements usually made between professors and their students."

"On what’s wrong with the way we teach." Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.

"While roughly consistent with Bloom’s Taxonomy, her research yielded much greater insight into the sequential nature of learning and its implications on the digital environment." from A List Apart.

"It's tempting to generalize: If programming is best learned in this playful, bottom-up way, why not everything else?"

"What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don’t learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good." from NYT.

"All puzzles that appeared in the Linguistics Challenge adhered to strict guidelines, as outlined by the charter of the International Olympics in Linguistics and Mathematics."

Introducing the mesofact. from The Boston Globe.

In an age of classroom multitasking, scholars probe the nature of learning and memory. from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

"Our findings suggest that students are vulnerable to evaluative letters presented before a task, and support years of research highlighting the significant role that nonconscious processes play in achievement settings." from PubMed.

The museum of science, art and human perception. Housed within the walls of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, the Exploratorium is a collage of hundreds of science, art, and human perception exhibits. The Exploratorium is a leader in the movement to promote museums as informal education centers.

The Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 8 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.

Two groups of neuroscientists using MRI brain imaging announced last month that they were able to see changes inside the brains of people after mastering a new skill. The big surprise is that the part of the brain that changed has no neurons or synapses in it! The cerebral remodeling during learning was seen in the mysterious and still largely unexplored “white matter” region of the brain. from Scientific American.

Waldorf education is a pedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Learning is interdisciplinary, integrating practical, artistic, and conceptual elements. The Waldorf approach emphasizes the role of the imagination, developing thinking that includes a creative as well as an analytic component. from wikipedia.

An educational philosophy focused on preschool and primary education based on the principles of respect, responsibility, and community through exploration and discovery in a supportive and enriching environment based on the interests of the children through a self-guided curriculum. from wikipedia.

If what we find changes who we become, we have to be vigilant about creating content worth exploring, worth discovering. from a list apart.

Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 [pdf]

What the Internet is doing to our brains. from the atlantic.

"...the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down." from nyt.

The Institute for Learning Innovation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to understanding, facilitating and communicating about free-choice learning.

Play is the hallmark of the paradoxically useful uselessness of extended immaturity.

process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative. from nyt.

energetic and flexible. from new scientist.

educating web professionals. from a list apart.

web education for the next generation of web professionals. from a list apart.

objects, attributes, and methods.

the emphasis on social learning stands in sharp contrast to the traditional cartesian view.