Although I am little late on this, already lots of (unnecessary) talks floating around, but I have to mention : James and Lorelle VanFossen  launched a neatly designed, usable magazine for the edublogging community : "Edublogs Magazine".

The Edublogs Magazine features articles and posts by edubloggers from around the world and aims to provide news, views, information, ideas, help and stimulation for all those working with or studying education and technology.

Currently, the Edublogs Magazine feature the following post categories on:

• Edublogs News features the news, information, and resources found around the Edublogs community of bloggers.
• Blogging Students covers examples and interviews of students using blogs to communicate, learn, teach, fundraising, and more.
• Blogging Teachers will showcase teachers using blogs and online technologies in their classrooms and life, having their say about the state of education.
• Online Education looks at the industry and technology of online education and distance learning, bringing the classroom directly to the student.
• Pedablogy is about the arts and sciences of teaching blogging and blog technology.
• Professional Development covers training programs, workshops, conferences, special events, and news about professional education development.
• Teaching Technologies offers articles on how on teaching technologies, how to teach, how to teach specific subjects, and products and services that may improve teaching techniques and skills.
• Blogging Tips offers tips, tricks, and techniques on blogging, invaluable to the blogger or the teacher teaching blogging and web technologies.
• Multimedia covers integrating modern multimedia technologies into blogs, websites, classrooms – all aspects from podcasting to moblogging.

UPDATE (22/02/08) From Beth: America’s Giving Challenge Official Results: We Came In First! Thank You Everyone!

Literacy is key to education and jobs for poor children. It’s a route out of poverty. One of the The Sharing Foundation’s programs is its Khmer literacy school. It helps farm children learn their native alphabet and numbers well enough to attend elementary school. The Sharing Foundation’s English Language Program offers village students, ages 8-18, the opportunity to learn English, allowing them to obtain jobs in tourism and word processing. These students are so dedicated that some meet on their own to study on weekends. The literacy school runs three sessions a day for 130 children of Roteang village’s poorest families. Ten bilingual Cambodian college graduates teach English to 500 students in 19 sections offered daily after school hours at the village school.

Propagating Beth’s message :
We have a chance to win $50,000 – if we get the most number of unique
donors. Right now we’re in second place with 7 more days to go. I’m
reaching out to my network to ask if they will blog or twitter about
the campaign, ask their networks to contribute the minimum donation of
$10. The contest ends on January 31st.

A Story about one child
http://tinyurl.com/2azmgf
Donation here:
http://tinyurl.com/yq6e2s
Campaign Wiki
http://americagivingchallenge.wikispaces.com/

Exploratree (a project by Enquiring Minds is a three-year research and development program which is run by Futurelab and funded by Microsoft) offers an impressive selection of free visual thinking tool, guides and framework.

It is a free web based tool where you can download, use and make your own interactive thinking guides. Thinking guides can support independent and group research projects with frameworks for thinking, planning and enquiry. We’ve provided a set of ready-made guides which you can print out or use online. All of the guides are completely customizable or you can start from scratch and make your own! You can share them and work on them in groups too.

Exploratree’s library of visual ideation tools includes some well recognized idea-generation techniques, such as SCAMPER and Lotus Blossom, as well as tools for evaluating ideas like PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting) and Thinking Boxes (considering things from different perspectives).

Found Via The Mind Mapping Software Weblog

Team Aquaduct, the San Bruno, California team – consisting of John Lai, Adam Mack, Brian Mason, Eleanor Morgan, Paul Silberschatz wins the first Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine contest. (read more about all the winners).

Their innovation is Aquaduct. A pedal powered vehicle that transports, filters, and stores water for the developing world. A peristaltic pump attached to the pedal crank draws water from a large tank, through a carbon filter, to a smaller clean tank. The clean tank is removable and closed for contamination-free home storage and use. A clutch engages and disengages the drive belt from the pedal crank, enabling the rider to filter the water while traveling or while stationary.

Watch the Aquaduct video

Like many of you, I am also hearing lot about  DataPortability.org and the high level buy -in’s (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, SixApart, Flickr, Twitter etc.).   Here goes a short video introduction to Data Portability to answer your basic questions. Exciting stuff!

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.