Techno-News Blog

by Peace Chiu, South China Morning Post

Speaking in Cambridge, Massachusetts last week, edX founder and CEO Professor Anant Agarwal said the firm was working towards launching “stackable” MicroBachelors courses in three years. “You can think of education as Lego,” said the electrical engineering and computer science expert, who was recently awarded a Yidan Prize for his innovations in education development. He said MicroBachelors courses could be used to customise an undergraduate degree and shorten study time.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education/article/2171613/harvard-or-mit-choice-may-become-obsolete-stackable-online

by Dorothy Gundy, VOA

Amazon wants to get more young people to consider becoming computer engineers. The American technology company this week launched a program that aims to teach more than 10 million students a year how to code. Amazon says it will pay for summer camps and other costs for young people from low-income families. It also will offer teacher training at low-income schools. The program is called Amazon Future Engineer. Amazon hopes the programs will help bring more African-American, Hispanic and female students to the field of computer science.

https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/amazon-wants-to-teach-kids-to-code/4638850.html

by Doug Black, Enterprise Tech

This time, AI isn’t fooling around. This time, AI is in earnest, and so are its related technologies: robotics, 3-D printing, genomics, machine/deep learning, man-machine interface, IoT, HPC at the edge, quantum – the gamut of new data-driven technologies. In decades past, AI has gotten off to hyped false starts, but not this time, the building blocks are in place for the convergence of data-driven power evolving toward an AI supernova that will bring with it profound changes to human existence over the decades to come. With this expectation has come serious thinking – and worrying – about AI’s potential negative impacts. Naturally, AI investors and developers are going full speed ahead while airily dismissing AI fear as generally baseless. Rarely from within the industry do we hear voices – Elon Musk’s is an exception – calling for controls on AI.

https://www.enterprisetech.com/2018/11/03/ignore-the-ai-fear-factor-at-your-peril-a-futurists-call-for-digital-ethics/

DAN ROTELLI, Venture Beat

Among the throngs of zombie AI systems, though, exist a few quality AI systems. These systems are highly intelligent, and though they have some minor human dependencies, they produce incredibly reliable results. The developers of these systems want customers to have a good grasp of the ‘magic’ behind the intelligence – ‘magic’ that really amounts to specific settings, mechanics, controls, even known limitations. True AI can be recognized by its interactivity and trainability. These systems combine intuitive interfaces with algorithms, instructions that tell the robotic brain what logic to use. And with a little coaching along the way, true AI gets smarter and learns to differentiate right from wrong. Compared to zombie systems, true AI systems require more time investment initially but are typically more sustainable in the long run because the coaching continually improves them over time.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/03/make-sure-youre-not-investing-in-zombie-ai/

Kathleen Walch, Forbes

Artificial intelligence is not a technology. Asking the question whether or not some particular technology is or isn’t AI is missing the point. Artificial intelligence is the journey. It’s the quest for the intelligent machine. All the technologies we’ve developed on the route to that quest are things that are individually useful, but all together, have not yet gotten us to the goal. This is why it’s important to understand that artificial intelligence is not a technology, in much the same way that the Space Race is not a technology.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2018/11/01/artificial-intelligence-is-not-a-technology/#2bec67d45dcb

by Alina Tugend, NY Times

David Danks, a professor of philosophy and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, just started teaching a class, “A.I, Society and Humanity.” The class is an outgrowth of faculty coming together over the past three years to create shared research projects, he said, because students need to learn from both those who are trained in the technology and those who are trained in asking ethical questions. “The key is to make sure they have the opportunities to really explore the ways technology can have an impact — to think how this will affect people in poorer communities or how it can be abused,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/education/learning/colleges-grapple-with-teaching-ai.html

Only a quarter of top higher education schools across the country have established Chief Innovation Officer roles, which may leave you wondering if colleges and universities need CIOs. his senior leadership position not only works closely with the university president but must also reach out to all the departments at the campus to foster collaboration, collegiality, and innovation. These outreach activities can include encouraging incubators, identifying funding opportunities for research and scholarship promoting discoveries, and improving the culture and rapport between departments. The Chief Innovation Officer is integral to overall university success by assisting with funding, building collaboration, and promoting innovation.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/why-higher-education-needs-more-chief-innovation-officers/

