Both YouTube and iTunes U are serving up huge quantities of educational content to a world already in the throes of a 50 year revolution in global education. In some ways they represent exactly the kind of education that a new world needs, too: learning that augments existing education and fosters life-long development of non-routine analytical and interactive skills. That's a recipe for good times.

Global Transformation

"During the past 50 years, the expansion of education has contributed to a fundamental transformation of societies in OECD countries," wrote the authors of this year's lengthy report Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators. (500 page PDF, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)

"In 1961, higher education was the privilege of the few, and even upper secondary education was denied to the majority of young people in many countries. Today, the great majority of the population completes secondary education, one in three young adults has a tertiary degree [Colleges, universities and polytechnics] and, in some countries, half of the population could soon hold a tertiary degree."

In other words, it's not an uneducated world gaining its first access to the information available in these free online education repositories. What's happening is augmentation of already historic global education levels.

Below: The United States used to be the most educated society in the world. That's no longer true. Click to view full size. From the OECD.

"Half a century ago, employers in the United States and Canada recruited their workforce from a pool of young adults, most of whom had high school diplomas and one in four of whom had degrees - far more than in most European and Asian countries," reports the OECD. "Today, while North American graduation rates have increased, those of some other countries have done so much faster, to the extent that the United States now shows just over the average proportion of tertiary-level graduates at age 25-34."

"First, each country has its own different processes and standards for accrediting completion of secondary or tertiary education. Second, the knowledge and skills acquired in education are by no means identical to those that enhance economic potential. And third, it has become increasingly evident that to realise human potential in today's societies and economies, lifelong learning is required, not just an initial period of formal schooling." (emphasis added)

That lifelong learning no doubt contributes to the global audience that amasses around this educational content online. For a high school teacher to be able to give their lectures not to 30 students at a time, but to 100,000 viewers around the world on YouTube has got to be a powerful opportunity. If many of those viewers are adults, so be it.

According to a presentation (10 page PDF) by Francesc Pedró, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Research and Information, OECD, the last 50 years have seen a dramatic change in the types of skills in demand in the workforce. A trend began, at least in the United states, as far back as 1985: demand for "routine manual skills" has held relatively steady, demand for non-routine manual skills has plummeted. Demand for routine cognitive skills climbed through 1970, then fell. What's hot? Non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive skills.

Those are things that a good YouTube or iTunes U video about world history or global ecology can help improve, your non-routine analytic and interactive skills. More than for just economic well-being, those are skills that positively impact quality of life in many ways.

Disruption

"A new phase of education change awaits the world, for those who embrace it," writes radical Canadian educator Joe Bower in a summary of last month's 2012 International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) in Malmö, Sweden.

A central message of the 25th ICSEI conference was that change brings challenge but also opportunity, with the need to find new means of collaboration, participation and networking to reshape education for the shifting demands ahead. A whole range of papers and presentations from 450 delegates from over 50 countries set an optimistic tone, with strong commonality in themes of respect, trust, new power relations and moving to evaluation as joint enterprise. In presentations from Iceland to Malaysia there were common threads of renewing teacher professionalism, establishing change via collaborative networks, and emphasizing systems perspectives through linkage and understanding, rather than prescription and grading...

"The central message of ICSEI 2012 was of strong common issues facing schools and their communities in far separated contexts, with global similarities in connecting responses. A few countries stood out in stark contrast, chastising schools and denigrating teachers, seeing change not as opportunity for partners in prospect, refashioning and renewing learning, but as a threat to be sanctioned in audit prescription. But whilst those systems are shrill and close at hand, a more pervasive and positive way forward was signposted in Malmö to a new responsible professionalism, embracing complexity and change, more loosely configured in uncertainty yet promise."

Good luck, teachers of the world, keeping up with the Internet. It's great to hear that so many are embracing change, surely caused by technology, as an opportunity and not a threat.

That's the kind of life-long learning that professional development has always required but that will go on in a global context for perpetual learning with increasing access to high-quality educational content online.

That's a recipe for a very different world than the one we lived in last century.

