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Now a study published by the European Commission reveals that learning an additional language such as English may bring benefits that go beyond the ability to use the language itself. This report has implications for why, when and how we teach and learn English as a second or foreign ­language.

One of the significant findings for English language teaching is that changes in the brain’s electrical activity may occur much earlier than previously thought.

this study suggests that changes in the brain may start even in the earlier stages of language learning.

And she noted that the department and the Obama Administration’s commitment to OER began “at the top,” with President Obama highlighting his support for “the creation of a new online and open source clearinghouse of courses” to help higher education achieve the goal of making the United States first in the world in the proportion of students graduating from college by 2020.

all the new intellectual property produced as a result of those grants, whether it’s a new open course or modules, or new kinds of learning materials,… would be released with a Creative Commons CC-BY license

His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned – and so it came to pass.

"Look, we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred printing press, the first things you get serve the basest human urges. But the presence of the erotic novels did not prevent us from pressing the printing presses into the service of the scientific revolution. And so I think every bit of time spent fretting about the fact that people have base desires which they will use this medium to satisfy is a waste of time – because that's been true of every medium ever launched."

Shirky does not own a television. Americans watch, collectively, two hundred billion hours of television a year, and if online social media diverts even just a fraction of that time, he argues, that has to be a good thing. "As I say in the book, even the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. And I'd still take the most inane collaborative website over someone watching yet another half hour of TV."