Techno-News Blog

by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

These free courses are all designed to help you get that little bit of extra knowledge so you can know what to look for in future apps, be able to quickly decide if it’s right for you, and you’ll simply know more than your students. For a couple minutes, at least. All these courses are from a side-project I’ve been working on called Modern Lessons. It’s a free online school for teachers and other education-lovers. Enjoy!

http://www.edudemic.com/2013/08/10-free-online-courses-for-technology-novices/

by Katie Lepi, Edudemic

When it comes to browsers, most people fall into one of two camps: Those who have no idea what the ‘thing’ they use to browse the web is called, and those who Feel Very Strongly About It.  So you might find yourself in a situation where you have multiple browsers to choose from, or you have one friend/colleague/family member or another telling you that you *have* to use one browser or another. So what is the best choice for you? Take a gander at the handy infographic at the URL below to see what browsers are the fastest and most popular on different platforms.
http://www.edudemic.com/2013/08/which-browser-is-best-for-you/

By Francesca Di Meglio, BusinessWeek

Nowadays you can go back to school without leaving your living room (or getting out of your pajamas), and new online education providers crop up everyday. One of them, an upstart from Russia called Eduson.tv, is focusing on the BRIC markets (Brazil, Russia, India, China) with a model that features business courses taught mostly by real-world practitioners. Since launching in April, Eduson has attracted tens of thousands of registered users and is adding more every day. As of June, 80 percent of them were from Brazil and India. “Distance learning is a primary solution for those in BRIC nations who need to be prepared for quickly growing economies,” says Eduson’s chief executive, Elena Masolova.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-16/mooc-newcomer-offers-online-business-courses-taught-by-pros-not-profs

By David Talbot, Technology Review

When Lavabit—an e-mail service used by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden—suspended service last week amid hints that it had received a government demand for information, a competing service called Silent Circle made a draconian decision: to obliterate all of its customers’ stored e-mail. The episode pointed out two fundamental weaknesses in e-mail. First, even if an e-mail service encrypts messages for secrecy, as Lavabit and Silent Circle did, the e-mail headers and routing protocols reveal who the senders and receivers are, and that information can be valuable in its own right. And second, the passcodes used as keys to decrypt messages can be requested by the government (if held by the e-mail company) or simply stolen by sophisticated malware.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518056/why-e-mail-cant-be-completely-private/

by Harvard Magazine

HarvardX announced fall online courses on the edX platform in fields spanning Chinese history, neuroscience, and poetry (see “HarvardX Announces Fall Courses”). Meanwhile, edX formed its first partnership in India, as the Indian Institute of Technology became an affiliate. In an interview with The Financial Times, edX president Anant Agarwal predicted a purely online degree offering by a partner university within less than one year. Coursera, the for-profit company offering a wide array of massive open online courses (MOOCs), raised $43 million in a second round of financing, from new investors including a World Bank affiliate; that brings its capitalization to $65 million. According to news reports, Coursera aims to expand international outreach (in part by translating materials and developing mobile-device courses for students in Africa and elsewhere who lack computers); open its platform to third-party developers (edX is open-source); and double its staff to approximately 100 (on a trajectory parallel to edX’s reported plans).

http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/09/brevia

By Hajer Naili, Women’s Enews

A year after The New York Times ran an article about Silicon Valley, which opened with “Men invented the Internet,” FemTechNet is about to launch an online curricula highlighting the significant contributions of feminists to technology. FemTechNet, which describes itself as “a global network of feminist, students and artists who work on, with and at the borders of technology, science and feminism in a variety of fields,” is calling the curriculum a DOOC, or Distributed Open Collaborative Course. “Dialogues in Feminism and Technology,” its first DOOC course–running from Sept. 16 through December in 15 universities across the United States and Canada–is something of a pilot, which starts in North America and aims to expand across the globe in the coming year.

http://womensenews.org/story/education/130814/feminists-launch-model-online-learning#.Ugy_S9LYcig

by Resource Link

In education, mobile devices have taken a strong hold – and for good reason. They are less expensive than computers, more portable, and far more responsive for impatient learners who demand instant access. There are thousands of apps designed with an educational focus, and many more productivity and content-creation apps that can be used effectively by students to facilitate and enhance their learning. Like all new technology, apps bring challenges to the school library – the centre in the school for resource and information management.

http://resourcelinkbce.wordpress.com/2013/08/15/living-appily-ever-after-in-the-library/

by Kevin R. Burke and Jessica Mahoney, Hybrid Pedagogy

When MOOCs went viral in 2012, traditional small colleges reached an identity crossroads, a midlife crisis where idealism and wisdom collide. Along with the rapid adoption at large, elite institutions and flagship state schools is the growing myth that MOOCs will threaten traditional liberal arts colleges and smaller institutions. Despite the massive amount of capital invested in Coursera, edX, and Udacity and the hype about global branding, according to Inside Higher Education the original MOOC platform included engaged learning activities found at most small liberal arts colleges. MOOCs, it appears, were not created to run the old guard out of town; rather, they can bring the best traditional liberal arts instruction in direct dialogue with fresh ideas from students across the globe. Recently Wellesley College announced its first course offerings with edX, making it the first liberal arts college to offer MOOCs.

