from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. http://radar.oreilly.com/

Study in Rats Shows High-Fructose Diet Sabotages Learning, Memory

from Educational Technology Research and Development (Browse Results) http://www.springerlink.com/content/1556-6501/?sortorder=asc&export=rss&MUD=MP&export=rss

from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. http://radar.oreilly.com/

from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. http://radar.oreilly.com/

from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. http://radar.oreilly.com/

from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. http://radar.oreilly.com/

from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. http://radar.oreilly.com/

from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. http://radar.oreilly.com/

from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. http://radar.oreilly.com/

--not surprising but nice to have a study backing it

"We found that when students believe their teacher is allowing them some autonomy – whether by helping lead the class or having some freedom of choice in what they study or how they express their learning – their engagement actually increases over the course of the year," said Chris Hafen, a post-doctoral research associate at CASTL and lead author of the report, which is to be published in the March issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Building upon a process- and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality — primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies — reveals patterns in youth’s information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appro

Visualization as enzyme for understanding.

During the Fall of 2011, the district provided iPads to half of Auburn's sixteen kindergarten classrooms. The remaining eight classes used traditional resources. The eight iPad classes were selected at random to provide a better examination of the short term literacy impacts. Auburn kindergartners from both settings completed a series of standardized literacy assessments in early  September (pre-iPad) and in late November (post-iPad), which provide an objective measure on each groups' emerging literacy skills.

On Feb 15th, Dr. Mike Muir, Sue Dorris and Dr. Damian Bebell presented the study results to the School Committee and the community at-large. The School Committee was pleased to learn that the study results were quite positive. In fact, students in the iPad classes outperformed non- iPad students, on average, across every literacy measure they were tested on. Most of the performance gains observed in the iPad classes were modest, however....

Not sure how accurate these summaries are but it might be a place to start some investigations.

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.

---sound like education to me . . .
This assumption—that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system—is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science. In general, we believe that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information, by our ceaseless accumulation of facts. Scientists refer to this process as reductionism. By breaking down a process, we can see how everything fits together; the complex mystery is distilled into a list of ingredients. And so the question of cholesterol—what is its relationship to heart disease?—becomes a predictable loop of proteins tweaking proteins, acronyms altering one another. Modern medicine is particularly reliant on this approach.

Realising an ethical future for humanity requires coming to terms with what new technologies will mean for everyday people. By undertaking research, our associates create original knowledge to inform global decisions about innovation. The cf. puts transdisciplinary learning at the heart of these discussions. Our work builds understanding through art, science, social science and the humanities, to develop a vision for the future that is creative, responsible and inspiring.

Many rubrics, such as the problematic examples presented in Tables 2 and 3, describe the lower levels of performance criteria in purely negative terms, which creates a dichotomous (negative/positive) tone in the rubric. For young learners who are progressing along a continuum, this format sends the wrong message. Students who find themselves on the lower part of the scoring rubric may not be motivated to progress with this type of feedback. The performance criteria in a classroom rubric should reflect a positive learning continuum, and should not suggest that progression from Level 2 to 3 is a leap from failure to success. This does not mean that words, such as none, not or seldom, should always be avoided in rubric design, but that their use should represent one end of a continuous and consistent scale without undue negativity. However, when rubrics are not modified to reflect a positive continuum, they may perpetuate low expectations for certain students rather than promote learning.

Hee Kim, a creativity researcher at the College of William and Mary, found creativity has decreased among American children in recent years. Since 1990, children have become less able to produce unique and unusual ideas. They are also less humorous, less imaginative and less able to elaborate on ideas

Last week, a  study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that cell phones have become "near ubiquitous": 83 percent of American adults own one. Over half of all adult mobile phone owners had used their phones at least once to get information they needed right away. And more than a quarter said that they had experienced a situation in the previous month in which they had trouble doing something because they did not have their phones at hand.

“We found no evidence for any discontinuity in technology use around the age of 30 as would be predicted by the Net Generation and Digital Natives hypothesis," says the report. What the reseachers do find interesting and worthy of further study is the correlation – which is independent of age -- between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. In short, students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work.

Some really nice primary source tools from the National Archives.

The student explained that he had heard that soldiers in the Pacific during World War II carried coconuts with them because the coconut milk could be used like plasma. If you look at the Wikipedia article on coconuts, you will find that "fact." I turned to the rest of the class and asked if any of them would inject coconut milk in their veins on the say-so of a Wikipedia article. I am delighted to report that not one of them would. We then set about trying to answer the coconut milk transfusion question--and each time someone found a source, we asked, "Would I inject the coconut milk into my veins based on this source?" 

