McGraw-Hill Education is continuing to woo talent from competitors and other organizations to build up its education business. The company recently announced that it would shortly be opening a new research and development and center of excellence operation in Boston’s Innovation District dedicated to education technologies. The new office will bring together technologists, developers, education specialists, cognitive researchers, and others to cross-pollinate education innovations.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/06/04/mcgraw-hill-expands-education-tech-research.aspx

A team of California universities has released a beta version of a system for managing big data along with more traditional forms of data. Researchers from the University of California in Irvine, Riverside, and San Diego have banded together to create AsterixDB, a Java-based “big data management system” (BDMS). The work began in 2009 with funding from the National Science Foundation and, eventually, the state of California and others. The goal was to create a set of new technologies for “ingesting, storing, managing, indexing, querying, and analyzing vast quantities of semi-structured information.” The researchers pulled ideas from three areas — semi-structured data, parallel databases, and data-intensive computing — to create a “next generation” open source application that could run on large clusters of commodity computers. At the heart of the system, the AsterixDB engine operates on a “shared nothing” architecture. Each computer in the cluster runs independently and is self-sufficient.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/06/10/u-california-researchers-release-beta-for-big-data-management.aspx

Draper University in San Mateo, CA has started accepting bitcoins for tuition and recently processed its first bitcoin payment for its summer program, which starts later this month. According to information released by Draper U, the educational institution has become the first to accept bitcoin for tuition. Draper, which bills itself as “an unconventional world class boarding school for the brightest young entrepreneurs from around the world,” also accepts other non-traditional forms of payment, including barter, equity, profit sharing, and even advertising tradeouts. Bitcoin is one of several cryptographic currencies generated by end users (“miners”) who tap their CPUs, GPUs, and other processing hardware to solve hash algorithms, resulting in newly minted virtual coins. Bitcoin, which has a fixed ceiling of 21 million coins, is currently by far the most valuable and popular of the cryptocurrencies, trading at a little more than $100 per coin as of this writing. (The currency can be highly volatile and has reached more than $200 per coin in the past.) Similar cryptographic currencies include litecoin, namecoin, and novacoin, to name just a few.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/06/11/draper-university-accepts-bitcoins-for-tuition.aspx

My use of Twitter in the Wire course might be my greatest break with pedagogical convention. Whatever its faults, Twitter allows my students to respond quickly and freely to this provocative drama about the complex interactions between police and drug dealers in Baltimore. Their spontaneous tweets form the foundation of a conversation in class once we’re done viewing a particular episode. I also use our hashtag for posting material that might be relevant for exams. For our midterm this semester, students worked in groups to produce components of a study guide. They took pictures of the results and then posted them with the hashtag, where everyone had access to them.

http://chronicle.com/article/Diverse-Students-Go-Digital/139645/

Prezi is marketed as a presentation tool, a killer app for the frustrated hordes of PowerPoint users who are looking for more dynamic and visually compelling modes of presentation. It accomplishes that task quite well with a digital canvas design structure, a user-friendly interface for adding text, images, and multimedia (it even cannibalizes existing PowerPoints well), and the capacity to create a step-by-step path through materials for presentation purposes. But if you start to think more creatively about what Prezi’s toolset offers, you begin to realize how powerful a tool it can be for designing a wide array of visual compositions. If one looks past the presentation use case, the combination of the flexibility of a nearly infinite digital canvas and easy-to-use design features makes for a powerful and highly accessible tool for developing thought maps, prototyping designs for digital interfaces and physical spaces, creating bespoke visualizations, and as a platform for comparative visual analysis and annotation.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/hacking-prezi-as-a-platform-for-visual-composition-and-design-experimentation/49909

Though there are differences from one platform to the next, crowdfunding sites function similarly: A person posts a description of his or her idea asking for small contributions from the community at large, and those who feel passionately about the project can donate. The fund-raiser is usually given a specific amount of time to reach his or her goal, or the backers are not charged. Typically the crowdfunding site receives a percentage of the amount the fund-raiser earns, and backers can receive “rewards” from the fund-raiser for pledging certain amounts of cash. Kickstarter, which launched in 2009, is the world’s largest funding platform for artists, musicians, filmmakers and designers. While many projects fail, some have found massive success on the site — like a video game that gained $4,188,927 from 74,905 backers. Replicating Kickstarter’s model, websites that are used specifically to crowdfund scientific or technology-based projects have launched in recent years. Some of these sites include iAMScientist, Microryza, Petridish and FundaGeek.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/06/10/academic-researchers-using-crowdfunding-platforms

Delivering the resources necessary for a highly connected education system, OET remains steadfast in its mission to provide leadership for the transformation of education through the power of technology. Conscious of the challenges, Director Karen Cator expresses her vision for the road ahead.

To begin, could you explain the main aims of the Office of Educational Technology (OET)? How does it fit within the US Department of Education?

OET is a policy-setting office located in the Office of the Secretary for Education. We provide expertise, strategic assistance and policy perspective for the US Department of Education across all programmes. Our role is to support all parts of the education system in assessing how to leverage technology to help achieve their goals, whether that is helping early childhood caregivers to improve their job performance, bringing down the costs of college, or fully engaging a generation of STEM-interested students.

http://www.research-europe.com/index.php/2013/06/karen-cator-director-office-of-educational-technology-us-department-of-education/

Anyone who teaches online has run into problems within their courses. Some of these problems can be complicated and if not correctly resolved can do major damage to the online instructor’s reputation and opportunity for teaching future courses. This month’s column tackles the worst of these. Culled from hundreds of emails I have received over the years from online instructors, as well as from my 18 years of online teaching experience, the 10 major obstacles and their solutions that follow have come up more than any others.

http://www.magnapubs.com/blog/teaching-and-learning/overcoming-the-10-most-serious-and-challenging-obstacles-of-teaching-online/

David E. Pritchard has dedicated his life to physics, conducting pioneering work in atom optics and mentoring But now Pritchard, whose aviator glasses and flyaway gray hair give him the look of the quintessential MIT professor, has dropped his physics research “cold turkey,” as he puts it. A new frontier of human knowledge has captivated him and others in academia: studying how people learn and finding ways to teach more effectively. Fueling their enthusiasm is the explosion of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, the new species of free classes prestigious universities are offering to students around the world. As educators debate what the classes mean for the future of traditional universities, one thing is clear — they provide a vast laboratory to study learning, using a trail of electronic data to examine what resources or study habits best help students, whether they take courses online or in traditional classrooms.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/06/08/professors-take-lessons-from-online-teaching/K5XTNA8N1cVGLQ8JJW5PCL/story.html

Earlier this week, Andy Kessler gave three cheers to the new partnership between Georgia Tech and Udacity achievement in the WSJ — but I’m not sure that he was right to hoist the MOOCification of the field of computer science as the standard for the rest of academia to follow. Kessler quickly turned from praising Georgia Tech to castigating a few schools that chose not to jump aboard the MOOC bandwagon: Duke University, Amherst College, and San Jose State University. As a Tar Heel, my beef is definitely not with his criticism of Duke. As much as it pains me to admit, however, I think Kessler is off the mark — the Duke faculty may actually be right. For one thing, he omitted a crucial detail: The online MS, or MOOMS, is still very much distinct from the on-campus MS degree. Georgia Tech does not consider the MOOMS degree to be anything other than vocational.

http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/350442/one-cheer-moocs-anthony-dent