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The Association of Virtual Worlds has just released the new edition of  The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds listing over 250 virtual worlds and is pleased to offer it free to anyone who is interested in the rapidly growing field of virtual worlds.

YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education Channel today and noted that nearly 80% of the viewership of educational content on the site came from outside the United States. Less than 70% of the site's total traffic is International, so the educational content is disproportionately viewed by global audiences. Both YouTube and iTunes U are serving up huge quantities of educational content to a world already in the throes of a 50 year revolution in global education. In some ways they represent exactly the kind of education that a new world needs, too: learning that augments existing education and fosters life-long development of non-routine analytical and interactive skills. That's a recipe for good times. YouTube now hosts more than 500,000 educational videos, on a wide variety of topics. The new mobile-friendly iTunes U also offers 500,000 educational resources and says that 60% of its viewership comes from outside the United States. This global consuption of US-created online educational content may be the newest chapter in a radical transformation of global education over the past 50 years. Life in this world is not like it used to be just a few decades ago, and the availability of world-class education on-demand, at almost no cost, is likely to help things change all the more as this century unfolds.

A trend began, at least in the United states, as far back as 1985: demand for "routine manual skills" has held relatively steady, demand for non-routine manual skills has plummeted. Demand for routine cognitive skills climbed through 1970, then fell. What's hot? Non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive skills. Those are things that a good YouTube or iTunes U video about world history or global ecology can help improve, your non-routine analytic and interactive skills. More than for just economic well-being, those are skills that positively impact quality of life in many ways.

California-based Katalabs has just released a free iPad and iPhone-friendly Web-based virtual world viewer, KataSpace, which works in conjunction with the open source Sirikata virtual world server software.

Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world

Guinness World Records has launched a new application for both Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating system. The application features six games and all you need to do to make a Guinness World Record is complete them in record time

As MOOCs cast their eye to the developing world, very minor tweaks matter a great deal, such as the ability to allow students to download, rather than only stream course videos. But even more major ones are coming, including edX’s plans to start open-sourcing its platform in the next few months, which could allow even more universities to post online courses, and software programmers around the world to experiment with customized interfaces.

“We need to make sure we are making tools that make it easy to create new content, so it’s not only someone at MIT or Stanford who creates.” Relevance, as he notes, is one of the biggest motivators for students.

One of the major challenges for MOOCs—which so far mostly come from U.S. universities—is to tailor the content of courses to a diverse worldwide audience with any number of combinations of language, educational, motivational, and cultural backgrounds. Critics fear the rise of big box education from only a few elite institutions in Western nations, and worry these may not fit the different learning styles in different nations.

What new opportunities do you see for apps in the developing world? Nobody focuses on the problem of creating apps for somebody whose monthly income is $200. Those people are not part of the computer age or the Internet age; most of them are not literate. So we run app competitions in India to try to get people thinking from that perspective. The winner of our last competition was a group of students who designed a commerce app for “fruit walas,” the guys who run around with carts selling fruits and vegetables. These students created a graphically intuitive way of running a small vegetable business. There are something like five million fruit walas in India, so if you had an app for them, there could be a lot of money to be made.

Frito-Lay decided to launch a multi stage campaign which would entice people to become fans on their new Facebook page. They did this so effectively that they set a Guiness World Record for the most fans on Facebook in 24hours!

fter a live cooking demonstration in New York Times Square created media buzz, customers were given free bags of chips if they registered on a special product giveaway site and liked the page.

A growing list of schools are turning to the "serendipity engine" to help students find cross-discipline collaborators for passion projects.

finding a cross-disciplinary collaboration is tougher--most of us are more likely to head to a meetup or networking event to fish for someone outside of our skill set. That’s fine, but it’s not a very efficient way to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Find What You Actually Want to Learn About First things first, you need to figure out what you're actually interested in.

Figure Out How You Learn Best Full sizeWe all learn a little differently, and while we're fans of learning by doing, you can't always do that with everything.

Learn By Doing Whenever Possible Full sizeIn most cases you're going to learn best by doing. That means practicing programming by actually making a program or learning a new language by speaking it. If you're having trouble getting over the learning hump and sticking with it, you might simply need to provide better context for the process.

The @Sweden program, known as Curators of Sweden, came about when the Swedish Institute and Visit Sweden, the government tourist agency, sought to develop a plan to present the country to the world on Twitter. They hired an advertising company, Volontaire.