By Tina Nazerian, EdSurge

One way professors can use artificial intelligence is to help find new materials to add to their lessons, said Bowen. An instructor can type in a concept or idea, such as “industrial design,” into the tool his team built, called Eureka!, which acts like a recommendation engine. Eureka! uses Wikipedia as a source of information. Once the tool generates results, the instructor can identify which ones are most like what he means by “industrial design” or whichever term he used. Eureka! will then use that information to refine the definition of that original term.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-11-01-robots-won-t-replace-instructors-2-penn-state-educators-argue-instead-they-ll-help-them-be-more-human

By Jordan Friedman, US News

An online degree program can be a big investment. Luckily for 37-year-old northern Virginia resident Grant Clough, his employer offers workers $8,000 per year toward tuition reimbursement for those who choose to continue their education. Clough, director of talent acquisition at AARP, initially considered an MBA program, possibly on campus. But he ultimately decided against pursuing another business degree, in part because he studied accounting as an undergraduate. He then came across the online Master of Studies in Law at Wake Forest University, and it turned out that his employer would be covering nearly all his tuition. With the online format, he would also have more flexibility to study around his schedule.

https://www.usnews.com/higher-education/online-education/articles/2018-11-01/7-ways-to-reduce-the-cost-of-an-online-degree

John Hanc, NY Times

Many of these students are traditional age. But for adult students (generally defined as those 25 and over, working full-time jobs or with parenting responsibilities) online education is a particularly attractive option. Citing several studies, Louis Soares, chief learning and innovation officer for the American Council on Education, says that about a third of all adult students — roughly 13 million — are pursuing advanced degrees online. “I think it has given adult students more opportunities,” Mr. Soares said. “If done correctly, online education can create a robust learning experience.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/education/learning/life-is-complicated-distance-learning-helps.html

Anant Agarwal, Forbes

edX research found that 29% of Americans ages 25 to 44 have completely changed fields since starting their first job post-college. Zig-zagging is not a phenomenon restricted to new grads, however, and while another study from Deloitte found that 43% of millennials plan to quit their current job within two years, a report from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently cited by JP Morgan Chase & Co. found that job hopping, across all fields and titles, has become a widely accepted characteristic of the modern workforce.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anantagarwal/2018/10/31/why-todays-professionals-are-taking-the-career-road-less-traveled/#6f8bef41466b

MIT, Engadget

When you teach language to AI systems, you typically use annotations that describe how words work. But that’s not practical in many cases — even if everybody agrees on those annotations, they often take a lot of time to produce and can still seem unnatural. MIT’s solution? Have AI learn like a child. Its researchers have developed a parser that imitates kids’ learning processes by observing scenes and making connections. The system studies captioned videos and learns to link words to objects and actions by determining the accuracy of a description.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/01/ai-can-learn-language-the-way-children-do/

by Stephane Kasriel, CNBC
According to the survey Freelancing in America 2018, released Wednesday, 93 percent of college-educated freelancers say their skill training is more useful in the work they are doing now than their college training.
Sixty-five percent of children entering primary school will end up in jobs that don’t yet exist, reveals the World Economic Forum. The result is a proliferation of new, nontraditional education options.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/31/the-future-of-work-wont-be-about-degrees-it-will-be-about-skills.html

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
The Khan Academy has launched a new series of videos focused on civics for students in K-12 and higher education — and anybody else interested in learning how government works in the United States. The videos feature academy Founder Sal Khan as well as news media celebrity and presidential debate moderator John Dickerson.  The videos feature lively conversations about U.S. government, politics and history, including little-known anecdotes from the nation’s past.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/10/25/khan-academy-takes-on-civics-and-us-history.aspx

By David Raths, Campus Technology
Drawing on the experience of eight public universities involved in a multi-year adaptive learning pilot program, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) has created a six-step guide for implementing adaptive courseware. APLU hopes to provide colleges and universities with a roadmap that runs from initial planning through scaling up the use of adaptive courseware across a campus. The idea behind adaptive courseware is to provide a personalized digital learning experience for each student. Courses are often delivered in a blended format that includes direct instruction from a professor who is able to tailor his or her own teaching based on student progress data that the adaptive courseware provides.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/10/29/aplu-develops-6-step-guide-for-implementing-adaptive-courseware.aspx

