MIT students turn whole building into huge game of Tetris
Paul Ridden, gizmag, April 30, 2012

The two-hundred and ninety-five feet (ninety meter) tall Building 54 on MIT's Cambridge campus has become the canvas for a number of carefully planned and daringly executed visual displays over the years, not strictly allowed by the administration but often looked upon with some appreciation. The building is home to the Institute's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science (EAPS) and has a host of meteorological instruments and radio communications equipment on its roof - but its the grid-like windows to the front that have become the main attraction to hackers, as they are known. The latest hack is the successful realization of a long-standing challenge, a huge playable game of Tetris.

Kids Speak Out on Student Engagement
Heather Wolpert-Gawron, Edutopia, April 26, 2012
"A while back, I was asked, "What engages students?" Sure, I could respond, sharing anecdotes about what I believed to be engaging, but I thought it would be so much better to lob that question to my own eighth graders. The responses I received from all 220 of them seemed to fall under 10 categories, representing reoccurring themes that appeared again and again. So, from the mouths of babes, here are my students' answers to the question: "What engages students?""

"Public school to create chain of 'happy academies'"
The Telegraph, April 26, 2012

“The field of positive psychology has demonstrable, scientifically tested benefits to people’s mental health. It helps people to lead better lives. It doesn’t mean that money or jobs or other traditional things don’t matter but we all have a sense that there is more to life than that. We want to encapsulate that in an education context.”

Stop Telling Students to Study for Exams
David Jaffee, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 22, 2012

"On the one hand, we tell students to value learning for learning's sake; on the other, we tell students they'd better know this or that, or they'd better take notes, or they'd better read the book, because it will be on the next exam; if they don't do these things, they will pay a price in academic failure."

"The Flight From Conversation"
Sherry Turkle, New York Times Sunday Review, April 21, 2012

"Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.

"FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d by.”

"And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection. These days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect."

"Protecting the heart with optimism: Positive thinking linked to reduced risk of cardiovascular events."Harvard Gazette, April 17, 2012

"In the first and largest systematic review on the topic, Harvard School of Public Health(HSPH) researchers found a connection between psychological well-being and a reduced risk of heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular events."

"Educating the Next Steve Jobs"
Tony Wagner, Wall Street Journal Essay, April 13, 2012

"How can schools teach students to be more innovative? Offer hands-on classes and don't penalize failure"

Maria Montessori – Guru to Business Leaders
James Martin, The Globe and Mail, April 11, 2012

From the outside, Google seems like a study in contradiction: Playful inquisitiveness and a $205-billion market cap don’t go together. Except, for Google, they do. In fact, the one may actually drive the other.

“You can’t understand Google,” Marissa Mayer, now Google’s vice-president of location and local services, told Newsweek, “unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”

"Is the World Ready for Gross National Happiness?"
Suzanne York, HowMany.org, April 9, 2012

"Happiness is back in the news, at least at the United Nations. If you paid close attention, you were reminded that the UN unanimously adopted a resolution last year based on the concept of Gross National Happiness."

"First World Happiness Report Launched at the United Nations"
The Earth Institute, Columbia University, April 2, 2012

"... These are among the findings of the first ever World Happiness Report (download PDF), commissioned for the April 2nd United Nations Conference on Happiness (mandated by the UN General Assembly). The report, published by the Earth Institute and co-edited by the institute’s director, Jeffrey Sachs, reflects a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness and absence of misery as criteria for government policy. It reviews the state of happiness in the world today and shows how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness."