Techno-News Blog

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education

While small community colleges may not have the resources that large universities do, they’re making an effort to be on social media so they can serve their students and community. Community colleges face both unique opportunities and challenges with social media, said Brian Smith, communications coordinator for Austin Community College in Texas, which enrolls more than 43,000 credit students. The college does not have the fan base of a large athletics program, which means it doesn’t have a built-in following on social media like universities do. Plus, students generally only spend two years at the college, so many don’t have as lasting of a connection with it. “With community college, you’ve got a lot of students who frankly may be ashamed of the bad rap that community colleges get, so they don’t want to associate themselves on social media with it,” Smith said.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Smaller-Community-Colleges-Make-Social-Media-a-Priority.html

BY TIM JOHNSON, Kansas City Star

Lost in the debate about online learning, however, is its impact in far-flung regions of the globe, places like the electrical engineering department at the University of El Salvador and the modest walk-up apartment of the Palacios family, above the medical clinic of Dr. Roberto Palacios Navarro, Roosemberth’s father. “At school, he hardly studies. He just shows up and takes the exams,” Palacios said of his son. But it isn’t for lack of ambition. “He wants to learn,” he said. Added the son: “I don’t like simple things.” The 16 year old aced a difficult engineering course offered online by a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Palacios lives with his family in Armenia, El Salvador.

http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/02/4524625/latin-america-becoming-fertile.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education

Social media monitoring of students has sparked a debate among education leaders, policymakers and legal experts. And recent monitoring decisions have added fuel to the fire. On one hand, social media monitoring of students could help education institutions identify cyberbullying, suicidal posts and illegal behavior. It could also give them opportunities to teach students about responsible social media use that benefits both students and institutions. On the other hand, monitoring student social media takes time away from educators’ regular duties and can lead to more of a disciplinary mindset rather than an educational one. This monitoring could pose legal liabilities, put educators into a role they’re not trained for, and generally track what students are saying even though there is no reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Student-Social-Media-Monitoring-Stirs-up-Debate.html

By Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

They’re not just tweeting, snapchatting, and Facebooking. Okay, maybe that’s what they do most of the time. But modern students are doing some pretty innovative things with technology these days. From blending up all their online and offline courses to integrating iPads into activities outside the classroom, there’s a lot happening that you should know about. The following visual guide from Internet Innovation walks you through a half-dozen ways that you may not have expected education technology to be used. Personally, I like the ‘virtual labs’ idea the most. Students log in to virtual labs, discuss what they’re doing, and do experiments together.
http://www.edudemic.com/students-using-technology/

by GARETH MCPHERSON, Cambridge News

A boost has been delivered to the teaching of computing in schools after three Cambridge institutions teamed up to offer free lessons for all. Mini computer pioneers the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Cambridge University Press and exam board OCR have launched what they claim is the first massive open online course (MOOC) designed to support school teaching and learning in computing, a subject previously bemoaned by the Education Secretary Michael Gove as forgotten. More than 80 bite-sized videos were released today focusing on essential knowledge for beginners to do with hardware, data representation and programming.

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/News/Raspberry-Pi-Cambridge-University-Press-and-OCR-team-up-for-free-computing-lessons-20131001175156.htm

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Cognitive Print is a personalized fingerprint of each student’s cognitive process. Cognitive prints are a real time, color-coded, sequential task analysis of the steps that a student takes as they complete their research and writing assignment. It can offer a new depth of insight into why a student may be performing exceptionally well (or not), and can help them to guide each student in a better direction.Cognitive prints give teachers an in-depth, personalized look at each student’s work process. Since Citelighter gives them the ability to see a log of every action their students take as they research, comment, paraphrase, organize content, and write, they don’t need to waste time trying to diagnose any particular students’ difficulties. The teacher and student can work together to put a more efficient process in place for each student.

http://www.edudemic.com/citelighter-cognitive-prints/

By Jake New, eCampus News

This summer, data on American campuses was under attack, with some schools like the University of Wisconsin reporting 100,000 cyber-attacks from Chinese IP addresses every day. CrashPlan backs up university’s data by encrypting it and storing it in the cloud. At the same time, more than half of universities still transmit various kinds of sensitive data over unencrypted channels, according to a recent survey conducted by HALOCK Security Labs. The not-for-profit consortium Internet2 is helping its 250 member institution members tackle the problem by providing them with the endpoint backup service CrashPlan.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/data-crashplan-cloud-025/

