Techno-News Blog

By Patrick Larkin, Edudemic

Personally, I have no strong emotion tied to one device or another. In fact, as a learner, I get a great deal of satisfaction by figuring out how I can get my daily tasks done on any device that is placed before me. In fact, my main takeaway from most of these debates regarding one device or another is that those of us in schools need to steer clear of strapping on the blinders that can come along with one platform or another. We need to ensure environments that are adaptable and allow learners to accomplish their tasks with whatever devices are available. For all intensive purposes, devices are now basically disposables after two to three years. It is time to dispose of the debate on devices as well.

http://www.edudemic.com/time-end-device-debate/

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

It seems to be part of the human condition that we are constantly looking to the future. From things a simple as “what’s happening this weekend” to “are we going to have flying cars in ten years”, wondering, imagining, and creating what our future will look like is so normal that it can often seem like it is just a part of our subconscious. In education, we’re always looking to the future. What can we improve? How can we change, add, or manage our toolkits to do exactly what we need? What skills will students need in the future, and how can we ensure we’re preparing them adequately? What technologies will they be using? The handy infographic below takes a look at the ‘education of tomorrow’. It showcases a few statistics on technology growth over the years along with an overview of what might be next for the future of education.

http://www.edudemic.com/future-of-education/

By Jonathan Webb, BBC

Scientists have produced a new computer chip that mimics the organisation of the brain, and squeezed in one million computational units called “neurons”. They describe it as a supercomputer the size of a postage stamp. Each neuron on the chip connects to 256 others, and together they can pick out the key features in a visual scene in real time, using very little power. The design is the result of a long-running collaboration, led by IBM, and is published in the journal Science.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28688781

by Stefano Ferretti, Gabriele D’Angelo, arXiv Cornell

Mobile gaming presents a number of main issues which remain open. These are concerned mainly with connectivity, computational capacities, memory and battery constraints. In this paper, we discuss the design of a fully distributed approach for the support of mobile Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs). In mobile environments, several features might be exploited to enable resource sharing among multiple devices / game consoles owned by different mobile users. We show the advantages of trading computing / networking facilities among mobile players. This operation mode opens a wide number of interesting sharing scenarios, thus promoting the deployment of novel mobile online games. In particular, once mobile nodes make their resource available for the community, it becomes possible to distribute the software modules that compose the game engine. This allows to distribute the workload for the game advancement management. We claim that resource sharing is in unison with the idea of ludic activity that is behind MOGs. Hence, such schemes can be profitably employed in these contexts.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.2774

By Kevin Bullis, Technology Review

When experts talk about future solar cells, they usually bring up exotic materials and physical phenomena. In the short term, however, a much simpler approach—stacking different semiconducting materials that collect different frequencies of light—could provide nearly as much of an increase in efficiency as any radical new design. And a new manufacturing technique could soon make this approach practical. The startup Semprius, based in Durham, North Carolina, says it can produce very efficient stacked solar cells quickly and cheaply, opening the door to efficiencies as high as 50 percent. (Conventional solar cells convert less than 25 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity.)

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529651/stacking-cells-could-make-solar-as-cheap-as-natural-gas/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Criticism of Google Glass has often focused on the way its camera makes surreptitious video recording too easy. Now researchers have shown that footage captured by the face-mounted camera could also pose a security threat.Software developed by the researchers can automatically recover the passcodes of people recorded on video as they type in their credentials, even when the screen itself is not visible to the camera. The attack works by watching the movement of the fingers to work out what keys they are touching. It also works on footage from camcorders, webcams, and smartphones, but Glass offers perhaps the subtlest way to stage it. The work suggests that “shoulder surfing”—stealing passwords or other data by watching someone at a computer—could become more of a threat as digital cameras and powerful image processing software become more common.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529896/black-hat-google-glass-can-steal-your-passcodes/

By Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

Even though I’m not a music teacher (nor have I ever been, or will I be), I tend to find technology in music classrooms to be some of the most exciting ways that technology is being put to use in classrooms overall. While there’s lots of time-saving-efficient-cool-useful stuff happening in all types of classrooms, there’s something particularly awesome about making music and integrating some awesome digital technologies into the process. There are a million and one ways to use an iPad or other tablet in your music classroom, but it definitely doesn’t stop there! The handy infographic linked below takes a look at how technology is revitalizing how musicians compose, record, perform, and distribute music – both in and out of the classroom.

http://www.edudemic.com/technology-is-being-used-in-music-classrooms/

By Zapmarketing, Edudemic

Integrating video into our classrooms can be a great way not only to get students more engaged in the material you’re presenting to them, but to get them using technology, giving and getting feedback, and tapping all parts of their brain while they learn. See the videos and factoids linked below.

http://www.edudemic.com/using-video-in-the-classroom/

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

What does ‘the internet of things’ mean, anyway? It is a term that I’ve heard periodically over the past few years but explored little and never wrote about here, as it doesn’t specifically refer to education and there are so many other (specifically) relevant things to share and talk about. The short explanation is that the Internet of Things refers to the interconnectedness of devices of all types – especially ‘smart’ devices that can react, anticipate, and adapt as necessary. In short, this interconnectedness and advancing technology is expected to simplify automation in so many areas of our lives. See the infographic linked below for more.

http://www.edudemic.com/guide-to-the-internet-of-things/

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

When we talk about what changes technology has brought to classrooms across the globe, the answers could basically be never ending. Teachers could talk about things like bringing ease to researching all types of topics, bringing organization (and a lack of physical papers to lose) to the classroom, and making connections for professional development. There could be a lot of discussion about the millions of nuances of amelioration brought to classrooms – both physical and virtual. That said, the handy linked infographic below takes a look at 4 ways technology is changing how people learn.

http://www.edudemic.com/technology-is-changing-how-people-learn/

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

When we published online education specialist Paul Beaudoin’s “6 Ways to Be a Better Online Teacher” a few months ago, it quickly became one of the top three most-read articles on our Web site this year. Paul’s academic background is in music; an accomplished composer, theorist, author and educator, he noticed early on that technology was changing the way he interacted with making music. It wasn’t long before he brought technology into his own classrooms — and online courses — to engage his students. He is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the Exemplary Course Award from Blackboard, and a frequent international workshop and keynote speaker. For this month’s issue, we asked Paul to write a follow-up piece: “Motivate and Engage Online Learners All Semester Long.”

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/08/07/learning-to-teach-online.aspx?admgarea=News

by Dorie Clark, Forbes

The average instructor brings in $7000 from Udemy courses, though there is a wide range of outcomes. I’ve met one instructor whose class earns him only $60 per month, but elite instructors – generally those with very large followings on social media who can mobilize their own audience to buy – can generate six figures annually from their courses.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2014/08/06/how-to-create-a-money-making-online-course/

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

Cheap depth-capture technology could make it easy to map indoor spaces, create realistic models of objects, and chat in 3-D. Mantis Vision’s technology, uses a projected infrared light pattern to capture 3-D images and videos, is included in Google’s Project Tango tablet. Gur Bittan is the chief technology officer of Mantis Vision, an Israel-based 3-D technology company that hopes to make this kind of experience commonplace. It is also working on a pocket-sized 3-D scanner and already offers an enterprise 3-D scanner called the F5.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529116/startup-wants-you-to-capture-the-world-in-3-d/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

