Christopher Lydon is returning to the radio with Open Source, a co-production with the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. PRI will distribute. Lydon hosted public radio's The Connection until he and staffers had a public falling-out with Jane Christo, then his boss and g.m. of Boston's WBUR-FM.

"[W]e could be much more effective if we would just get better at asking listeners to give based purely on value," says consultant John Sutton in a blog post about on-air fundraising practices. "So few can do it well."

Nearly half of distance-learning courses used by K-12 schools are given by college-level institutions, says a major U.S. Department of Education study released March 2. Nine percent of schools used distance learning in 2002-03, with 328,000 enrollments a year (counting some students more than once). Two-way video is the most popular platform, used in nearly half of school districts. A big PDF of the full 97-page report is available online.