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There was something about the Mama Bear family tech conference a week ago that creeped me out. I am the father of a 5-year-old boy, and perhaps a third of the people at this conference were trying to build apps for him. All the apps were well-intentioned. All were, at some level, educational.

Still, all the apps felt wrong to me. I wanted my son to have nothing to do with any of them.

I've been trying to understand why these educational apps were getting under my skin to this extent. It's not like I'm anti-technology when … Read more

Startup Coursera today announced it has raised $16 million and will expand its curriculum, a sign of how interest in online learning technology is heating up.

Silicon Valley venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers funded the company which was started by two Stanford University professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng.

Coursera offers online classes from Princeton University, Stanford, University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania.

The classes are structured as videos between 10 and 15 minutes, punctuated with short quizzes and auto-graded exercises to help students grasp the material.

Coursera is part of … Read more

Schools are using technology in the classroom at an increasingly rapid rate. Now, the next frontier for tots might be social networking.

A kindergarten teacher at a New York City public school has begun experimenting with using Twitter as a teaching and learning platform, according to The New York Times.

"We added more days in school stickers. We didn't have any lame reflections. We had snack outside. Ask us about time," read a recent 116-character tweet from the kindergarteners, The New York Times reports.

This class's teacher, Jennifer Aaron, says that Twitter helps students think about … Read more

MIT researchers are trying to get computers to correctly interpret hand signals used by crews aboard aircraft carriers so that robot planes can follow them.

As Northrop Grumman continues to develop its X-47B robot stealth plane, which is aimed at carrier use, Yale Song and colleagues at MIT are working on a machine learning system that could allow autonomous planes to understand crew directions.

In its research presented in the journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, the team used a database of abstract representations of 24 gestures often employed by carrier personnel. They trained an algorithm to classify gestures, including posture and hand position, based on what it knew from the database. … Read more

Ever tried teaching your child how to draw an animal, but just didn't know where to start? Next time, try starting with a butt. That's right.

Everything Butt Art, a freemium iPad app, wants to teach your child how to draw, a learning process that relies on repetition and familiarity. One where every drawing starts with a butt. It may sound kind of strange, or perhaps even offensive at first, but once you begin using the app and go through the steps of each drawing, your apprehension quickly turns into admiration.

Let's take a look at how … Read more

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology started giving away the content of its courses over the Web 10 years ago. Now it plans to give away its online learning software, too.

The university today launched MITx, an initiative to provide students with a certification for taking MIT-taught classes online through a software platform MIT plans to make open-source.

Anyone with an Internet connection can take classes through the software system, which is expected to be released in the spring of 2012. Students who are able to "demonstrate mastery of the material" through online tests can get credentials for what … Read more

It's end-of-the-year roundup time, when we marshal the power of hindsight and judge all of the tech products that came out in 2011. There were some obvious groaners (hello, HP Veer), but plenty of winners, too.

This is a whopper of a poll. The choices are all culled from the hardware that made CNET's list of the top tech of the year.

There is some stiff competition here. The iPad 2 has been cooking up millions of sales, but Amazon's Kindle Fire has muscled onto the scene in a big way.

The iPhone 4S landed on both the winners and disappointments lists. Will that stop if from coming out tops in the poll? … Read more

Whew! Today was an extralong episode, and we start things off speculating about the mysterious location of Grand Theft Auto V. The teaser Web site from Rockstar Games hints at a financial theme, so we're definitely thinking an American city known for its financial institutions...Washington, maybe? Or maybe it's Billings, Mont.? Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, perhaps? We'll know for sure on November 2.

Bringing up GTA inevitably devolves into a discussion on the negative effects of video game violence on children (Godwin's law, too), but luckily the ophthalmologists over at the Micro Surgical Eye Clinic in Kolkata, India, are using games for good.

This team has found that a modified version of the first-person shooting game Unreal Tournament can be used to strengthen the eyesight of teenagers suffering from amblyopia, or "lazy eye syndrome." Still no progress being made on the cure for "lazy everything else" syndrome.… Read more

The father of the iPod creates a cool home thermostat, the Obama campaign joins Tumblr, and Netflix reports its first drop in customers in nearly two years--and it's a doozy.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded: