Techno-News Blog

by MAX NISEN, Australian Business Insider

Colleges around the country should be worried. The quality of online courses is catching up fast. Kevin Carey, the director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation put it to the test, spending four months taking two MOOCs, from start to finish. One, a Coursera Introduction to Philosophy was everything critics dislike, he says. Too brief, and with none of the problem sets, essays, or tests that make sure you absorb and apply the information. The second, an MIT introductory biology course hosted by edX, was an entirely different animal. After taking the course, Carey admits that while not every course can transition online for less money and at a higher level of quality than what most students experience, the amount that can is “a lot more than people realise or want to admit.” That’s going to lead to a lot of disruption, and many lost jobs. But there’s a lot of upside, as well.

http://au.businessinsider.com/online-courses-are-challenging-college-classes-2013-6

By Allan Metcalf, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The 50th anniversary of the Third passed in 2011 with still no Fourth in sight. So it was a happy surprise this year to learn that all of a sudden, available online from the publisher was a new Merriam-Webster Unabridged. The print version would have had to wait until it was finished, years hence. The online version allows access to the revision as it is being born. If you subscribe to the Unabridged for $29.95 a year, you’ll get something new: 5,000 new entries (like anonymize, crowdsourcing and alt-country music) along with 107,000 new example sentences.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/06/12/unabridged-online/

by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

One of the biggest (yet newest) names in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is edX. In case you’re new to the MOOC or Edudemic world, edX is basically a consortium of schools that have banded together to assemble a robust library of online courses. From Physics to History to Computer Science, many of the world’s largest universities and colleges have come together to use the edX online learning platform. And now the edX platform is yours. The edX team made their code open source as of June 1, 2013 and are actively encouraging developers around the world to remix, rethink, and build onto the platform. After all, what better way to develop a product than to have countless people around the world add to it, use it, and continuously test it. The model has worked for a ton of major web tools like WordPress and Wikipedia.

http://www.edudemic.com/2013/06/edx-wants-you-to-improve-their-online-learning-platform/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

A team of California universities has released a beta version of a system for managing big data along with more traditional forms of data. Researchers from the University of California in Irvine, Riverside, and San Diego have banded together to create AsterixDB, a Java-based “big data management system” (BDMS). The work began in 2009 with funding from the National Science Foundation and, eventually, the state of California and others. The goal was to create a set of new technologies for “ingesting, storing, managing, indexing, querying, and analyzing vast quantities of semi-structured information.” The researchers pulled ideas from three areas — semi-structured data, parallel databases, and data-intensive computing — to create a “next generation” open source application that could run on large clusters of commodity computers. At the heart of the system, the AsterixDB engine operates on a “shared nothing” architecture. Each computer in the cluster runs independently and is self-sufficient.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/06/10/u-california-researchers-release-beta-for-big-data-management.aspx

By David Nagel, Campus Technology

Smart phones are expected to overtake feature phones in worldwide shipments for the first time this year. According to a new forecast released by market research firm IDC, year-over-year growth in smart phones will approach 33 percent in 2013 and continue strong for the next five years. “2013 will mark a watershed year for smartphones,” said Ramon Llamas, research manager for IDC’s Mobile Phones program, in a prepared statement. “If you look at the number of vendors who support both feature phones and smartphones, many of them have not only successfully transitioned their product portfolios to highlight smartphones, but smartphones have become their primary value proposition going forward. In some cases, smartphones have accounted for well over 50 percent of their quarterly shipment volume. Looking ahead, we expect the gulf between smartphones and features phones to grow ever wider.”

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/06/11/smart-phones-set-to-overtake-feature-phones-this-year.aspx

By David Nagel, Campus Technology

Draper University in San Mateo, CA has started accepting bitcoins for tuition and recently processed its first bitcoin payment for its summer program, which starts later this month. According to information released by Draper U, the educational institution has become the first to accept bitcoin for tuition. Draper, which bills itself as “an unconventional world class boarding school for the brightest young entrepreneurs from around the world,” also accepts other non-traditional forms of payment, including barter, equity, profit sharing, and even advertising tradeouts. Bitcoin is one of several cryptographic currencies generated by end users (“miners”) who tap their CPUs, GPUs, and other processing hardware to solve hash algorithms, resulting in newly minted virtual coins. Bitcoin, which has a fixed ceiling of 21 million coins, is currently by far the most valuable and popular of the cryptocurrencies, trading at a little more than $100 per coin as of this writing. (The currency can be highly volatile and has reached more than $200 per coin in the past.) Similar cryptographic currencies include litecoin, namecoin, and novacoin, to name just a few.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/06/11/draper-university-accepts-bitcoins-for-tuition.aspx

