Full documentary on this amazing person.

Another TechCrunch article on Education: We are in a time of convergence: teachers are incorporating technology from their everyday lives to increase student engagement, while visionary administrators are using the momentum of grassroots digital learning movements to move our institutions forward. Hopefully education will catch up before the Singularity arrives.

From the Wolfram Education Portal: Wolfram has long been a trusted name in education—as the makers of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, we’ve created some of the most dynamic teaching and learning tools available. We are pleased to offer the best of all of our technologies to you here in the Wolfram Education Portal, organized by course. In the portal you’ll find a dynamic textbook, lesson plans, widgets, interactive Demonstrations, and more built by Wolfram education experts.

Check out what it is like to author textbooks using iBooks Author. Everything feels very fluid and it’s obvious that the same team that worked on iWork was also responsible for this product. This isn’t iPhoto for books, by any means, though. While it’s not Adobe InDesign or a complex design tool like either, it’s clearly meant for users who are willing to put in a bit of time to create the best possible product…

My new book on Organizing Digital Information for Others is out. When we interact with web and intranet teams, we find many struggling to move beyond conceptual-level discussions on information organization. Hours on end are spent on discussing the meaning of "metadata", "controlled vocabulary" and "taxonomy" without any strategic understanding of how everything fits together. Being so bogged down at this level they fail to look beyond to the main reason for their pursuit—organizing information for others (the end users) so that they can find the information easily. Web and intranet teams are not the only ones facing this challenge. Staff in companies are finding themselves tasked with organizing, say, hundreds of project documents on their collaboration space. And they usually end up organizing it in the only way they know—for themselves. Team members then often struggle to locate the information that they thought should be in "this folder"! In this short book, we explore how lists, categories, trees and facets can be better used to organize information for others. We also learn how metadata and taxonomies can connect different collections and increase the findability of information across the website or intranet.

An interesting infographic on the changes in the classroom because of technology. "The proliferation and sheer breadth of accessibility that the Internet offers has in many ways redefined the process of "growing up" — this graphic explores this redefinition and provides insight into not just how we learn stuff, but also what we learn from a young age now that we have computers."

eSpark is hoping to be the cure that parents need to get into the education game. "Primary schools (and parents) are adopting iPads at a breakneck pace, but many struggle to find the best learning experiences from the some-100,000 educational apps and eBooks on the iOS platform. So, eSpark is working with more than 3,000 apps and learning experiences (i.e. eBooks, iOS apps, web apps usable on iOS, instructional videos and songs), curating those apps into custom learning profiles and playlists for students based on their individual needs."

Interesting study reported by Techcrunch In the study, simple humanoid robots teach English by drawing shapes and translating their meaning. The experimental study found that 19 children, between the ages of 4 and 8, learned best when the Nao toy robot didn’t always make the correct translation, and could learn from students’ corrections.  

Craig Malloy has argues that LMS, CMS, Social Business Software, etc., are silo-ed attempts at the primary goal of the organisation: knowledge sharing. As frustrated as we may ever be, productivity is still one of the greatest levers any executive has at her disposal. Job satisfaction and employee retention is ultimately all about getting things done, and accomplishing great things as a team. Otherwise, why are we working so damn hard? Everyone wants better knowledge sharing.