Guillermo Ramirez from Politecnico Grancolombiano in Bogota Columbia has shared a provocative presentation on SlideShare that attempts to bring us back to the basics of what education is and what education is not. His presentation highlights that the primordial essence of the concept of education is strongly rooted in a relationship between teacher and learner. The presentation is a good reminder that educational models that put the learner first, the instructor second, and the technology third are models that are congruent with long proven educational concepts. MORE >>

Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation Seeks Education Founders Here is some news for anyone thinking of starting an education company. New Kauffman Foundation program has been launched that is searching for passionate, aspiring founders of high-growth, scalable education enterprises The Department of Education’s Race to the Top competition isn’t the only program focused on dramatically improving education. Education is a $1 trillion market where innovations can produce massive benefits to the world and also create huge change in the lives of individuals.” MORE >>

And adding technology hardware is not enough, the next wave in engineering and technology education is to leverage the connectivity of the third millennials and their aptitude for creating content to share with others via web-based and mobile-based social networking tools. As educators, we can’t ignore the digitally connected culture or reality of these soon-to-enter-the-workforce youngsters. We are obligated to examine their culture and to integrate parts of that culture into our educational approach. Tags: Education MORE >>

Some stray thoughts, in no particular order, gathered over time, on the differences between education and training, from the lens of custom content creation for diverse companies across the world. Education (even vocational education) is far transfer; training is near transfer. Education emphasizes first principles; training emphasizes application. Education focuses on building the mind; training on building skills. While on RoI, measuring the efficacy of both education and training is equally difficult; and is more elusive than we’d like to accept. MORE >>

Certain countries opt to increase education and research (e.g. Germany) and cut budgets in other areas, other countries are slicing down education/research (e.g. Personally, I cannot imagine how any politician that understands the growing knowledge era can vote in favor of research/educational cuts. But then I am a firm believer that education will add to human solutions (which is not the same as that education will save us all, but. Last year Becta was closed, this year CHERI , or the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information is closed. MORE >>