Emil Protalinski has a much more thorough analysis of what is happening, which includes the Pew Research report AP used, as well as a July 2011 Pew report that focused solely on teens and social media use. His conclusion? Teens are definitely using Twitter more, but they are not giving up their Facebook accounts to do so.

The AP report seemed aimed at the myth that younger users found Twitter "uncool" and less protective of their privacy. AP draws some solid conclusions on why teens may be using Twitter more than they once did: unlike Facebook, Twitter allows them to set up multiple accounts and they can do so anonymously. There's also rising evidence that teens like to use Twitter with a smaller, select group of friends while keeping Facebook as a more public profile for a wider group of friends and family members.

But score a big swing-and-a-miss for the assertion that teens are "shifting to Twitter" included in the AP report. Like a lot of us, teens, including at least one of the two teens AP quoted in its story, maintain multiple social media accounts on multiple social media platforms.

Anecdotally, I can't speak for teens, but as a part-time college writing and journalism instructor, I can say Twitter has been the best crossover platform for me when it comes to connecting with students in their late teens and early twenties. There's a growing body of evidence suggesting that social media in the classroom can increase student engagement, so I've been experimenting with different ways to do just that over the course of the past year.

For many students and faculty, there remains a creep factor for friending on Facebook. I also know of a handful of students who have been in abusive relationships and have either been advised to shut down their Facebook accounts or limit the number of friends they have while amping up their privacy settings.

I tried using Google+ in one of my classes last fall but ran into problems when a couple of 17-year-old freshmen couldn't register for the site (Google has since changed the policy and opened Google+ up to teens). Google+ was still relatively new at the time, so there was a lot of class time wasted in getting students up to speed with its many features.

While not all students love using Twitter, it is workable in most situations. Roughly half of my students have Twitter accounts before they enroll in my class, and for those that don't, its a simple enough platform that I don't have to spend loads of time demonstrating the basics in class. Students who are truly worried about their professor creeping on their Twitter feed can easily and quickly set up a new one (which is something I recommend they do).

Today, the company set their sights on textbooks, an industry Steve Jobs himself described as being "ripe for digital destruction." True as that may be, is what Apple planning to do in the space really all that disruptive?

If the company's efforts are going to help revolutionize textbooks and education, it's going to be some time before that happens, and they're not going to do it alone.

Costly and Not Cross-Platform

Apple released the second version of its iBooks app for iOS today, which includes access to the new textbook titles. One thing the company did not announce is that the app is coming to other platforms. Granted, the iPad is still the leader of the tablet market, but Android is slowly catching up and Amazon just released a device geared toward content consumption that costs less than half of the entry level iPad. And it's growing fast.

Of course, Apple ultimately wants to sell more of its hardware, but if it really wants its textbook initiative to truly take off, it will have to develop apps for other platforms, just as Amazon has done with its Kindle apps.

Another barrier to widespread adoption of this model is the cost of the iPad. It starts at $500, which is not something every American family can afford, especially with an economy in flux. With hundreds of "pages" of content, 3D interactive graphics, embedded video and other bells and whistles, we have to imagine these books aren't particularly light on file size. As the books accumulate over time, alongside other content stored on the iPad, the 16 GB entry level model may no longer cut it, making it an even more expensive investment.

Not Aimed at the College Market (and Did We Mention the iPad is Expensive?)

The cost issue might be mitigated somewhat if the initiative were not targeted exclusively at high school students.

At least for the time being, Apple's digital textbooks are targeted primarily at high school students. That fact alone presents a few roadblocks to the initiative being truly disruptive. For one, not every high school student in the United States can afford a $500 tablet device. Apple may well end up dropping the price when they launch the iPad 3 in a few weeks, but even then we're probably still talking about a several-hundred-dollar gadget. Many middle and upper class families can afford that, but kids in inner city schools and other low-income areas, some of which can barely afford enough paper textbooks, aren't going to be learning from iPads anytime soon.

