Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Digital Library

Watercolor of a purple flower.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (
Bequest of Miss Louise Veltin, 1937
John La Farge

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has created a collection of digital reproductions of artworks that it has been able to verify as out of copyright. They are marked on the individual record pages with an “OASC” (Open Access for Scholarly Content) graphic below the image. There are the basic non-commercial, educational, or fair-use limits and a lot of use information including how to cite them on the FAQ.

University Websites: Top 10 Design Guidelines


Google Course Builder, why it’s cool and why it’ll fail


So I went digging for information.

  2. It’s a hosted app so the URL is “”
  3. It won’t work for most educators I know.






In Victory for Open-Education Movement, Blackboard Embraces Sharing




How database searches solved a 50-year-old medical mystery

Calcium supplement pills

Whats really interesting is how the Mootha Lab did it. Sure, there was plenty of traditional wet lab work involving pipettes, beakers, and chemical reagents – but techniques like these had failed to identify MCU for close to fifty years. The difference was the Mootha labs strategic and creative searching of publicly-accessible biological databases.

via How database searches solved a 50-year-old medical mystery.

Disrupting Class: Honoring Multiple Intelligences through a Student-Centric Approach | Technology Teacher

disrupting class book cover

He says we need to move to more student-centric learning, using the strengths of technology to help students learn in their own ways (you remember Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences?). For instance, instead of assessing students at the end of a unit, we should test them daily, using technology to capture and record data, thus allowing the teacher to more efficiently help students learn at their own level and speed.

via Disrupting Class: Honoring Multiple Intelligences through a Student-Centric Approach | Technology Teacher.  via @mstephens7

I hated the U.S. educational system when I was in it, mostly because I spent most of my time locked up in classrooms bored out of my mind. I was a perfect example of someone who needed a different approach, I got good grades but I wonder how much more I could have learned if I had been involved.

Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education | The Nation




via Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education | The Nation.

How Children Fail: angry lessons from failures to teach

How Children Fail: angry lessons from failures to teach – Boing Boing

…The valiant and resolute band of travelers I thought I was leading toward a much-hoped-for destination turned out instead to be more like convicts on a chain-gang, forced under threat of punishment to move along a rough path leading nobody knew where and down which they could see hardly more than a few steps ahead. School feels like this to children: it is a place where they make you go and where they tell you to do things and where they try to make your life unpleasant if you don’t do them or don’t do them right…

So many people have said to me, “If we didn’t make children do things, they wouldn’t do anything.” Even worse, they say, If I weren’t made to do things, I wouldn’t do anything.

It is the creed of the slave …

I felt like this all through school, even grad school. I read an article a couple of years ago where the author stated that the American school system was built to process corporate drones. No creativity needed. Now that corporations are becoming more automated, that system is breaking down. My aunt home-schools her children because the system isn’t challenging enough for them.

Video: How to Speak

Video: How to Speak

Running time: 45 minutes.