Fate and technology have pummeled many professions since 1963, from bookseller to travel agent to auto worker. But teachers have resisted the powerful forces reorganizing industry. The dream of the teacherless classroom has remained just that.

Today the dream has returned. Thanks to broadening Internet access, advances in multimedia and the market potential of millions of historically underserved learners among the developing world’s youth and the rich world’s adults, modern versions of the doughnut building are flowering globally: systems through which chunks of teaching can be “scaled up,” in business jargon, and beamed to hundreds of thousands worldwide.

[Source: New York Times]

Curriki is a community of educators, learners and committed education experts who are working together to create quality materials that will benefit teachers and students around the world.  It includes an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them.

More info…

Leslie Whitaker, a guest blogger for Wired Campus, is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Previously she worked as a reporter for Time magazine.  She reflects on what happened when her class blogged about the Fort Hood shootings.

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education - Wired Campus]

Like iTunes™ for research papers – a free research management tool for desktop & web

Mendeley, a Web service that lets users organize and share research papers, recently announced that it has surpassed 100,000 users, and that its database now includes some 8 million works. The announcement has generated a lot of hype for the fledgling company. Mendeley says it is doubling in size every 10 weeks.

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education - Wired Campus]

Stanford professor Larry Lessig is one of our foremost authorities on copyright issues, with a vision for reconciling creative freedom with marketplace competition.  The Net’s most celebrated lawyer cites John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights and the “ASCAP cartel” in his argument for reviving our creative culture in this TEDTalk.

In this brief, but fast-paced talk, Lessig outlines two cultures – the read-only culture (RO) and the read/write culture (RW). In stating his case, Lessig cites these classic examples from the remix culture:

Jesus Will Survive – Jesus Christ! The Musical

The Bush-Blair Love Song

The new Kindle for PC application is now available for free download. Read over 360,000 Kindle books and get the best reading experience available for your PC – no Kindle required.

Get it now… (for Windows 7, Vista, and XP)

URL shorteners like bit.ly present some profound problems for the health of the web: for one thing, they might vanish if they company that provides them goes bust (for some other things: it exposes your internet browsing to surveillance by random URL-shortening companies; it exposes you to malware and phishing attacks, and so on).

The first problem — URLs can vanish — looks like it may be solved soon. Many URL shortening companies are escrowing their databases of shortened URLs with the Internet Archive, an honorable, established nonprofit. If the companies go bust, their URLs will be redirected to the Archive and thus persist.

via URL shorteners suck less, thanks to the Internet Archive and 301Works – Boing Boing.

Well, it’s not the mythical Google Drive, but it’s close. For a price. And assuming you only want to store pictures and emails.

Google tonight announced that it was drastically slashing prices while at the same time offering more storage pricing options for users of its services. Specifically, while Gmail users currently get about 7 gigabytes for free and Picasa users get about 1 gigabyte for free, both can now upgrade to 20 GB for just $5 a year. Previously, it cost $20 to get just 10 GB of additional service.

But what’s really pretty incredible is that Google has an option for you to buy up to 16 terabytes, yes, terabytes, of storage from them. As Google notes, that enough to store 8 million very high resolution photos. Considering that most consumers probably still have south of 500 gigabytes of storage in their home, that’s pretty massive.

Of course, you’ll pay for it: 16 TB will set you back $4,096 a year. But if you do something that requires you to store 16 TB of photos, you can probably afford that. And there are varying storage levels at different price points leading up to that. 8 TB is $2,048 a year, 4 TB is $1,024, and so forth.

via Google Offers A 16 Terabyte Cloud Drive For $4,096 A Year.

Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.

What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. Whatever the truth, and it’s likely in between, having a robust set of functioning drivers is extremely important to Chrome OS’s success. People will want to download this to whatever computer they use and have it just work.

via Google Chrome OS To Launch Within A Week.