In my third month of writing here about 21st century education, way back in March 2007, I put the pom-poms down, stopped cheerleading, and started thinking about all the ways schools can kill the learning that is possible when students have a simple laptop and a blog. This snippet from a post from back then [...]

A quickie: A couple weeks ago, I posted about the fatal weakness of RSS readers – their exclusion of a feed’s comments. Derrick Kwa replied with an offer to send me a no longer available WordPress plugin that shows a post’s comments underneath it. Derrick was kind enough to follow through (and by the way, [...]

In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“ –the [...]

Real-time Twitter Search – Tweet Scan Education for Well-Being gets my vote as one of the most important educational sites on the web, period. Bill Farren makes the videos he posts there, writes lucid and relevant discussions of them, and links to supplementary resources for possible classroom use. His written posts are as well-crafted as [...]

I received this comment recently on my podcast post, “My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story.” The comment is from a teen named Jack, who is experiencing now what I experienced 30 years ago. I’m sharing it because it’s evidence that the meme I’m about to propose – voluntary, as usual – [...]

From my Quotiki sidebar widget: Conservatives say teaching sex education in the public schools will promote promiscuity. With our education system? If we promote promiscuity the same way we promote math or science, they’ve got nothing to worry about. – Beverly Mickins I’m telling you, there’s magic in these random quote widgets – especially when, [...]

Another limitation of RSS readers I’ve often griped about before: with a few exceptions (Bloglines for one), they exclude comment threads from the feed. This sends entirely the wrong message: that the posts are the main thing, and the writer of the blog is the expert. I operate on the opposite assumption: I post my [...]

[Before I launch into the statistics, I want to urge you to watch the YouTube video at the bottom of this post. It's a beautiful testament to the scientific method. In it, a scientist proves Darwin right on a hypothesis that, when Darwin was alive, earned him ridicule. The proof took 150 years to come [...]

Carolyn Foote wrote this week about the new Pew study on the effects of technology on teen writing. An article about the study in eSchool News (free subscription – well worth it – required) pulls out a few details that for me, at least, suggest some weird thinking. The “news” that [t]eens who communicate frequently [...]