Students in my spring semester Politics and Media class at the University of Delaware wrote blogs on current issues, relating them to class content. I’ve been posting some of their work as part of the “Blog Blog Project.” This entry, written by UD student Cori Schreider, asks whether MTV’s online election game can engage young people in this year’s election. MTV is attempting to change this. Yes, MTV — also known as the channel that brings us our favorite educational programs like The Jersey Shore and Teen Mom. Nevertheless, they are taking it upon themselves to “get the vote out” with an online game. A play off of fantasy sports, the game will be a “Fantasy Election,” where players will draft a team of candidates either running for the presidency or for Congress, and will play against other gamers across the country. They earn points for registering to vote, or checking in at town halls or voting stations via Foursquare. It’s assumed that MTV hopes putting hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes on the line will increase enthusiasm and participation. While this innovative idea could be successful in increasing both participation and voter efficacy, others are not so sure.
EPIC 2020, a ten-minute free movie, was released to the public today on the epic2020.org web site. EPIC 2020 presents a prophetic dramatization of the death of the traditional higher education system by the end of the decade. EPIC 2020 a creative commons property follows in the footsteps of EPIC 2014 that was released in 2004 and predicted the demise of the print newspaper industry. EPIC 2020 describes the technological forces that are intersecting with major industry forces to provide online courses by the best professors in the world supported by the best academic technology scaled to where a single professor can educate every student in the world in a given subject. EPIC 2020 identifies new business models that turn the current academic business model of tuition on its head as well as new concepts in defining and documenting skills that render degrees obsolete.
By William R. Mattox, Jr., the Heritage Foundation
Most parents want two things: (1) to protect their children from being immersed in a school culture that is at odds with their family culture or philosophical world view and (2) for their children to be sufficiently exposed to people who are different from them that they will be well prepared for success and influence in the real world. Regrettably, one-size-fits-all schools have a very difficult time facilitating this very delicate balancing act. But hybrid schooling can offer a way out of these counterproductive cul-de-sacs, allowing us to customize the learning opportunities for all children so that they can get a well-balanced social and academic upbringing tailored to their unique needs, interests, talents, learning styles, stages of development, and personalities.
To hear Dean Pacey describe online learning is a lesson in how the Internet—despite its vastness—can actually be a very personal place. In fact, taking courses over a computer, he believes, has the potential to make education more intimate and effective than any typical class-teacher setting, which is often full of distractions. “When I go to university and I sign up for psych 100, I’m sitting with 1,500 other students with one talking head who I can’t hear and who may or may not speak English well at the front of the room,” he says. “How is that a rich experience?” By comparison, Pacey imagines a world in which students in any country can pick and choose the courses they’d like to take over the Internet from the best international schools, many of which are in Canada.
Do you trust commercial programs made in foreign nations, particularly those nations with authoritarian regimes or a history of cyberattack? At the very same time we are concerned about cyber-attacks, phishing attacks, botnet invasions, and other penetrations of our personal, industrial, and national defense systems and networks, we’re turning over the protection of those systems to foreign companies with possibly questionable loyalties. This is becoming a national security issue. We may need to establish defensive strategies that include blocking (or at least shining a light on) security products we rely on, produced by foreign agents or agencies.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster reckons that iOS will only provide 2 percent of Google’s total revenue in 2012, or $4.5 billion. Apple is likely to push Google Maps out of the way next week at its WWDC powwow in what’s a long march toward nixing the search giant—friend now mobile foe—as a default service provider. The longer war between Apple and Google will revolve around courting developers. Bottom line: Developers will follow the money. With Apple developers garner more app revenue—folks pay for iOS apps, but Android versions are often free. Google will have to push its iOS wares through the app store. Any built-in service will eventually get the boot.
Despite being rock-solid, snappy and responsive, as a platform to do work on Windows 8 feel utterly unusable, and that’s down to one thing — the “Metro UI” user interface. I’m going to avoid commenting on Metro on touch-based systems for now because Windows 8 is too far off in the future to know what the hardware is going to be like. Instead, I’m going to limit my discussion to using the operating system on desktop and notebook systems. On the face of it, Metro UI looks good. It’s new and shiny and refreshing, and it looks like it could actually be quite usable. If you’ve used Windows Phone then the interface feel familiar. Things feel good. And then you start to use it.
Bok Academy teachers not only played with computers, they built them as well. Principal Damien Moses said teachers are being trained this year so they can teach students this fall. A program called IT Kid Academy, prepared for the school by Sylus Green and Tyrone Williamson will be a 120- to 150-hour class to teach students the basics of how computer hardware works using lectures, videos and hands-on instruction. After completing the one-year, students will be able to build, troubleshoot and repair computers and support the technology programs within the school system.
Getting a jump on Apple’s near-certain announcement of its own mapping application, Google introduced the next dimension of Google Maps today. In the coming weeks, the company will roll out three new features to its mapping solution: Improved 3-D models in Google Earth, offline maps and Street View Backpack. Using automated technology to extract 3-D data from collected aerial images, the company has been able to improve 3-D imagery in Google Earth. Google offered a sneak peek of the new capability by showing off a map of San Francisco, complete with 3-D models of buildings and landmarks.
Reports began swirling this morning that around six million passwords attached to LinkedIn accounts had been compromised, and after looking into the matter, the site has confirmed that “some of the passwords” attached to accounts of LinkedIn members have been affected. The network doesn’t specify the number of passwords leaked, nor does it confirm the rumored count of six million. It does, however, promise that it will invalidate passwords of the hit accounts — and vows to send an email to each affected user with instructions on how to reset their password, followed by another piece of correspondence explaining what happened. Below you’ll find the company’s official statement, as well as what it is doing to ensure its members are safe.
