---be interesting to play this concept out online in a variety of ways

The upshot of all this is that, after your first game, you are playing on a board unlike any other in existence, with cities positioned according to your whims, locations named by your opponents, and cards customized per the preferences of your game group. And that’s just the beginning. The Risk: Legacy box contains a number of sealed packets and compartments, which are only opened when specific conditions are met (e.g., a single player wins his second game). Opening a cache may introduce to the mix new cards, new stickers, new rules, and even new pieces (maybe! I don’t even know!). The game was designed to be played at least 15 times, preferably with the same group of people.

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic
search engines, has made accessing information as easy as
lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly
efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the
old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor
who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four
studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions,
people are primed to think about computers and that
when people expect to have future access to information,
they have lower rates of recall of the information itself
and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The
Internet has become a primary form of external or
transactive memory, where information is stored
collectively outside ourselves.

Because they take out the middle, it is a lot harder to pursue the American dream by working your way up the ladder. Climbing up rung by rung, you will find a machine staring down. And it won’t retire or move up the ladder to make room for you. Once in place, a retirement or promotion is not going to happen, it isn’t going to be opening up a spot.

Another challenge is the vetting of content to ensure it is accurate and appropriate for a specific set of students. Many states have adoption processes that provide such curation, but how is that process replicated when there is so much content beyond what has been available in the traditional textbook? And how do you maintain standards of accuracy and appropriateness with digital textbooks that are continuously updated?

The scoring rubric for the ranks were a combination of seven factors.  The first, the Google Scholar score, measures publications in which the author is widely cited.  Book points, the second, gathered the total number of books a scholar had either authored, co-authored or edited via Amazon.  The third measure was the author’s highest-ranked book on Amazon.  The last four was the number of times a scholar was quoted or mentioned in four areas: education press, blogs, newspapers and in the Congressional Record.

An interesting MOOC on the future of education.  It's run by some interesting people who've been doing MOOCs for a while in higher ed.  It might interest some of you.

7.15.11 | One of the ways to determine if a revolution is happening in education is if things that were thought to be the antithesis of good pedagogy are actually becoming the most dynamic way to teach. Welcome to this week’s Playback, which features the instructional power of everything from “Angry Birds” to virtual worlds.

In a bold move towards digitizing education, South Korea’s Ministry of Education Science and Technology has announced it is spending 2.2 trillion Wan ($2 billion USD) over the next four years, to convert its schools from classic paper textbooks to new digital versions on tablet PCs. The adoption of tablet based reading will also be accompanied by WiFi and cloud computing systems in schools.

“Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”<br />
“A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”.<br />
After the president's announcement: “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”<br />
“For the people who are trying to email me to reach me, I simply can’t filter out the notifications from the emails :-( “<br />
The fact that Osam bin Laden's death was live-tweeted is almost too astonishing to believe. Yet the tweets and the timestamps are right there for anyone to see. Reporters have not yet confirmed Athar's identity but it will certainly be fascinating if and when he comes forward.

In 2002, digital data storage surpassed non-digital for the first time. By 2007, 94 percent of all information on the planet was in digital form. These were among the conclusions of researchers at the University of Southern California who tried to quantify the amount of data in the world.

---Worth reading and thinking about.<br />
<br />
The sheer quantity of information now permeating our environment is astounding, but more importantly, networked digital information is also qualitatively different than information in other forms. It has the potential to be created, managed, read, critiqued, and organized very differently than information on paper and to take forms that we have not yet even imagined. To understand the true potentials of this “information revolution” on higher education, we need to look beyond the framework of “information.”