Along with the general increase in the number and availability of online resources, educational or otherwise, the last decade has seen a growing trend towards developing complete post-secondary-education courses that can be made available online for free. In contrast to the widely varying quality and the general absence of systematic and educational-research-backed course-design standards that characterize online courses offered at a premium from a growing number of traditional or exclusively online higher-education institutions, the quality and standards of these free courses is consistently high—probably a reflection of the kinds of faculty and institutions willing to devote time and expertise to free education.

My mother is a serial entrepreneur and has worked in retail for many years. She often says that the toughest thing about her line of work is the demand to always be “on”—to be perky, pleasant, enthusiastic, and accommodating at all times. Now that the new quarter is under way and I find myself teaching again, I’ve been thinking a lot about the similar pressure for instructors to be “on” when interacting with students.

Up until now, the reports of the death of the textbook industry have been greatly exaggerated. Remember when the PDF was going to change everything? But this week, I have seen a couple of really cool stories that have convinced me that the traditional market for textbook is in its last days.

The first story is the preview of Plastic Logic’s new electronic-reading device, which premiered at this year’s DEMO conference. You can watch the five-minute demo below.

“Change,” a slogan of the Obama campaign, is undoubtedly winning its own presidential bid in the buzzword competition. The word “change,” probably of Celtic origin, is defined as an action to make different or to shift from one to another (Merriam-Webster OnLine). It can mean anything from a slight alteration to a radical transformation. When it comes to education, I think that change is, in fact, the ultimate goal of teaching and learning: change from unknown to known, from viewing things from one level to viewing them from another, and from systematic knowledge acquisition to an individualized, conscious battle of lucidity (Morin, 1999; George Siemens 2008). And that ultimate form of change as a result of learning is called “transformational learning.”