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"The Live Lingua Project is part of our commitment to helping as many people as possible learn a foreign language, even if they can't afford our paid Skype language lessons. Part of the earnings of Live Lingua go to hosting, maintaining and constantly updating this area. This project is the internet's largest collection of free public domain language learning materials. It hosts thousands of free ebooks, audios and videos for over 130 languages from around the world. One of our missions is to make language learning accessible to everybody. Enjoy."

"Machine translation is leaps and bounds faster and more effective than my old dictionary method, but it still falls short in accuracy, functionality and delivery. That won't be the case for long. A decade from now, I would predict, everyone reading this article will be able to converse in dozens of foreign languages, eliminating the very concept of a language barrier."

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.

Grammar Girl provides short, friendly tips to improve your writing. Covering the grammar rules and word choice guidelines that can confound even the best writers, Grammar Girl makes complex grammar questions simple with memory tricks to help you recall and apply those troublesome grammar rules. Whether English is your first language or second language, Grammar Girl's punctuation, style, and business tips will make you a better and more successful writer. Mignon Fogarty is the creator and host of Grammar Girl. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.

"For example, there's a lot of overlap in the processes of reading and the processes used for understanding speech - processes that assign syntactic roles to words. Do we see any evidence that people are having a harder time understanding spoken language? Or does the problem lie in the mental processes that build understanding of larger blocks of language, as when we're comprehending a story? If so, habitual Web users should have a hard time understanding complex narratives not just when they read, but in television and movies. No one should have watched The Sopranos, with its complicated, interweaving plotlines."

"Speaking of companies. Interestingly, language learning companies like Rosetta Stone, Alliance Française and Lingo Live are among the first adopters. So is MOOC behemoth Coursera offering a mix of free and paid tutoring sessions for its Machine Learning course. Notably there is a big group of language tutoring both from companies and private tutors in the Education & Career category, showing that this is still the easiest subject to bring online. Prices range from free over $5 to up to $25 per 30 minute session. Nevertheless other popular subjects like math are also widely offered. As Google Helpouts are built upon Google Hangouts features like screen sharing and document sharing, they also enable tutors to also teach topics that need more interaction or visual support."

"in higher education, we do not have a common language to discuss the value of a college credit. At an event hosted by Jobs for the Future and Higher Education Advocates,called Paving New Pathways: Today's Students, New Credentials, and the Next HEA, I noticed a recurring theme: There is a serious issue with college credit transfer policies across postsecondary education. Courses that count for credit at one institution do not "translate" to another. This issue has real consequences on student success and degree completions."

"What those parents likely don't realize is that the same neural mechanisms that make kids sponges for Mandarin likely also make them highly receptive to computer languages. Kindergartners cannot become C++ ninjas, but they can certainly start to develop the skills that will eventually cement lifelong fluency in code."

"First of all, blogging is writing, 21st-century style, plain and simple. Blogging constitutes a massive genre.  It comes in many forms, addresses myriad topics, and can certainly range in quality. For my money (which usually means free), blogging provides the best venue for teaching student writing. As bloggers, young people develop crucial skills with language, tone their critical thinking muscles, and come to understand their relationship to the world."

"ISOTYPE, the vintage visual language pioneered by Austrian sociologist, philosopher and curator Otto Neurath and his wife Marie in the 1930s, shaped modern information graphics and visual storytelling. America and Britain: Three Volumes in One, also known as Only an Ocean Between, is a wonderful 1946 out-of-print book by P. Sargant Florence and Lella Secor Florence from the golden age of ISOTYPE, kindly digitized by Michael Stoll, presenting a series of minimalist infographics that compare and contrast various aspects of life in Britain and the United States, a-la Paris vs. New York."

A shift from traditional textbooks to e-books is gaining speed in Utah, as the state Office of Education coordinates efforts to develop digital texts in science, math and language arts. At least two state math texts are already available and the first of the science texts will be released this summer. The state texts will be open source, meaning anyone or any school in the state may use them for free.

A good rule of thumb is if it's boring to write, then it's probably boring to read. The reason is that your enthusiasm for the subject is reflected in your treatment of the subject. If it's a subject you are passionate about, it is only natural that you lavish attention on the details and spend that extra time fussing over the language. So how do you take a hum-drum post and make it awesome?

Phillip Penix-Tadsen, assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures at the University of Delaware, is reaching his students at new levels inside and outside the classroom. The spring 2012 semester was the first time Penix-Tadsen required the use of Facebook Groups by all his students to increase engagement and participation.

"With all of the new technologies that are surrounding us, and to the many school administrators that are not feeling comfortable with Twitter, Facebook, etc., I would like to suggest three ways (as opposed to the typical round number of 10) that you can focus on your own professional development over the summer. Less is oftentimes more in the digital world as we move from simply being "literate" to "fluent" in this language. "

Two teachers and a few students at Monday's school board meeting questioned the decision, noting the other services provided by Google - such as Google Docs - in some classrooms. One student involved with the National Honor Society said his club uses Google's Gmail to communicate with one another. One teacher said her students use Google Docs to prepare essays. The program, she said, offers students a chance to review each other's papers and she can view students' projects from her computer as they are working on them. "My kids love this," said Laurie Davidson, a seventh-grade language arts teacher.

"We will begin from the first layer of the web infrastructure: the Operating System, with around 60% of the web servers running Linux (without counting other open source derivatives like BSDs and Open Solaris) against 27% of Windows Servers. Moving one step up to the second layer: the web servers, considered to be the key element of the Internet infrastructure, we can notice a 60% market share for the open source Apache web server in 2011, leaving only 20% for Microsoft IIS. If we count up other open source servers, namely nginx and lighttpd, we will see that open source dominate more than 68.3% of all web servers. The last piece of the web infrastructure is the server-side programing language with a stoning 75% market share for PHP, on the other hand, Microsoft ASP.Net is facing a decaying 23.1% share."

"What are the true benefits of personal branding? How is it done? This presentation presents a complete guide to personal branding, from A to Z. Learn the language of personal branding in this concise ..."

"How does knowledge grow? Sometimes it begins with one insight and grows into many branches; other times it grows as a complex and interconnected network. Infographics expert Manuel Lima explores the thousand-year history of mapping data - from languages to dynasties - using trees and networks of information. It's a fascinating history of visualizations, and a look into humanity's urge to map what we know."

"The Federal Government currently invests billions of taxpayer dollars each year in programs that include the creation of educational, training, and instructional materials through grants, contracts, and other cooperative agreements. This investment produces educational resources ranging from innovative curricular resources to workforce training materials to English language learning tools. While these materials are created for the public good, they are generally not open to the members of the public who paid for them. At a time when educational opportunity, workforce development and access to knowledge are critical to America's future, these valuable publicly-funded resources should be openly available to students, teachers, businesses, workers and the public to use in new and innovative ways."

"The curb-cut principle is the idea that some accommodations intended for specific audiences provide benefits to others as well. For example, sidewalk curb cuts for wheelchair users are also beneficial for bicycles, shopping carts, and strollers. This same principle applies to digital accommodations. It can be very helpful to identify some accessibility fixes that are likely to have a greater impact than others. For example, captions are essential for students who are deaf or hard of hearing but are also beneficial to second-language learners or anyone in a noisy environment."