At the office of the Mitra Netra Foundation for the blind, a boy, still in his senior high school uniform, is busy in front of one of the computers. Running his fingers deftly over the keyboard, he steers his way from program to program, relying on a computerized voice to read him the text on the screen. He manages to download several songs, save them in a special folder, open a text document to type his name and “read” the news online. During the past decade, several technological advances such as those at Mitra Netra have opened up a new world to people with disabilities.
With so much focus on whether college is worth it, relatively little attention has been paid to the value of certificate programs – vocational courses of study beyond high school that do not lead to an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. Over the last few years, these certificates have been proliferating, in fields ranging from health care and computer technology to cosmetology, interior design and paralegaling. A new report from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University examines whether these certificates actually help students in the labor market.
QUESTION: Our school system will buy iPad tablet computers for junior and senior high school students this fall. ANSWER: The apps for an iPad won’t work on another type of computer. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that tablet computers are a waste of money, or that your school ought to be buying laptops instead. Your school is one of many that are embracing tablet computers for their potential as highly portable electronic textbooks and multimedia teaching devices. While it remains to be seen whether tablet computers will improve teaching, it seems likely that a student’s college experience is going to involve tablet computers as much as laptops.
Inspiring girls and women to pursue technology. The benefits of computing are no longer limited to “geeks” and “video gamers,” it is shaping all aspects of modern society‚ from the way we track and monitor our lives to virtual socialization. With the adoption of smartphones and their application, as well as social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. technology is more prevalent than ever before. Incorporating women, who are creating a global paradigm shift and shaping technology so rapidly, is crucial to the future sustainability of technology. Girls are smart, bold, and brimming with innovative ideas; we are helping them unleash their potential. We want to challenge the traditional ‘nerdy’ stereotype with that of the ‘femgineer’- an innovative, empowered, well-rounded engineer who lends human compassion to the face of technology. We value human indecision as much as deterministic Turing machines.
Northwestern University researchers are the first to discover that very different complex networks—ranging from global air traffic to neural networks—share very similar backbones. By stripping each network down to its essential nodes and links, they found each network possesses a skeleton and these skeletons share common features, much like vertebrates do. Mammals have evolved to look very different despite a common underlying structure (think of a human being and a bat), and now it appears real-world complex networks evolve in a similar way. The researchers studied a variety of biological, technological and social networks and found that all these networks have evolved according to basic growth mechanisms. The findings could be particularly useful in understanding how something—a disease, a rumor or information—spreads across a network. This surprising discovery—that networks all have skeletons and that they are similar—was published last week by the journal Nature Communications.
Silicon Valley companies portray themselves as inventors of the future, but they’re afflicted by a longstanding problem. From board rooms to “brogrammers,” men still dominate many corners of the tech industry, where the pantheon of famous founders — from Hewlett and Packard to Jobs to Zuckerberg — is still largely a boys’ bastion. The gender-imbalance issue came to the forefront again recently when a partner at the country’s most prominent venture capital firm filed a sexual harassment lawsuit alleging that a former colleague retaliated against her for years after she cut off a brief relationship with him. The firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, has denied the allegations. Whatever the merits of the claim, the suit again has put a spotlight on the tech industry’s gender gap.
Meeting technological demands is hard in a 40-year-old building, but Muskogee Public Library workers do what they can, said Head Librarian Jan Bryant. “The way we have our computers set up, it’s like cordwood, one on top of each other,” Bryant said. “There’s no space for private space.” Running computer cable and fiber optics through the ceiling also has been a challenge, she said. “We have wires hanging down all kinds of poles,” Bryant said, explaining how public access computers on the second floor “are all right in the middle of things.”
Starting in 2013, the Fargo School District will begin to put some form of electronic learning device – be it a tablet or laptop computer, smartphone or other gadget – into the hands of each student at the three comprehensive high schools. The sophomore class will be the first up to get the devices, said Jodell Teiken, the district’s director of instructional resources. The change could come in the second half of the coming school year, or at the start of the 2013-14 school year, Teiken said. It’s expected to cost $300,000 of the district’s $1.4 million instructional technology budget to buy the devices, software and training, Teiken said.
The iPad offers many math apps to help students who need visual tools and manipulatives to help understand basic functional concepts to more advanced math. Hands on Math Hundreds Chart $1.99 – Teachers, have “green” friendly interactive 100’s chart on your iPad. It also has sound for students to hear the numbers- fantastic for ELL and special needs students. An extensive Instructor’s Guide for this app is available at the support website. Download the document and install it in iBooks to access ideas about how to use the Interactive Hundreds Chart for teaching elementary mathematics.
The girls robotics team at Stewart Middle Magnet School didn’t even know how to program a Lego Mindstorms robot in March. A month later, they had designed a computerized control system that guided their robot through a twisting obstacle course. The effort won them first place in a countywide competition against more experienced middle school students. “I am blown away,” said Rick Pountney, a technology teacher at Stewart and their sponsor. “It’s so impressive. “These girls will make a big difference in keeping girls in the program.” Robotics is part of Hillsborough County Public Schools’ STEM education — a specialized focus on science, technology, engineering and math.
Today with the growing popularity of 3-D printer technology, anyone who fancies him or herself an inventor can find out overnight if they’re truly innovative – or just a pretender. “We have an enormous advantage over a poor guy like da Vinci, whose every idea would involve a laborious effort to verify. Things that were good ideas, he would have discarded because of the manufacturing challenges. We don’t have that problem any more,” said Stocco, a professor of engineering at the University of British Columbia who is an inventor himself. His specialty is creating equipment for robot-assisted orthopedic surgery. He designs a part in three dimensions using computer-aided design or CAD software, feeds the design into a 3-D printer and, within a few hours, the machine spits out prototypes of the parts he needs to test his idea.
