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"Google has funded an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education to develop a "Big Open Online Course," or BOOC. Daniel Hickey will offer a free course in September focused on educators and titled "Assessment Practices, Principles and Policies" for as many as 500 students, funded by a $50,000 Google grant."

"The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of the academic workforce are now tenured or tenure-track.  Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses (MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival. "

A shift from traditional textbooks to e-books is gaining speed in Utah, as the state Office of Education coordinates efforts to develop digital texts in science, math and language arts. At least two state math texts are already available and the first of the science texts will be released this summer. The state texts will be open source, meaning anyone or any school in the state may use them for free.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was a participant in E-learning and Digital Culture and it was from that course's twitter feed that I learned about H817 Open Education. I was interested in doing the comparison because my experience in EDCMOOC transformed the way I viewed e-learning. I have not been a participant in DS106, at least not yet, but I did go to the DS106 site, reviewed some of the webpages and listened to the professors discuss the creation and results of the first year of the course.

As "MOOC mania" completely overshadows the Open Education Resource (OER) initiative of UNESCO and the Hewlett Foundation, a potentially valuable point is being overlooked. The MOOC format, as it exists today, seems especially inappropriate for degree completion by a traditional age student (18-24). It may even be a challenge for the older, post- traditional student as the issue of how learning is to be validated still has most institutions questioning the credit worthiness of such offerings.

"If you've been following my work over the past several months, you know that I've been hosting Open Webinars with Grant Wiggins, Nick Provenzano, Don Buckley, and Mark Barnes, among others. Grant and I quickly realized that more people were interested in these conversations that the capacity of our current WebX subscription, so we decided to try Google Hangout On Air as our platform. "

"There is substantial overlap between the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. If you've already mastered this content, there's no reason to start all over again taking Composition 101 your freshman year. Testing out of elementary college classes lets you take more interesting, engaging classes beginning with your very first semester. It lets you graduate sooner, it gives you more flexibility if you want to study abroad or do a double major or take a year off, and it can potentially save you thousands of dollars."

"Stanford faculty members are playing a leading role in exploring online education - and a number of them are now sharing experiences about their activities and what they are learning in a new series of videos available on the Stanford Online website."

San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hoarders stockpile online information for their use ONLY. They have no intention to share it, remix it or even think deeply about it. Such information isolation is unhealthy and unproductive. It's not something to model for colleagues or students. However, all was not lost. I found redemption by beginning to store information with a larger purpose: to share it.

"Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty - by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity."

"Google Life Archive is a wonderful resource of historical images. It features millions of searchable photographs from the Life photo archive stretching from the 1750s to the present day. Most of these images were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of Google and Life magazine."

"The law driving this is called the Family Education Rights & Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA states that schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information about a student. "

"Google announced that you can now add up to 15 people to a Google+ Hangout if you are business, government or school using Google Apps with Google+."

This is great I wanted to use it for the class I am teaching but we have 14 students. Now I can use it... Thanks for up-date.

"We all know what it's like to sit through a bad presentation. We can easily spot the flaws - too long, too boring, indecipherable, what have you - when we watch others speak. The thing is, when we take the stage ourselves, many of us fall into the same traps."

While many children's home lives are abuzz with the same platforms and devices as the 21st century workplace, school just hasn't kept pace, and in many classrooms pedagogies are barely more inclusive of new technology than they were in the 1980s. We desperately need to improve on this record, which is why schools need to make hiring educational technology professionals -- whether specially trained classroom teachers or dedicated staffers -- a top priority.

"from time to time I have had the luxury of developing learning materials relating to my own specialities in workplace learning. These are the projects I have most enjoyed and which, in my opinion, delivered the best results. So, what works best: designing with your own content expertise, or concentrating on the process, without necessarily having content expertise?"

" Educators also have personal learning networks (PLNs) enabling them to connect with other learners around the globe. If you're new to this world, personal learning networks are created by an individual learner, specific to the learner's needs extending relevant learning connections to like-interested people around the globe. PLNs provide individuals with learning and access to leaders and experts around the world bringing together communities, resources and information impossible to access solely from within school walls."

The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why can't governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens.