In January 2009, a mathematician at Cambridge University named Tim Gowers decided to use his blog to run an unusual social experiment. He picked out a difficult mathematical problem and tried to solve it completely in the open, using his blog to post ideas and partial progress. He issued an open invitation for others to contribute their own ideas, hoping that many minds would be more powerful than one. He dubbed the experiment the Polymath Project.

Several hours after Mr. Gowers opened up his blog for discussion, a Canadian-Hungarian mathematician posted a comment. Fifteen minutes later, an Arizona high-school math teacher chimed in. Three minutes after that, the UCLA mathematician Terence Tao commented. The discussion ignited, and in just six weeks, the mathematical problem had been solved.

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“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”

–Peter Drucker (1909-2005)

The small gathering of students huddled underneath the tent at Columbia International University early Friday afternoon and listened as a classmate read from the book of 2nd Timothy.

The campus was nearing the final hours of a four-day journey through the story of creation, the fall of mankind, redemption and restoration as told through the words of the Bible.

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that all God’s people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work,” the reader recited to the students seated before her.

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Student question. Personally like to thank you for saving me winter algebra last year through Khan Academy investment. Is there a need for a teacher role anymore?

Gates. If you go from kindergarten to college, certainly the need for adult supervision hopefully goes down somewhat. But remember education to some degree is about motivation. If you’re motivated to learn physics, read Feynman’s book. Education is not about the unique availability of information, it’s about curating info into form that student chooses to ingest. Always will be teacher, but most replaceable in terms of lecture. We have about 20 schools now that have agreed to design entire experience around Khan lectures.

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After the iPhone and the iPad, the iZone is a different kind of design experiment.

It’s New York’s attempt to reinvent an inner-city school.

The iZone project – or Innovation Zone – is challenging state schools in New York City to rip up the rule book.

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If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure.

No business in America ”” and therefore no job creation ”” happens without someone buying something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.

Moreover, very few start-ups get off the ground without a wide, vibrant network of advisers and mentors, potential customers and clients, quality vendors and valuable talent to employ. You don’t learn how to network crouched over a desk studying for multiple-choice exams. You learn it outside the classroom, talking to fellow human beings face-to-face.

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After [Education Secretary Arne] Duncan’s visit there was some back and forth between the Obama administration and Oregon City on how the money should be spent. But ultimately, the Department of Education said it should be given to teachers as direct bonuses. It also said it wanted to restrict the funds to schools with lots of low-income students, which would have excluded half of Oregon City’s schools.

Oregon City wanted to put the money into a shared fund, possibly for teachers’ continuing education.

Nancy Noice, president of the Oregon City teachers union, said one solution the feds proposed was that employees hand their bonuses back to the district. But Noice says that didn’t seem workable.

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Here’s a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers.

Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts….

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We are witnessing the emergence of something profound: Humans, historically divided by geography, culture and creed, are beginning to connect and collaborate on a scale never seen before. The driving force behind this creative wave are digital tools and networks that allow new forms of collaboration and knowledge creation.

What starts out as social networking is evolving into social production. We’ve witnessed how self-organizing groups, leveraging social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia, have launched revolutions throughout the Arab world and created the most important reference work in the English language in less than 10 years.

In spite of all the potential to innovate surrounding blogs, forums, wikis and social networks, there are legions of detractors. And no institution is more skeptical about the benefits of social media than education. But there are also few institutions that have more to gain from social media.

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Kevin Schombert, a student with Down Syndrome, was crowned homecoming king this weekend at Urbana High School in Frederick County.

Schombert is a manager for the school’s basketball team and a huge sports fan.

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Four education administrators from across the Communion will start a fellowship scheme in London next year following the success of the Anglican Alliance bid for Commonwealth funding.

The four the Caribbean, Nigeria, Ghana and the Solomon Islands will be the first fellows in the scheme set up by the Anglican Alliance and funded by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission.

They will spend eight weeks visiting UK education services and specialist education institutions to see what lessons they can learn for delivering education services at home.

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Tennessee overhauled its teacher evaluation system last year to win a grant from the federal Race to the Top program. Now many teachers say they are struggling to shine, and that’s torpedoing morale.

For Janna Beth Hunt, who teaches first grade at Norman Binkley Elementary in Nashville, it’s been a disappointing process. Tennessee’s new observations grade teachers on a scale of 1 to 5. Many are scoring what feels like a C, which under the system isn’t enough to get the job security of tenure.

“I definitely feel like I’m better than an average teacher. I’m not happy with a 3, but I told my principal that, and he knows that I’m a perfectionist and that I want a 5. It’s just extremely difficult to get a 5,” Hunt says.

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Students and workers seeking retraining are borrowing extraordinary amounts of money through federal loan programs, potentially putting a huge burden on the backs of young people looking for jobs and trying to start careers.

