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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.

Apparently, no one really wants to talk about MOOCs anymore, the panel included. In one of my last posts for Edcetera, I wrote about how MOOCs changed higher ed in 2012, and I think we all agree to the fact that MOOCs have been hyped a lot over the past months. The panelists agreed that MOOCs are nothing really that new or exciting. There have been online courses available for quite a while, so why all that buzz all of a sudden?

Mobile Commons is the technology behind today's most effective mobile messaging campaigns. We empower brands to increase sales and consumer engagement, and enable organizations to achieve unprecedented results in fundraising, social action and behavior change.

"An open online course, Current/Future State of Higher Education, offering in fall 2012 will evaluate the change pressures that face universities and help universities prepare for the future state of higher education."

"The MOOC Local option looks like the future to me. Where a school has a "coach" who helps students when they need it, who can be that connection and even connect students within a school. Think how this could change what it means to be a teacher….."

""This flies in the face of all these traditional views that all structural development happens in infancy, early in childhood," Schlegel said. "Now that we actually do have tools to watch a brain change, we are discovering that in many cases the brain can be just as malleable as an adult as it is when you are a child or an adolescent.""

"The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field," says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT's project. "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge.""

Jonathan is also the director of the BadgeStack Project, the first system designed for badge-empowered learning and community-building, and the first to issue Mozilla Open Badges. We'll talk about the changing nature of professional development (PD) in particular and learning in general with the rise of online meeting technology, and how informal and non-traditional learning environments are impacting how we think about education.

""My dream is that every single person on the planet can build their own LMS, if that is what they want to do. I want to build an ecosystem of tools that make life easier for teachers""

"Phones are ringing off the hook for the four-man IT department at the Wichita County courthouse after hundreds of employees discovered Monday their Internet use during work hours is being monitored."

"The two industrial giants aren't so much showing off as signalling transformation. Both firms are going through the most profound change in their corporate histories, attempting to switch from being makers of machines into fully digital businesses. GE's chief executive, Jeff Immelt, says the plan is to join the world's top ten software firms with sales of programs and services worth $15bn as early as 2020."

" I'm sure many teachers would happily outsource homework grading and assessment to the droids. Blended learning will likely continue to make advances across classrooms as a substitution of teachers' time, though I see it unlikely to dominate instruction, particularly in elementary grades."

""Relate" videos get the student to feel connected to the instructor. They seek to establish instructor presence. They also prompt students to reflect on their own prior experiences with the topic and reasons for taking the course. "Narrate" videos share stories, anecdotes, or case studies that illustrate a concept or put the learning in context. They tap into the power of narrative to make learning sticky. "Demonstrate" videos illustrate how to do something in a step-by-step way. They pull back the curtain on invisible phenomena or procedures. They visually demonstrate how students will complete assignments and apply learning in the real world. "Debate" videos are perhaps the most important if you want students to actually change the way they think. These videos explicitly surface and address the misconceptions that students have about a domain and showcase competing points of view."

The Case Foundation, created by Steve Case and Jean Case in 1997, invests in people and ideas that can change the world. We create and support initiatives that leverage new technologies and entrepreneurial approaches to drive innovation in the social sector and encourage individuals to get involved with the communities and causes they care about.

"Static knowledge was useful when the pace of change in the world was slower than it is now. The focus now is on having the ability for lifelong learning and contributing. The internet enables this through the sharing of vast amounts of information and the opportunities for collaboration across the classroom and across the world!"

"This point of dramatic -- and traumatic -- change didn't swoop in unannounced. Rather, it crept in like a series of streams meeting in a roiling confluence. Only by stepping back and looking in panoramic fashion can we truly understand how we've arrived at a point of transformation and how we might deal with it. Let's take a look. "

"Aggregation is one of the core concepts of content presentation and commercialization. Any analysis of what happened to the record business, what is happening to newspapers, or the future of books and bookstores and magazines and TV that does not feature this concept prominently is almost certainly flawed."

"Curation is a term that has always referred to the careful selection and pruning of aggregates, such as for a museum or an art exhibition. But the concept in the digital content world means the selection and presentation of these disparate items to help a browser or consumer navigate and select from them. Aggregation without curation is, normally, not very helpful. Curation creates the brand."

it's no coincidence that the death of Google Reader corresponds with the rise of Google's own social networks. As Wired's Christina Bonnington points out, "No matter what Mountain View says about changing user habits, though, both Now and Plus do one thing: They keep you in Google's world." Of course, this is an industry-wide trend. Not just Google, but Facebook, LinkedIn and the other big networks are all gunning to become become true media properties. Just like traditional media outlets-from TV networks to newspapers - the more users they have and the better they hook those users, the more they can charge for ads.

"The definition of "a state education" may also change. Far more money should be spent on pre-schooling, since the cognitive abilities and social skills that children learn in their first few years define much of their future potential. And adults will need continuous education. State education may well involve a year of study to be taken later in life, perhaps in stages."