Camtasia for Mac, Education, Blogging, and Brain Cells

Review: Camtasia for Mac - eQuixotic

Ultimately Camtasia for Mac is a beautiful piece of software that is intuitive and enjoyable to use - and bargain-priced at one third the cost of its admittedly more features-rich (but ugly and clunky) Windows comrade. Does it suffer from the typical version 1.0 rough edges? Yes, but not as many as I expected. TechSmith did a fantastic job with this initial release.

After Years Of Toil, Sustaining Change In Education Still A Vexing Problem - Science Daily

"What really is an effective practice?" Century asked. "Just because something works in a particular setting or context, does that mean it's effective?" Century has doubts. "When you're talking about replicating best practices, the research tells us that that doesn't happen. It's a fallacy," she said. Educators instead need to think about how practices inevitably change as they move from place to place, Century said.

At Your Fingers, an Oxford Don - New York Times

The Department of Education recently announced that it was developing a new National Educational Technology Plan to provide a "vision of how information and communications technologies can help transform American education." The plan, the agency said, will include "concrete goals," with a draft expected early next year.

The long tail of blogging is dying - Guardian

Facebook's success is built on the ease of doing everything in one place. (Search tools can't index it to see who's talking about what, which may be a benefit or a failing.) Twitter offers instant content and reaction. Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone's Wall, or tweeting. People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed.

Star-shaped Cells In Brain Help With Learning - Science Daily

In order to learn something, i.e. to process new information, nerve cells grow new connections or strengthen existing contact points. At such contact points, the synapses, information is passed from one cell to the next. Once a synapse is created, new information has a means to be passed on and the information is learned. Enhancing an acquired skill through practice is then accomplished by strengthening the synapses involved. Incoming information elicits a much stronger response in the downstream nerve cell when passing through a strengthened synapse, as compared to a "normal" synapse.