Techno-News Blog

by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

Flipped learning has been around for awhile. It’s a rethinking of the standard classroom model that puts students in the driver’s seat. With the influx of technology into education, the flipped classroom model has really taken off. In fact, it’s one of the hottest education trends we’ve been monitoring on Edudemic for the past 4 years. We published a useful guide to flipped classrooms many moons ago but were excited to see an updated visual guide to flipped classrooms from the fine folks at We Are Teachers. It details the basics of flipping, apps that you should use in a flipped classroom, and more.

http://www.edudemic.com/2013/07/what-is-a-flipped-classroom-updated-for-2013/

By Nicole Freeling, University of California

Now that state lawmakers have approved $10 million for the expansion of online education at the University of California, UC faculty and administrators are moving ahead with plans to develop dozens of online courses for high-demand undergraduate subjects. The funding will be focused squarely on the development of for-credit classes in areas where students face bottlenecks in progressing through their studies, UC Provost Aimée Dorr told the UC Board of Regents today (July 18). In the last academic year, UC campuses offered a combined 200 undergraduate classes and 60 graduate level courses online, Dorr reported. Many of the undergraduate courses were offered through extension programs and summer session. UC’s current efforts are focused on building the number of online offerings — now numbering 33 — available during the regular academic year. Unlike online summer session and extension offerings, students would be able to take these classes without paying any additional fees.

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/29787

By Lynh Bui, Washington Post

The future of digital learning in classrooms will require more than just getting tablets in the hands of students to be successful. Education leaders and policymakers must focus on investing on infrastructure and professional training for teachers and administrators to grow technology in education. That was one of the major themes education technology experts, lobbyists and policy makers repeated at a Monday roundtable discussion, organized by Internet Innovation Alliance, and which focused on how private and public sectors can work together to improve digital learning in the nation’s classrooms.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/roundtable-infrastructure-teacher-training-key-to-improving-technology-in-classrooms/2013/07/15/e7158bc6-ed75-11e2-9008-61e94a7ea20d_story.html

By Sarah Hoffschwelle, Texas A&M Battalion

Danny Davis, lecturer and director of the CHLS program, said the program courses were offered online because of limited physical space and increased flexibility. “Classroom space is big reason for all courses being online,” Davis said. “We didn’t have space at the Bush School for all the classes. Most of the students are middle to upper class working professionals and are working during work hours. The online classes provide flexibility to work and do schoolwork.” The online set-up of the program not only allows students with full-time jobs the ability to participate in the program, but also invites the best in the industry to instruct the courses whether they are full-time professors at another prestigious university, full-time professionals in the field, or even professors at Texas A&M. “Our professors are scattered all over the country — the best experts in homeland security in the field and the best professors around the country, and one or two resident professors,” Brown said. “Every class, I learn from my students because [many of them are] professionals in their fields.”
http://www.thebatt.com/news/online-program-offers-diverse-security-education-1.3048836

by Lauren Hepler, San Jose BizJournal

Big Data may be a major Silicon Valley buzzword at the moment, but don’t expect a new online data science master’s degree program at the University of California, Berkeley to get too caught up in the fad. Starting in January 2014, Berkeley’s School of Information, or I School, will offer the country’s first fully online Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) degree program, the university announced Wednesday. While students will learn the mechanics to analyze millions of rows of data, courses will also cover other elements of data visualization, machine learning, database analysis and data security.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/07/17/not-a-big-data-degree-uc-berkeley.html

By Lynh Bui, Washington Post

The future of digital learning in classrooms will require more than just getting tablets in the hands of students to be successful. Education leaders and policymakers must focus on investing on infrastructure and professional training for teachers and administrators to grow technology in education. That was one of the major themes education technology experts, lobbyists and policy makers repeated at a Monday roundtable discussion, organized by Internet Innovation Alliance, and which focused on how private and public sectors can work together to improve digital learning in the nation’s classrooms.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/roundtable-infrastructure-teacher-training-key-to-improving-technology-in-classrooms/2013/07/15/e7158bc6-ed75-11e2-9008-61e94a7ea20d_story.html

By Rich Hein, CIO

Most of us have had a boss or worked with someone who tried hard to portray himself or herself as something they weren’t. Not only was it off-putting to their co-workers and subordinates, but it was likely exhausting for them. You can’t lead people by trying to be something you aren’t. Being an authentic leader helps to create an environment where people are not only confident in your ability to get the job done, but also in your motives for doing so. So what can you do to be a more authentic leader with your teams? CIO.com spoke with CIOs and professional-development experts to find out what it takes to be the leader people want to follow. Here are 10 keys.

