There are gender wars, and then there are casualties. It wasn’t until 2011 that the behemoth toymaker LEGO acknowledged girls’ desire to build with bricks, even though the company had long before made a seemingly effortless pivot to co-branding, video games, and major motion pictures. So it’s little wonder that girls face all-too-real obstacles when […]
Read moreMonth: June 2011
Summer mobile trends
June 30th, 2011 by IDEA
Mobile is exploding, and this has vast implications for education. Here’s a summary of top news and trends for mobile this summer…
Smartphones are popular phones. According to Nielsen, 38% of Americans now own smartphones, and 55% of those who purchased a new handset in the past three months bought a smartphone (rather than a dumb one), up from 34% a year ago. Android’s growth curve flattened in 2011 while the iPhone’s got a boost. Collectively, Android and iOS are activating over 800k devices per day.
Last weekend, IDEA’s SpicyNodes project received a “Best Websites for Teaching and Learning” from American Association of School Librarians (AASL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). Here’s a three minute video of our acceptance speech from the conference… (more…)
There’s a great new video on YouTube, “I’m a climate scientist.” It uses gangsta-rap flavor to bring home the point that a lot of people talking about climate change are not actual climate scientists. Here’s the video, which contains some expletives:
If you are at work, or don’t like the word “F##k,” try out this clean version. Here’s the story… (more…)
All publications from the National Academies Press (NAP) are now available for free as PDFs. NAP is the publishing arm of the National Academies, and publishes 200+ books a year on topics in science, engineering, and health.
Making the PDFs free is the culmination of a decade of research and sales modeling on how to finance a nimble publishing house with paid print books, with enough spare revenue to allow free release of electronic books. Here’s the evolution:
