A quiet news week. It must be the end of the school year.
Despite living in a world of of online dictionaries and spellcheck, the interest in the Scripps National Spelling Bee is as high as ever. Congratulations to 14-year-old Sukanya Roy who won the competition by correctly spelling the world "cymotrichous."
YouTube added support for the Creative Commons Attribution license this week. Now when users upload a video to YouTube, they can select the CC-BY license instead of just the existing YouTube license. This means that it will be easier for people to reuse and remix the video content on YouTube (something that, arguably, people have been doing since the site's inception -- but now they can do so with properly licensed material). YouTube also launched a Creative Commons library, featuring over 10,000 CC-BY videos from organizations like C-SPAN and Al Jazeera.
The music industry is set to update its Parental Advisory notices so that digital music and videos will be flagged with the same warnings about strong language, sex, or violence that have accompanied the physical versions of CDs and DVDs.
Amid the speculation of what will be announced at WWDC next week -- Apple's developer conference, there are rumors that the company will announce an update to its Back-to-School discounts. In addition to offering a free iPod Touch with the purchase of a new Mac, the company may be offering steep discounts on iPads for students as well. Whatever discounts are offered on stage, technology observers will be tuning in on Monday to see what CEO Steve Jobs unveils in his opening keynote.
Language learning company Rosetta Stone finally launched an iPad app. The app is a tablet version of the company's desktop software, and while it is free to download it does require a subscription to Rosetta Stone's TotalE software, something that will set consumers back several hundred dollars. Can Rosetta Stone compete with the much cheaper language-learning apps now available on both the Web and on mobile devices?
The Department of Education announced the 2011 Investing in Education competition. $150 million in funding is available to school districts and non-profit organizations to "support of innovative approaches that significantly improve teacher effectiveness and student achievement, engagement and attainment." Applications are due August 2.