Posted: 05 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT

Teachers and students have a new portal to find open educational resources: OER Commons. It is the first comprehensive open learning network where teachers and students from kindergarten to graduate school can access OER materials, share, and work together. Users can search, browse, and discuss over 32,000 open educational resources. Examples include: university courses, math or physic stimulations, digital textbooks, and elementary lesson plans, worksheets, and activities.

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The merits of failing faster

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 03:00 AM PDT

Promoting a culture that supports failure is a foreign concept to most people, but not for the panelists speaking about open government and business at CityCamp Raleigh. According to the panelists, who range from vice presidents of corporations to chief information officers of Raleigh government, there is a general consensus that failing faster provides a quicker path to innovation.

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Oracle v. Google and API copyrightability

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 07:30 AM PDT

As has been widely reported, the district court in the Oracle v. Google case has issued an order holding that the "structure, sequence and organization" (SSO) of 37 J2SE 5.0 API packages is not copyrightable. Oracle is expected to appeal.

The API packages at issue, comprising over 600 classes and over 6,000 methods, form part of the 166-package class library bundled with Sun's J2SE 5.0 JDK and JRE products. The accused 37 of the 168 packages in the Android Froyo platform's Dalvik class library substantially