This is the story of my first experience 3D printing with students in my kids’ school, and some thoughts on what you can do if you want to try it too. We helped a whole class of sixth-graders to design, model, print, and paint their own personal monuments, all in just a week or two.

Most First Lego League teams start learning to code using Word Blocks. These colorful, puzzle-like pieces snap together with a simple drag-and-drop interface, making them approachable for beginners. You can quickly get a robot moving, and even begin to explore concepts like sensors. And Lego has a bunch of built-in lessons to get you going.

Solving an impossible problem with a top-notch team was too hard to pass up.

When robot competition calls, the Chicago Machine answers. How I built a robot for the first time and even survived to tell the tale

In the next few days, Chicago Public Schools will release its annual school quality ratings. But parents should know what goes into the rating so they can make an informed decision about school quality.

Imagine a world where students receive immediate feedback that gives them confident direction on how to improve — yet teachers spend less time grading than they do today. Imagine if, instead of cranking through dozens of papers to discern how their class is doing, teachers receive a daily report on the strengths and weaknesses of their students. Teachers could use the extra time saved to address individual needs of their students one on one.

I've often seen products fail because they meet the needs of only a subset of the three key stakeholders: students, teachers, and administrators.

But for education technology companies, conventional metrics are insufficient. None of the standard measures of growth, engagement, financials directly measure student learning outcomes, and many education entrepreneurs have only a vague notion of exactly how their tools impact the students they serve. Why build a product for classrooms without knowing if it improves education and provides more learning opportunities to the students?

To have strong impact, you have to know what you’re measuring. I wanted to either join or possibly start a company that had a zealous focus on measured, mission-driven impact.

I brought social app discovery tools from the web to mobile devices.

Logout: the other half of the identity equation

Making OpenID more useful: let’s detect logged-in state

An old proposal for an open stack for identity on the web.

For most sites that accept OpenID today, the user experience is one of two things:

I’m running for the OpenID board of directors. I’m a little nervous, having never done any sort of political thing before. So let me try to answer some questions.

Last week we finally launched Facebook Connect to the general public. In the time since I joined the team last May, I’ve definitely been surprised by a few things I thought I’d share.

My wife and I have been Netflix subscribers for years, during which we have rented hundreds of movies. We are considering a switch to Blockbuster, but one of the holdups has been that Blockbuster supposedly only has best sellers, while Netflix has lots of niche and foreign movies that make it more attractive. Then I realized it doesn’t really matter what the selection is in the abstract; what matters is, are the movies we want available? So I wrote a quick Perl script to help answer that question. It was fun so I thought I’d share my methodology and results.

Let me count the ways…

Five minutes each. That’s all they got. Yet these presenters were able to fill my head with swirling images of two-man pogo sticks and robots taking over the world. Not to mention the career advice, a computer-aided cure for autism, and an awkward yet somewhat interesting take on the world of messenger bags.

We live in a world where information is disseminating incredibly quickly. You can search locally based on your zip code. You can upload photos with geographic data in them. You can send emails. You can make phone calls at your fingertips. For each of these actions, some amount of information is captured. Where does that data go? And who owns it? Increasingly, I’m afraid, the answer is: not you.