The amount of student loans taken out last year crossed the $100 billion mark for the first time and total loans outstanding will exceed $1 trillion for the first time this year. Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards, reports the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Students are borrowing twice what they did a decade ago after adjusting for inflation, the College Board reports. Total outstanding debt has doubled in the past five years ”” a sharp contrast to consumers reducing what’s owed on home loans and credit cards.

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Children’s minister Sarah Teather said the trials would start next summer and run for two years. The scheme will cost £5 million for the vouchers plus set-up costs.

“The overwhelming evidence from all the experts is that a child’s development in the first five years of their life is the single biggest factor influencing their future life chances, health and educational attainment,” she said.

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…protestors rounding the corner of Zuccotti Park encountered dozens of white-robed worshipers singing spirituals and blessing the demonstrators while holding signs reading “Blessed are the poor” and brandishing handmade Christian crosses.

The group, calling themselves the “Protest Chaplains,” traveled from Boston to join the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which claims to advocate for “the 99 percent” of Americans against the “1 percent” who control much of the country’s wealth.

The Protest Chaplains, a loose group of mostly Christian students, seminarians and laypeople organized though Facebook, expressed support for the movement the best they knew how: through their faith.

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While serving nine months in a South Carolina prison on forgery charges, Michelle N. Owens capitalized on the explosion in online higher education to tap into a new ”” and highly lucrative ”” way to profit from fake documents.

Using information she gathered as she handled paperwork in the prison’s education department, Ms. Owens filed applications for admission and financial aid to Webster University’s distance-learning programs on behalf of 23 unknowing inmates. The applicants were admitted and granted the $467,500 in requested aid, including $124,821 for books, transportation and living expenses ”” though of course their room and board was already provided by the state. The aid was sent in the form of debit cards to the residential South Carolina address Ms. Owens supplied.

An alert employee at Webster in St. Louis, which has campuses overseas and on dozens of United States military bases, eventually noticed an unusual number of applicants from the same address in Florence, S.C. Ms. Owens, 36, who continued to make fraudulent applications to Webster for more than a year after she was released from Leath Correctional Institution in 2008, was sentenced on Sept. 29 to 51 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $128,852 in restitution.

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Best Buy and Microsoft are among companies partnering with the Federal Communications Commission on a plan to help the 100 million Americans without high-speed Internet service.

The initiative, to be announced today by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, aims to assist the broadband-challenged — many of whom are poor, unemployed or live in rural areas — from falling behind in today’s tech-centric economy. Plans include offering Internet skills classes and job certification programs online and on-site at Best Buy stores, libraries and schools.

U.S. broadband adoption (68%) currently falls far below that of countries such as Singapore and South Korea (each at 90%), Genachowski notes. “If we can take the broadband adoption rate to 100%, that will help boost our economy and our leadership position in the global economy,” he says.

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[Amber Carvaly] listened to his stories about going to the morgue, setting up for a service, picking up the deceased ”” babies from families, husbands from wives ”” and she was amazed that someone her age could do this work.

Classes started in August and are designed to give students an edge when they take the state and national licensing exams. If Carvaly graduates in three semesters, she will have paid a little more than $5,000 to learn how to embalm and to arrange a funeral. Some have called the profession “the dismal trade,” but she sees nothing dismal about it.

“We can’t appreciate life without appreciating death,” she says. “I want to help people realize this.”

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Charles Kingsley Barrett, who has died aged 94, stood alongside CH Dodd as the greatest British New Testament scholar of the 20th century. Barrett regarded commentary on the texts as the primary task of the biblical scholar, and his meticulous commentaries have provided solid foundations for students and clergy for more than 50 years. He was a Methodist minister for nearly 70 years and, during his time as lecturer and professor of divinity at Durham University (1945-82), and in retirement there, he preached most Sundays in the city or a nearby village. His opposition to the scheme for Anglican-Methodist reunion in the 1960s brought him into contact with a wider public as a church leader, as well as a renowned teacher.

He was born into a Primitive (Calvinist) Methodist clergy family in Salford. He was sent to Shebbear college, in Devon, where he became captain of cricket and a promising opening batsman. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he distinguished himself in the mathematical tripos before transferring to theology. His supervisor, Noel Davey, directed him to what turned out to be the last course of lectures on the theology and ethics of the New Testament by EC Hoskyns.

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Never have scientists had so much readily accessible, real-time data about what people say. Twitter, the service that allows users to send text updates of up to 140 characters out to the public, publishes more than 200 million messages, or tweets, a day. Compared with information from cellphone records and social-media sites, Twitter texts are as timely as a pulse beat and, taken together, automatically compile the raw material of social history.

As Twitter’s message traffic has grown explosively, so has the scientific appetite for the insights the data can yield. Dozens of new scholarly studies over the past 18 months by computer-network analysts and sociologists have plumbed the public torrents of data made available by Twitter through special links with the company’s computer servers. This research has harnessed the service to monitor political activity and employee morale, track outbreaks of flu and food poisoning, map fluctuations in moods around the world, predict box-office receipts for new movies, and get a jump on changes in the stock market.