By Denny Carter,eCampus News

An algorithm designed to spot struggling students and offer guidance and assistance even in the first couple weeks of their college career proved highly effective at Purdue University over the past six years. Signals was first used at Purdue University in 2007. The program, known as Signals, is one of the first advanced analytics programs to identify at-risk students by delving into reams of data that offer a clear picture into how a student in adjusting to her college education. Signals examines numbers gathered from more than 20 data points stemming from learning management systems used at Purdue.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/purdue-online-retention-164/

By Kaylene Hong, the Next Web

The result of this partnership is Coursera Zone, a Chinese-language Web portal which will be hosted on NetEase’s open education website open.163.com. Eli Bildner from Coursera’s growth team says in a blog post: The aim in creating Coursera Zone is to help Chinese-speaking students more easily find and engage with content from Coursera’s partner universities and institutions. Specifically, Coursera Zone will feature translated course synopses, a Chinese-language orientation to the Coursera platform, Chinese-language discussion forums, and student testimonials. For the translation part, Coursera says it has teamed up with Chinese social networking site Guokr and volunteer translator community Yeeyan.

http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/10/08/online-learning-startup-coursera-moves-into-china-with-netease-partnership/

By Jake New, eCampus News

With college costs at a record high, many prospective students are forced to choose between price and prestige – and women facing that decision are overwhelmingly choosing the former by turning to online courses. Women “see online degrees as more achievable than traditional on-ground program” by a margin of three-to-one, according to a survey released in September by Western International University.  Nearly 80 percent of the survey’s respondents, who were all women between the ages 22 and 50, said they believed online universities offered specialized degree programs and that they could advance their careers.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/research/women-degrees-online-162/

By David Talbot, Technology Review

By one estimate, global mobile data traffic will increase 13-fold between 2012 and 2017, requiring new solutions for adding capacity. A wireless networking technology found in Apple’s new operating system could—if tweaked—provide a 10- to 20-fold bandwidth increase in some situations, like on a moving train or in a busy urban environment, new research suggests. The technology is called multipath TCP. It allows you to use multiple wireless networks—such as 4G and Wi-Fi—at the same time. But Apple isn’t using it fully, nor is it using an advanced version—one that also encodes the data being transmitted in new ways— recently shown to provide those dramatic potential gains.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519646/how-apple-could-boost-speeds-20-times-on-the-next-iphone/

by Mike Orcutt, Technology Review

Technologies that make computers more energy efficient will be vital to the future of the industry. Computer chips that use light, instead of electrons, to move data between electronic components and to other chips could be essential for more efficient supercomputers and data centers. Several industrial research labs are working toward such optical interconnects that rely on germanium to turn light into ones and zeros. But recent research suggests that graphene devices could be far better and cheaper. An optical interconnect consists of a modulator that converts electrical signals into optical ones, and a photodetector, which does the reverse. Current iterations feature modulators made of silicon and photodetectors made of germanium. Intel recently announced plans to use such technology and begin manufacturing a product it calls “silicon photonics,” for use in data centers

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519441/graphene-could-make-data-centers-and-supercomputers-more-efficient/

by Phys.Org

A team from UC San Diego is launching a new course on the Coursera online learning network that breaks ground on several fronts. In “Bioinformatics Algorithms – Part 1,” UC San Diego computer science and engineering professor Pavel Pevzner and his graduate students are offering a course that incorporates a substantial research component for the first time. “To our knowledge, this is the first major online course that prominently features massive open online research, or MOOR, rather than just regular coursework” said Pevzner. “All students who sign up for the course will be given an opportunity to work on specific research projects under the leadership of prominent bioinformatics scientists from different countries, who have agreed to interact and mentor their respective teams.”

http://phys.org/news/2013-10-massive-online-frontier.html

By Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

If you’re overwhelmed by all the talk of iPads, classroom connectivity, and basically unsure of how to actually turn your current classroom into something more cutting-edge, then this visual is for you. It details the step-by-step way to turn your 4 walls and desks into a 21st century classroom. While I hate that term, it fits into this visual (see below) so be sure to check it out. The following guide we found quite awhile ago on Visual.ly draws some interesting ideas out of the usual ‘get some tech into your classroom’ mantra we all follow.

