Techno-News Blog

December 31, 2013

IBM predicts: Goodbye password, hello digital guardian

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by GMA News

By 2018, people could be bidding goodbye to passwords as they will have so-called digital guardians protecting their identities online. The concept of a digital assistant is one of the innovations that IBM predicts will potentially change people’s lives in the next five years. “In five years, each of us could be protected with our own digital guardian that will become trained to focus on the people and items it is entrusted with, offering a new level of identity theft protection. Security will assimilate contextual, situational and historical data to verify a person’s identity on different devices,” it said. A digital guardian can also be trained to tell the difference between “normal or reasonable activity” and advise the owner if it senses something unusual.

http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/340769/scitech/technology/ibm-predicts-goodbye-password-hello-digital-guardian

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Four time factors are key to online learning success

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by Simon Frazier University

If you think online learning gives you all the time in the world to learn, think again say four researchers, including three in Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Education. Associate professor Alyssa Wise, her master’s student Simone Hausknecht, her recently graduated master’s of education student Yuting Zhao and an American researcher say time management is crucial to successful online learning, especially now. “As more learning experiences include online components or take place wholly online, it is important to understand how to best support students in being successful as learners in this exciting but challenging medium,” says Wise. “An understanding of the unique temporal aspects of online learning discussions can contribute to this.”

http://www.sfu.ca/sfunews/stories/2013/four-time-factors-key-to-online-learning-success.html

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From E-Learning to M-Learning: A Different Beast

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By Meghan Decker, Business 2 Community

I was doing some consulting with a e-learning company a few years ago when the iPad first came out. We had no idea how it would change the landscape for e-learning. While traditional e-learning programs still have their place, it is not on a mobile device. The constraints and opportunities that come with mobile dictate an entirely new way of looking at how we deliver learning. A great m-learning course might look like this: small chunks of learning, no more than 10 minutes at most; emphasis on information design rather than instructional design; single training need focus; accessibility of key concepts for later reference; focus on support rather than teaching and testing.

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/e-learning-m-learning-different-beast-115049597.html

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December 30, 2013

Israeli Online Course Attracts Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi Students

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By Anav Silverman, Tazpit News Agency

Thousands of students from Arab countries have signed up for Haifa’s Technion’s first online course taught in Arabic as well as in English. Even before officially opening, the Israel Institute of Technology’s nanoscience course, which begins in March 2014, has drawn more than 32,000 views from all over the world, including from Arabic-speaking countries. The syllabus has had thousands of views which include 5,595 in Egypt, 1,865 in Kuwait, 1,243 in Saudi Arabia, and 1,243 from Syria. The course, covering nanotechnology and nanosensors, will be taught in Arabic by Technion Professor Hossam Haick of the Faculty of Chemical Engineering. Professor Haick, a native of Nazareth, pioneered innovative cancer detection via breath tests, with a device he invented known as the Na-Nose.

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/israeli-online-course-attracts-egyptian-syrian-and-saudi-students/2013/12/20/

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University CIOs Share the Biggest Challenges That Lie Ahead for Their Schools

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by Molly Greenberg, BH Courier

Whether it’s budget cuts making research funding all the more difficult or new technology wreaking havoc on the traditional brick-and-mortar education world that has remained untouched for years on end, universities across the U.S. are facing a whole slew of challenges these days. Rather than make assumptions about what’s happening on school grounds, though, Education Dive took it upon themselves to spend a couple of months interviewing higher ed CIOS. They set out to gain a better understanding about what the biggest issues on campus are and will be over the duration of the next decade.

http://bhcourier.com/budget-reductions-spells-end-of-beloved-nj-place-educational-program/2013/12/20

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Incentives and Training for Online Learning

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By Marian Stoltz-Loike, Inside Higher Ed

A new academic fairy tale goes something like this. Once upon a time there was a great faculty member who had been lecturing to her class for 25 years. She was smart, entertaining and interesting. One day, the president of her university told her they were going to flip the classroom. In a flash, she placed much of her material online, along with interesting videos and other material and, in class, she cleverly led the discussion among students, always making sure to speak far less than her students. The reality? It doesn’t always work out that way. Educational magic is created by great faculty members who provide the knowledge and tools students must acquire to reach their goals. To make that happen we need to ensure that instructors receive the training they need to be most-effective in the rapidly changing educational landscape.

