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.

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.

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.

One year earlier, however, the same court upheld the suspension of a student who had created a fake MySpace profile insinuating a principal was a sex addict and a pedophile.

Both the lower court and the National School Boards Association have asked the court to review the case, and consider abandoning Tinker, which is no longer relevant in the Internet age.

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.

Several studies have suggested that students are more engaged and get better grades when social media is a component of their college classes. Junco surmises that students preferred Facebook because it's easier to use. Previous fears about over-sharing with professors appear to have been eased by easier-to-understand privacy settings and groups that allow professors to keep course-related discussions on topic.

Junco finished crunching data for a paper he plans to publish later this year. The bottom line, he said on his blog, is students "overwhelmingly" prefer Facebook when given a choice beween social networks for use in class.

"Since students are 'always' on Facebook, it's easy to see when new comments are made to a post from a class," he wrote. "Some of my research has shown that how students use Facebook is sometimes more important than time spent on the site in terms of grades and student engagement."

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."

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.

Stanford has been offering many online classes, like other universities around the world. The class is more fully described here in this post on IEEE Spectrum.

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

One of my most surprising moments upon entering a very basic primary school in rural Ayenhyah, Ghana - a room with no electricity or running water - was being told that the school had a no cell-phone policy. Students have such a hunger for communication that they get their hands on a mobile phone by any means necessary. They keep them charged using the full power of their creativity, hooking them up to the small solar cell powering the community's medical clinic or latching them onto a motorcycle battery. Kids from Botswana to the U.S. to Zambia love to text.

Simple Machines

I've been thinking about simple machines a lot recently, while in Africa working in education. You probably remember simple machines from elementary school science. They're the basic building blocks of mechanical technology, from the inclined plane that helps move equipment easily from one height to another, to the pulley that enables everything from hoists to the modern bicycle, to the wheel. Simple machines are technology at its most elemental form. Think of a bike climbing a hill and you can see all of them working together gracefully; imagine a dump truck and you see how they allow us to create the tallest buildings and the longest highways. Without them, we'd still be carrying water in pails.

Technology helps us advance, but in education it has often been a source of false hope, peddled by people who promise to revolutionize learning. The problem often is that the technology ignores the basic configuration of any classroom in any school: the triangle that connects students, teachers, and ideas. My experience is that technologies that reinforce the relationship between those three poles represent opportunities for stronger classrooms and better education. But those that interrupt that relationship stall and ultimately fail.

E-readers are a fascinating example of a technology seems to be working in the developing world. At a very basic level, having an e-reader is equivalent to having a set of books at hand. Happily, even in schools with only the most rudimentary learning tools available, both teachers and students are well-versed in the importance of books and the ideas within, and readily recognize the value of having great access to them. This represents an enormous improvement over the status quo, where access to books is extremely limited: Botswana, a country the size of France, has fewer than 10 bookstores, and the village library of Kade, Ghana, is nearly empty of books. Imagine for a moment the power represented by e-readers: Students can walk around holding a library of books larger than all those in the bookstores and libraries of their country. It's a device that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, like Dr. Who's Tardis or Harry Potter's charmed tent.

The e-reader satisfies an important core need, providing access to the books of the world at a moment's notice. And it does so in a way that's accessible to both students and teachers, strengthening the bonds between them rather than disrupting their relationship.

The Price Point of Literacy

E-readers have something else going for them as well that is critical in an educational setting: A declining cost, even as the amount of content available increases. Numerous organizations are quickly digitizing the world's books, including local textbooks and storybooks. There is an enormous and growing variety of books available inexpensively or for free, from open-source textbooks like those from the CK-12 Foundation to public domain classics like the works of Jonathan Swift or Miguel de Cervantes. Meanwhile, the devices themselves are relatively sturdy, work well outside, and their costs are declining almost daily. (Their singleness of purpose also helps: it's very hard for a teacher to compete with the pull of Facebook or the call of Twitter.)

Perhaps most of all, e-books in the developing world are an example of leverage, a word inspired by another simple machine. Cell phones have paved the way for book and other content delivery as well as for recharging, not to mention helping million of children learn how to take care of and use a small device with a keyboard and screen. Publishers are going digital fast: Amazon has famously reported that it now sells more Kindle books than paper books, and 75% of John Grisham's newest thriller are sold as e-books.

The cost to donate e-books to the developing world is essentially zero, and might even represent a way to create a new market of readers in a generation. The early results we have seen using e-readers in Kenya and Ghana are very promising, with children spending up to 50% more time reading than before the introduction of e-readers, and reading fluency scores increasing quickly. But what's most exciting is that the children and teachers are using e-readers even when not being asked to, downloading books and samples and coming to voluntary summer reading programs to have access to the e-books. When books are scarce, access becomes enormously attractive.

This, then, may be a model for use of technology in education: Find or develop technology that allows us to strengthen the basic triangle between teacher, student, and ideas. The example of e-readers can provide valuable clues for how technologies can successfully help education, and in the process, help millions of children get access to books throughout the world.

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

App Inventor was a Google Labs project that was discontinued last week, but Google open-sourced the code. The MIT Center for Mobile Learning's adoption of the code comes as a relief to fans of App Inventor, many of whom worried that no one would step up to carry on its development.

The Center for Mobile Learning will be co-directed by professors Hal Abelson, Eric Klopfer and Mitchel Resnick. Abelson's input helped shape the initial development of Android App Inventor in 2008, aiming "to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world." He says that Resnick's Scratch software, also housed at MIT, was inspiration for the project. App Inventor uses the OpenBlocks framework, another MIT project advised by Klopfer, to visually represent blocks of code, so that App Inventor users can simply build their applications from a menu of modular options.

The center's stated goal is "transforming education and learning through innovation in mobile computing." Android App Inventor was popular among computer science educators because it lowered the barriers to entry for new developers and served as a teaching tool to computer science students. Its new home at MIT will reassure those who feared that this tool would become deprecated after Google stopped development.

"Google incubated App Inventor to the point where it gained critical mass," says Dr. Maggie Johnson, Google's Director of Education and University Relations. "MIT's involvement will both amplify the impact of App Inventor and enrich the research around it. It is a perfect example of how industry and academia can work together effectively."

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?

From the press release:

"The program is targeted to individual students creating innovative projects that further the ideals of digital journalism. A key goal is to promote geographic, gender and ethnic diversity, with an emphasis on rural and urban areas."

Applications are now open. Only U.S. citizens are eligible (see eligibility requirements). The deadline is January 27, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

This is a strong partnership in the online news space. The AP is one of the largest and most influential news organizations in the world, with a clear need to prepare the next generation of journalists. The Online News Association is the largest membership organization of digital journalists. Google, the seeming outlier in this group, seeks to organize the world's information. Without new, high-quality information, there would be nothing for them to organize.

For years, AP and Google struggled over content licensing issues, but the parties eventually reached an agreement. The announcement of this joint scholarship indicates that the two organizations see cooperation as the best option for the future of news content on the Web.

Google has ramped up development of its news offerings this year, introducing a new Google News interface, badges to add a game element to news reading, and location-based local news on mobile devices.