John Borthwick of Betaworks

The point isn't to take the serendipity out of college education, Thornburgh is quick to note. Rather, it's to help students and teachers and administrators make better-informed decisions when it comes to class selection and other choices that can have a bearing on a student's overall academic record. Basically, "we give them Netflix-style recommendations," Thornburgh says. And they can do with those recommendations what they wish. The Citivas platform suggests classes that have provided avenues for success for similar students in the past; and "we can warn them about taking combinations of classes that have shown to be toxic for students.

via civitaslearning.com

Unfortunately, recent studies have shown that the current approach isn’t working. Creative Quotient scores (a creativity measure developed and tracked since the 1950s whose correlation to creative success is three times stronger than IQ) are showing a significant downward trend in children between the ages 4 and 10. As children spend more and more time taking standardized tests and engaging in highly structured play (organized sports, video games, etc.), open-ended and imaginative play is being marginalized.

The answer, quite simply, is to take back creative play by reimagining it for the modern era. Kids create, learn, and share their ideas through imaginative play. With pirate costumes, dolls, saucepan drum sets, and refrigerator-box moon bases kids aren’t just practicing for “real life,” they’re training their brains to see new possibilities--building the “what if” skills that will be critical to their creative success in later years.

TODAY’S INNOVATORS ARE DISPELLING THE MYTHS OF THE AUTEUR AND THE EUREKA MOMENT.However, with “kids getting older younger” (a common lament in the toy Industry) and increasingly favoring digital games to traditional toys, it’s our responsibility as toy designers to embrace the brilliant possibilities mobile devices afford for digital play. Phones and tablets empower our kids to collaborate through multi-touch, narrate their creations, share their ideas with other kids online, see the world through augmented-reality lenses, and explore the great outdoors with GPS. These aren’t just video games anymore: they’re an open platform for the greatest toys and creative tools yet to be invented.

I am particularly fond of a principal Sep calls cyclicality:

Every tool should nourish the things upon which it depends.

We see this principle at varying levels in some of our tools today. I call them cyclical tools. The iPhone empowers the developer ecosystem that helps drive its adoption. A bike strengthens the person who pedals it. Open-source software educates its potential contributors. A hallmark of cyclical tools is that they create open loops: the bike strengthens its rider to do things other than just pedal the bike.

Cyclical tools are like trees, whose falling leaves fertilize the soil in which they grow.

via avc.com

Writers are building their own industry.

Google buys the company that design the XBOX 360

via intomobile.com