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Collaboration_Small_Colleges_MOOC_Hybrids.html#unique-entry-id-153

by Ashley MacQuarrie, K12 Blog

We’ve previously written about the educational potential of Minecraft, and the response from our readers was huge! Parents told us how their kids play and learn with Minecraft, kids let us know that they think it’s educational too, and teachers shared the ways they’ve used the game with their students.  But we wondered if there were even more ways to engage kids in game-based learning with Minecraft, and it turns out, we had just scratched the surface. Creative parents and educators have found so many fun opportunities for learning in this virtual world.

http://blog.k12.com/learning-games-mobile-apps/transforming-way-we-learn-more-ways-kids-can-learn-minecraft

by Sherry J. Jones & Vena M. Long, Journal of Online Learning and Teaching

This paper reports on a research study that focused on equity in learning as reflected in the final grades of online and on-site students from the same post-secondary mathematics course taught repeatedly over 10 semesters from Fall 2005 through Spring 2011. On-site students attended regular class sessions, while online students only attended an orientation session and a final exam. Mean final course grades for all online and on-site students were compared statistically to see if there was a significant difference in learning. The findings revealed significant differences in online and on-site students’ final grades, in favor of on-site student achievement. Statistical tests were also conducted on a number of subsets drawn from all students’ final grades in order to search for any underlying nuances that might exist. When the first three semesters of data were removed from the dataset, no significant difference was found between the mean scores for on-site and online students for the seven most recent semesters. It is reasonable to conclude that it is possible for students in both on-site and online sections of a course to achieve equity in mathematics learning as measured by final course grades.

http://jolt.merlot.org/vol9no1/jones_0313.pdf

By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, Christian Science Monitor

Spelling out what students need to demonstrate to earn passing or high grades “takes the subjectivity out of it,” says Sanborn English teacher Aaron Wiles. A student tripping over one math concept gets pinpointed help, rather than accumulating gaps in understanding and having to take the entire course again. Students reflect on and revise their work until they meet expectations. “They take ownership of it,” Mr. Wiles says. This approach to learning is known as competency-based education, and New Hampshire is among the pioneers. As it gains momentum around the United States, the expectation is that it will deepen learning and tie education more explicitly to skills that will equip students for the workplace and college-level studies – everything from accurate math and writing to creative problem-solving. Competency education can be done in a variety of ways and across all subjects, but it takes a different mind-set than simply marching through a textbook-based curriculum.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2013/0814/Is-your-student-competent-A-new-education-yardstick-takes-the-measure

by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, ZDNet

Most Mac and Linux users think anything Windows can do their operating systems can do better. Often, they’re right, but then there comes that day when they really need to run that one special Windows application and then they’re stuck. There are many ways of handling this. Some people keep old Windows PC around; others dual boot their computers; and quite a few run virtual machines (VM)s of Windows on their Linux PCs and Macs. That’s all fine, but it’s also a fair amount of trouble. Then, there’s CodeWeaver’s approach: Use a program, CrossOver, which enables you to install and run the one or two Windows applications you need on your favorite operating system.

http://www.zdnet.com/run-windows-apps-on-both-os-x-and-linux-with-crossover-12-5-7000019345/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

A new type of memory chip that a startup company has just begun to test could give future smartphones and other computing devices both a speed and storage boost. The technology, known as crossbar memory, can store data about 40 times as densely as the most compact memory available today. It is also faster and more energy efficient. The technology’s ability to store a lot of data in a small space could see it replace the flash memory chips that are the basis of memory cards, some hard drives, and the internal storage of mobile devices. Data can be accessed and written to crossbar memory fast enough to see it also possibly compete with DRAM, used as short-term memory, in computing devices. The technology is significantly more energy efficient than both flash and DRAM.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517996/denser-faster-memory-challenges-both-dram-and-flash/

By Aviva Hope Rutkin, Technology Review

Millions of cars, computer networks, and devices rely on GPS. Lurking trouble: A console on the yacht that was taken over by University of Texas researchers who made bogus GPS signals seem legitimate. University of Texas researchers recently tricked the navigation system of an $80 million yacht and sent the ship off course in an experiment that showed how any device with civilian GPS technology is vulnerable to a practice called spoofing. Led by GPS expert Todd Humphreys, the researchers used a handheld device they built for about $2,000. It generates a fake GPS signal that appears identical to those sent out by the real GPS. The two signals reach the targeted system in perfect alignment. The strength of the fake signal slowly ratchets up and overtakes the real one.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517686/spoofers-use-fake-gps-signals-to-knock-a-yacht-off-course/

by Roland Greene, Berfroi

The MOOC era has dawned with a rush of utopian and dystopian bombast, much of which is bound to be wrong. A platform for enabling high-quality instruction over the internet will probably be a boon for higher education at large, even if it drastically changes the working conditions of many people in the profession. At the same time, MOOCs have demonstrated their value only in a handful of fields that deal in limited kinds of knowledge and assessment (and in those venues, as far as I can tell, they are not especially controversial).
Much of the concern for MOOCs as a sign of the future comes out of the interpretive humanities and social sciences, where online instruction on a large scale is likely not germinal to the future. In these settings, what problem do MOOCs address: access? cost? quality? interactivity? pedagogical experimentation? Each of these assumptions describes a different rationale for the MOOC.

