Together, the Jerry Seinfeld Calendar and Pimsleur’s Graduated Interval Recall, create a method for improving the ways we learn.

GOOD magazine has spent this month posting selections from their first ever GOOD 100 (or so) issue, publishing a new entry every day from their collection of the most inspirational ideas, projects, people, and movements making the world better.

Non-profits like MarkProf Foundation are filling the marketing education gap in the Philippines and boosting employment while they’re at it.

Big Picture schools allow students to set a curriculum based on their interests, and spend two days a week interning.

StraighterLine is a new kind of remote education company, offering online college courses in basic subjects such as math, accounting and writing at an extremely low flat rate of $99 a month.

For one Boston Prep school, the satisfying turn of the page and row upon row of books have been replaced by the calculated clack of keyboards and endlessness of the internet. As the modern library it seems, contains no actual books.

Slow Food USA is running the “Time for Lunch” campaign, a national effort to improve the country’s school lunch programs by offering healthier food choices.

Silent Studio’s Youth Music Box is a fully interactive musical sandbox where up to four or five people can perform using instruments like keyboards, drums, and a DJ style interface.

The Echo Park Time Travel Mart, part of the 826 educational network, has joined together with the Federation for the Advancement of Time to create a new poster series.

IDEO has developed a free guide tailored for NGOs to develop solutions to social programs. The Human Centered Design Process Guide is over 150 pages of case studies and step-by-step instructions on how to develop innovative solutions to pressing problems.
It’s broken down into different phases and comes with a set of Aspiration Cards. What’s interesting about this free-source is how in-depth it is, and how much it reveals about the company’s internal processes.
You can download the complete guide here.

When we were on Valencia in San Francisco a couple of weeks back, PSFK popped into Dave Eggers’ Pirate Supply Store and picked up a copy of Essentially Odd. This book is a catalog of all the fantastic products that have been created to aid education programs at the 826 National Stores across the US
Essentially Odd offers a behind-the-scenes look at the innovative design that takes place at our chapters across the country and features more than 150 pages of color photos of each 826 chapter’s storefronts and products, along with notes and commentary from the product designers.
We rifled through [...]

San Francisco based Studio For Urban Projects is putting on a very different kind of summer camp for kids over the next two months. “A Curious Summer” is a series of unique workshops for children between the ages of 7 and 14 that explore a different idea for a week at a time, allowing participants to really dive into and understand the subject. Topics for this summer’s program include: Camera Obscura, Magnetic Fields, Shelter and local farming.
Bryan Welch and Marina McDougall of The Studio For Urban Projects explain:
A Curious Summer is a series of one-of-a-kind workshops driven by the curiosity [...]

Hoping to replace the cramped, dingy trailers that have been implemented to ease California’s terribly overcrowded classrooms (ranked among the worst in the US), Project FROG is designing overflow educational space that is both conducive to learning and green. FROG’s classrooms are made of prefabricated, modular structures that can be arranged to match each school’s varying size and space needs, and maximize exposure to natural light (found to boost standardized test scores).
[via GOOD]

Popular venture capitalist Fred Wilson has posted the video of the (rather lengthy) talk he gave at Google on which markets he expects the internet will disrupt next. He starts the talk with the impact of web and explains that attractive start-ups today are ones that offer services for less than five times the current market price. He says that this may lead to lower revenues but as expenses should be significantly lower, profits should be greater.

So what businesses does he predict will be impacted? He says that any businesses that can be end to end digital will be [...]

When it comes to utilizing design or creative thinking to shape our society, few avenues are more direct or have more potential than reaching out and fostering a commitment to social responsibility within our schools and our children. An interesting newcomer to this form of education is Design Ignites Change, an initiative created by Worldstudio Projects and Adobe’s Youth Voices, which promotes and encourages high school students to use design thinking to solve real world problems. Fostered through a mentoring program which pairs creative professionals or university organizations with area high schools, the projects address a range of issues from [...]