From Josh Karp in Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning.

During a fellowship in neuroscience at the National Institute of Health, it struck Jack Hidary that the facts he’d learned during a lifetime of classroom science education mattered less than the basic lessons he’d learned tinkering around on his own as a kid.

“It was clear to me that the facts I’d accumulated weren’t what was important,” says Hidary, a successful finance and tech entrepreneur who established his own foundation in 2001 to promote sustainable development and apply market forces to social issues. Instead, he found, the more important factor was his experience with “the process of discovery.”

And it’s the love of that process that Hidary and the Obama administration are hoping to instill in school children with National Lab Day, a nationwide effort to provide support and opportunities for kids to learn science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) through “hands on” application, rather than in the world of Bunsen burners and books with titles like “Laboratory Procedures.” The underlying idea, according to Obama, is to encourage American kids to be “makers of things, not just consumers of things.”

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It is one of the simplest ideas in American education—and one of the most confounding: Elected officials and educators have been talking about establishing national, or common, academic standards for at least a half-century.

On its face, the logic of that goal seems incontrovertible.

Why should students in one state be introduced to a topic such as fractions as 1st graders, to cite a common example, when their peers in other states won’t cover that mathematics topic until later? More broadly, why does the United States—a mobile society in a globally competitive era—maintain an education system that tests students, trains teachers, and churns out textbooks and classroom materials based on the myriad and often idiosyncratic demands of different states?

In several higher-performing nations, a single set of national academic standards guides all or most of those decisions. Yet in this country, the obstacles to establishing national standards have proved numerous and persistent, even amid concerns about the United States’ international standing in education.

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The latest issue, Volume 16, Number 11, of The International Journal of Learning includes:

• Using Gagne’s Instructional Design in a Computer Graphics Course: Malaysian Students’ Perceptions and Attitudes by Tse-Kian Neo and Mai Neo.
• Teacher Educators and the New Technologies: Maximizing Theory-Practice Connections Made by Pre-Service Teachers in a Practicum by Joanne Kingsley.
• Undergraduates and Intercultural Communication Competence: Creating a Plan for Performance by Annette Madlock.
• Co-operative Group Teaching and Learning in the Greek and Cypriot Primary Education by Stavroula Kaldi, Diamanto Filippatou and Maria Onoufriou.
• Environmental Education: Camp as an Alternative Learning Site by Karen Barak.
• Internship Students’ Workplace Communication Skills: Workplace Practices and University Preparation by Ena Bhattacharyya, Shahrina Nordin and Rohani Salleh.