http://www.berfrois.com/2013/08/a-mooc-point/

by Lee Gardner, Chronicle of Higher Ed

IBM is expanding its push to encourage the study of “big data” through a brace new partnerships with prominent universities and a new round of grants to support data-analytics pursuits in academe, the company announced on Wednesday. Georgetown University, George Washington University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Northwestern University are among the nine institutions and higher-education agencies worldwide that will introduce new curricula developed in partnership with the computer company. The other participating institutions—the University of Missouri, India’s Mother Teresa Women’s University, and universities overseen by the Philippines Commission on Higher Education—are introducing graduate and undergraduate courses. The universities join more than 1,000 other institutions with which IBM has created partnerships in order to boost the number of students able to grapple with the floods of data currently redefining how things are done in business, science, and other fields.

http://chronicle.com/article/IBMUniversities-Team-Up/141111/

By Robert C. Baron, Daily Record

You’ve heard the myths: Online degrees are not accredited so you are not getting a ‘real’ degree; employers won’t take your online degree seriously; no respectable college or university would ever dare offer an online degree. The facts, however, tell a much different story. In today’s high-tech world, the importance of keeping up with the latest in technological trends and advancements is paramount in the workplace, and the colleges and universities that provide the education to the corporate workforce are no different. Major universities, such as Auburn University, the University of Connecticut and the University of Florida, are among the leaders in offering online graduate business programs, according to U.S. News and World Report. In a December 2012 report, the SUNY Chancellor’s Online Education Advisory Team said the SUNY system delivered over 200 complete online degree and certificate programs, with over 100,000 enrollments annually.

http://nydailyrecord.com/blog/2013/08/12/commentary-enhanced-earning-capacity-can-impact-online-learners/

by Geoff Cain blog

We often hear that online learning takes a lot of time for instructors. I have found that it can, but when a course is set up in advance to take advantage of a learning management system’s features, a lot of time can be saved. A little work and planning in advance can save teachers a lot of time when it will really count. Many of these techniques make for a more engaging experience for the students and make teaching online less stressful for instructors.

http://cain.blogspot.com/2013/08/time-saving-tips-for-teaching-online.html

by Ki Mae Heussner, GigaOM

Consumer eye-tracking technology that automatically pauses videos when viewers look away is moving into the corporate arena — but it’s not really for your benefit. . . it’s for your boss’s. Each year, companies pour $62 billion into corporate training programs, according to a recent report from Bersin by Deloitte. But just $2 billion of that goes to online learning. Digital learning companies say C-suite executives would be willing to increase their spending if they could feel more confident that employees were actually using the content, not just hitting play and possibly checking their email instead. To give companies a more clear window into how their employees are using online training programs, online training company Mindflash on Tuesday rolled out a new eye-tracking feature (in beta) that monitors employees and automatically pauses the video when it senses that they’ve been distracted. Mindflash develops online training software that allows businesses from Microsoft to McDonald’s to create their own online courses for new hire onboarding, sales training and other kinds of non-technical corporate training.

http://gigaom.com/2013/08/13/paying-attention-new-online-corporate-training-tech-keeps-an-eye-on-employees/

By International Association for K-12 Online Learning

The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) and the Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute (MVLRI), a division of Michigan Virtual University, today announced the launch of the new Research Clearinghouse for K-12 Blended and Online Learning (http://k12onlineresearch.org), to house the latest research examining studies and trends in blended and online learning. “This clearinghouse offers the most complete picture of innovative instructional models and practices for blended and online teaching and learning for personalizing K-12 education,” said Dr. Kathryn Kennedy, iNACOL’s Director of Research. “It provides a wealth of information for researchers, policymakers and education leaders exploring all aspects of blended and online learning as they consider implementing next generation learning models for students and teachers.”

http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/13/5646211/new-education-research-clearinghouse.html

by Philip Chan, Android Apps Review

Always seeking to learn more about anything and everything? Looking for an app that will quench your daily thirst for knowledge? Then the Coursera On The Go Free app from developer Aliaksei Radzinski is the perfect app for you! Imagine being able to learn new things and add to your educational knowledge every time you have a spare minute. This is what the Coursera On The Go app can do for you. This app combines the best of learning tools, the internet, online lectures, and educational videos to help your expand your brain power. Learn everything from higher mathematics to lesser known sciences at the simple tap of your fingertips, whether it is downloading courses or viewing more video functions. In order to access the Coursera On The Go app, you will need to have an account to log in with and also make sure that your device has the capability of playing mp4 video formats. There is a paid version available as well, which has additional features such as: simultaneous unlimited downloads, streaming subtitles, PDF documents accessibility, default player selection, cache directory, and free of advertisements.

http://www.androidappsreview.com/2013/08/12/coursera-on-the-go-android-app-review/