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As I've carried on my work this month, I've returned again and again to the role of computers in learning. I keep trying to understand not only the subject itself, but the sources of my own fascination. The presentation at Delaware was perhaps my fullest effort to date to get at the vexed question of what a computer is, or rather, what it symbolizes.

A computer science professor at an Australian University is doing something revolutionary with YouTube - he's offering students who can't attend his classes college credit for watching his videos. Richard Buckland, a senior lecturer at the University of NSW in Sydney, Australia, was frustrated that high school students with a passion for computing and capable of studying at the college level were not able to make the commute to the university fit into their school day.

Google's investment is part of a broad movement toward "cloud computing," a literally hazy term for a concept that takes outsourcing, software as a service, and similar rent-don't-own trends to their logical conclusion. Think of it as a ubiquitous Wi-Fi hotspot that can satisfy all of a company's computing needs, from software applications to data to communications and collaboration. No more data centers; everything you need is "out there" in the cloud, accessible for a fee. Or fees.

I constantly meet really smart non-technical people -- doctors, lawyers, teachers -- who have no clue how computers work. They treat them as magic black boxes that randomly break and never make sense. Why? Because software is a fundamentally different kind of system. It does not behave like the other things around us that we are used to.

In the era of technology students do not pass notes or try and whisper quietly to one another, they send text messages from their cell phones or Facebook messages to one another if on a computer during class. These actions are done silently and do not cause a disruption in the classroom. But is it distracting? Maybe. Is it beneficial? I think so.

Three teams of four students spent Winter Session collaboratively problem solving how to manipulate Myro robots and how to create learning games for young children who have received an XO laptop from the One Laptop per Child program.

Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925) is an American inventor of Swedish and Norwegian descent.[1] He is best known for inventing the computer mouse

Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design.