Techno-News Blog

BY SATISH SUBRAMANIAN, eSchool News
Four experienced “makers” and K-12 educators dish their top tools and advice to build a meaningful classroom makerspace from the ground up. Makerspaces are becoming a classroom staple. As these shared spaces for student-led learning continue to flourish, the concepts, tools and applications of makerspaces have reached a new level of variety. For those new to “making,” developing the blueprints for a classroom makerspace this back-to-school season can be intimidating.  The teaching and learning benefits of maker education are clear and simple. This practice enables students to exercise creativity and abstract thinking to see a problem from beginning to end. They test, analyze and modify ideas in both the design and production stages. Making offers our youngest generation a fluid model for approaching problems through trial-and-error, a skill that can last a lifetime.

https://www.eschoolnews.com/2017/09/01/teachers-makerspace-must-haves/

By Mike Masciadrelli, WWLP

More students at UMass are going online to get their degrees. More than 75,000 students enrolled in UMass online courses last year, up 6 percent from the previous fiscal year. “Sometimes online classes can be a little less rigorous, you don’t have to go to class all the time,” said Hannah Boyd, Junior at UMass Amherst. “It just makes it easier to get those extra credits.”  UMassOnline offers 150 degrees and certificate programs, along with more than 1500 courses. One of their more recent online programs allows students to obtain a graduate certificate in business analytics at UMass Amherst.

http://wwlp.com/2017/08/29/more-umass-students-are-getting-their-degrees-online/

by Devin Coldewey, Frederic Lardinois, TechCrunch

Tech giants Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all applying the lessons of machine learning to translation, but a small company called DeepL has outdone them all and raised the bar for the field. Its translation tool is just as quick as the outsized competition, but more accurate and nuanced than any we’ve tried. I only speak a smattering of French in addition to my passable English, but luckily my colleague Frederic is a man of many tongues. We both agreed that DeepL’s translations were generally superior to those from Google Translate and Bing. Take, for example, the following passage from a German news article linked below.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/29/deepl-schools-other-online-translators-with-clever-machine-learning/

BY: PATRICK BEAN AND ANDREW HORSFALL, Biz Community
The current education system is ripe for disruption. Historically, institutions have positioned themselves as knowledge leaders and the primary place to receive expertise to prepare students for the workplace. However, in the age of free online courses from the world’s top universities and part-time study sites, such as edX and Coursera, that information is becoming widely available outside the system.Universities are facing a future where students will be able to study online with reputable and internationally recognised institutions for a relatively cheap fee, potentially even free. In the online space, education is becoming more commoditised and there will be a few global winners, dominated by well-known education brands that collaborate with technology companies.

http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/371/166798.html

by Technavio

Technavio’s latest report on the global machine learning courses market provides an analysis of the most important trends expected to impact the market outlook from 2017-2021. Technavio defines an emerging trend as a factor that has the potential to significantly impact the market and contribute to its growth or decline. Increasing popularity of adaptive training is a key trend in the global machine learning courses market. The market is growing at a fast pace because of the growing awareness of machine learning among students and professionals. The inclusion of analytics and robotics in many industries is prompting organizations to upscale the knowledge of their employees in the AI domain. The most popular AI courses available in the market are machine learning and deep learning.  Online teaching is another factor that has bolstered the growth of the global machine learning courses market as it provides individuals with better learning flexibility.”

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170831005098/en/Machine-Learning-Courses-Market—Trends-Forecasts

By Sydney Johnson, EdSurge

For many attending the Future of Work symposium on Wednesday, there wasn’t any question whether automation is going to take over jobs—but rather when, and how education should respond. Hosted at Stanford University, the day-long event brought together dozens of minds who are thinking about what careers and skills students need to prepare for, and how an increasingly digital higher-education system will need to adapt to help get them there. Speakers including edX CEO Anant Agarwal, associate dean and director of Stanford’s Diversity and First-Gen office Dereca Blackmon, and Deborah Quazzo, a co-founder of investment firm GSV, shared their ideas on what that might look like.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-31-so-what-is-the-future-of-work

by Dennis Romera, LA Weekly

The University of California system has 10 campuses, 150 academic disciplines and 600 graduate degree programs. An Orange County real estate broker wants to add tens of thousands of online courses to that list. And he wants to make them available to the public. For free. The Bernie Sanders–style proposal, officially submitted this week to the California attorney general as a potential ballot initiative, is clearly a long shot. But its author, Boyd Roberts of Laguna Beach, thinks people will be so enthused by the prospect of getting a world-class education on their laptops for no cost that they’ll come out in droves to help him get the measure on the November 2018 ballot. “The first thing it does is establish the right of the public to access publicly owned higher education,” he says. “More specifically, it gives them the right to audit all publicly owned higher education online.”