For college students, investing in an iPad or similar device to replace textbooks makes simple economic sense. A single semester's worth of textbooks can easily approach the cost of an iPad. If the e-books available on the device are drastically less expensive than their paper counterparts, it would be foolish not to make the digital switch. Of course, how dramatically prices would drop remains to be seen.

Apple is Partnering With Big Publishers, Not Killing Them

College textbooks are enormously, obscenely profitable for the the companies that print them. In fact, they've come up with all kinds of creative ways of milking more money out of students. Textbooks about ancient history will be revised and re-issued every other semester and the company will package supplementary CD-ROM's and other digital learning materials, using them as a justification to jack up the price.

To get its new initiative off the ground, Apple is partnering with major publishers like McGraw Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. For the high school market, perhaps those companies can afford to agree to a $15-per-book price tag. But when it comes to higher education, publishers are unlikely to allow a $180 biology print textbook be replaced with a $15 e-book. That would cut into their profits pretty dramatically. At the same time, interactive e-textbooks can't be resold once they're used, so perhaps the publishers can be convinced that their e-book revenues will be replenished on a semesterly basis without fail.

Interestingly, at the same time that Apple has unveiled major partnerships with textbooks publishers, it also unleashed what appears to be a powerful, easy-to-use publishing toolkit for producing those books. If independent authors manage to create enough competition, it's possible that bigger publishers will have no choice but to play ball with Apple's preferred pricing for textbooks.

Apple's Not the Only Player

There's little reason to doubt that a decade from now, the classroom and the tools in it will look very different from what students are accustomed to today. The textbook is indeed one of the educational tools that is most in need of a digital makeover. When paper textbooks are finally a thing of the past, it won't have been Apple's efforts alone that got us there.

For one, education is already being blown wide open by the Web. The mere concepts of "the lecture" and "the textbook" begin to look antiquated in light of things like Khan Academy, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, iTunes U and MIT's Open Courseware.

Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg. You'd be hard-pressed to find a student in the U.S. today that isn't already using the Internet to supplement their educational experience to some extent. Apple is well aware of the changes that are already underway. That's why they're doing this. That's why their DIY publishing tools include the ability pull in pieces of the Web and incorporate HTML5 and JavaScript.

Apple is also not the first company to try to re-imagine the textbook for a digital world. The so-called "smartbooks" offered by e-textbook startup Inking are in some ways more advanced than what Apple is bringing to the table. Other companies already active in this space include Chegg and Kno, as Audrey Watters points out on Hack Education.

Indeed, Apple is anything but the first entrant into this space. Not that that's stopped them in the past.

Lead textbook photo by Stephen Cummings. Phil Schiller photo courtesy of The Verge.

Apple's new digital textbooks will be available through the iBookstore and will feature much more rich and interactive components than their existing, consumer-focused e-books. In a demo at today's press event in New York City, the company demoed a science textbook complete with video, rich graphics, multitouch support and thumbnail-based navigation.

To bring this new initiative to market, Apple partnered with textbook publishers Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Initially, the textbooks will largely be geared toward high school students, but it sounds like there are plans to expand to other levels of education in time.

Fulfilling Steve Jobs' Vision

In his official biography of Apple's late cofounder, Walter Isaacson revealed that in addition to television and photography, one industry Steve Jobs was hoping to revolutionize next was textbooks, which he saw as being "ripe for digital destruction."

Today's demonstration very much echoed Jobs' vision for textbooks, which he saw as cumbersome, heavy and slow to update. By contrast, the iPad is portable, interactive and of course quite easy to update with new information.

To that end, Apple is rolling out a new application for the Mac that enables authors to easily build interactive textbooks using a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG interface. iBooks Author for OS X supports everything from simple text to interactive graphics and allows authors to weave the Web into their publications using JavaScript and HTML5 add-ons.

Apple also unveiled a new iTunes U app, which gives teachers more digital tools to stay organized and communicate with their students.

This is not an all together shocking direction for Apple to move into, considering its somewhat recent foray into e-books with iBooks and how the iPad is already being used for educational purposes. That the tablet form factor makes for a potentially excellent educational tool is not at all a new concept, and it's one that Apple has already been using to help sell the iPad pretty much since day one.