http://www.cio.com/article/736337/10_Ways_to_Be_an_Authentic_IT_Leader

by CIO

Storing files is just the beginning. Dropbox will soon allow you to sync and transfer files, data, to-do lists and more between any of the devices you own. When Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says he wants to kill the hard drive, he doesn’t mean it literally, of course. What he does mean, though, is that Dropbox is becoming much more than a place in the cloud to stash your digital stuff. It’s becoming a platform, the center of a suite of different applications and technologies that will allow users to manage and share a wide range of content on laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

http://blogs.cio.com/online-storage/18124/dropbox-aims-replace-your-hard-drive

by Doug Holton, EdTechDev 

Universities and colleges have a huge problem with retaining and graduating their students – particularly students in STEM areas (science, technology, engineering, math, where 60% drop out or transfer) and students at community colleges (55% never graduate).  But state colleges (only 51 to 77% graduate [ref]) and many private universities also have retention problems (Western Governors only has a 6.5% graduation rate).  Online programs and courses also suffer from poor retention (see “The dirty little secret of online learning: Students are bored and dropping out“), and of course MOOCs have the worst retention of all, with an average of 90 to 95% of enrollees never completing the courses (see an earlier post that discusses pedagogical problems with many MOOCs).  All universities and programs are also showing disparities in the graduation rates of minority and low income students.

http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/two-courses-that-made-a-difference-in-student-retention/

by David Hamilton, the WHIR

MOOCs are delivered through a Virtual Learning Environment, an application that enables an educator to run online lectures, deliver multimedia, administer tests, assign homework, mark assignments, and grade students. A good deal of the potential of MOOCs is dependent on these VLEs, but also the hosting infrastructure and technology that supports the VLE as it delivers a MOOC to thousands and tens-of-thousands of students. There are plenty of options for an educational institution to consider when rolling out a MOOC:  join a course aggregator network like Coursera, spend time and money on building their own solution, buy proprietary software and hosting, use Google Course-Builder which runs on Google App Engine, or host an open-source app like Moodle.

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/handling-hefty-course-loads-the-hosting-infrastructure-behind-massive-open-online-courses

by M. Mitchell Waldrop, Nature

Confronted with the explosive popularity of online learning, researchers are seeking new ways to teach the practical skills of science. “Labs are where we offer students the opportunity to engage with real lab equipment, to analyse authentic data, to experience the wonder of observation,” says Mike Sharples, an education-technology researcher at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. Today, almost all the lab work is available online through the university’s OpenScience Laboratory. Just like many working scientists, students can collect real data from remotely controlled instruments — among them a γ-ray spectrometer for identifying elements and isotopes, and a 0.43-metre telescope in Majorca, Spain. Students can also explore real data with simulated instruments such as the virtual microscope, with which they look at high-resolution images instead of real specimens. “They zoom in, adjust the focus and control where in the sample they’re looking,” says Sharples — just as they would on real instruments.

http://www.nature.com/news/education-online-the-virtual-lab-1.13383

by: Jeanne Grunert, Business Administration Information

Today, younger students are embracing an online learning model and foregoing a traditional college experience altogether. The study’s authors note that the 2014 data collection is needed to verify their hypothesis that more and more online learners resemble traditional college campus students. Distance learning has undergone a dramatic transformation from the days of correspondence classes to today’s MOOCs (massive open online courses). Students today are faced with myriad choices ranging from pursuing their entire postsecondary degree in a traditional, in-person campus setting to an entirely online program in which they never set foot on the actual college campus.

http://www.businessadministrationinformation.com/news/students-seeking-online-degrees-now-more-like-traditional-on-campus-students-new-study-reports

BY DAVID PLOTNIKOFF, Stanford

A study from the Stanford Graduate School of Education of how students best learned a neuroscience lesson showed a distinct benefit to starting out by working with an interactive 3D model of the brain. The researchers drew on data gathered from students using the BrainExplorer, a tabletop tool that simulates how the human brain processes visual images. A new study from the Stanford Graduate School of Education flips upside down the notion that students learn best by first independently reading texts or watching online videos before coming to class to engage in hands-on projects. Studying a particular lesson, the Stanford researchers showed that when the order was reversed, students’ performances improved substantially.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/july/flipped-learning-model-071613.html

by eGrappler

The web design & development education industry has exploded from a small niche to a powerful, continually expanding force. Countless people around the globe are interested in learning about how to design and develop websites, and tons of companies are cropping up promising the ultimate solution. The competition in this field is a great thing for customers. You have more options than ever for learning just about anything you want to know about web technologies. For those, who wants to learn web design and development, we are sharing following high quality sites and resources. Start learning web design and development today!