An important step toward supporting teachers and ensuring that all students have access to high quality instruction is to develop fairer and more useful measures of teacher effectiveness. This is the goal of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which will support independent education researchers–in partnership with school districts, principals, teachers, and unions–to develop objective and reliable measures of effective teaching. Rather than relying solely on how well a teacher’s students do on assessments, the Measures of Effective Teaching project seeks to uncover and develop a set of measures that work together to form a more complete indicator of a teacher’s impact on student achievement.

The Center for Digital Education is a national research and advisory institute specializing in K-12 and higher education technology trends, policy and funding

Even well-designed, sophisticated analyses with important conclusions can be compromised by a misleading presentation of results.

This study presents an exploration into facilitation practices of teacher professional development networks. Stimulating networked learning amongst teachers is a powerful way of creating an informal practice-based learning space driven by teacher needs. As such, it presents an additional channel (besides more formal traditional professional development initiatives) for teacher education and sustained professional development. This study describes a set of challenges facilitators of teacher networks encounter and presents ways to overcome them. Successful facilitation is the cornerstone for vital teacher networks in which they share knowledge and develop their practice.

---Interesting to think about w/re to project work/PBL etc.<br />
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Over the years, social scientists have found that abstract thinking leads to greater creativity. That means that if we care about innovation we need to be more abstract and therefore more distant. But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view. We draw closer rather than step back.<br />
That's a mistake, Polman and Emich suggest. "That decisions for others are more creative than decisions for the self... should prove of considerable interest to negotiators, managers, product designers, marketers and advertisers, among many others," they write.

The NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition, a research effort led and published by the New Media Consortium, is rolling out at three important venues over the next few weeks. Three international organizations — the New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) — collaborate on identifying technology experts and other aspects of the research, and this year, for the first time, each organization is planning a significant event related to the new report for each of their audiences.

The insights gleaned from neurobiological and cognitive neuroscientific experimentation in humans and in animal models have identified many of the processes at the molecular, cellular, and systems levels that occur during learning and the formation, storage, and recall of memories. Moreover, with the advent of noninvasive technologies to monitor patterns of neural activity during various forms of human cognition, the efficacy of different strategies for effective teaching can be compared. Considerable insight has also been developed as to how to most effectively engage these processes to facilitate learning, retention, recall, and effective use and application of the learned information. However, this knowledge has not systematically found its way into the medical education process. Thus, there are considerable opportunities for the integration of current knowledge about the biology of learning with educational strategies and curricular design

The mistake was a lack of customer focus. I know, I know: "They ran a survey! Customers loved the idea!" But that's exactly the problem. Walmart didn't pursue the question of what customers wanted. Instead, Walmart came up with the answer first, then asked customers to agree to it. That's exactly the wrong thing to do, because it ignores customers while attempting to fool stakeholders into thinking that the strategy is customer-centered.<br />
<br />
Put another way, Walmart based this incredibly expensive misadventure on what customers said, rather than what they did. And the customer experience is all about what customers do. In real life. No hypotheticals. Walmart acted without considering the customer experience, and that was a big mistake. (

So the assistant professor in communications at Elizabethtown College designed an experiment for 120 students at the college and has just reported the results. It turns out that professors with personal Twitter streams appear to be more credible than those who stick to business. The study, co-authored with Jamie Bartolino, one of her students, appears in the most recent issue of Learning, Media and Technology.

As so often happens in science, two studies from different labs, using different techniques, have simultaneously produced strikingly similar results. They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

Project RED provides you a selection of articles summarizing successful implementations of technology-transformed schools. Use the search box to the right to search for the name of the research or keywords related to the research content.

Interesting 1:1 report from Eastern Townships in Canada.

The project, which began three years ago, grew out of a lecture neuroscientist Beau Lotto of University College London gave at the school, where his son Misha was a student. Lotto spoke about his research on human perception, bumblebees and robots, and then shared his ideas on how science is done: “Science is nothing more than a game.”<br />
<br />
“Nature’s way for us to discover patterns and relationships is to play. That’s the same aim that science has,” Lotto said. “I think everyone does science every day. The scientific process is part of life.”

While his classmates let their imaginations run wild making up colorful characters and fantasy worlds, the little boy said repeatedly, "I can't think of anything," Ms. Dea says. Although she reassured him that nothing he did would be judged "wrong," he tried to copy another student's game, then asked if he could make a work sheet instead. She finally gave him permission to make flash cards with right-and-wrong answers.

This past weekend, I’d heard enough from mainstream American media about the latest PISA international assessment data comparisons of our kids to everybody else’s kids. According to the results of the 2009 test of 15 year-olds around the world, Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone children are long gone and those left are all just below average. I wanted to know more about the assessment, the findings of the OECD, and how the international media processed the results in other countries.<br />
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--from Pam Moran (Sup. Albemarle)