Dear Mr or Mrs Next US President,

Thank you for stopping during recess for a quick study session. 35 educators have collaborated to present this Carnival of Education as a useful lesson plan for you and your education policy team on what our real concerns and suggestions are.

In case this is your first visit to our SharpBrains blog, let me first of all point out some useful resources to stay sane during the rest of the campaign: selected Brain Teasers, a list of 21 great Brain Books, over a dozen interviews with leading scientists on learning and brain-based topics, and more.

Without further ado, let’s proceed to the issues raised. We hope they provide, at the very least, good mental stimulation for you and your advisors.

Education as a System

Here you have a few good recent blog carnivals (collections of selected blog posts around specific topics) 

- Tangled Bank: science-related posts across a variety of disciplines. 

- 2 editions of the Carnival of Education: this week and last one.

- HR carnival: because “human resources” have brains, too.

- Medicine 2.0: how web 2.0 can enhance the practice of medicine.

- Change of Shift: nursing topics.

- Gene Genie: human genetics.

…that understanding how our brains and minds work may contribute to all of them.

Here you have some of the best blog carnivals (collections of blog posts on specific topics) we have contributed to this week:

• Grand Rounds: “brain exercise” is as important as nutrition, physical exercise and stress management.
• Green Living: let’s start the conversation about “sustainable brains”.
• Human Resources: isn’t it obvious, yet often neglected, that “human capital” rests on brain development and learning how to learn?.
• Brain Fitness Carnival: fully devoted to our topic.
• Video Game Bloggers: “games” can be good vehicles for cognitive and emotional training, if properly developed and used.
• Gene Genie: our genes are not destiny.

You can also check the Medicine 2.0 carnival that we hosted.

Eliane writes a great post estimating the size of the Serious Games Market, building on the overall PriceWaterhouseCoopers report that seemed to indicate that the Global Video Game Market is Set to Explode.

Some quotes

• “The overall gaming audience continues to expand and become somewhat more female and older than in the past thanks to casual games and games becoming an “important part of culture” – which in my view would embed the Serious Games segment.”
• “Whereas the military was one of the first customers of Serious Games, it has been joined by a long line of users, including other government agencies, healthcare providers, schools (both K-12 and universities) and Fortune 500 companies (for team building, leadership training, sales training and product education, among others).”
• “This is my conservative estimate: the Serious Games market would be ranging between $200 – 400 million per year only in US, in 2007. “
• “There is now an emergent supply chain for Corporate Serious Games, with a number of corporations taking Read the rest of this entry »

Hot off the press!

We just found on the newstand an amazing special issue of Discover magazine on The Brain-An Owner’s Manual (Spring 2007), with fascinating articles on how the mind changes from infancy to old age, female vs. male brains (yes, we men have brains too), videogames as brain training (by Steven Johnson), an article titled “24 hours in the life of the brain”, the “most magnificent neurons, and much much more.

A bit technical, but not too much for anyone who reads popular science books. It will probably become a classic for brain aficionados. We can not find any mention of it in www.discover.com, so we will keep our eyes open and link to the index and more info as soon as we find somewhere to link to…