Every Friday at 3pm, ProfHacker starts the weekend with 5 links and a video worth watching.

Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan announced a national coalition to enroll five million children in Medicaid and CHIP within five years.

Moving from an old computer to a new one needn't be a daunting task, and can provide a good opportunity to do some digital housekeeping.

Alabama, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Tennessee are among the states that will receive funding to support education jobs.

Learn about five things that helped one ProfHacker contributor survive the job market.

Learn more about the new Priority Inbox feature in Gmail and how you might use it to increase productivity.

Read Secretary Duncan's remarks to state leaders about Race to the Top Assessment winners and the next generation of assessments.

I’ve heard of SNAPP before – ” software tool that allows users to visualize the network of interactions resulting from discussion forum posts and replies” – but decided to play around with it today. This is a good example of a fairly simple, light-weight tool to analyze social interactions in an LMS like Moodle, Blackboard, or Desire2Learn. The process is simple: install a simple bookmarklet in your browser, go to your LMS, select the discussion forum that you want to analyze, and then activate the SNAPP plugin. SNAPP does its analysis and posts the results on the bottom of your browser window. The analysis isn’t very comprehensive, but does provide frequency of posts and social network structure. Greater analysis of the nature of interaction (i.e quality, not only quantity) through language/concept analysis seems like a logical next step. The best part of the tool is that it’s under the control of the educator (or learner). It’s simple, easy to install, and could provide useful insight into interactions. If you want to try it, download SNAPP and head to the introduction forum (an open forum, no login required) from CCK08 and see how it works.
What are you using for light-weight analysis of student learning or content?

How do you handle those small issues of disrespect in your classroom?

What roles should a whiteboard app play on the iPad? Read a review of Whiteboard HD.

Learn about the author's five essential apps for an Android phone.

What's the best way to approach conducting an academic job search when you already have an academic job?

The Teaching Carnival is back, and it's chock-full of teaching goodness. Since 2005, the Teaching Carnival has been a semi-regularly published roundup of the best Web-based writings on pedagogy.

As many theorists of innovation have noted, it’s difficult for mature established fields (and corporations, for that matter) to reinvent themselves. Change often comes from the outside. Once an organization has settled into a revenue stream that provides some security, it’s almost impossible for that organization to adopt approaches that harm or cannibalize that revenue stream (Blockbuster and video rentals, Microsoft and Office). Risk-taking is the domain of young companies and outsiders to a field. ReadWriteWeb presents five ways for tech companies to disrupt education. Suggestions: it should be free(mium), grassroots, 21st century learning & teaching, use open content, be open source. Can’t say I see that as being sufficient to disrupt education. Any solution that does that would need to:

1. Be based on a unit of influence that is at the control of each individual (i.e. connections not networks)
2. Scale social interactions (not only content) so large network learning occurs, but in a way that permits various group/collective sizes
3. Promote and benefit from learner autonomy, helping learners to building skills and capacity for ongoing learning
4. Use distributed, decentralized technical infrastructure (p2p not centralized)
5. Extensively use learning analytics, preferably blurring physical and virtual interactions
6. Use curriculum intelligently (linked data/semantic web) in order to provide learners with personal and adaptive paths
7. Allow information splicing so that flows can be adjusted and organized to reflect different learning and social tasks
8. Enable easy variance of contexts – or as my colleague Jon Dron states – “context switching”.
9. Offer varying levels of support and structure, under the control of the learner. If a subject is too challenging, learners can choose a structured learning path. Or, if learners prefer greater autonomy, more flexible paths can be adopted.
10. The system needs to learn from the learners (Hunch is a good example)
11. Integrate activities from various services so learners can centrally interact with data left in other services (Greplin)
12. Provide learners with the tools to connect and form learning networks with others in a course and across various disciplines (diversity exposure to ideas and connections needs to be intentional)

What are your thoughts? What type of tool, or functionality, do you think would disrupt education? What types of tools would teachers need to disrupt education?

Email – having survived many declarations of its death – is experiencing a renewal. This week, Google launched priority inbox. Then came the announcement of Greplin (most likely candidate for Google acquisition) – a service for searching across multiple platforms: gmail, twitter, facebook, dropbox, etc. And guess what? Now email has been raised to platform status with “huge potential for extensibility”. Only a year ago, Google Wave was hailed as an email killer. Today, Wave is gone and email soldiers on. Email and bed bugs have similar resiliency, it appears.

Here's some concrete advice for those considering a career in one of the hybrid professions centered in and around the academy, where there are rich opportunities to put deep training in scholarly disciplines to use.

Google's services are so easy you might use more than one account to be productive. Now you can work with both profiles at once.

We've all been told about the importance of getting enough exercise -- but how do you do that?

Secretary Duncan commended California for being the first state to submit an application under the Education Jobs Fund.

Do you teach with small-group activities? Here's why it's helpful to assign students to groups and rotate the group memberships frequently.