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The Internet may have grown up first in the United States, but it's a global phenomenon now. The same can be said for the fast-growing body of educational content on the web. YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education Channel today and noted that nearly 80% of the viewership of educational content on the site came from outside the United States. Less than 70% of the site's total traffic is International, so the educational content is disproportionately viewed by global audiences.

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.

Apple revolutionizes stuff. It's practically conventional wisdom in the tech world that, even if they're not first in the game or necessarily even the best, the Cupertino-based giant has a tendency to make a noticeable impact. They didn't invent the MP3 player, smartphone or tablet, but they sure have redefined all of those products. Even if this tendency is strong, it's not necessarily always how things play out. For an example, look no further than the Apple TV.

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?

The U.S. Supreme Court will not hear a case this term that could have clarified the authority schools have over students and their use of social media when they're not in school.

On Tuesday, the court said it would not hear appeals on the suspension of a West Virginia student who ridiculed another student or a lower court's decision to overturn a Pennsylvania school district's suspension of a student who posted comments about her principal online. Officials on both sides of the issue saw the high court's decision as a setback, as it means it will be at least another year before the Supreme Court offers clarity to an issue that has divided lower courts.

A ruling by the Supreme Court on any of the cases it was asked to hear may have also updated a Vietnam-era free speech ruling that has become dated in the Internet age. The 1969 ruling applied to on-campus speech that would "materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school." More recently, however, the ruling in Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District has been interpreted to give schools authority over comments students make on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other social networks, regardless of the student's physical location when the comments are posted.

College students appear to have gotten over the creep factor of connecting with their professors on Facebook and would prefer to use the 800-million member social network for formal class assignments and discussions over other platforms, including Twitter.

Those are the preliminary findings of Dr. Rey Junco, a college professor who has been studying social media in the college classroom. Not too long ago, students often bristled at the idea of using Facebook in classes because it meant connecting with their professors. But Junco's more recent research shows students prefer Facebook because they're already using it.

"I think [using Facebook] would've been easier and a little more comfortable for people because I think pretty much everyone in my class had a Facebook and nobody had either one of these thing," one student in the study said of a class that gave students the option of using Twitter or Ning, a service that lets people create closed social networks.

YouTube has launched a new initiative called YouTube for Schools, which will enable educators to open up classrooms to the wide world of educational content on YouTube without all the junk. Open Internet access in schools is tricky, with all the distractions and time-wasters out there, so Google is taking this step to make educators' lives easier.

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.

Do you want to build a game for Android, a theme for your blog or a twitter desktop client? Have a great idea but lack the development chops to take it from the pages of your legal pad to the App Store? Want to make sure your kid learns to program, even though your local school system may not offer the best options? This post should give you a good starting point for learning to program.

We have many developers who read ReadWriteWeb, so this post is meant to both be a help for aspiring programmers and a place for those of you with much more knowledge than I, to drop in suggestions. Please let me know what we've inevitably left out.

Students, educators and others interested in finding the best published content, events and experts for learning new things will be heartened to learn that a new metadata markup standard is in the works to make discovery of learning materials easier than ever. Perhaps more importantly, it will make those materials easier for machines to find. Once finding the right content is a solved problem, many new things could become possible.

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.

If you haven't yet enrolled in the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class at Stanford University that we mentioned earlier this summer, you still have time to participate in what is being billed as the largest Google+ hangout tomorrow morning. At 8 am PT tomorrow, the two professors teaching the class, Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, will hold "office hours" and answer the most popular questions from the class.

Since they have tens of thousands of followers, it "would be hard to fit everyone into their actual offices," says the intro video. It is an intriguing use of the Hangout feature. You don't have to be a Stanford student, or even enrolled in the class, or even know something about AI. All you have to do is add Norvig to your Google+ circle, ask your question on their YouTube channel now and tune in tomorrow.

About 18 months ago, I came across Lalit Pant, the brain behind the Kojo desktop learning environment, working as a volunteer math teacher at the Himiyota School in India. Lalit, like myself, is a programmer and I discovered we have similar goals: making computer-programming fun, simple and easy to learn. What I really enjoy is that Lalit has committed his time to doing this for children.

Lalit spent the first six years of his career as a software engineer in India, most of them at TCS , then in the US for about 11 years, working at a startup in Pittsburgh, and subsequently at Sterling Commerce in Dallas. Increasingly unhappy with where his life was going, and eager to apply his experiences to accomplish something more meaningful, Lalit moved back to India with his wife and children to become a teacher.

Online studying solution BenchPrep has announced a new feature called OpenPrep that adds the vast reach of the open Web to its suite of paid courses from major publishers. BenchPrep sells interactive courses for standardized tests like the LSAT, GMAT, GRE, MCAT, Bar Exam and more, and they sync your work across all your digital devices.

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.