Apple has unveiled three new tools to compete in the digital educational realm through their Apple in Education program: iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U. The iBooks 2 app for the iPad will host digital textbooks, ones that are “an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and truly interactive”. By using the iBooks Author app, Multi-Touch e-books can be created for the iPad by anyone with a Mac. Also unveiled today is an all-new iTunes U app that gives “educators and students everything they need on their iPad, iPhone and iPod touch to teach and take entire courses”. iTunes U will give access to the “world’s largest catalog of free educational content from top universities including Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford”. Beginning today, this content is provided free to K-12 schools to teach full courses through the app. All three apps are available to download for free from Apple.

images via Apple

YouTube is piloting a “teacher-friendly” educational program called YouTube For Schools to allow schools access to safe video content for students.

YouTube for Schools provides schools access to hundreds of thousands of free educational videos from YouTube EDU. These videos come from from well-known organizations like Stanford, PBS and TED as well as from up-and-coming YouTube partners with millions of views, like Khan Academy, Steve Spangler Science and Numberphile.

via YouTube Blog

Denver Westword has posted this series of classroom discussion posters from 1973.

Age 13 is a melodramatic 1955 educational “social warning” film from director Sid Davis that depicts a grieving teenager named Andrew as he struggles to cope following his mother’s death. As the story goes begins, Andrew’s radio coincidentally stops working the same time his mother dies which sets him in the wrong direction. Later, Andrew is sent to the school psychologist’s office for a Rorschach test after shooting off a gun in the schoolyard (!). In the end, he runs away from his bitter stepfather but eventually is taken in by family members and shows the ‘first signs of winning his inner struggle’ with the love of his adopters. As campy as the film can be, it does show a fun slice of 1950s life of the “working-class Inglewood, Hollywood and other parts of the Los Angeles basin” where it was filmed. Age 13 is in the public domain and available from the Prelinger Archives.

“60-Second Adventures in Thought” is a fast-paced animated overview of six famous thought experiments from Achilles and the tortoise to Schrödinger’s cat. The animation is by the Open University in the UK. We previously wrote about another Open University animated lecture “The History of English.”

via The Daily What

Dressed to the nines, trumpet player Gabriel Angelo busks at the corner of Mission and 4th in San Francisco to earn money to continue his music education at San Francisco Conservatory and JazzSchool in Berkeley. Fabian Sixtus Körner of Stories of a Journeyman filmed a short documentary on Gabriel doing his thing in The Trumpet Kid.

From Fabian Sixtus Körner of Stories of a Journeyman:

Gabriel Angelo is a 12 year old trumpet enthusiast who earns the money for his music school by performing on the streets of San Francisco.

…He plays on the streets to earn money for his music lessons at the S.F. Conservatory of Music and Berkeley Jazz School. And when you see him out there just passing by, it feels like he is a professional and experienced performer. Kind of a grown-up in a childs costume, handing out business cards to people who are interested in booking him for an event. But after I got to talk to him I realized, he’s a kid like all the others but also a kid like no other.

via Nerdcore

photo by Daniel Castro

Kio Stark, an author who teaches at NYU’s graduate program ITP, has launched a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to get her handbook on independent learning, Don’t Go Back to School, off the ground.

If you’re thinking about going back to school or about the possibility of self-taught learning, Don’t Go Back to School will help you figure out if you can do it on your own—and it’ll show you how. The book explains the basic infrastructure that school provides—things like resources, expertise, evaluation, and a learning community. And it features profiles of fascinating, self-taught people, showcasing the practical ways they meet those needs.

In 2009 chemistry teacher Chris Bergmann showed his students The Exploding Pumpkin Trick for Halloween demo day.

via Daily Picks and Flicks

Blackboards in Porn is a site that reviews the blackboards found in school-themed pornography for accuracy and educational level.

The handwriting is large and generally clear, even though this class appears to only have one student in it, and he sits at the very front. It might be worth advising the student to have his eyes tested if he is unable to read smaller text at this distance. Remember that poor learning may be as a result of poor vision – the student might not even be aware that he has a problem. If the teacher does keep her handwriting that size she will have to get a bigger whiteboard when she starts doing quadratic equations. Finally, when writing algebraic equations, it is preferable to do a more cursive x for the unknown symbol, to avoid confusion with a multiplication sign.

via Nerdcore

“Live the Language” is a video series directed by Gustav Johnansson that promotes studying abroad with short, beautifully shot films about various international destinations (see Vancouver, Barcelona, and Beijing). The series is for Education First, an international education company.

