Education has been a hot topic lately and one of the biggest innovation to occur in this space as of late has been the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy is an amazingly simple yet brilliant platform that utilizes web video to engage with students and teach effectively

I'm currently reading The Element by Sir Ken Robinson and he briefly touched on the concept of 'groupthink' and how it affects individuals. Groupthink occurs in a close group of individuals who make decisions based on avoiding conflict, conforming to the perceived expectation, and ignoring your individual beliefs

This year’s State of the Union Address focused more on innovation, entrepreneurship, and new jobs, in particular for the youth and those just graduating from college. You can see the word cloud from this years address below. You can compare this to last year’s SOTU Address word cloud. As you can see, last years SOTU was more focused on the overall economy and the people, as well as health and energy. A much more overarching approach, but in this years version, we see a more focused vision around new business, creating jobs, and an actual plan to take this forward. Many have been wondering how exactly Obama will bring in this new wave of innovation, entrepreneurship, and the like. One new initiative just launched by the White House is the Startup America Partnership that brings together a number of big players, combining the private and public sectors to promote startups. This focus on entrepreneurship appears to be a good strategy, as the unemployment issue is not getting much better. A recent article by Umair Haque exemplifies the fact that the issues of youth unemployment are not isolated to countries like Egypt or Tunisia, but are very real problems in Europe and the U.S. as well. He focuses on the solution lying with innovation, but more specifically institutional innovation, which should support the rest of the economoy. Hopefully the Startup America

In this week's top links we have an interview with author Tim Feriss, a World Clock tracking stats of 2011, the best business models of 2010, a game focused on typing skills, and an article from Seth Godin on your true friends. Enjoy!

Technology is getting bigger and better, day by day, as the growth is exponential and nearly impossible to keep up with. Despite these major advances in technology, I’m curious as to how much tech savvy is necessary to really be able to understand the fundamentals of technology and have the tools to be able to learn any new software or hardware that may be developed in the future. Furthermore, how robust does a technology really need to be able to create valuable innovative content? Not as much as you think… check out this brilliant animation created with Google Docs Powerpoint. So as you can see, something as simple as Powerpoint can be used to create animations that are comparable to much more complex software programs out there. In my opinion, someone capable of creating such a presentation should have the ability to learn and utilize newer technologies as they are developed. The question then becomes how much technology is necessary as part of our education to develop the needed foundation for learning new technologies independently. I feel its much less than we may think, as this generation and those following will grow up with these technologies as part of their everyday lives. What do you think

In this week's top links we get some visualized data of online use in the world, the challenge of trying to balance the U.S. spending budget, a great article on education and the value of play, the chance to truly learn about browsers and the web, and an article about the benefit of an MBA to entrepreneurs.

Quote from Albert Einstein talking about the value of allowing a pupil to learn independently rather than be taught, a process that may not actually be effective for students to grasp ideas and concepts.

Influencers is a video about how certain people are able to influence trends, spark creativity, and make ideas contagious. Check out the video below by R + I Creative. How can we cultivate more influential people in the world? There are a number of different factors that come into consideration, but one is certainly education. The school system needs to focus more on nurturing the creativity of the next generation, rather than killing it. What other ways can we develop a generation of influencers

The average time a person spends in the education system is approximately 17 years during which they spend about 21,420 hours or 1,285,200 minutes physically in school. Is it worth it? From Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, we learn that it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, so based on that tidbit, we should all hopefully be experts in two separate areas. I was personally an expert at the extended bathroom break and concealed texting during class. Now maybe the point of our earlier years of school isn’t to develop expertise, but rather just develop a solid, diverse foundation to prepare ourselves for college. This so-called foundation is focused around math, science, english, and other “core” subjects, but are these subjects appropriate for everyone?? If school’s primary purpose is to prepare us for our career, life, and future then is this concrete curriculum really fulfilling these needs? I feel that each individual has a certain passion, an area that they are best suited to and that school’s simplest purpose should be in discovering what this passion is. How many of you really had no idea what you wanted to do when you went to college? How many of you changed your degrees at least once? How many of you realized that you didn’t want to pursue your degree after college? I think the biggest problem with our