http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2013/12/18/essay-incentives-and-training-teaching-online

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December 29, 2013

Virtual meetings and online learning praised by experts

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by UK Virtual College

Video conferences and online lectures are effective means of employee training and development, audience members at the Associations Congress in London have been informed. According to experts speaking at the event, digital tools like webinars and live streaming offer workers a convenient way of accessing the information they need to thrive in their role. Wendy Holloway, operations manager for the International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, said the video content launched by her organisation has had a number of benefits for members. While 80 per cent of her trainees identified the technology as main resource they want to use when they sign up, “we have found over the last two or three years that web lectures and online learning has become the second most important membership delivery,” she explained. This is likely to be because e-learning is a much more engaging way to train, and offers both employers and staff the flexibility to manage and study at their own pace.

http://www.virtual-college.co.uk/news/Virtual-meetings-and-online-learning-praised-by-experts-newsitems-801672894.aspx

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Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems For Massive Open Online Courses

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by Technology Review

Not only does student participation decline dramatically throughout the new generation of web-based courses but the involvement of teachers in online discussions makes it worse. Today, Christopher Brinton at Princeton University and a few pals offer their view. These guys have studied the behaviour in online discussion forums of over 100,000 students taking massive open online courses (or MOOCs).

And they have depressing news. They say that participation falls precipitously and continuously throughout a course and that almost half of registered students never post more than twice to the forums. What’s more, the participation of a teacher doesn’t improve matters. Indeed, they say there is some evidence that a teacher’s participation in an online discussion actually increases the rate of decline.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/522816/data-mining-exposes-embarrassing-problems-for-massive-open-online-courses/

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EdX: Expanding Education Beyond the American University

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By KRISTINA D. LORCH and CONOR J. REILLEY, Harvard Crimson
This is about experimentation; it’s about research; it’s about rethinking education,” said Harvard Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 last May, when the initial partnership between Harvard and MIT was announced. Although conceived by two elite American institutions of higher education, edX has quickly established a global footprint among not only college students, but also working adults and high-schoolers looking to supplement their formal degrees. As edX continues to expand its presence overseas and partners with an increasingly diverse array of non-educational institutions, professors and students agree on the initiative’s international significance but say its precise impact on the landscape of higher education remains uncertain.
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December 28, 2013

REPORT: 90% of Associations Use Technology to Enhance Learning

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BY KATIE BASCUAS, Associations Now

Associations that implement a strategic approach to incorporating technology into learning report more revenue gains, according to a new report from Tagoras. Roughly half of associations that use technology for learning purposes reported they have been able to increase their net revenue from educational offerings, a new report from Tagoras found. The day will arrive, maybe sooner than we all think, when we can drop the term technology altogether when talking about learning. The report—“Association Learning + Technology 2014”—also found that less than a quarter of the 200 associations surveyed have a formal, documented strategy for using technology to enhance or enable learning.

http://associationsnow.com/2013/12/report-90-of-associations-use-technology-to-enhance-learning/

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Mom, Do Your Homework!

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By Joe McGonegal, MIT Technology Review

Agarwal says embracing texting has helped him communicate with his own teenage daughter. Parents and teachers both need to accept changing technology, he said in a TedGlobal talk this year. “Let’s embrace technology and the millennial generation’s natural predilections.” Sonal Patel has since enrolled in two more edX courses. In online discussion groups, she found a growing body of MIT parents like herself taking their children’s courses alongside, or soon after, them. She formed an MIT parents Facebook group, whose page has become a place to recommend courses, discuss their children, and praise their favorite professors.Many parents enjoy classes and appreciate the insights they gain about their students’ college lives. “What really drove me to edX, and [certain] classes in particular, was taking a class that I knew that my daughter had taken or would eventually take,” says Ric Cazares, who is the parent of a junior and has completed 6.002x and 2.01x, Elements of Structures. “Even though our respective experiences with the classes are very different, I feel good knowing that I have a feel for a couple of her classes.

