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"Despite the rapid advances in telepresence and distributed working tools, people still brave traffic and go to the office. Business travel is on the rise as people congregate for meetings and conferences. Attendees pay $7,500 for tickets to TED talks when the content is all posted free of charge on their website. And 250 leaders [including John Hagel] will attend Techonomy 2012 in Tucson starting Sunday. Are we just stubborn creatures of habit who are slow to adopt a better solution? Or, is there a fundamental value to the brick-and-mortar, flesh-and-bone world that cannot be replaced?"

Like a superhero, the U.S. Library of Congress has just swooped in and unveiled an enormous new (and free!) resource that's all about the Common Core. It's located at http://www.loc.gov/teachers and worth checking out.

inklewriter is a free online tool that lets you create your own interactive story. Rather than creating a contrived example, click here to try a real story! In this case, "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle"

"Current students who take the free online college courses can earn certificates of completion, but not college credit. However, if MOOCs are determined to be close enough to traditional college courses as to become eligible for academic credit, they could make higher education more affordable and accessible, Ms. Lewin writes."

Firstly, everything is a trade-off. If you think that your message really requires a certain format, you accept the consequences, and that is the case here. I develop the premise that an individual subject matter expert can create a rich, interactive e-textbook that is competitive with commercial offerings, and at such low cost that it can be offered to students for free or at very little cost.

"On Tuesday, San Jose State University announced an unusual pilot project with Udacity, a for-profit provider of the massive open online courses, to jointly create three introductory mathematics classes. The courses will be free online, but students who want credit from San Jose State will be able to take them for just $150, far less than the $450 to $750 that students would typically pay for a credit-bearing course."

Brainstorming and Voting Amazingly Easy. Free Online Tool |

The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal's intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers' computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.

Free Conference for K-20 around world...can submit proposals.

What do you geek? Here you will find resources to follow your interests with free, open courses at major universities. Browse the resources below or check with the reference librarian for library resources.

"There are a multitude of ways that Google Hangouts can make learning more engaging and personalized for students, teachers and administrators. This free web conferencing tool can make a big difference for classrooms by connecting students to people outside of the classroom, and it can make regular communication and collaboration much easier for teachers and administrators."

Colleges following what the company calls the Textbook Zero model would offer a section using open-education alternatives for every required course and elective needed to earn the degree. Lumen is now testing the model with an unnamed community college on the East Coast, and is also looking for colleges interested in applying the model to general-studies and computer-science degrees.

" after two years of development, Mozilla has released Open Badges 1.0, free software that allows for a new way to recognize learning: digital badges."

The prices of traditional textbooks continue to increase, further driving up the cost of Higher Education. CTE's goal is to help save OU students money while delivering highly engaging and pedagogically sound course materials. There are a number of options to supplement or replace high cost textbooks such as free online resources, lower-cost digital books and course packets and downloadable open-access textbooks.

Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education. It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, assessment tools, research, study groups, textbooks, etc.). Open education seeks to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.

"Weavly is a free and easy to use video and music mixing browser app. Use it to show your pupils how to edit videos and give them new means of expression for their assignments!"

A true educational Commons would be a force for reducing academic hierarchy and income inequality. I'm all in favor of that. You say you are too. But is that what you are telling your partners in finance and university administration? Or are you telling them that they can accumulate even more of what they already have-money and prestige-while appearing to be giving it away? I will know my course has been successful when my students understand Coursera's business model behind offering free higher education globally (along with the promise of greater social equality) as an exciting venture capital investment opportunity through which to increase privately-held wealth and lock in existing educational hierarchies.

"While MOOC's have attracted huge attention, and hype, for supporting massive enrollments and for being free its the pedagogical aspects of MOOC's that interest me the most. The challenge is this - How can you effectively teach thousands of students simultaneously? I'm fascinated by the contrast between post-secondary faculty and K-12 teacher contract agreements that limit class size and the current emergent MOOC aim of having as many enrollments as possible. What a dichotomy."

WCC will offer two classes next semester with readings available online for free instead of textbooks with high price tags. The courses - one reading course and one math course - typically have high enrollment and high textbook costs. The offerings are part of the Kaleidoscope Project, a grant-based initiative funded by Next Generation Learning Challenges.

Amherst's Chair of Neuroscience Stephen A. George led the faculty rejection of edX. It wasn't a rejection of online learning or open resources or the idea of making entire courses available for free online that they rejected, he said. "It was just the massive, synchronous MOOC that didn't seem to fit" with the school's mission and identity.