See Also: Why Apple Won't Disrupt the Textbook Industry Anytime Soon

Exactly what they'll unveil tomorrow isn't yet known, but some hints and leaks have started to paint the picture. That the event is centered around education is no mystery, as the official press invite wasn't shy about making that point. As for which area of education is set to be targeted by Apple, all available evidence points to the textbook.

Just as Apple has entered the market for digital music and, more recently, consumer-focused e-books, it appears set to put a digital, interactive spin on the textbook. The company's plans are said to revolve not just around distribution of digital textbooks, but also around their creation. According to Ars Technica, Apple will unveil a platform for producing digital textbooks for iOS, quite possibly in manner simple enough to warrant it being nicknamed the "Garage Band for e-books". The effort is reportedly headed up by Roger Roser, a VP best known for his work on the iWork productivity suite.

It's not a terribly surprising direction for Apple to move into, considering its recent forays into e-books and how the iPad is already being used for educational purposes. This is an angle Apple is already using to market the device.

Even outside of schools, one of the biggest takeaways about the tablet revolution in general is that it's dramatically changing how and when people read. If that's true among consumers and working professionals, imagine the implications the tablet will have for education. Indeed, some expect that tablets will outnumber desktop computers in schools within a few years.

The confirmed details are few and far between at this point, but rest assured that ReadWriteWeb will bring you latest news and analysis about Apple's announcement tomorrow morning.

The iPhone and iPad tablet manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million human beings around the world. (They produce other electronics as well.) The company said last month that it plans to cut that number in half with the enlistment of 1 million new robot workers, a 100X increase in its robot workforce, over the next 3 to 5 years. "An empire of robots," the company says. Human workers? They will move up the value chain, the company says. How might that actually happen? People say that education is undervalued, what if robots saved us from that?

A cynical, apocalyptic view of that plan to build "an empire of robots" is easy to imagine. If Foxconn builds 1 million robot workers, that will likely double the number of robot workers on the planet today. I want to consider a potential upside to all this; with regard to human freedom, creativity and opportunities for innovation in learning systems and technology.

But the robotization of the workforce does have clear risks. Enterprise 2.0 forefather Andrew McAfee is the co-author of a new book called Race Against the Machine. He put it this way in an interview with Steven Cherry at IEEE Spectrum earlier this month:

..it is possible for some people to be left behind, even as productivity surges ahead and even as our society as a whole benefits. There is no economic law that says that everyone has to share in those benefits equally, and when we looked around we started to see a lot of people--and particularly a lot of workers in the economy, people who wanted to offer their labor to the economy--we saw a lot of people being left behind as the machine races ahead.

McAfee is concerned that this could lead to a violation of the social contract and widespread social unrest. On some level, this definitely makes sense. The situation may be vastly understated and need of more human compassion. McAfee:

"...the social contract has been something like, If you are willing to work, there will be a job waiting for you. And we've done a fairly good job with that social contract, not a perfect job obviously, but pretty good. When I hear a lot of the protesters talk, I get the impression that they believe that social contract is fraying. When we looked at the data, we came to the same conclusion.

What does that mean in an era where there is less and less demand for unskilled labor, though?

Maybe We Can Make Some Great Lemonade

Whether due to robots or due to an increasingly competitive and complex world, it seems apparent that there is a growing imperative for human workers to move up the value chain - to develop and more widely distribute the skills to perform more skilled, creative work.

That's not good news for humans.

Parents have been telling their children for years now that computers are going to change the world and young people need to develop skills to offer in the marketplace.

It may soon come to the point, if it hasn't already, where the supply of and demand for skilled labor become imbalanced enough that the market value of skill building shoots through the roof.

Human Capital Acquisition and Management, otherwise known as training people and keeping track of the skills available in your organization, is an increasingly potent field.

I can't stop thinking about SAP's acquisition of Human Capital Management firm SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion this month. That ten year old company is one of many firms focused on building, retaining, optimizing and managing skills in the workforce.