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Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Catholic Education Foundation announced a campaign to raise $100 million for Catholic schools in our area.

Catholic education in the United States is in dire straits. A report from Loyola Marymount University in June found that Catholic schools continue to close even though they graduate 98% of their high school students and send almost all of them onto college. In the early 1960s, the U.S. had over 13,000 Catholic schools with 5.5 million students. Today there are 6,900 schools with two million students. In the Los Angeles area, enrollment has fallen by 20% over the past 10 years, to 80,000 students from 100,000. This trend is due not to lack of demand, but to the inability of parents to pay tuition.

The urban poor are more desperate than ever for Catholic education. Urban public schools have failed these families, graduating approximately 30% of Los Angeles high school students in four years. Catholic schools are their best hope””something I know from personal experience.

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For students with their sights set on a private college, the anxiety comes as a one-two punch: first from competing with thousands of others for a precious few spots, then from trying to scrape together up to $50,000 a year to foot the bill.

Starting next year, Seton Hall University will try to ease that follow-up blow for early applicants with strong academic credentials, giving them two-thirds off the regular sticker price for tuition, a discount of some $21,000. For New Jersey residents, who constitute about 70 percent of Seton Hall’s undergraduates, that would make the cost equivalent to that of Rutgers University, the state’s flagship public institution; for those from out of state, the private school would be much cheaper than the public one.

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Vanderbilt University’s review of student organizations’ obedience to its nondiscrimination policy has some students, professors and outside advocates saying the university itself is the one doing the discriminating.

Vanderbilt has asked “a dozen or so” student groups, including five religious ones, to come into compliance with the policy, which says the Nashville school doesn’t discriminate against individuals based on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Those groups, which the university declined to identify, have been given provisional status for the time being but could ultimately lose access to Vanderbilt funding and facilities if they don’t comply.

“We are committed to making our campus a welcoming environment for all of our students,” Vanderbilt said in a statement after declining to make administrators available for interviews Monday.

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‘I love beginnings,’ Elie Wiesel told a panel of eight students on stage and about 700 in the audience during a Sunday appearance at the College of Charleston’s Sottile Theatre.

That’s because he thought Auschwitz signified the end of history, he said. And because much of human endeavor tends to end badly, with injustice, terror and death. Though the meaning of life can be elusive, it is the obligation of human beings to act in ways that make a better world.

‘When one person suffers, you have to do something,’ he said later, at an evening lecture that filled the Sottile for a second time. ‘The opposite of hate is not love, but indifference. Indifference is the opposite of everything that’s created, everything that’s noble in human experience. The opposite of indifference is commitment, education.’

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Author Bret Lott says his book “The Hunt Club” is a story about a 15-year-old figuring out who he is in the most specific and universal sense.

Wando High School parent James Pasley says the book uses foul language, degrades women and people of color, and isn’t appropriate to be on a recommended reading list for high school students….

“I don’t know what motivates this kind of reaction except a kind of Victorian sensibility, and I say that as a believing Christian and Sunday school teacher,” Lott said. “How do you shield children from racism? Virtue is not virtue unless it is made vulnerable and put to the test in confronting these things.”

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Afternoon quiz–Princeton and Yale played their first football game in 1873, but the game was delayed for 1 1/2 hours before it could start. Why the delay?

No fair researching or googling, take a guess.

The number of college admissions officials using Facebook to learn more about an applicant has quadrupled in the past year, underscoring the effect social media has on U.S. culture and academic life, a survey shows. Googling is nearly as prevalent.

The rise suggests a growing acceptance of the practice, despite concerns that it invades student privacy.

“This is the world we live in now,” says Paul Marthers, vice president for enrollment at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “If you were able to find out that somebody misrepresented themselves in their application, I think it could be used to help you make a decision.”

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[Principal Chris] Duncan said he normally wrote an 800-word article on education or school issues, but he was prompted to take a different approach after having to help a 16-year-old student who suffered serious abuse on Facebook.

“It was one of those reflex actions,” he said.

“I put it [the newsletter] out and thought this is going to offend half of the school community, but the feedback I’ve had is overwhelmingly positive.”

Mr Duncan said he was aware of students who had been sent into an “appalling state” due to abuse they received on Facebook, with some children being more vulnerable than others.

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The tools of communication have changed. Use of social media has exploded, and the new services have influenced the way we interact with one another.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, LiveCast, blogs, gaming sites, online comment forums and many other interactive electronic platforms — they are fast and easy ways to fire off electronic messages, to forgo formalities, to avoid proofreading. And it’s common to reach a multitude with a few key strokes.

With speed and breadth, however, comes risk. As people rely more and more on social media, privacy diminishes and the opportunity to offend increases.

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