By Shawn Francis Peters, Chronicle of Higher Ed

My use of Twitter in the Wire course might be my greatest break with pedagogical convention. Whatever its faults, Twitter allows my students to respond quickly and freely to this provocative drama about the complex interactions between police and drug dealers in Baltimore. Their spontaneous tweets form the foundation of a conversation in class once we’re done viewing a particular episode. I also use our hashtag for posting material that might be relevant for exams. For our midterm this semester, students worked in groups to produce components of a study guide. They took pictures of the results and then posted them with the hashtag, where everyone had access to them.

http://chronicle.com/article/Diverse-Students-Go-Digital/139645/

by Kimon Keramidas, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Prezi is marketed as a presentation tool, a killer app for the frustrated hordes of PowerPoint users who are looking for more dynamic and visually compelling modes of presentation. It accomplishes that task quite well with a digital canvas design structure, a user-friendly interface for adding text, images, and multimedia (it even cannibalizes existing PowerPoints well), and the capacity to create a step-by-step path through materials for presentation purposes. But if you start to think more creatively about what Prezi’s toolset offers, you begin to realize how powerful a tool it can be for designing a wide array of visual compositions. If one looks past the presentation use case, the combination of the flexibility of a nearly infinite digital canvas and easy-to-use design features makes for a powerful and highly accessible tool for developing thought maps, prototyping designs for digital interfaces and physical spaces, creating bespoke visualizations, and as a platform for comparative visual analysis and annotation.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/hacking-prezi-as-a-platform-for-visual-composition-and-design-experimentation/49909

By Lauren Ingeno, Inside Higher Ed

Though there are differences from one platform to the next, crowdfunding sites function similarly: A person posts a description of his or her idea asking for small contributions from the community at large, and those who feel passionately about the project can donate. The fund-raiser is usually given a specific amount of time to reach his or her goal, or the backers are not charged. Typically the crowdfunding site receives a percentage of the amount the fund-raiser earns, and backers can receive “rewards” from the fund-raiser for pledging certain amounts of cash. Kickstarter, which launched in 2009, is the world’s largest funding platform for artists, musicians, filmmakers and designers. While many projects fail, some have found massive success on the site — like a video game that gained $4,188,927 from 74,905 backers. Replicating Kickstarter’s model, websites that are used specifically to crowdfund scientific or technology-based projects have launched in recent years. Some of these sites include iAMScientist, Microryza, Petridish and FundaGeek.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/06/10/academic-researchers-using-crowdfunding-platforms

By Nathan Eddy, eWeek

Android-based tablets expanded their share of the market notably in 2012, and IDC said it expects that trend to continue in 2013. Tablet shipments will exceed 350 million by the end of 2017, due to a predicted surge of smaller, lower-priced devices in the market, according to the latest forecast update of IDC’s “Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker.” The research firm raised its 2013 forecast for the worldwide tablet market to 190.9 million from its previous forecast for the year of 172.4 million units. Increases in tablet shipments have been made throughout the forecast period, with an average annual increase of 11 percent between 2013 and 2016, the IDC report noted.

http://www.eweek.com/mobile/tablet-sales-rising-thanks-to-smaller-sizes-lower-prices-idc/

By Don Reisinger, eWeek

There was a time when the Windows PC was the computer platform that was most vulnerable to malware and hacking. Although some malicious hackers were targeting Nokia’s Symbian mobile operating system, for the most part, they focused their efforts on Windows. Why? The answer was simple: The many security flaws in Windows made it an inviting target for thieves to steal data and cash for the least effort. It was purely economics. And it made sense. But according to the latest data from security software company McAfee, things are changing. New Android malware samples the company discovered in the first quarter were up 40 percent compared with the previous year. What’s worse, McAfee believes that over the next several years, the number of threats that will impact Android will increase exponentially.

http://www.eweek.com/security/slideshows/10-android-security-applications-to-keep-your-mobile-devices-safe/

By Jeffrey Burt, eWeek

New chips from the likes of Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Qualcomm—and a new chip design from ARM—and the range of mobile systems they’re powering was a key theme at this year’s Computex 2013 show in Taiwan, Asia’s largest tech show. The improved the performance, energy efficiency and feature sets of the systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) are enabling systems makers to come up with new form factors, many of them designed to give consumers and business users devices that offer the performance and productivity of traditional notebooks and the ease, long battery life and instant-on capabilities of tablets

http://www.eweek.com/mobile/slideshows/intel-amd-arm-unveil-new-chips-designs-at-computex/

