While MIT welcomes its accepted applicants with posters and confetti, Stanford University has taken advantage of today's technology and is engaging in a new trend in its methods of notifying 90% of its hopeful applicants, one that is admittedly environmentally friendly while also being...well, downright mean. They've taken to sending out text messages to rejected applicants, ones that very well may read like Rice University's text "Admissions Decision: Deny". One such rejectee states "They say they won't be sending you an actual letter because that would only make it worse. Ha ha like I didn'...

Son, before you torture that soldier, consider the Geneva Conventions Video games present many teachable moments. One father, who designs educational exhibits for museums, was faced with a quandary when his 13 year-old son wanted to play Call of Duty online with his friends. Because the father had worked for military museums before, he knew that the information contained in the game was, for the most part, accurate. His problem was with the general (and possibly gratuitous?) violence found in the game. How...

Obama's Stimulus Plan & Ed Tech The new $787 billion federal economic-stimulus package includes something that many of my Trends in Ed sources are excited about: funding set aside specifically for ed tech. This booster shot will give $650 million (of the $115 billion sliced for ed) to Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program which is authorized by the No Child Left B...

Ghetto Film School Some lucky film-loving students are living out a fantasy (and possible future reality!) at the Ghetto Film School in the Bronx. Perhaps some of you more hip to the know in video already heard about this school but for the rest of you, read on. Former social worker, Joe Hall, founded the school in June 2000 as a way to connect talented budding filmmakers to educational and career opportunities in the field. Competition to get into the 15-month program is fierce (only 20 of 120 applicants are accepted) and rightly ...

White Papers to Guide Development of Educational Games The Education Arcade at MIT recently released two white papers on educational games and related learning technologies. Moving Learning Games Forward examines both learning and commercial games and recommends a list of design principles for learning games (pgs. 31 to 43) to a wide range of stakeholders. Using the Te...

Wikiversity As Wikipedia is to a free encyclopedia, Wikiversity promises to be a free online university. According to the February issue of First Monday, Wikiversity is "a repository of free, multilingual educational resources; a network of communities to create and use these resources; and group effort to learn, which may or may not be led by an instructor, who may or may not be an expert on the topic." Wikiversity ran i...

Rethinking High School Over the weekend I was googling ed tech in relation to professional development for K-12 educators in NYC…questioning, to what extent did they make use of district-provided prof dev resources to collaborate online with their colleagues to improve their curriculum & teaching methods?…so on and so forth. Student achievement was also of an interest, since for some, their livelihood is now closely linked to students' performance on tests. Because this work was for a policy analysis/implementation class, I needed scholarly research studies, journal ar...