http://www.laweekly.com/news/proposal-seeks-to-open-university-of-california-to-all-for-free-8594210

By Jessica Stillman, Inc

Class Central aims to clear up some of the confusion by curating the 8,000 or so MOOCs (massive open online courses) currently available to students. They also put together an annual list of the 50 most highly rated classes in areas from technology to the humanities.  Students rate the classes on a five-star scale similar to how they would a restaurant on Yelp. We sort the classes based on the Bayesian average of their rating, which factors in the number of ratings for the class,” Class Central founder and CEO Dhawal Shah explained to Inc.com in an email.  If you are specifically hoping to hone your business skills online, here are the top five business-related MOOCs recommended by the 30,000 students who have reviewed classes on Class Central. To get a certificate of completion and have your work graded, you may need to shell out a small fee of about $50. Otherwise the courses can be taken for free.

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-5-best-online-business-courses-of-the-year.html

by Steve Ranger, ZD Net

Western Digital has unveiled what it says is the world’s highest-capacity microSD card — one that crams 400GB of storage into your smartphone. The card can hold up to 40 hours of Full HD video and can transfer data at up to 100MBps: at that speed, users could move 1,200 3.5MB photos per minute over USB 3.0. The card, which Western Digital is aiming at Android smartphone and tablet users, comes with a ten-year warranty and a US retail price of $249.99.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/storage-breakthrough-worlds-biggest-microsd-card-crams-in-a-massive-400gb-of-data/

By Maria Danilova, Associated Press

The use of technology in schools is part of a broader concept of personalized learning that has been gaining popularity in recent years. It’s a pedagogical philosophy centered around the interests and needs of each individual child as opposed to universal standards. Other features include flexible learning environments, customized education paths and letting students have a say in what and how they want to learn.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/aug/27/can-computers-enhance-the-work-of-teachers-the-deb/

by Ray Pelosi, EdTech

So, what can universities do — on their own and in league with solutions vendors — to protect against botnet assaults on their IoT devices? Design and Build with Security Top of Mind: For starters, security must be a design consideration instead of an afterthought. “Developers must start thinking about security and building it in,” says Bob Turner, CISO at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It should be a bake-it-in, don’t-bolt-it-on approach.” That includes developing security controls that focus on encryption, device authentication, key management, virtual local area network (VLAN) segregation and code signing — and doing so in a timely, cost-effective fashion.

https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2017/08/how-protect-your-university-malware-you-ve-never-heard

by Steve Lohr, NYTimes

In the last five years, dozens of schools have popped up offering an unusual promise: Even humanities graduates can learn how to code in a few months and join the high-paying digital economy. Students and their hopeful parents shelled out as much as $26,000 seeking to jump-start a career. But the coding boot-camp field now faces a sobering moment, as two large schools have announced plans to shut down this year — despite backing by major for-profit education companies, Kaplan and the Apollo Education Group, the parent of the University of Phoenix. The closings are a sign that years of heady growth led to a boot-camp glut, and that the field could be in the early stages of a shakeout.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/technology/coding-boot-camps-close.html

by Will Knight, MIT Technology Review
Andrew Ng, one of the world’s best-known artificial-intelligence experts, is launching an online effort to create millions more AI experts across a range of industries. Ng, an early pioneer in online learning, hopes his new deep-learning course on Coursera will train people to use the most powerful idea to have emerged in AI in recent years. The thing that really excites me today is building a new AI-powered society. Even though a lot of the buzz in AI has been around large tech companies—and clearly the large tech companies are creating huge amounts of value with AI through better Web search, online advertising, better maps, better payment systems, and so on—if you look across an entire economy, really any Fortune 500 company can create a lot of value with AI as well.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608573/andrew-ngs-next-trick-training-a-million-ai-experts/

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

In the 21st century, it is important for colleges not only to have computers and the Internet that students can access; colleges should implement up-to-date and popular technology for students to use in their everyday lives. The place to begin this goal is in the Instructional Technology Department. IT Departments should help colleges create their IT strategies. But, it is of utmost importance to include students in a college’s IT strategy to make it the most effective.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/involve-students-colleges-strategy/