By Mark Ward, BBC News

All day. Every day. Anyone and anything connected to the net is under attack. The standard defences, such as antivirus programs, firewalls, spam filters and intrusion detectors will stop most of those attacks reaching their target – be that a person, a computer or a database. Now and then an attack does get through but, if the target is you, the chances are you will spot the fake emails when they land in your inbox.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22656288

By QUENTIN HARDY, NY Times

This week, Dell and Oracle announced a partnership unique to both companies. Dell would offer Oracle software on its machines and would resell Oracle services. Much head-scratching ensued among industry analysts, largely over misunderstandings about where the industry was headed. What bothered many of these analysts was the idea that both Dell and Oracle sell commodity servers based on Intel’s x86 reference designs. Oracle picked up that business when it acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2010. Sun was never a big player in that business, however, having come to it late and grudgingly. It always preferred its own machines, which used the Sparc chip.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/the-new-economics-behind-the-oracle-dell-partnership/

By Leo Kelion, BBC

A physical platform and matching shoes which allow video gamers to control characters with their foot movements are to go into production after securing crowd-sourced cash. Omni will use shoes fitted with sensors to track the motion and direction of the player. They also have pins on their soles which fit into grooves on the stand’s base to prevent users from slipping. Manufacturer, Virtuix, claims the gear offers a more immersive experience.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22807205

by Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC

Imagine a day in your life – thousands of images of people and places, miles walked, driven, and cycled – all disappearing as the memories fade. But what if you could capture, store, and then share your day? Well, now you can.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22767096

by Om Malik, GigaOM

Waze, a mapping data service with social features has been subject of acquisition rumors for a while. There was speculation of Apple buying them. There there was Facebook and its rumored $1 billion offer. Now Israeli-media reports are speculating that Google is the new buyer.

http://gigaom.com/2013/06/09/looks-like-now-google-is-buying-waze-for-1-3-billion/

By Susan Young, Technology Review

Brain network activity contributes to complex brain functions and mental illness, but how these networks change on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis is not well known. Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is undertaking some intense introspection. Every day, he tracks his mood and mental state, what he ate, and how much time he spent outdoors. Twice a week, he gets his brain scanned in an MRI machine. And once a week, he has his blood drawn so that it can be analyzed for hormones and gene activity levels. Poldrack plans to gather a year’s worth of brain and body data to answer an unexplored question in the neuroscience community: how do brain networks behave and change over a year?

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514886/the-quantified-brain-of-a-self-tracking-neuroscientist/

by Clyde Smith, Hypebot

Berklee College of Music’s online division is taking a somewhat bold move and releasing a free BitTorrent Bundle of music lesson videos and ebooks. Given a still controversial BitTorrent brand, Berklee Online’s choice to take advantage of BitTorrent tech may surprise some but seems in keeping with the online division’s embrace of current options to share educational materials while marketing their online classes. The Berklee Online Musician’s Guide was released yesterday as a BitTorrent Bundle. Such bundles have previously contained multimedia content by musicians and other artists and this seems to be the first example of such related content being distributed as a BitTorrent Bundle by an educational institution or other business.

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/06/berklee-online-releases-bittorrent-bundle-of-music-lesson-videos-and-ebooks.html

By Rachel Williams, Central Florida Future

Soon-to-be UCF graduate Stephen McFarlane has witnessed a lengthy list of changes in his 12 years of undergraduate education. The biggest change McFarlane witnessed in that time frame was the increase in technology: from online classes, to communicating online, to even just carrying a laptop. “Online classes were not popular,” McFarlane said about when he first started college in 2001. “There were maybe four or five per degree.” Now, the majority of UCF students have taken online classes. During the 2012-2013 academic year, 74 percent of students took at least one of the 3,576 offered online courses, Thomas Cavanagh, associate vice president of distributed learning, said. “I love them now. If I never had to set foot in a classroom again that’d be fine,” McFarlane said.

http://www.centralfloridafuture.com/news/from-in-class-to-online-student-reflects-on-12-year-journey-1.2829113#.UbTiBefYc3U

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

Few gadgets have generated as much excitement and hostility as Google Glass, a voice-activated computer-monitor combo worn on eyeglass frames. Now being tested by early adopters, Glass is an ambitious attempt to advance “wearable computing.” It’s also a milestone for Thad Starner, a Georgia Tech professor who has been building and wearing head-mounted computers since 1993. A decade ago, he showed Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin a clunky version of such a device; in 2010 they hired Starner to be a technical lead for Project Glass. He met recently with MIT Technology Review IT editor Rachel Metz.

http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/515681/wearable-computing-pioneer-says-google-glass-offers-killer-existence/