IDEA.org

03/05/2014

If they are girls, they must be cheerleaders.

There are gender wars, and then there are casualties. It wasn’t until 2011 that the behemoth toymaker LEGO acknowledged girls’ desire to build with bricks, even though the company had long before m...

11/18/2013

Creative literacy must start young. It's not too late for Dinovember!

“Uh-oh,” Refe Tuma heard his girls whisper. “Mom and Dad are not going to like this.” It's Dinovember, and his family's plastic dinosaurs have been getting into mischief all month. Every year, Tuma...

11/01/2013

Drones can help put a face on nature and culture with cool aerial videos. It's becoming surprisingly inexpensive.

A new generation of small video cameras and consumer robotic helicopters make amazing video shots possible. Stick your phone on a drone for enchanting views of the natural world, architecture, muse...

10/29/2013

We scored the relative importance of Wikipedia articles. See the top 1000.

Wikipedia has 4,362,397 articles in English. But how many of those are seriously encyclopedic, and what are the most important articles? We've been looking closely at Wikipedia for an upcoming app...

08/29/2013

Words matter. And so does presentation. Fifty years ago, this week, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech. But what if King eschewed wordiness, and instead de...

08/21/2013

Images gain new meaning when given the context of location or change. Two sites, from NASA and HistoryPin do this to good effect -- such as showing the the dramatic melting of the Muir glacier in A...

07/29/2013

The orange triangle are high school grads who don't go to college. Could they learn via online courses?

Online education can have a real impact in the developing world. Last week, we needed to hire a programmer for a small freelance job. To my surprise, several candidates advertised they had complete...

07/01/2013

NASA redesigned their web site, with a magnificent failure of design by committee. It is a failure of content (eliminated the most interesting details about the science and engineering), a failure ...

04/22/2013

Online courses with very large enrollments have rapidly matured in the last two years, led largely by experiments outside mainstream academia by Coursera, Udacity and edX. Ambitious educators, tech...

02/19/2013

Crowdsourcing means involving a lot of people in small pieces of a project. In educational and nonprofit outreach, crowdsourcing is a form of engagement, such as participating in an online course, ...

01/31/2013

The Grand Canyon is yet another place that Google brings to your digital screens, from their Street View family of content. Google has been collecting street-level views of our world at a scale tha...