The LaTimes has analyzed 7 years of Standardized Test scores from the Los Angeles Public Schools, and found huge variation in teacher effectiveness (using the Value Added method). Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year. There is a substantial gap at year's end between students whose teachers were in the top 10% in effectiveness and the bottom 10%. The fortunate students ranked 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math... Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students' academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets. (more)

There may be a Google Chrome OS Tablet released on Black Friday. Or not.

The Dell Streak is a 5" Android Tablet. (yikes that's small) Actually it's a big Smart Phone, as it can make calls.

high-performance Messaging library with a socket-style API. It provides a Message Queue, but unlike message-oriented middleware (MOM), a ØMQ system can run without a dedicated Message Broker. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98MQ (more)

I'm at BarCamp-Chicago. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bcchi10

page was renamed from z2010-08=08-DiggRatingsGamed (more)

Bill St. Arnaud is a Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation Internet, clouds, cyber-infrastructure, Web 2.0 and how these technologies will address innovation, climate change to next generation democracy. For more about me please see http://infoexecutive.itincanada.ca/tweetme.php?ct=308&pr=11577 (more)

Students at EdVisions made a great Video showing how they implement Project Based Learning. EdVisions grew originally out of the creation of the Minnesota New Country School in 1991 when a group of educators used the Coalition Of Essential Schools model and a teacher-owner CoOperative centered on project-based learning. Since then, EdVisions models have sprung up around the country. Furthermore, grants totaling close to $9million have come in from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This has helped to spark over 30 schools in a variety of settings nationally.

book by SuzieBoss: Reinventing Project Based Learning ISBN:156484238X (more)

Stowe Boyd reports that Stanford University Medical School is issuing IPad-s to all students. And they'll be heavily using Aji's I Annotate app for highlighting/annotating PDF-s (Annotation Systems). Unlike other apps that only let users draw on top of a PDF, iAnnotate fully integrates its annotations directly into the PDF such that they will be available to any standard PDF readers like Adobe Reader or Preview. You can transfer PDFs via email, iTunes sync or even clicking any PDF web link in the integrated web browser. Marking up and emailing it right back out couldn't be easier!

The last US combat troops have left Iraq. Of course, there are still 50k "non-combat" troops there. Plus lots of mercs (oops "contractors").

Slide Share has done some Pivot work to get a launchable Freemium product. They used a combination of Minimum Viable Product and A-B Test work to learn fast.

The Daily Beast is creating a BeastBooks Book Publishing company. At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an EBook edition. (With Paper Back coming later. Only if EBook sales are good?) (more)

Dr. Steven Nissen recently shared the tape he secretly made of a meeting between he and Glaxo Smith Kline (PharmCo) executives in 2007 about their Avandia diabetes drug. During the meeting with Dr Nissen, the four executives spoke as if they did not know the results of Dr. Nissen’s still-unpublished study. And Dr. Nissen did not mention that he had already sent it to the journal, the recording shows. But a week before the meeting, the Congressional investigators said, Glaxo Smith Kline had been secretly and inappropriately faxed a copy of Dr. Nissen’s manuscript by a journal reviewer who also worked as a consultant to Glaxo Smith Kline. (more)

SlateCom's SlateLabs focuses on Multimedia Journalism.

An encyclopedia (also spelled encyclopaedia or encyclopædia) is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. (more)

Ramit Sethi says Financial Planning needs a Marketing mentality to help people actually change their behaviors. It means that experts in personal finance have gotten fat and intellectually lazy by writing bullshit like, “The 7 types of bonds.” In general, facts do not change behavior. Nobody cares about “objective” advice that’s not tailored to them... 99% of people care about their money and couldn’t care less about “learning” about personal finance in general... The editors did a terrific job of simply listing off topics, much in the same way an Encyclopedia editor organizes and lists off material. But the encyclopedia editor doesn’t expect anyone to ever read his material.

Mark Pesce sees the future of computing, and Educating Kids, in the IPad Tablet. It’s not clear that computers as we know them today – that is, desktops and laptops – will be common in a decade’s time. They may still be employed in very specialized tasks. For almost everything else, we will be using our iPads. They’ll rarely leave our sides. They will become so pervasive that in many environments – around the home, in the office, or at school – we will simply have a supply of them sufficient to the task. When everything is so well connected, you don’t need to have personal information stored in a specific iPad. You will be able to pick up any iPad and – almost instantaneously – the custom features which mark that device as uniquely yours will be downloaded into it. (more)

As part of the 100Days project for summer, NateMatias is creating 100 Summaries of different works. He's using TinderBox.

Bob Stein has been pondering a new Framing of the Future Of The Book, for going beyond the shovelware EBook style. *Assuming that whatever replaces the book in the futurist landscape to come will not be called "a book," people often ask me why I named our group The Institute for the Future of the Book. My answer has consistently been a variant of the following: while it's true that whatever replaces the book as a crucial mechanism for moving ideas around time and space is not likely to be called "a book," since we don't have that word yet, "book" works better than "institute for the future of discourse" or "institute for thinking about what comes after the book." I end my answer by suggesting that one day we'll realize that a word describing a new-fangled object, or perhaps a word referring to a range of behaviors has come to signify the dominant media form which has in fact supplanted the book. (more)