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A year and a half ago, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) released the first 42 of Washington state's 81 high-enrollment courses under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY). Now they have released the remaining 39 under the same terms, which means that anyone, anywhere, including the state's 34 public community and technical colleges and four-year colleges and universities, can use, customize, and distribute the course materials.

"Integrating a complex set of technological tools in delivering a class results in "digital pain" as the professor talks, brings up video, monitors live chat, and performs a number of other tasks simultaneously, often without support. Responding to technical problems experienced by individual students is not possible in real time during the classes. Dr. Matrix does provide extensive one-on-one technical support before and after classes."

ZoomIt is a screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations that include application demonstrations. ZoomIt runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image. I wrote ZoomIt to fit my specific needs and use it in all my presentations. ZoomIt works on all versions of Windows and you can use pen input for ZoomIt drawing on tablet PCs.

THE SCHOOL DISTRICT of Philadelphia is getting into the cyber-school business this fall in an attempt to win back city students who attend cyber-charter schools, which cost the district more per pupil. The Philadelphia Virtual Academy, for kids in grades six through 12, would offer some real-life perks, such as a drop-in center where students can meet up with fellow students as well as a support team for each pupil. Every team includes a teacher and technical specialist.

In October 2011, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges launched the Open Course Library, a collection of high-quality, low-cost educational materials to correspond with the 81 largest-enrollment courses in the state. The first 42 courses are available immediately, and the remaining 39 are slated for development in 2012 and release in 2013. In conjunction with the release of the first 42 courses, the Student PIRGs conducted this informal study to evaluate just how much the Open Course Library could reduce costs for students. Based on a survey of 22 of the program's 42 course authors, all of whom had agreed to adopt the materials in their own teaching, we have preliminary estimates for the impact of these courses.

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.

"I'm delighted that there's some very smart and committed people working on the technical side of the Open Badges ecosystem. For example, yesterday's community call (which unfortunately I couldn't make) resurrected the 'tech panel'. One thing that's really important is to ensure that the *user experience* across the Open Badges ecosystem is unambiguous; people who have earned badges need to know where they're putting them and why. At the moment, we've got three services wrapped up together in badge issuing platforms such as Open Badge Academy:"

For many years, Professor Pollock has actively worked for improving the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in computer science. She has been an active leader at the annual Grace Hopper celebrations of Women in Computing, encouraged her students to have service learning opportunities, and has been active in the development of high school Computer Science curriculum. Her students report that she exhorts them to find ways to use their technical knowledge to make the world a better place.

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants to find out whether the massive open online courses that have proved so popular in advanced and often highly technical fields offer the same promise for remedial and introductory courses."

"One of the most fun and useful things I've been doing lately is automating small processes I do all the time. It took me a while to work up the courage to dive into automation, as it always seemed like a really difficult, technical thing to do, which should be left to programmers."

"But the metric system is another matter. "I don't understand why y'all don't use the metric system" is something I've heard too often. I don't argue with them because there is no technical argument for why we haven't adopted the Système Internationale - our refusal is based on emotion and familiarity."

"We want graduates who can generate content, of course, but they also need some technical skills. And most of the time we can only hire one person. Do you have anyone like that?" "We want liberal-arts graduates who are not digitally challenged," one museum director said."

"The time has come to create privacy tools for normal people with a normal level of technical competence. That is to say, all of us"

"The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) provide the most official data on colleges and universities in the United States. At long last they have started to include data fields for online education (technically distance education, the vast majority of which is online) starting with the preliminary data released through Fall 2012 term. Despite all of the talk about data and measuring online programs, we can only now start to get official information from a central source rather than relying on surveys or institutional data."

Ken Grant is known as the "Godfather of Delaware Social Media" - or, in his words, the First State's "Designated Pot Stirrer." "I feed off the energy of crowds."

The University of Delaware hopes to bring professors together and improve classroom technology at the same time.

Rep. Hans Zeiger wants to cap it at $100 per book. He introduced House Bill 1958, which would restrict professors from requiring books above that amount unless no comparable lower-cost material is available. The bill would apply to community and technical colleges as well as four-year state universities.

"Courses will be available in "power skills" (e.g. communication), "technical skills" (e.g. IT) and career-advancement skills" (e.g. negotiation). Learners pay $50, $100 or $150 for courses and, upon completion of an assessment, receive printable certificates or digital badges."

"One way of defining these workplace skills is to consider what employers actually ask for in job postings. Based on Burning Glass Technologies' analysis of millions of job postings, one in every three skills cited in job ads is a "baseline" skill - that is, skills that aren't specific to any particular kind of job but rather that are requested by employers across the board. (Most of these are soft skills, though the analysis also includes skills like Microsoft Office that are so common as to be considered core to employability in the modern workplace.) A worker who has these in addition to technical skills is going to be welcome anywhere."

"You'll hear a reasonable amount of discussion about "new traditional" students today. But the common assumption - in Washington at least - seems to be that they require more vocational education to fill a "skills gap," particularly in STEM or technical fields. Or that they need quicker, cheaper paths to a degree."