My mom used to say, “I don’t think you could stand on the corner and hand out twenty dollar bills without making people angry.” There are multiple ways of viewing everything, but this isn’t the way I would have seen this development: Developing countries are rapidly increasing the number and quality of college graduates, generating a sea change in the relative education advantage that advanced countries have enjoyed over literally hundreds of years… “Given recent trends in primary education, the world economy may achieve near universal literacy within a generation,â€? says Gail D. Fosler. ...

The Elusive Quest for Growth My rating: 4 out of 5 Easterly argues that for all the money, theorizing, and research that have been poured into the effort to raise the standard of living in developing areas, little progress has been made because everyone ignores the first principle of economics: people act in response to incentives. If we wish to take education into the developing world, what are the incentives to which we expect potential learners will respond? A fun read, full of great quotes like “The prime suspect for mucking up incentives is government” (217). ...

The Elusive Quest for Growth My rating: 4 out of 5 Easterly argues that for all the money, theorizing, and research that have been poured into the effort to raise the standard of living in developing areas, little progress has been made because everyone ignores the first principle of economics: people act in response to incentives. If we wish to take education into the developing world, what are the incentives to which we expect potential learners will respond? A fun read, full of great quotes like “The prime suspect for mucking up incentives is government” (217). ...

I never thought I’d see a screencast in a screencast, but that is just what I got watching this fabulous presentation about using screencasts, podcasts, blogs, etc. in support of education. Any time you come away with brand new ideas about how to be a better teacher, more efficiently, you have to share…

Great quote from a short piece called Innovative User Interfaces: Whether building the killer app or defining a new market, the message should be clear: innovate only where necessary, avoid being overly creative, and be aware of the technical limitations facing your product. Corporations that successfully balance innovation with standard, usable feature-sets will set themselves apart from the pack and greatly increase their survival rate.

Interesting thought from a paper mentioned in the UNESCO IIEP forum on open educational resources: An important debate is currently taking place within universities but also among researchers, diplomats and governmental sectors all over the world. Can education be considered as a commercial service and, as a result, regulated by the World Trade Organization (WTO)? If the reply is positive, does this mean that the rules and principles of GATS (the General Agreement on Trade in Services) apply to education or should it be considered as a public service? What are the implications of the answer to this question? And if the idea of public service is retained, what are the principles that must guide the organization, content and policies for higher education in developing countries in general? ...

So by now you’ve heard - Blackboard is buying WebCT, and in 18 months or so there will be one uberproduct. We all saw this coming, but still - wow. Why am I mad? Because the state of Utah just completed a bid process to license and buy support for an LMS to be used at all state schools. And after phone calls and emails with a company who will remain un-named (why do we protect the guilty?) who assured me they would put in a bid to install / configure / support Sakai for the state, today I heard that they never bothered submitting a bid. I could spit I’m so angry. I could have worked with any of a handful of companies to get this OSS solution in the competition, but I naively believed this vendor’s word that they would put in a bid. And now it’s all said and done, and Sakai wasn’t even in the mix. I actually threw something across the room today when I heard. ...

So by now you’ve heard - Blackboard is buying WebCT, and in 18 months or so there will be one uberproduct. We all saw this coming, but still - wow. Why am I mad? Because the state of Utah just completed a bid process to license and buy support for an LMS to be used at all state schools. And after phone calls and emails with a company who will remain un-named (why do we protect the guilty?) who assured me they would put in a bid to install / configure / support Sakai for the state, today I heard that they never bothered submitting a bid. I could spit I’m so angry. I could have worked with any of a handful of companies to get this OSS solution in the competition, but I naively believed this vendor’s word that they would put in a bid. And now it’s all said and done, and Sakai wasn’t even in the mix. I actually threw something across the room today when I heard. ...

Only in the Instructional Technology Department could two people who sit all day within ten feet of each other have an extended conversation about work via their blogs. Brett pushes back on my Gagne, Games, and Learning post with another of his own, lest we forget, learning is complex. It’s good stuff. ...

Looks like lots of excellent stuff is coming out of the Web 2.0 conference. Far and away the most interesting looking of the presentation notes online so far is Script-Tunnelling REST Using Microformats. Reading it was one of those holy-cow-why-hasn’t-someone-thought-of-this-before moments for me. Smart people are great… and it’s even better when they share. You should also see how to encode scripting data structures in XHTML microformats, which provides a real example using the XOXO (“shosho”) microformat. As an added bonus, if you call now, you can follow a link to Ian Davis’ notes about Less. ...