If an empire of robots eliminates a substantial amount of the demand for unskilled human labor, that may mean that both companies and individuals have a strong economic incentive in moving people from low-level jobs where they have to be told exactly what to do and how to do it, into higher-functioning roles at work where they can be told simply what needs to be accomplished, then be capable of accomplishing it in whatever ways make the most sense.

Systems that help optimize that learning process would then confer a powerful competitive advantage. Successfactors is huge. Rypple, a small player in the same market, was just acquired by Salesforce, which says it is now building out a new product suite in Human Capital Management called SuccessForce. WorkDay has an IPO pending; analyst Josh Bresin calls its software "amazing".

That sounds to me like a world in which humans get to learn new skills as fast as competitive cloud services can train them on those skills. Then they can act as creatively and intelligently as they can, having been empowered with new forms of Human Capital.

Including work in creative use of cloud services and robots. Have you seen the new social network for robots, MyRobots.com, for example? Rather than worry about having robots and machines doing the things we used to do, why not focus on learning how to work with the robot and machine cloud layer of data and functionality?

The ability to move from being told explicitly what to do into a role where you're told generally what needs to get done is not just an economic change - it's a change of conditions for the human spirit.

There are certainly equity, justice, privacy and other issues that need to be figured out. But it's not all bad news - far from it.

If robot workers can in fact be treated as tools for a human workforce that is effectively moved up the value chain, using services from an increasingly competitive Human Capital Management sector to make that shift, then I think the end result is win-win. Less unskilled labor, more support for better systems for teaching and learning. More fruit of skilled labor in the future.

Will it work that way? We'll see. That seems a possible trajectory for the future.

Photo: Menace From The Land Before Color, by JD Hancock

While traditional schools struggle to fit the bill, the internet is finally rising the the occasion. Startups like Treehouse, CodeAcademy, Lynda.com and of course Khan Academy are capturing the imagination of learners around the world, of all ages. Can these sites give traditional education the "Wikipedia vs. the encyclopedia" treatment? Why are these new websites aimed at teaching new skills so hot right now? A discussion of those questions leaves me feeling very optimistic, for the future of humanity even.

The phrase human capital might seem cold and unappealing, but when you think of capital as something with the capacity to create economic value, then having some becomes important for anyone who can get it. The future may be characterized by the big gap between the quality of life of a relatively small population of highly skilled workers and a much larger population of unskilled workers. There certainly can be dignity and value in unskilled or semi-skilled labor, but I'm guessing that most readers here are people interested in the world of skilled or highly skilled work.

I remember first reading about Human Capital Management years ago when people were writing about the huge waves of baby boomers about to retire. What could be done to retain the incredible body of business knowledge they had amassed after they leave the workforce?

I'm not sure how well that human capital was maintained, but the paradigm seems to have become even hotter in recent years. Looking at the economic outcomes of some recent companies in this sector should make anyone sit up and pay attention: SAP acquired talent management service SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion in cash this month. Jason Corsello, of talent management company Cornerstone OnDemand, once called SuccessFactors "not only the hottest vendor in the HCM (Human Capital Management) space but in the entire enterprise software sector."

Then last week HR and performance management feedback loop web app Rypple got acquired by Salesforce. Now business services provider in the cloud WorkDay is reportedly planning a very big IPO.

As computing gets faster, lighter, more mobile and more powerful, optimization of precious human resources to leverage it is becoming an increasingly imperative and potent opportunity for software and services to focus on.

"The total US training market is massive, it's a $125 billion market and it's moving online fast," says Tom Turnbull of training marketplace OpenSesame. His startup aggregates training content from more than 100 providers with 10,000 different courses. "We're creating Amazon.com for courses," Turnbull says. "And many of the content creators are individuals who didn't previously have access to the corporate market. It's also a chance to make education more affordable and broadly available."

Enter the DIY Web Apps

How does the individual relate to this? As Napoleon Dynamite said 7 years ago, "Nunchaku skills... bowhunting skills... computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills!"

Where are you going to get those great skills?