http://www.technologyreview.com/article/522026/mom-do-your-homework/

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An Interview with Daphne Koller of Coursera

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by Peter High, Forbes

Daphne Koller: I think there are universities that are going to be at risk from this, but it is not necessarily the lower level ones. I think it is the ones that don’t give careful thought to the implications of this transformation and how it impacts the value proposition that they provide to their students that will have trouble. I think many universities go into this or have traditionally gone into this with the assumption that their primary value for their students is the dissemination or delivery of content. Content is becoming a lot more readily available, through many open educational resources, and universities had better be more than just the content they have been providing to the students and also more than just a degree. So, what are the value-added services that the universities provide? Is this the support with tutoring? Is this internship tutoring with the ability to get involved in research with a faculty member? There are a lot of other performances with the university experience that do provide huge value, but you really have to clarify that with the students and really execute on that. If they don’t do that, then they are the ones that are going to suffer.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2013/12/16/for-coursera-broader-is-better/

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December 27, 2013

How to Use Technology in Education: Just remember how the book revolutionized teaching – Frederick M. Hess & Bror Saxberg, National Review

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The book first became available to the masses after the invention of the printing press in the mid 1400s. Previously, teachers and students had relied on painstakingly hand-inscribed parchment. As statistician Nate Silver has observed, “Almost overnight, the cost of producing a book decreased by about three hundred times, so a book that might have cost $20,000 in today’s dollars instead cost $70.” The availability of books skyrocketed. Educators today have expressed plenty of questions about new technologies, so it’s useful to recall that educators also didn’t exactly welcome the printing press. Schools were predominantly church-run affairs, and religious leaders worried about the lack of moral and interpretive guidance for learners left to their own devices. There were also fears that printed books would be a poor, cheap substitute for the rich experience of reading a scribe-written book. In 1492, abbot Johannes Trithemius fretted about the loss of “devotion to the writing of sacred texts. . . . Printed books will never equal scribed books, especially because the spelling and ornamentation of some printed books is often neglected.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366375/how-use-technology-education-frederick-m-hess-bror-saxberg

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College classes move online to meet student demand

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By DIANE D’AMICO, the Press of Atlantic City

Traditional colleges also are offering a greater number of online courses and degrees as they work to meet students’ desire for flexibility and alternate paths. But it is a challenge for colleges to keep up with rapidly changing technology that can accommodate all the ways students learn and communicate. “The future of online education has to change to meet student expectations,” said Matthew Cooper, assistant provost at Thomas Edison. He said the school has switched from the Blackboard delivery system to Moodle and Google Docs. It also moved content into cloud storage, where students can download it to whatever device they are using. “We have to have technology that is compatible with all the other technology,” he said.

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/education/college-classes-move-online-to-meet-student-demand/article_512b3cf2-660e-11e3-9e5e-0019bb2963f4.html

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Cash and credits: Online classes during winter break a boon for colleges and students

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by Jacqueline Palochko, The Morning Call

NCC, Kutztown University and East Stroudsburg University all begin online, winter session classes Monday. Lehigh Carbon Community College started its winter classes last week. The online classes, which run through mid-January, are relatively new at these colleges, but every year more students register for them. And while many colleges around the country are grappling with budget gaps and falling student enrollment, interest in online classes in the Lehigh Valley region is climbing. Schools say they’ve been promoting everything from British literature to introductory psychology courses, and they’ve received a good response — mostly from students needing an extra course or two to graduate. The 2012 Survey of Online Learning conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group shows that more than 6.7 million students, nearly a third of total enrollment at degree-granting postsecondary institutions, took at least one online course during fall 2011.

http://articles.mcall.com/2013-12-15/news/mc-lehigh-valley-colleges-winter-session-20131215_1_winter-session-winter-break-online-classes

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December 26, 2013

Leading the E-Learning Transformation of Higher Education

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by Gary Miller, Meg Benke, Bruce Chaloux, Lawrence C. Ragan, Raymond Schroeder, Wayne Smutz, Karen Swan