By Matt Reed, Inside Higher Ed

There’s plenty to chew on in the latest IHE poll about college faculty attitudes about technology, OER, and assessment. (Least surprising finding: skepticism about assessment remains strong.) But at least in the OER section, it strikes me that we need to ask a different question. Anecdotally, several faculty here who’ve adopted OER for their classes have reported pleasant surprise at finding that more students actually do the reading.  That tends to result in better class discussions, for obvious reasons, as well as better student performance on tests and papers. They reported that the difference stems mostly from two factors, one obvious and one surprising.  The obvious one was the elimination of cost as a barrier. The surprising one, at least for me, was that having everything in easy electronic form — without any DRM hampering access, and sufficiently platform-agnostic that it could be read on almost any device — made it easier for students to sneak a couple of minutes of reading at a time at work.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/survey-i%E2%80%99d-see

By Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

American colleges and universities that have yet to figure out a plan to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation still have time to act, attendees at Educause’s annual conference heard Wednesday. Speaking at a conference session called GDPR: Where Are We Now? Esteban Morin, a lawyer at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, told university IT leaders to “not panic” if they are just starting to develop a plan to ensure their institution is compliant with the E.U. data protection and privacy rules.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/01/eu-slow-enforce-new-data-privacy-rules-colleges-told-not-panic-about-lack-compliance

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Implementing technology in the classroom can be a real learning process even for professors at the higher education level. It can lead to a lot of frustration and misuse of the devices, particularly when professors aren’t well trained. As a result, lots of mistakes might be made with the new technology that can significantly impact students. Here are five of the mistakes that professors most often make when it comes to the use of new technology.

5 Mistakes that Professors Make with Technology

By David Nagel, THE Journal
Nintendo is working with the nonprofit Institute of Play to bring its popular Labo kits for Nintendo Switch to classrooms in North America. The Institute of Play is developing STEAM curriculum and a teacher guide for Labo and is seeking classrooms to participate. It’s already running a pilot in New York. Labo is a making and invention system for the Nintendo Switch gaming platform that brings mixed-reality capabilities to the platform, allowing users to build interactive devices out of cardboard and other materials that can not only interact with games and content on the screen but can be interacted with. For example, users can build a car out of cardboard that can actually move using vibration controlled through Switch.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2018/10/23/nintendo-bringing-labo-to-classrooms.aspx

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Google will give away $25 million to projects that propose ways to use the artificial intelligence of computers to help create a more humane society. The grant program announced Monday is part of a broader Google initiative called “AI for Social Good” that aims to ease concerns that advances in artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs and perhaps even be autonomously deployed by militaries to kill people, Other technology companies have taken similar steps to address ethical issues in AI. For instance, Microsoft has committed $115 million to an “AI for Good” initiative that provides grants to organizations harnessing AI for humanitarian, accessibility and environmental projects.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/google-give-25-million-fund-humane-ai-projects-58834119

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
Over the past five years, the higher ed LMS market for institution-wide adoptions in the United States and Canada has become increasingly dominated by “the Big Four”: Instructure Canvas, Blackboard Learn, D2L Brightspace and Moodle, according to a 2018 analysis from e-Literate’s Phil Hill. As a result of that “consolidating market,” the “aggregate market share” for the year’s top four systems has grown from 80 percent to 95 percent over that period. When counted by student enrollment, the largest share of learning management system deployments is held by Instructure, which overtook Blackboard this year. Currently, according to Hill, the institutions of higher education running Instructure’s Canvas have a possible 8.3 million students on the LMS platform, compared to 7.9 million for Blackboard Learn. That represents marketshare of nearly 35 percent for Instructure and almost 33 percent for Blackboard. Hill and e-Literate co-publisher Michael Feldstein consult and perform market analysis on tech usage in education.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/10/30/4-companies-sit-on-95-of-lms-adoptions.aspx