Treehouse is a subscription site where you can view videos about and acquire skills in web and mobile application design and development. Founder Ryan Carson says a number of factors have contributed to his startup's rapid early growth:

"Huge numbers of people are switching careers because they got laid off or their business failed. Professionals in other industries are realizing they need to learn how to design/build web sites or iOS apps. There is a massive global swell in the desire to learn Web Design, Dev and iOS. Movies like the Social Network have popularized the idea of creating tech startups.

"We take people from knowing nothing to being able to launch a site or app. There really isn't any other service that holds your hand and guides you through that entire process.

"We're hoping to help people land jobs after they finish a certain number of Badges. We've partnered with Facebook, Living Social, WordPress and more to help them start recruiting Treehouse Members."

Self-Actualization as a Service

It's not just about amassing human capital to maximize your employability or workplace effectiveness. Another set of startups is emerging that is focused on skill building and life change outside of work. Startups like DailyPath, MightyBell and Obvious Corp-backed Lift could be described as instrumenting self-actualization through social software.

Whether at work or in life, there is a continuum of skill levels that we all can be understood within; you could say it goes from "low task," in which people must be told what to do and how to do it, to "high task" circumstances in which people are capable of being given a general direction and then figuring it out on their own. We probably all sit in different places in that continuum in different circumstances in our lives. (I got to thinking about this after listening to this brain-exploding podcast interview from SuccessFactors with Marc Demerest, CEO and Principal of Noumenal Inc., titled Leading knowledge intensive organizations under duress.)

These kinds of web applications could be understood as helping people move up that continuum towards higher level functioning in life and work. The independence, confidence, power and freedom that come from that represent some of the best things the web could possibly offer us.

With so much business and personal potential, learning services like this are only going to grow in number and sophistication. When there's a crowded market looking to serve a world hungry for these kinds of technologies, then all the startups will have to continually improve in order to compete with each other.

That sounds like reason enough to feel very optimistic about the future, for the growing number of people with the access and time needed to take advantage of these rapidly expanding opportunities.

Illustration titled "Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot" by Flickr user Mike Licht

Network administrators can turn on YouTube for Schools to give school computers access to the vast library of YouTube EDU content from partners such as the Smithsonian and TED. The content is organized into topical and grade-level playlists. You can view the lists at youtube.com/teachers.

YouTube for Schools allows unfettered access to educational videos without any of the YouTube stuff that's inappropriate for school. Schools can customize their YouTube portals with playlists and topics tailored to their curricula. And teachers can find videos arranged by topic and grade level to help them formulate lesson plans.

In 2010, Google's launch of encrypted search ran afoul of school network administrators by clashing with the Children's Internet Protection Act, a federal law that would have required schools to block Google. Google had to move encrypted search to a new, separate domain to fix the problem. With this specialized version of YouTube, it looks like Google has figured out how to better serve the needs of schools.

YouTube has run some interesting educational promotions this year, such as a contest to perform your science experiment live from space.

Read more about YouTube for Schools on the YouTube blog.

Do you think YouTube is a good educational resource?

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), a project co-led by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, today took the next step towards submitting its specification to Schema.org, the collaboration between Google, Yahoo and Bing that maps out 100 different types of content online in a standardized format.

Active participants working to figure out how to construct LRMI and how to integrate it into Schema.org include people from small non-profits like open curriculum community Curriki, corporate education technology giant Pearson, international information standards group Dublin Core and intellectual property law group Creative Commons, among others.

Participants debate on the official mailing list over new terminology, balancing concerns like coherence with Schema.org, ease of input by people who will enter metadata to go with resources being published online and specificity gained or lost by the way that metadata fields are named and framed.

While some semantic technologies are able to assert categorization from the top down, whether content publishers participate or not, it seems likely that the kind of data that will be communicated in LRMI will require informed participation by the producers of the content themselves. Requiring participation in categorization could pose a challenge to hopes the spec will gain meaningful adoption.

The LRMI effort doesn't seem well-known yet outside its own ranks, either; the official website has almost no inbound links indexed by Google yet and none of the education technology blogs we track here at ReadWriteWeb have mentioned LRMI yet. The project was just announced last month though and in the education market, a month isn't a very long time.

