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Silicon Valley has wielded its growing political clout at the state Capitol to kill a digital privacy bill that would have given consumers access to information about them being collected online. Had the Right to Know Act become law, California would have been the first state to take direct aim at an online industry that stockpiles and trades in a wide range of personal data about nearly every adult in the United States. In a major defeat for consumer groups and privacy watchdogs, AB 1291 will instead become a two-year bill, effectively putting it into a deep freeze until next year.

"On most four-year college campuses, full-time students don't pay by the credit hour (think by channel on your cable bill). Rather they pay a flat fee for the semester (a programming package on your cable bill) and are typically allowed to take as many courses up to a certain limit."

"Under current law there is no recognized right to privacy in a student's or applicant's social networking site passwords and account information. This Bill makes it unlawful for a public or nonpublic academic institution to mandate that a student or applicant disclose password or account information granting the academic institution access to the student's or applicant's social networking profile or account. This Bill also prohibits academic institutions from requesting that a student or applicant log onto their respective social networking site to provide the academic institution direct access to the student's or applicant's social networking site profile or account. It is acknowledged by the General Assembly that new technological advances in internet use and social networking require new approaches to protecting reasonable expectations of privacy in personal information."

A new bill introduced in the U.S. Senate seeks to tackle the rising cost of textbooks by giving states an incentive to experiment with open educational resources. The Affordable College Textbook Act, introduced by U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Al Franken, Democrats of Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, would create a grant program that would fund the creation of new textbooks -- as long as they are made available for free online.

"Both chambers of the Delaware Legislature have now given unanimous approval to a bill that would keep schools from taking even a single peek at their students' social media profiles. The prohibition applies to all the state's students, regardless of whether they are enrolled in a public or a private school. The measure, HB 309, is one of a pair dealing with social media privacy."

Today California (CA) Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (author of the CA open textbook legislation) announced that SB 520 will be amended to provide open, online college courses for credit. In short, the bill will allow CA students, enrolled in CA public colleges and universities, to take online courses from a pool of 50 high enrollment, introductory courses, offered by 3rd parties, in which CA students cannot currently gain access from their public CA university or community college.

The bills would create an online library of digital textbooks for the 50 most widely-taken lower division courses at the University of California, California State University and the state's community colleges. The project would get under way when state or private funding becomes available. The digital texts would be "open-source," which means they are not copyrighted the same way traditional texts are, making them much less expensive. The texts are primarily available online; students can typically buy a print-out for around $20, about one-tenth the cost of many traditional textbooks.

The House education committee, led by Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., released its reauthorization proposal over the summer in four smaller bills that respectively focus on simplifying the financial aid application process; increasing transparency by creating a centralized "College Dashboard" containing information on student outcomes; increasing financial awareness by providing counseling options for students and families; and promoting innovation through competency-based education pilot programs. All but the first bill have been passed in the chamber, but Democrats have criticized the House package for not doing enough to curb the high cost of college.

Rep. Hans Zeiger wants to cap it at $100 per book. He introduced House Bill 1958, which would restrict professors from requiring books above that amount unless no comparable lower-cost material is available. The bill would apply to community and technical colleges as well as four-year state universities.

To award grants to encourage State educational agencies, local educational agencies, and schools to utilize technology to improve student achievement and college and career readiness, the skills of teachers and school leaders, and the efficiency and productivity of education systems at all levels.

"Instead of paying tuition and fees, students in the program would sign a contract to pay a percentage of their gross income to the state or their college or university after graduation for a specified number of years. The program would be available only to Rhode Island residents, and students would be required to graduate on time in order to remain eligible."

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international alliance of academic and research libraries, applauds Governor Pat Quinn for signing into law the Open Access to Research Articles Act. The bill, which was spearheaded by State Senator Daniel Biss, requires each Illinois public university to create an open access task force with the goal of making its research available to the public online and free of charge.

"But the online application for the job included a space in which to enter one's Facebook account. The Navy man, who deliberately didn't have a Facebook account, left the space blank - which seemed to puzzle the company. "They said, 'Well, get a Facebook (account) and we'll interview you,' " Boquist recalled in her public testimony before a Senate committee on Feb. 18. "He said, 'I'm not going to have one.' So he did not get the interview.""

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.

I reference first the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the bill being proposed in the California legislature to create a "faculty-free" New University of California online (read it and scream). And yet, this should surprise no one. We are living in a plutocracy. MOOCs are becoming popular as potential money savers for universities and money makers for "education" companies. One might think these two phenomena are unrelated. They're not.

Just in time for Creative Commons' 10th birthday celebration of its license suite, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) announced a 3.5 million dollar grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a new program - Integrated Digital English Acceleration (I-DEA) - that will help adult English language learners improve their language skills while simultaneously providing career and college readiness training through technology-based tools and resources.

"Last month, State Governor Jay Nixon signed Senate Bill 54, which goes into effect on August 28, 2011 in the state of Missouri. The new law bans direct social networking contact between teachers and students in the hopes of setting more distinct boundaries on the relationships between the two."

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants to find out whether the massive open online courses that have proved so popular in advanced and often highly technical fields offer the same promise for remedial and introductory courses."