http://www.edudemic.com/cutting-edge-classrooms/

By Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet

Microsoft announced its new ARM-based Surface 2 and Intel-based Surface 2 Pro devices on September 23 in New York City. Specs and packaging are largely what was rumored — other than the fact that the Surface 2 will be available in silver. The rumor was, according to my source, the ARM-based Surface 2 would start at $499 for the 32 GB version. Instead, Microsoft announced today that it will start at $449. As expected, the previous model (Surface RT) is staying at $349.

http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-surface-2-pricing-starts-at-449-7000021037/

by Jim Shimabukuro, ETC Journal

They’re billed as SPOCs, or small private online courses, and they’re being led by Harvard and UC-Berkeley. According to Rob Lue1, Harvard’s edX director, “We’re already in a post-Mooc era,”2 and SPOCs are the next generation. Considering the specs on SPOCs, however, SOOC3 — for selective open online course — may be a better fit for what appears to be a strong candidate for nextgen status. The problem with the moniker is that SPOCs aren’t always private.

http://etcjournal.com/2013/09/26/spocs-are-mooc-game-changers/

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Understanding how learning happens is a huge part of teaching. If you don’t understand what needs to happen for learning to occur, how can your students learn? We’ve heard it SO many times, especially as of late – you can’t just throw information at your students anymore, you have to teach them how to process it so that they can learn how to learn. The handy infographic below takes a look at the BELS process – Brain Essential Learning Steps. In other words, how does the brain process information in the learning process? The graphic breaks it down in terms of how to teach the material, making this a super useful reminder for teachers planning their lessons. Keep reading to learn more.

http://www.edudemic.com/brain-essential-learning-steps/

By Tim Carmody, Technology Review

Smartphones and tablets created a rich ecosystem of apps, unlocking new experiences for users. Apps already available for the Galaxy Gear include Banjo, which shows social posts by people nearby, and Atooma, which lets users program different tasks. The age of wearable computing is upon us. Forget the debate over how capable or fashionable the first devices are, how popular they may eventually become, or even whether we fully understand what we’re getting into with these devices (see “The Paradox of Wearable Technology”). The big question is simply: what will they do? And the answer will have much to do with the apps that emerge. Both hardware makers and software developers hope that wearables, like the smartphone, tablet, and television, will become a new platform for application development.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519541/in-search-of-the-next-boom-developers-cram-their-apps-into-smart-watches/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Making search better able to understand natural language and speech could allow major changes in how people use mobile devices. Google announced a series of upgrades to its search engine and mobile search apps today that strengthen its ability to understand queries in the form of natural sentences like those used in conversation. The changes are particularly focused on enabling more complex spoken interactions with Google’s mobile apps, boosting the company’s challenge to Apple’s Siri personal assistant. “We are making your conversation with Google more natural,” said Amit Singhal, who leads search technology at Google. He spoke at a press conference held in the Menlo Park garage that Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made their first office space in 1998.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519681/google-tweaks-search-to-challenge-apples-siri/

By Aviva Hope, Technology Review

Robots are incapable of performing many physical tasks. Taking inspiration from nature could help. Robots usually look rigid and nonhuman, with joints engineered to avoid the elasticity that can make their movements less predictable and harder to control. Roboy, a robot developed by Rolf Pfeifer and colleagues in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich, is an example of a different approach that is slowly gaining momentum. Roboy has a four-foot-tall human shape and a set of “muscles” inspired by the human musculoskeletal system. The plastic muscles work together via electrical motors and artificial tendons. Tendon-driven systems like Roboy mimic the flexible mechanics of biology, and could result in a new class of robots that are lighter, safer, and move in a more natural way.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518796/some-robots-are-starting-to-move-more-like-humans/

by Dave Clinefelter, Learning House

Between regulatory changes, the introduction of new learning models such as MOOCs, and rising tuition rates, online higher education is evolving at a rapid pace. No longer is it an expansive market where schools can build an online program and expect an instant boost in enrollment. How, then, can schools succeed? A panel of diverse industry experts, including Richard Garrett, vice president and principal analyst for online higher education at Eduventures; Bradley Safalow, founder and CEO of PAA Research; Gregory Ferenbach, partner at Dow Lohnes, PLLC; and Dr. Susan Aldridge, senior fellow of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and newly appointed senior vice president for online learning at Drexel University, has some answers.

http://www.learninghouse.com/blog/marketing/four-perspectives-on-the-future-of-online-education