A new breed of mobile wireless device lacks a battery or other energy storage, but it can still send data over Wi-Fi. These prototype gadgets, developed by researchers at the University of Washington, get all the power they need by making use of the Wi-Fi, TV, radio, and cellular signals that are already in the air. The technology could free engineers to extend the tendrils of the Internet and computers into corners of the world they don’t currently reach. Battery-free devices that can communicate could make it much cheaper and easier to widely deploy sensors inside homes to take control of heating and other services.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529576/mobile-gadgets-that-connect-to-wi-fi-without-a-battery/

by the BBC

People who use wearable gadgets to monitor their health or activity can be tracked with only $70 (£40) of hardware, research suggests. The work, carried out by security firm Symantec, used a Raspberry Pi computer to grab data broadcast by the gadgets. The snooping Pi was taken to parks and sporting events where it was able to pick out individuals in the crowds. Symantec said makers of wearables need to do a better job of protecting privacy and handling data they gather.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28602997

by TARA E. BUCK, Education Technology

Anant Agarwal is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he taught the first edX course in circuits and electronics, in May 2012. Since that time, the nonprofit, massive open online course (MOOC) provider has attracted more than 50 institutions as partners and 2.5 million students from every country in the world, Agarwal said in his morning keynote. The edX platform itself is free and open and is seeing rapid adoption by many countries looking to host free and open courses in local languages. France, China and Jordan are among those nations now offering open education opportunities through sites built on the edX platform. “Already, in the space of a year, the open-source platforms around the world have more than 1 million students on them,” Agarwal said. “This federated, decentralized approach is really spreading education all over the world.”

http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2014/07/campus-tech-2014-reinventing-higher-education

by CHRIS DUNKER, Lincoln Journal Star

Online-only students in the program — both Nebraska residents and nonresidents — increased by 16 percent in 2013-14, to roughly 7,600 students. In all, more than 28,000 of NU’s approximately 50,000 students, including 75 percent of undergraduate students, took at least one class online last year, said Mary Niemiec, associate vice president for distance learning and director of Online Worldwide. Many see the program as way to custom-tailor their higher education experience, Niemiec told the NU Board of Regents last week.

http://journalstar.com/news/local/education/more-students-logging-on-to-courses-online/article_3ee163a8-6328-5dfd-8345-370d03d99db0.html

By Michelle R. Weise and Clayton M. Christensen

The economic urgency around higher education is undeniable: the price of tuition has soared; student loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion and is greater than credit card debt; the dollars available from government sources for colleges are expected to shrink in the years to come; and the costs for traditional institutions to stay competitive continue to rise. At the same time, more education does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. Employers are demanding more academic credentials for every kind of job yet are at the same time increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction with the variance in quality of degree holders. An examination of online competency-based education unveils the tectonic shifts to come in higher education. Over time, the industry-validated experiences that emerge from the strong partnerships between online competency-based providers and employers will ultimately have the power to override the importance of college rankings and accreditation.

http://www.christenseninstitute.org/publications/hire/

by Jessica Lieber, Fast Company

A much wider array of nations are now become MOOC adopters and providers. On edX, a non-profit founded at MIT and Harvard in May 2012, a total of 1.2 million students from non-Western nations have signed up, and now non-English language courses are offered from universities in 20 countries, including as India, Mexico, France, and Hong Kong. Using edX’s open-source codebase, 12 Chinese institutions launched their own platform, XuetangX, which Agarwal says has already signed up some 300,000 users since last year. When the Queen Rania Foundation in Jordan opened up a similar portal, Edraak, to provide Arabic language content from three Middle Eastern schools, it adapted the edX code base so it could display text from right to left. Currently there are almost a dozen other countries working to launch their own versions of edX, according to Agarwal.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3033132/moocs-are-no-longer-a-cultural-export-of-the-west

By Paul Beaudoin, Campus Technology

For many learners, taking an online course can be like diving into the pool. They may feel they require a whole new skill set to stay afloat, and it’s important that you help guide and motivate them from that first splash to the finish line. How will you encourage them to continue achieving the goals that they may think are too challenging? Here is a set of techniques and strategies that can be used all semester long to get your learners swimming with ease.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/07/30/motivate-and-engage-online-learners-all-semester-long.aspx