LRMI isn't alone though, either. Nathan Angell, a Board Director at the collaborative open education software community Sakai Foundation and a Product Manager at rSmart, calls LRMI "another welcome intervention in growing list of data specifications for education."

"These days we have access to an unbelievable number of learning resources--both open and proprietary--but it's still hard to find the right ones, quality resources, suited to your needs, when you need them.

"For example, in the Sakai community, we have built a new platform--the Open Academic Environment--that helps people create and tag learning materials, and most importantly, share them openly by default.

"With the LRMI specification, we can help people tag their materials with exactly the right information that will make them easy for others to find and use...and even better, we can augment the suggested content widgets we already have in place to discover resources in the moment that match the very specific needs of a particular educator or student."

Angell, who isn't associated with LRMI in particular, sees data specifications like this as potential game changers. Those suggested content widgets are really shorthand for computation that can begin at a higher level of abstraction if the hard work of content categorization and description has already been done in a standardized way. That means education technology providers, search engines and others don't have to invest time and energy into understanding educational resources online - they can begin with a pre-existing understanding of that content and then offer higher-level features and services on top of already-organized information.

"LRMI helps set the stage for the hive mind that will help our children's children learn faster and better than we ever thought possible," Angel says. "In comparison, school today will look like drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick."

A system proposed earlier this year by the Mozilla Foundation will be the basis of a global competition. As much as $2 million in grants from Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation will be awarded to interested parties, in amounts ranging up to $200,000 apiece, who can propose a technical infrastructure and/or physical appearance for what Mozilla describes as a standard system of verified icons for representing individuals' Web developmental skills.

The picture Mozilla paints for us is of a diverse environment of educational providers including online courses and after-school programs, which would be authorized to provide icon-like badges to individuals based on criteria they decide. Those badges could then be displayed on Facebook pages, on Web sites (like the mockup created by Mozilla above), and in resumes.

As a Mozilla spokesperson told RWW this afternoon, "the badge itself is more than a static image or button. Its value comes from the information or metadata attached to it." The plan is for the metadata for the badge file to contain the name and authentication of its issuing party, the date of issue, the way the badge was earned, and links to URIs that describe the works leading up to the badge being earned. There will be, the spokesperson said, an "implicit validation system" that reduces the chances of anyone counterfeiting or illicitly using a badge or something that looks like a badge.

But it's this system, among other components, that will be the subject of Mozilla's and MacArthur's Digital Media+ Learning Competition. For Stage 2 of the competition, applications will be accepted between December 12 and January 12, for grants ranging from $10,000 to $200,000. "Fully developed badge systems will include a badge or set of badges, assessments and the technology required to issue, track, and measure performance," read the contest specifications.

OpenPrep supplements those courses with open Web resources like Wikipedia articles, Khan Academy tutorials, YouTube videos and more, all pulled in by algorithms tuned to find the most relevant content for your course of study.

"YouTube and Wikipedia are knowledge warehouses, which rival the greatest libraries ever built yet they lack the structure and curriculum required to master a subject," says BenchPrep CEO Ashish Rangnekar. "Our goal is to help students tap into this open knowledge base in an intuitive, convenient and engaging way while maintaining the academic structure of a course."

OpenPrep accomplishes this by using topic detection and ranking algorithms to analyze the test prep material and draw in relevant material from these free Web resources using their APIs. Additional resources from Wolfram Alpha, Pearson, Associated Press and more are coming soon.

Rangnekar says that BenchPrep students have already begun to take advantage of these new open Web options, tweeting and sharing YouTube videos to their friends from within the BenchPrep applications. Social learning is an integral part of BenchPrep's courses, but the new OpenPrep features let students share what they learn with friends outside their courses.

BenchPrep's cross-platform test prep tools are now enhanced by some of the vastest libraries of knowledge available on the Web. Check out some of our past coverage of how educational publishers are adapting to the networks and form factors of the future.

Also check out this study we covered yesterday about how users' love of interactivity and control has made tablets a better way to read and learn.

