"A Conversation With 2 Developers of Personalized-Learning Software"
Marc Parry, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18, 2012

"Here's why education is different from search or social media. For one thing, the average student studies for more time than they spend on Google or Facebook. People spend way more time in Knewton than they spend on Google—they spend hours a day as opposed to minutes per day. So that's one big reason why we produce a few orders of magnitude more data per user than Google, just based on usage.

"But then there's the more important reason even than that, which is that education is not like Web pages or social media. It's a different product. And it lends itself infinitely more to data-mining than does any other industry right now. The reason is that nobody has tagged all the world's Web pages for Google down to the sentence level, the way that we ask publishers to tag every sentence, every answer choice of every question. They say, Here's what this sentence is about, or this video clip. They're basically telling us every single thing about every single piece of their content. That's how we can slice and dice it so finely."

"Readers: Five ways to motivate students"
Meris Stansbury, eSchool News, July 13, 2012

"We asked readers: “What are some ways/tactics/activities you implement to motivate students?” Their advice ranged from “be there for your students and let them know you care about them,” to “entice them with technology they use with their friends.” 
...
"2. Put them in charge of their own learning.

"“Hands down, the best environment to stimulate intrinsic motivation is PBL (problem-based learning)--a student-centered pedagogy in which students learn about a subject in the context of complex, multifaceted, and realistic problems (not to be confused with project-based learning)!"

"Junior Juilliard"
Mitch Smith, Inside HigherEd, May 23, 2012

"High school musicians will soon be able to take a class from the Juilliard School. Well, kind of.

"The noted conservatory, which offers bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in music, is lending its name and expertise to a series of online K-12 courses that will be marketed to individual students and school districts starting this fall and offered through Pearson’s Connections platform."

Harvard & MIT Announce EdX, a Disruptive Joint Venture That Will Offer Free Online Courses
Lauren Landry, BostInno, May 2, 2012

"By the time the first MITx course launched,90,000 people had already registered, merely proving the popularity of online education. Today, however, with the help of Harvard University, MIT’s upped the ante. Together, the two have announced EdX, a new tool designed to build on both schools’ experience in online learning."