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Science class is about to look a lot more boring. One million kids logged on to Maker Camp last summer, so today Google and Maker Faire announced the second year of its online summer camp that teaches teens to build, hack and explore. The six-week program on Google+ includes virtual field trips to NASA, CERN, and Disney Imagineering plus making tensile strength towers, glowing candy, and potato canons.

Each SLC Camp is a combined Codeathon and Tagathon. These are volunteer events to help build usable applications to help teachers, parents and students in K-12 Education. Volunteers will use the open source sample code and APIs available at dev.slcedu.org, as well as tools available on the same site for bulk data ingestion, data format transforms, and meta-tagging of educational content.

That's where my TEDx experience becomes a tale of two TEDs. There is TEDx and there is TED. TEDxStanford, and similar grassroots-organized TEDx events, are community-based events, made strong by the lived experience of those in the community. We were together in that space, part of a group that largely felt connected, welcoming, and accessible. We laughed together, we cried together, we ate meals together, we held our breaths together when a presenter seemed to stumble on a word, and at the end, we hugged complete strangers like we were leaving summer camp…together. Then there is TED, the expensive, "unassailable" events. While I am sure that some TED attendees feel some of the things TEDx folks feel, TED looks from the outside more like an exclusive social club than summer camp.

"A prominent online program management company, 2U, announced this morning that it will purchase Trilogy Education Services, a large boot camp provider that partners with continuing education divisions at dozens of universities."

The last weekend of September ended the month wonderfully with a fantastic conference in Wilmington, Delaware : Pod Camp East. A smaller conference atmosphere than many other social media events, the setting made for great dialogue and opportunity to really get involved with participants & speakers.

" Course providers like Udemy and Lynda.com, along with coding boot camps and massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as edX and Coursera, promise to refresh workers' skills or help them acquire expertise they didn't get in college. But those new credentials don't carry much weight in hiring yet, recruiters say, because managers don't trust or recognize many of the companies and organizations behind the badges and courses."