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Find open source software alternatives to well-known commercial software Our mission is to provide easy access to high quality open source alternatives to well-known commercial products. And remember that open source software is also a freeware alternative.

"Tell your story any way you'd like. Known is a simple platform for publishing words, pictures, podcasts and more to a site that you control. Choose to share it on networks like Twitter and Facebook, or the software you already use."

"ISOTYPE, the vintage visual language pioneered by Austrian sociologist, philosopher and curator Otto Neurath and his wife Marie in the 1930s, shaped modern information graphics and visual storytelling. America and Britain: Three Volumes in One, also known as Only an Ocean Between, is a wonderful 1946 out-of-print book by P. Sargant Florence and Lella Secor Florence from the golden age of ISOTYPE, kindly digitized by Michael Stoll, presenting a series of minimalist infographics that compare and contrast various aspects of life in Britain and the United States, a-la Paris vs. New York."

The issue of wealth inequality across the United States is well known, but this video shows you the extent of that imbalance in dramatic and graphic fashion.

"Today, you can capture your thinking the way da Vinci did with Evernote, a powerful personal information manager that enables you to store, tag and organize nearly any kind of digital content, any time, anywhere. My gut feeling, based on what is known about da Vinci's passion for learning and exploration, is that he would embrace Evernote's many capabilities to fully to capture, enhance and bring even more of his remarkable ideas to fruition."

Code.org, the new non-profit aimed at encouraging computer science education launched last month by entrepreneur and investor brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi, has assembled an all-star group of the world's most well-known and successful folks with programming skills to talk about how learning to code has changed their lives - and isn't quite as hard as people might think.

Partnering with Lumen Learning, a Portland, Ore.-based company that helps educational institutions integrate open educational resources into their curricula, TCC plans to offer a textbook-free associate of science degree in business administration based on Lumen's Textbook Zero model. For students who pursue the new "textbook-free" degree, the total cost for required textbooks will be zero. Instead, the program will use high quality open textbooks and other open educational resources, known as OER, which are freely accessible, openly licensed materials useful for teaching, learning, assessment and research. It is estimated that a TCC student who completes the degree through the textbook-free initiative might save one-third on the cost of college.

The first two-dimensional bar codes, or QR codes, as they're known, were installed Friday at Arpoador, a massive boulder that rises at the end of Ipanema beach. The image was built into the sidewalk with the same black and white stones that decorate sidewalks around town with mosaics of waves, fish and abstract images.

"The Transportation Security Administration - better known as the TSA, or the folks who pat you down at the airport - has opened its own account on Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service. Yes, really."

"For the fiscal year 2017 budget, the U.S. Department of Education (Education) estimates that all federally issued Direct Loans in Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans will have government costs of $74 billion, higher than previous budget estimates. IDR plans are designed to help ease student debt burden by setting loan payments as a percentage of borrower income, extending repayment periods from the standard 10 years to up to 25 years, and forgiving remaining balances at the end of that period. While actual costs cannot be known until borrowers repay their loans, GAO found that current IDR plan budget estimates are more than double what was originally expected for loans made in fiscal years 2009 through 2016 (the only years for which original estimates are available). This growth is largely due to the rising volume of loans in IDR plans."

"The key to unlocking a brighter future for students lies within the understanding and application of learning science. As a data scientist and edtech developer, I believe our job is not about inventing the next shiny digital device; it's about improving education outcomes for students, and doing so demonstrably and empirically with research. And the starting point for that is looking at what we already know from the science of learning."

The strategy Think-Pair-Share, along with a variety of twists, is a versatile strategy that can be used before, during or after a reading, viewing or listening activity. It incorporates elements of strategies that are known to increase learning (summarizing, comparing/contrasting, restating an idea, collaboration, think time, and using different learning modalities).

"Digital Storytelling 106--better known as "ds106"--sprouted in 2010 as a computer science class on digital storytelling at University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Founded by Jim Groom, educational technology consultant Alan Levine, and instructional technologists Martha Burtis & Tom Woodward, ds106 has evolved into a model for all instructors and students who aspire to experience, explore, and extend connected learning."

With the scrambled classroom model, we are challenged to learn new possibilities, but also to design instruction based on principles we have known about for some time. In the scrambled classroom model, the innovation is not so much "online learning," but "human learning" supported by all that the 21st century brings to the table.

Perhaps even more surprising, "From 2000 to 2011, the amount of overall class coverage declined by [about] 44%, whereas the averages on MAT exams increased by 13% over the same period." (p. 332) "Our data suggest that a more efficient use of time is mastering fewer topics deeply while fostering the development of critical thinking skills that enable the student to apply known information (with greater confidence) to new topics." (p. 333) In this case then, the claim that less teaching resulted in more learning stands. "We define our use of the term 'less teaching' as moving the burden of active effort from the teacher to the student." (p. 333)

How updating the communication device known as a "diploma" will help students acquire the right skills and help companies hire the right talent.

MOOCs are too new for there to be compelling evidence of their value, cost, and risks. The potential benefits and threats to academic quality, student outcomes, institutional integrity, and administrative processes are not yet known. However, the emerging features of MOOCs that have made them distinctive from the other types of OER are the services integrated with the content. The MOOC platforms for organizing and delivering the multimedia content, integrated with the social media tools for engaging individuals, and the assessment and analytic tools for providing feedback on learning and teaching are critical services that manage the content delivery within a design for learning. These services available through the open enrollment of MOOCs are the additional benefits that have been recognized as valuable by some learners, teachers, and institutions.

During last month's round of School of Open courses, I helped out with a facilitated version of the Open Science course supported by Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and PLOS. On four Tuesdays in August, Billy Meinke hosted online discussions with a handful of well-known members of the open science community while participants from around the world completed course modules and blogged about their experiences. Here's how things went down.

The UL system has teamed up with the SAS software company of Cary, N.C. and MyEdu, of Austin, Texas, to create a massive data trove that should help make students more marketable to prospective employers and help those companies find the desired types of students. "This partnership allows us to use data to connect the dots," Woodley said. "It allows us to use data to target-market opportunities to our students they may not have known about."