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Earlier in the year, legislators had promised 100 Mbps by the end of 2015, but on Wednesday the Ministry of Transportation and Communication announced an intermediate step: 1Mbps by July 2010 for Finland’s more than 5 million citizens. The news, reported via the Finnish broadcasting company YLE, makes Finland the first country in the world to declare broadband internet access a right.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are defined as “materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone” (Downes, 2011). Open Educational Practices (OEP) are practices which “support the production, use and reuse of high quality OER through institutional policies, which promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path.” (ICDE, 2011). Open Communication is reciprocal and respectful exchange which contributes to social presence in online learning (Gunawardena & Zittle, 1997), and the development of intercultural awareness and competence in language learning.

“A culture of sharing resources and practices will help facilitate change and innovation in education” (OER Commons, 2011).

Open access initiatives to make research publications freely available online or the adoption of open source software solutions, such as Moodle or Mahara, are already having a big impact on education.

The act of teaching is fundamentally about sharing knowledge. OER embodies the purpose of teaching and is today’s most compelling manifestation of the core values of education in a digital world, that is, to share knowledge freely.

WikiEducator is a flagship project of the OER Foundation

Cape Town Open Education Declaration

Netbooks are essentially mini-laptops that combine the physical characteristics of a cell phone with the capabilities of a traditional laptop, overcoming nearly all of the hardware obstacles to continuous student technology use in the classroom.

But hardware is only half of the picture. Open-source software is the answer to achieving cell phone reliability and ease of use on a device. With Linux and open-source software on netbooks, all the complexities of typical proprietary operating systems can be stripped away, leaving elegant, cell-phone like interfaces of simple icons, with reliable and secure underpinnings that are not prone to failure, malware, or general instability.

Through the use of free, open-source applications, students gain access to a diverse set of tools and resources for content creation, and teachers are empowered to challenge students to demonstrate subject area mastery using any one of a variety of tools and contexts. Since the software is free to distribute, students can install the same programs on any computer they have access to, creating an environment in which teachers can have a reasonable expectation that technology-based activities and assignments can be completed regardless of the student's location. And free classroom management tools enable teachers to monitor student activity, communicate privately or with groups, take control of a workstation, start a demonstration from theirs or any student's machine, and garner the attention of the class at a moment's notice, all through an easy to use interface on the teacher's workstation.

I think Google Wave is something I’d like to have open all the time, as I see it as a new potential variety of communication for the web. And if I have it open, I don’t need another service, like email, to notify me about new messages. But I don’t have it open all the time now because usage among people I know is too sporadic.

“Although we are opening up access a bit, do remember that Google Wave is still only in its early preview phase,” the team notes today

1. Recover old revisionsGo to File > Revision History and the entire past of the current document will be revealed.

2. Create HTML tablesYou can access a document's underlying HTML code direct by going to "Edit > Edit HTML".

3. Add CSSGoogle Docs allows you to add CSS styles to any document.

What's the goal, the one unifying everything that we need from technology? It's really quite simple... One device with ubiquitous access to information via the internet.

That's all we need. Paper, gone. Books, gone.

Assessment is one of the key components of technology in education.