The series includes the wonderful typographic designs of Albin Holmqvist, which we wrote about previously.

via Doobybrain

The Oatmeal takes a look at what we should have been taught in our senior year of high school.

Codecademy is a free website that provides interactive lessons on coding for web development. Founders Ryan Bubinski and Zach Sims have started the site with eight Javascript lessons, and plan to expand the coursework to other programming languages.

Codecademy was created when Zach got frustrated with learning how to program. For years, Ryan taught Zach the basics of HTML and CSS, but books and videos didn’t help. Ryan and Zach teamed up to create Codecademy, a better, more interactive way to learn how to program. This is just the beginning. Join us as we make it easy for everyone to love and learn how to program.

via VentureBeat

Rachel Walsh, a second year illustration student at Cardiff School of Art & Design, was given an assignment to “explain something modern/internet based to someone who lived and died before 1900″. She decided that Victorian era author Charles Dickens needed to be schooled on Amazon’s Kindle wireless electronic reading device. To do so, she cleverly devised a way for a big book to hold forty miniature books and did so by cutting spaces in the pages to hold the shrunken titles. The end result is simply beautiful and certainly illustrates an e-reader to someone not at all familiar with technology.

via Kuriositas

photos by Rachel Walsh

Radioactive Orchestra is a collaborative project between Swedish nuclear scientists and musicians to demystify radioactive isotopes by turning them into music. Nuclear scientist Bo Cederwall, musician Axel Boman, and artist Kristofer Hagbard collaborated to translate the decay of isotopes into musical melodies (see how they did it in this video). At the very addictive Radioactive Orchestra website, users can create their own musical pieces composed of isotope melodies. The project was produced by the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and the Nuclear Safety & Training organization.

via Brain Pickings

As someone who spent the first part of my adult career in print publishing, the Florida Atlantic University journalism class experiment, All on Paper, really made me smile. During my lifetime, the gap between analog print publishing and digital closed in and there was no turning back, until now. Newspaper veteran and volunteer advisor, Michael Koretzky, recently guided a group of college students through the production of their first newspaper without the use of digital equipment. That meant they had to figure out manual typewriters, film cameras and processing (in a makeshift mens’ room darkroom, no less), and even paste-up the entire paper by hand. All copy-editing was done with pencils and they used pica poles and proportion wheels to lay it all out. Cutting and pasting took on a very literal meaning.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

The Society of Professional Journalists sponsored the exercise in living history and overall it was a rousing success. The students had a lot of fun and really gained an appreciation for our current state of technology and how quickly it can all change.

Videographer Tatiana Cohen produced a short video about the newsroom time machine.

via Waxy

photos by Michael Koretzky

Well before Nancy Reagan was pushing the “Just Say No” anti-drugs campaign in the 1980s to the nation’s youth, a company named Winston Products for Education was creating Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Identification Kits for schools, scouting organizations and law enforcement agencies to get the word out back in the late 1960s.

There is little information to be found on this identification kit but the Wiley Online Library points to the following description of New Instructional Materials from the June 1969 Journal of School Health:

The Dangerous Drugs—Identification Kit contains harmless facsimiles of the more commonly abused dangerous drugs. The Kit was designed to be used primarily as an instructional aid in educational and training programs directed toward combating the existing narcotics and dangerous drugs problem. It consists of a plastic container which is transparent and durable. Plainly visible within the container are facsimiles of amphetamines and barbituates, reproduced with exacting fidelity in terms of color, size, shape, and other distinguising characteristics.

This particular kit is part of my personal collection and I have been told, though I cannot prove conclusively, that Winston Products for Education was backed by R.J. Reynolds’ Winston cigarettes brand.

photos by Rusty Blazenhoff and Ken Dashner

Animator Rachel Kwak painstakingly created the elaborate part flip-book short film,  A World I Never Made, for her final project at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.  The inventive piece combines an animated story based on English poet A.E. Housman‘s book of the same name and an actual copy of the book that houses the poem. Silhouettes of rabbits  jump right off the page in seeming synchronicity to the song Eon Blue Apocalypse by Tool.

Her former Experimental Animation professor at Pratt Institute, Robert Lyons, explains:

…this film is a beautiful example of visual poetry. A variety of techniques are employed including; cut-outs, hand-drawn, stop motion and replacement animation.

via Kuriositas

photos by Rachel Kwak

Kerry Howley, a 23-year old art school student from London’s Middlesex University, has created a collection of interlaced necklaces out of human hair. Inspired by damask wallpaper patterns and using her mother’s friend’s cut hair, the pieces, entitled Attraction / Aversion, have already gained kudos in the art world by winning the Arthur Silver Award 2011 from the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture.

