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While we visited Brimfield Antique Show in May of 2011, this last weekend was the summer show. Glad we beat the heat. Brimfield is an explosion of unbelievable antiques and other oddities that have to be seen to be believed.

Check out the future of ebooks….it is astounding!

Ever want to make changes? In this short video Matt Cutts talks about taking 30 days to make changes. This video is less than 4 minutes long and might just give you the ‘kick’ to make a change.

I came across this resource from IDEO, the premier design and innovation consultancies in the world today.  They have this amazing toolkit which breaks down a design-oriented mindset to problem solving in five steps: discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation and evolution. Simplify the exercises and see if you can use them to define and find unusual solutions to a challenge you’re facing in your life or business.

Be sure to watch this video Why Design Thinking? from Design Thinking for Educators on Vimeo.

The Coaching eLearners 6-12 Summer Session 2011 opened this week.  A very exciting course for developing 21st century habits of mind.

Today’s NYTimes had any interesting article called, “Homework Help Site Has a Social Networking Twist”.  Poojan Nath is the founder of Piazza a website created to help students post questions and get answers.

“The whole idea of Piazza stems from the dynamics that I observed at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an elite engineering school in India where Ms. Nath went to school.  There, she had seen how her male classmates collaborated on problem sets.  From the sidelines I saw how effective it was to get immediate help, from peers in the same room,” Ms. Nath, 30, said.

Although there are rival services, like Blackboard, an education software company, Piazza’s platform is specifically designed to speed response times. The site is supported by a system of notification alerts, and the average question on Piazza will receive an answer in 14 minutes.