Sasha Barab discusses a challenging implication around the No Child Left Behind policy, i.e., the distillation of academic content into facts to be memorized. He suggests a new paradigm: Giving every student the authentic experience of being a scientist who must solve a problem that is situationally important and personally meaningful.

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Jim Gray of Leapfrog discusses his interest in reaching out to the GLS community because of their interest in promoting deep learning with games. He feels that games can play an important role in "whole-child" (socio-emotional, cognitive, and physical) development.

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Erin Reilly, Research Director of Project New Media Literacies, give a recap of their recent conference, "Learning in a Participatory Culture," which included the launch of their Learning Library, a distributed web application that helps educators create media-rich lessons that can be easily published and shared with others. Join the Project NML community site to learn more: projectnml.ning.com.

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Margaret Robertson is a game consultant for a UK outfit called Lookspring (lookspring.co.uk). Margaret has spent the last year looking at the educational potential and the reaction of the educational community to Will Wright's Spore. Turns out Spore's Creature Creator won the day as a free and powerfully open-ended creativity tool.

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Alan Yu of ngmoco:) explains why the terms "educational games" and "casual games" are a bit beside the point. ngmoco (an acronym for Next Generation Mobile Company; blog.ngmoco.com) is a publisher of video games for the iPhone OS. The company was founded by former Electronic Arts executive Neil Young in July 2008.

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Lauren Davis runs the Hidden Agenda Project (www.hiddenagenda.com) a 25K contest that challenges college students to build an educational game for middle school students. Lauren discusses Slinkyball, the 2007 award winner by Pomona College student Alexander Haro that teaches physics concepts.

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Willie Reale, head writer from The Electric Company, discusses making the show relevant and "cool" while maintaining educational integrity.

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Rafael "Tico" Ballagas from the Nokia Research Center visits the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and describes some of the forward thinking research in mobile devices and learning.

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Def Jam Enterprises marketing Guru Lauren Wirtzer discusses the value and potential of Hip-Hop and Rap in education.

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Game guru Jamie King discusses his new company, 4mm Games, and the process they go through when creating virtual experiences.

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At the Celebration of Teaching and Learning Conference, Karen Kaun, PhD candidate from Columbia Teachers College and founder of small non-profit, described her doctoral research with young English language learners (ELL) and a transcription technology called Dragon Naturally Speaking. The program scaffolds their oral skills and supports writing development.

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Michael Horn, co-author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, discusses his book at the Celebration of Teaching and Learning Conference. The book uses the theories of disruptive innovation to identify the true causes of our schools problems and suggests a path forward to meet the educational needs of every child.

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