Attraction/Aversion is a material exploration of attraction and aversion and how people can feel these seemingly opposing emotional responses simultaneously.

The necklaces are made of human hair, a familiar material that we take pride in. However once off of the body hair becomes an innate source of aversion. Kerry wanted to see if she could make discarded hair attractive again.

Through the familiar form of a necklace, and using patterns and symmetry that are instinctively pleasing, Kerry has created a delicate balance between the viewer/wearer’s feelings of aversion and attraction.

via Geekosystem & Oddity Central

photos by Arts Thread & MoDA

In the California Academy of Sciences‘ largest expedition in history, the 2011 Philippine Biodiversity Expedition research team has discovered at least 300 new species of terrestial and marine life forms.  According to the Academy’s website, the research team found “dozens of new insects and spiders, deep-sea armored corals, ornate sea pens, bizarre new sea urchins and sea stars, a shrimp-eating swell shark, and over 50 colorful new sea slugs.”

The shrimp-eating swell shark ”can inflate its stomach with water to bulk up and scare off other predators” and some of these species of snake eel, Myrichthys, “mimic highly venomous sea snakes,” according to Stephanie Stone, the Academy’s Director of Communications.

KGO ABC7 News in San Francisco went along on the 42-day expedition and shot over 30 hours of footage of the trip that was based on the largest Philippine island, Luzon, and will be showing the video highlights all summer. Dr. Terry Gosliner, invertebrate zoologist and the Academy’s Dean of Science and Research Collections, led the expedition which was funded by a gift from Margaret and Will Hearst.

The Academy will be celebrating the landmark trip with a public viewing of some of the newly discovered specimens along with Filipino food and dancing at their San Francisco-based Expedition Nightlife event on Thursday, June 3o, 2011.

via KGO ABC7 News

photos by Stephanie Stone and Gerry Allen, California Academy of Sciences

Bots High is a documentary by Joey Daoud that follows three teams of high school students as they build combat robots for a national competition (see the trailer). The filmmakers are planning a Worldwide Screening Day on October 6.

Some kids play football in school. Other kids build bone-crushing combat robots with the expressed purpose of dismembering competing bots in thrilling caged-death matches. This film is about kids in the latter group.

Bots High follows three teams of high school robotics geeks who build and battle their way to a national robotics competition in Miami. Our heroes include genius inventor Will, who constructs seemingly indestructible bots that unfortunately self-destruct (sometimes in a cloud of smoke and flames), and My Mechanical Romance, a team of Catholic school girls who stand out amid male bot participants with a combination of beauty, brains, and fashion sense.

Doonesbury takes a look at how search engines impact the life of a college student.

via Nick Douglas

Evernote Peek is a clever learning app for iPad 2 that uses the Smart Cover to emulate the trusty pen and paper flash card of yore.

Conan O’Brien giving a hilarious 2011 Commencement Address to the graduating class at Dartmouth College.

via Team Coco

We all know getting older isn’t fun, but Koken, a Japanese manufacturer of training gear for medical professionals, wants to be sure you know the specific details. To that end, they’ve produced this cousin to the “fatsuit,” or “empathy belly,” a little bondage ensemble they not-so-idiomatically have dubbed “The Aged Simulation Set.” Not sure where the Bib of Shame or orange-and-green color scheme comes in, but then seniors aren’t known for their fashion sense.

The aged simulation set is a teaching material intended to demonstrate the inconveniences felt by the aged due to musculoskeletal, visual and auditory aging. This set is the most suitable for medical practice, nursing and welfare training. Inconveniences to the aged due to the changes in bones, muscles, sight and hearing can be experienced with this simulation set. This simulation set is suitable for the field of medical and welfare education.

Instead of creating one logo for the MIT Media Lab, design firm TheGreenEyl created a system that allows for thousands of unique but clearly related logos–enough that all faculty, staff, and students may have their own.

The logo is based on a visual system, an algorithm that produces a unique logo for each person, for faculty, staff and students. Each person can claim and own an individual shape and can use it on their business card a personal website. The design encompasses all collateral, business cards, letterhead, website, animations, signage etc. A custom web interface was developed to allow each person at the Media Lab to choose and claim an own individual logo for his/her business card, as well as a custom animation software which allows to create custom animations for any video content the lab produces.

via Fast Company Design

images via TheGreenEyl