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Looking for something different from the current hysteria of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)? A digital storytelling course started by Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), ds106 was set loose as an open course in January 2011. Yet the UMW catalog does not include such a course. Its actual course designation is CPSC 106 (Computer Science)-a small but telling example of how ds106 plays with and questions the norm.

"The unpopularity of personal data encryption isn't a problem in itself but a symptom of a bigger issue: The increasingly social, distributed and proscriptive nature of computing means that if you want to use the latest software and services you simply cannot keep your personal data to yourself."

"Last year, based on our departmental assessment procedures, I determined that I wanted a more subjective way to give feedback to my students. To me, programming is more than just right or wrong code; I want students to develop good habits and styles of programming that use the tool to communicate the process of problem solving, not just the final answers. And I felt that that would be better achieved by giving students consistent verbal feedback, in addition to simple rubric scoring of their work."

"Over 49,000 students registered for the class, over 16,000 attended the first week's lecture, and over 4,900 students earned a certificate at the end of the 10-week course. It would take 32 years of teaching our SI 502 foundations course on networked computing to interact with that many students."

The district, comprising East and West Leyden high schools, realized its long-planned hope of providing a computing device to every student and gave out 3,500 new Google Chromebooks.

Shortly after the invention of the quantum computer chip, and the laying of fibre optic broadband to almost every house in the UK, it had been clear that the days of teaching as a profession were numbered. Teaching had been relegated to a minority profession in a matter of years. It had been simply a question of scale. A teacher, working for 45 years, could teach maybe 1,500 children. Some lessons would be better than others, some children would get more attention and do better than others, they'd occasionally need time off and so on. Simply put, human teachers were inconsistent, and not always great. So when the new educational bodies started recording the best lectures for every subject from around in the world, annotating them in 3D, and enhancing them with CG, what could the schools do to fight back?

"Dropbox is an awesome service. You can back your files up to the cloud, sync them between computers, and share them with your friends. That's not all it can do, though. Here are our top 10 favorite clever uses for our favorite file syncing program."

Wolfram Alpha, the "computational knowledge engine" that quietly handles a large number of queries from Apple's Siri, launched a new feature today that allows you to quickly get an overview of all your data on Facebook. The new report, says Wolfram CEO Stephen Wolfram, expands Wolfram Alpha's "powers of analysis to give you all sorts of personal analytics." The company plans to expand these reports with new features over time, but they already give you a pretty deep look at your Facebook habits.

"it's important to turn off our computers and do things in the real world."

Glass looks like only the headband of a pair of glasses - the part that hooks on your ears and lies along your eyebrow line - with a small, transparent block positioned above and to the right of your right eye. That, of course, is a screen, and the Google Glass is actually a fairly full-blown computer. Or maybe like a smartphone that you never have to take out of your pocket.

"PLN stands for Personal Learning Network.  Simply put, it is the people you connect with to collaborate, share resources, and discuss ideas.  We each have a PLN of some kind, even if you have never logged onto a computer in your life."

I think I can start getting my head around all of these tools as long as I keep reminding myself that this is my PLN, this is my PLN. And then use it like one.

"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."

This report is the result of a National Science Foundation-Sponsored Computing Research Association Workshop held at MIT on January 9-11, 2013. This workshop developed a framework for understanding current disruptive change in higher education learning delivery models and outlined steps towards a research agenda for realizing possible benefits while avoiding future pitfalls.

Chadron Public Schools have yet to see the cost savings in textbook purchases that was expected from providing iPad tablet computers to all of its high school students. In discussion of the district's financial position at Monday's school board meeting, Chadron High School principal Jerry Mack told board members that costs for textbooks haven't gone down, even though the books themselves may not be used by students, because of publishers' pricing strategies. "Publishers demand that you purchase the hard copy before you get the digital version," said Mack. "For some texts, in order to get the digital copy, they require you to get the key first," added technology director Uati Paopao.

"While universities have routinely collected information about students for years - from their family backgrounds to what books they take out of the library - increased computer power and better digital skills now offer the possibility to piece it all together. It could fundamentally change the way institutions operate - as well as raising challenging ethical and privacy issues. "It's almost waste stuff, generated as a by-product of communications, and previously we did nothing with it," says Rob Englebright, programme manager at Jisc, which champions use of digital technologies in education. "Now we can look at it and form patterns.""

""Where's the beef?" was the famous campaign slogan from the 1984 Presidential campaign. For two years, MOOC watchers have been asking the same question, as hundreds of thousands of students participated in free online courses that delivered knowledge but no certification of any real value. The Georgia Institute of Technology recently changed all that: Its May 14 announcement that the school would offer a fully accredited Online Masters of Science in Computer Science (OMS CS) for less than $7,000 suddenly brought the abstract potential of MOOCs into stark relief."

"An intelligent tutoring system is computer software designed to simulate a human tutor's behavior and guidance. Because these systems are able to interpret complex student responses and can learn as they operate, they are able to discern where and why a student's understanding has gone astray and to offer hints to help the student understand the material at hand. Intelligent tutors provide many of the benefits of a human tutor to very large numbers of students. Intelligent tutoring systems can also provide real-time data to instructors and developers looking to refine teaching methods."

Yes, I can buy a jar of commercially produced pickles (typically including high-fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring, dried onions, and chemicals that I do not recognize as food), just as we can scale up our production in the classroom by increasing class size, using computer-graded tests, and reducing or eliminating the student writing that requires a faculty member to provide focused attention to each piece of work.

"What we're really trying to do is enable a new kind of interaction with Google where it's more like how you interact with a normal person," says Huffman. To illustrate, he picks up his smartphone and says "How far is it from here to Hearst Castle?"

"Helpouts are face-to-face video calls powered by Google+ Hangouts. You can start and join a video call from your computer, Android, iPhone, and iPad devices. The Helpouts platform is different from Hangouts because Helpouts takes care of all of the setup and maintenance associated with delivering your services - from payment, to scheduling, reputation management, and customer acquisition."