http://www.egrappler.com/20-sites-resources-to-learn-web-design-development-for-free/

by Kelly Sheridan, Information Week

Learning management company Blackboard Inc. recently announced that 15 additional colleges and universities have signed up to use its services to run massive open online courses (MOOCs). Classes will be free of charge and run this summer and fall. This is a big step for Blackboard, one of the first companies to combine teaching and learning with the Internet. Since its 1997 founding, Blackboard has expanded to offer clients mobile apps and a variety of learning management platforms.Schools that are currently licensing Blackboard’s learning management system, Blackboard Learn, will have access to the MOOC platform at no additional cost. Now Blackboard partners can use CourseSites to run free unlimited MOOCs as well. CourseSites is hosted on Blackboard Learn 9.1. Non-partnering schools and instructors can use CourseSites to create and manage MOOCs. However, individual instructors cannot offer more than five MOOCs to students at once.

http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/blackboard-mooc-gains-15-more-colleges/240158375

by Katrina Schwartz, Mind/Shift

Web-based tools continue to proliferate, giving teachers more to add to their arsenal, but it can be hard to determine which resources are worth spending time exploring. At the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) conference this year, Adam Bellow, founder of EduClipper, and Steve Dembo, Online Community Manager for Discovery Education offered a quick run through of some favorite apps. The two educators are early adopters of ed-tech classroom strategies and have a lot of experience with tech integration.

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/07/13-free-web-tools-students-and-teachers-should-know-about/

by Nick DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Ed

American research universities are facing an increasing spate of cyberattacks, many of which are thought to come from China, testing their ability to ward off the attacks and forcing some to overhaul their security policies, The New York Times reports. Campus officials who specialize in information technology and data security told the Times that detection is a key concern for institutions in trying to thwart the attacks because many hackers are adept at routing their efforts though computers and countries around the world. William S. Mellon, associate dean for research policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told the newspaper that his institution’s system is besieged by 90,000 to 100,000 hacking attempts per day from China alone, with many others coming from Russia and Vietnam.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/american-research-universities-face-growing-wave-of-cyberattacks/63209

By Joshua Bolkan, Campus Technology

Worldwide IT spending will reach $3.7 trillion this year, according to the latest forecast from market research firm Gartner. The company’s latest estimate forecasts a two percent growth rate, down just over two percent from their previous quarter’s prediction of 4.1 percent, due mostly to changes in the dollar’s exchange rate. “Exchange rate movements, and a reduction in our 2013 forecast for devices, account for the bulk of the downward revision of the 2013 growth,” said Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner, in a prepared statement. “Regionally, 2013 constant-currency spending growth in most regions has been lowered. However, Western Europe’s constant-currency growth has been inched up slightly as strategic IT initiatives in the region will continue despite a poor economic outlook.” Growth in all categories will improve in 2014, according to the company, when global IT spending will reach $4.1 trillion.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/07/10/it-spending-approaches-4-trillion.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

A computer science professor from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville has just earned a million dollar grant to explore the next generation of high performance computing. Jack Dongarra, who’s also affiliated with the University of Manchester and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, received the three-year grant from the United States Department of Energy to better understand the changes that will be required in the software for exascale supercomputers, as they’re called. This new generation of supercomputers will be capable of a quintillion floating point operations per second or one exaflop — equivalent to a thousand petaflops. Today’s fastest supercomputer, China’s Tianhe-2, performs at about 34 petaflops per second; Cray’s Titan supercomputer was benchmarked at 18 petaflops per second. Exascale computing is expected to be reached much later in this decade.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/07/10/u-tennessee-prof-takes-on-exascale-computing.aspx

By David Nagel, Campus Technology

Year-over-year shipments of PCs fell off worldwide for the fifth consecutive quarter, the longest sustained decline in the history of personal computing, dropping by 9 million units in the second quarter of 2013. And the picture might have been even more bleak had it not been for the relative strength of the professional market. According to a report released by market research firm Gartner, consumers across the globe seem to be shifting their purchases away from traditional desktops and laptops and toward media consumption devices like the iPad. But while their impact is being felt, these devices aren’t solely responsible for the decline. “The sharp decline in the second quarter of 2013 was partly due to the shift in usage patterns away from notebooks to tablets, and partly because the PC market was exposed to inventory reductions in the channel due to the start of the transition to new Haswell-based products,” said Isabelle Durand, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a statement released to coincide with the quarterly results report.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/07/15/pcs-see-longest-sustained-decline-in-history.aspx

by the Huffington Post

According to the University of Maryland Office of the Provost, a blended learning course combines both face-to-face interaction and online resources for a both individualized and collaborative learning experience. “Culture is changing. There is a growing recognition that it is a good idea to innovate our class structure, just as we innovate our research and all other things we do,” said Ben Bederson, Special Advisor to the Provost on Technology and Educational Transformation at the University of Maryland. According to Bederson, the University of Maryland chose to initiate blended leaning options for ten courses in 2011, an effort put forth by a group of faculty and administrators who saw the potential Blended Leaning offered, especially in contrast to more ineffective lectures.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/uloop/blended-learning-college-_b_3598718.html