Announcing a new book!  Written by pioneers in the field of online learning, Leading the e-Learning Transformation of Higher Education is a professional text that offers insights and guidance to the rising generation of leaders in the field of higher education. It explains how to integrate online learning into an institution during a period of rapid social and institutional change.   This important volume:
• Shares success stories, interviews, cases and insights from a broad range of leadership styles
• Reviews how technology is transforming higher education worldwide
• Provides an overview of how distance education is organized in a range of institutional settings
• Breaks down current leadership challenges in both unit operations and institutional policy

http://stylus.styluspub.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=295407

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Grab Your Free ThingLink EDU Upgrade

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by Susan Oxnevad, Cool Tools

It’s no secret that ThingLink EDU is one of my favorite and most frequently used tools. I love ThingLink because it provides users with the ability to turn any image into a multimedia rich interactive graphic. Add video, images, audio, and links to any content on the web with the click of a button. Pack a lot of content into a small space and embed it into a variety of online learning platforms for easy access, 24/7. ThingLink is a user friendly and flexible tool that’s just gotten better for educators!

http://d97cooltools.blogspot.com/2013/12/grab-your-free-thinglink-edu-upgrade.html

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Why Does Google Need So Many Robots? To Jump From The Web To The Real World

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by John Biggs, Tech Crunch

Robots, then will be the driver for a number of impressive feats in the next few decades including space exploration, improved mapping techniques, and massive changes in the manufacturing workspace. Robots like Baxter will replace millions of expensive humans – a move that I suspect will instigate a problematic rise of unemployment in the manufacturing sector – and companies like manufacturing giant Foxconn are investing in robotics at a clip. Drones, whether human-control or autonomous, are a true extension of our senses, placing us and keeping us apprised of situations far from home base. Home helpers will soon lift us out of bed when we’re sick, help us clean, and assist us near the end of our lives. Smaller hardware projects will help us lose weight and patrol our streets. The tech company not invested in robotics today will find itself far behind the curve in the coming decade. That’s why Google needs robots.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/14/why-does-google-need-so-many-robots-to-jump-from-the-web-to-the-read-world/

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December 25, 2013

Increasing accessibility to computer science education across the U.S.

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by the National Science Foundation

Jan Cuny, NSF program manager for computer education and broadening participation says “The challenges of underproduction of degrees, lack of a presence in K-12, and underrepresentation for computer science are significant and interrelated. The computing community has an unprecedented opportunity to affect K-12 education with its enthusiasm and experience, together with its best ideas on curriculum, pedagogy, and ways to engage a broader, more diverse group of students.” Central to NSF’s efforts is the CS 10K Project, which focuses on making computer science accessible in high schools. CS 10K is a nationwide effort to get engaging, rigorous academic computer science courses into 10,000 schools taught by 10,000 well-prepared teachers. The project pays careful attention to the inclusion of women and minorities–groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in computing.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=129882&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

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5 Great Live Blogging Tips For Teachers

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By Jennifer Carey, Edudemic

Live Blogging is a popular medium to convey information as it is announced. Unless you’ve been privileged enough to get an invitation to the latest Apple or Google Event, then you have likely seen the release of information via Twitter or other live blog platforms. Live Blogs include not only writing, but images, video, links, and more. In essence, they are multimedia publications. Most conferences have access to wireless, and their inherent nature and culture – engaging, interactive, and open – lend to a live blog platform.

http://www.edudemic.com/live-blogging-tips-for-teachers/

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Find Your Perfect Tablet With This Flowchart

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By Jeff Dunn, edudemic

If you’re looking to embrace education technology, you’re likely considering an Apple iPad, an Android tablet, or perhaps a few other options. There’s the built-for-education but getting-mixed-reviews Amplify tablet and a slew of options to consider. This useful flowchart from Mashable lays out exactly which of the newest tech goodies are right for you. Hunting for the perfect tablet? Use this as a jumping off point as you begin your epic journey.

http://www.edudemic.com/find-perfect-tablet-flowchart/

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