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
Institutions are focused on strategic technologies that help support student success and other initiatives.  Technologies for planning and mapping students’ educational plans, along with mobile app development, are among the top strategic technologies covered in EDUCAUSE’s 2017 Integrated Planning for Advising and Student Success (iPASS) trends and technologies report. The report examines higher ed’s top strategic technology priorities. Strategic technologies are newer compared to mature and commonly-deployed technologies such as financial information systems, and these newer technologies are the technologies on which institutions will likely spend most of their time implementing, planning, and tracking this year.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/it-newsletter/technologies-fall-higher-ed/

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal
Teacher Laura Rangel, left, works with a group of other educators to plan a world history lesson using primary sources during a summer teaching event at the University of California, Davis. Historians and teachers in California are working together to develop free, open, online instructional materials for teaching history and social sciences in K-12. Scheduled to be available by July 1, 2019, the new content will adhere to a history-social science framework adopted by the state’s Department of Education in 2016. The curriculum will include digital versions of primary and secondary sources, lesson plans and related instructional materials.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/08/25/teachers-and-historians-to-develop-free-open-online-curriculum.aspx

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
Our 2017 Teaching with Technology Survey found that faculty have a positive outlook about technology’s impact on their work, teaching effectiveness, student learning and more. In a survey of faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States, 73 percent of respondents said technology has made their jobs “easier” or “much easier.” And nary a one considered their job “much harder” thanks to tech. Those findings came out of Campus Technology’s second annual Teaching with Technology Survey, in which we asked faculty to dish on their use of technology, likes and dislikes, views of the future and more. Their responses revealed a lot about the business of teaching and learning with technology today — and how it has changed over the last year.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/08/23/most-faculty-say-technology-has-made-their-jobs-easier.aspx

By Sri Ravipati, Campus Technology

Wearables generated $30.5 billion this year, with smartwatches raking in roughly a third of total sales, according to a new Gartner forecast. In 2017, there will be approximately 41.5 million smartwatch units sold, compared to 34.8 million units last year, according to the market research firm. Gartner researchers predict smartwatches from Apple and Fossil will take the lead in sales for the segment. “We expect other consumer electronics brands such as Asus, Huawei, LG, Samsung and Sony to sell only 15 percent of smartwatches in 2021, because their brands do not have as strong an appeal as lifestyle brands for personal technologies,” according to a news release. Notably, smartwatches for children ages 2-13 are forecast “to represent 30 percent of total smartwatch unit shipments in 2021.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/08/25/report-smartwatches-take-up-nearly-a-third-of-all-wearables-sales.aspx

By CRAIG CALHOUN, NY Times

Davidson argues persuasively that student-centered, active learning can transform classrooms and even online courses. Technology itself is neither the enemy nor the solution (recent fantasies about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, notwithstanding). She rightly rails against both rising costs and a public defunding of higher education that together mean students graduate with huge debt burdens and accordingly make educational choices based on guesses at how they can best pay them off rather than what they want to learn or how they can best contribute to the world. She criticizes disciplinary departments as too dominant and points out that neither the world’s problems nor its jobs are organized entirely by academic disciplines. She complains that ubiquitous grading and ranking of both students and schools have produced not only an obsession with hierarchical standing but also an approach focused more on exclusivity and weeding out than on helping everyone learn.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/books/review/cathy-davidson-new-education.html

by Christina Cox, the Signal

Students entering college this year have grown up in a world where a phone is used for anything except voice communication. Instead, it is a video game, a direction finder, an electronic telegraph and a research library. For these students, conversations can be had through emotions, relationships can be found on eHarmony and jobs can be discovered on Monster.com. These are just some of the facts catalogued on Beloit College’s annual Mindset List for the Class of 2021 that was released Tuesday. Currently in its 20th year, the Mindset List aims to bridge the gap between generations and acts as a touchstone for teachers to have one-on-one chats and class discussions with students.

https://signalscv.com/2017/08/22/todays-college-freshmen-never-lived-without-smartphones-emojis/

By Manuela Ekowo, EdSurge

This October, two open education pioneers are teaming up to pilot a new edX course titled “Introduction to Open Education” with hopes to amplify and answer some of these questions. George Siemens, professor and education technology researcher at the University of Texas at Arlington, and David Wiley, co-founder and chief academic officer at OER company Lumen Learning, will lead the free course that aims to introduce graduate students (though anyone with internet access can take the classes) to open education, and how the field has evolved. The six-week long MOOC will touch on topics including open educational resources (OER), open pedagogy and practice, open knowledge and open research.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-23-george-siemens-and-david-wiley-join-forces-for-a-mooc-about-open-education