How do you think social Web technologies in education can supplement face-to-face learning?

Newark Mayor Cory Booker announced the grants on his Facebook page this morning, signaling what the city hopes is beginning of a long-running process to build a Web tech presence, and improve teaching into the city's school system.

Newark is one of many urban centers plagued by high dropout rates, but peppered with promising charter school networks and education upstarts that are trying to fix the problem.

Companies that make mobile apps, social networks dedicated just to teachers and students, as well as live video teaching platforms are just a few of the thousands of startup ideas being incubated by venture capitalists or fueled by angel investors.

Facebook image comes from Douglas Crets' news feed

The bid for Connections, which has been growing at 30% year-over-year, shows that online learning is being driven by the private sector.

Connection Education's online learning business, Connections Academy, serves 40,000 students in 21 states. The acquisition will also make for more competition and put pressure on Connections' biggest rival, K12, to innovate and grow. K12 Inc. considering buying Connections at one point.

Education watchers say that the private enterprise push for K12 education that blends online learning with a traditional classroom approach is going to become the trend for growth. Typically, it has been small, non-profit charter school operators that have pushed online learning efforts.

The infographic mixes analyst projections about future digital content trends with current usage data, as well as opinions from educators. Its point is that the old one-size-fits-all education model is not as well suited to growing up in the Web age as the custom fit that new technology allows. Yesterday, we wrote about new tools for enhancing lifelong education with Web technologies. This infographic describes the trends behind these developments.

What do you think of these trends? Let us know in the comments.

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

The app is also available on Android and the Web, but the previous iOS version required students to work on the device for which a course was purchased. Today's update will sync work across all devices, including test answers and performance as well as notes and other student-created content. Work done offline will sync as soon as the device is connected again.

BenchPress CEO Ashish Rangnekar says social features are part of the company's educational philosophy. "Social learning," as Rangenkar frames it, means using data from student activity to form online study groups, matching students based on their work styles and enabling students to share notes, flash cards or other prep materials. Printed materials and conventional e-books, he says, are "very static. There is no interaction. There is no feedback, there is no analytics, and these things are all part of what we believe learning should be."

Rangnekar says this philosophy comes out of the team's many years as students, rather than a background as educators, but that leads to an app developed with the interests of students at heart.

Test Prep is BenchPrep's Specialty

Currently, the course offerings are mostly for higher education, but Rangnekar says that the app is beginning to reach the high school market as well. "We want students to graduate within the platform," Rangnekar says. Because BenchPrep can offer prep courses across all levels of education, with performance analytics that students can bring with them, Rangnekar envisions a use case for BenchPress that follows a student "throughout the educational life cycle." Subject tests for graduate school usually require students to reach back to high school- or college-level math. Having that old test material, as well as detailed performance analytics, readily available on the same platform would be a great help to students.

The analytics also provide value for the publishers, who can get more meaningful feedback from interactive educational materials than simple print sales figures could provide.

BenchPrep is positioned mostly as a self-prep tool; it doesn't yet offer textbooks or help teachers create curricula, but Rangnekar says BenchPrep is "in the process of building analytics tools for [educators]" to help them monitor their students' test preparation. As a platform, BenchPrep would already be able to deliver textbooks or other in-class material, it just hasn't broken into that kind of content yet.

We offered a round-up of Web-powered test prep services in the past, and Watermelon Express, BenchPrep's predecessor, was first on the list. Other services, such as Grockit, also emphasize social learning, but BenchPrep's integration across platforms and devices stands out.

Toward the Future of Educational Content

BenchPrep's platform seems scalable, and it could conceivably expand beyond the test prep space and have an impact inside the classroom. Chegg and Amazon's Kindle Textbook Rental are well-established in the digital textbook market, but BenchPrep's model could offer textbook publishers a different kind of business for a different kind of content. With its interactive capabilities, and especially with its offline access, BenchPrep could deliver educators and students a new kind of course material, rather than renting static content based on the model of the physical textbook.

How do you think social Web technologies in education can supplement face-to-face learning?