This year, Minnesota 2020 has released some exciting critiques of the state of education in Minnesota and nationally. And, by “exciting,” I mean sometimes scathing critiques … with a glimmer of hope. At the top of their hit list (and rightfully so) is No Child Left Behind. This morning, they blogged:

Last fall, [...]

Last month, IBM took out a two-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal that touted their vision for a smarter planet. They believe:
The world continues to get “smaller” and “flatter.” But we see now that being connected isn’t enough. Fortunately, something else is happening that holds new potential: the planet is becoming smarter.
That is, intelligence is [...]

As touched upon lightly a couple weeks ago, the blogosphere is getting easier to navigate. Both Alltop and Blogged offer editor-picked/-rated indices of blogs, sorted by topic. These goes beyond the usual scope of blog/news aggregators by incorporating human elements of review.

Receiving generally-positive initial reviews (including a thumbs-up from me), Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop [...]

With many folks away at SXSW, CIES and AERA, the next couple weeks are going to be quiet. What better time than now to catch-up on the mail!
First, Elaine Wooton sent a note a couple weeks ago in regard to my chart of Education 1.0/2.0/3.0:
I am part of a group starting a school outside [...]

That’s right. I’m going to grow out my solidarity beard until the Minnesota Supreme Court decides what to do with us country bumpkin bloggers. From the Minnesota Lawyers Blog, the court is afraid of:
the specter of the “unshaven blogger” coming in with cell phone camera at the ready. Apparently the judges are worried [...]

Maya Frost has put together an interesting blog to help promote ideas she’s assembling for a book: The world is your campus: How to skip the SAT, save thousands on tuition, and get an outrageously relevant global education. Her take is that people need to balance education with creative life experiences. Why learn about the [...]

Following-up from yesterday’s post on the characteristics of co-seminars, here’s a taste of what they look like.
This joint co-seminar, organized between the University of Minnesota, FLACSO-México, FLACSO-Chile and the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja is an “open seminar” – that is, with permission from the students and collaborating institutions, all course content and most of [...]

Danah Boyd joined the call for reforming how academics publish their work by calling for a boycott of non-open-access journals …and, provided a list of suggestions on what needs to be done now:

Tenured Faculty and Industry Scholars: Publish only in open-access journals.
Disciplinary associations: Help open-access journals gain traction.
Tenure committees: Recognize alternate venues and help the [...]

As a follow-up to last week’s posts by Ai Takeuchi with Japanese perspectives on global education, I wanted to comment on Steve Jobs’ claim that nobody reads books anymore –and counter his claim by pointing out that books are alive and well in Japan because the Japanese are embracing the distribution possibilities provided by new [...]

Blackboard Beyond’s Greg Ritter sent me a note announcing that “the issue [I] experienced with SafeAssign that enabled [me] to gain access to a SafeAssign user’s paper has been resolved. Blackboard released a new version of the SafeAssign central service as well as a new version of the SafeAssign Building Block last Tuesday, November 20.”
Since [...]