Educational Technology

By Chris Preimesberger, eWeek

What are the most worrisome security problems now facing small and midsize businesses as well as large enterprises? Some, such as social engineering threats that fool employees into downloading viruses, have been around for years and aren’t fading away. But an increasing number of companies are falling victim to hacktivism, a phenomenon most CIOs have only started to think about counteracting. But the biggest problem is simple stupidity. Lax access policies and internal employees are still the biggest source of security headaches. A recent Verizon report backs this up, with research indicating that 96 percent of attacks are not sophisticated and 97 percent are easily avoidable. In the following slide show is a list of current security concerns for enterprises, ranging from one-person businesses to large companies.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Security-Threats-Facing-All-Enterprises-Top-10-Issues-That-Need-Attention-226329/

By Amy Cavender, Chronicle of Higher Ed

It’s no secret that many of us here at ProfHacker are fans of (and regular users of) cloud storage. We’ve written quite a bit about services such as Dropbox, Box.net, and Google Drive. Each of these services offers a reasonable amount of storage for free, with additional storage available for purchase. Though some who have substantial storage needs choose to stick with one service and pay for additional storage, others have found that they can acquire sufficient storage space by splitting their files across services. It’s not a bad strategy, but it does have one downside: How on earth do you remember which files you’ve stored where? Enter Otixo. Otixo lets you log into multiple cloud services from the same place, allowing you to view and manage all your files in one dashboard (including moving files from one service to another).

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-quick-introduction-to-otixo/40855

by Todd R. Weiss, eWeek

Google is starting and seeding a project to fight the extinction and loss of more than 3,000 endangered languages around the globe to help preserve the history, cultures and knowledge of mankind. The effort was announced today in a Google blog post by Clara Rivera Rodriguez and Jason Rissman, two managers of the company’s Endangered Languages Project. Google says the new site can be used by people to find and share the most up-to-date and comprehensive information about endangered languages so that they don’t disappear because they haven’t been passed down to younger generations.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/Google-Begins-Effort-to-Help-Preserve-Languages-Nearing-Extinction-880618/

by Vineet Madan, Huffington Post

Over the past several years, the education debate in America has increasingly become a conversation about technology. As we’ve seen the benefit of having tablets and smartphones in our lives, we’ve started to pin to it our hopes for our nation’s education system, as well. Recently this talk has reached something close to a fever pitch. In January, Apple announced that it would be working with major education companies (including McGraw-Hill) to develop academic titles specifically for the iPad, inspiring a wave of blog posts and tweets hopeful for education’s rescue. The FCC took things one step further in March, convening a meeting in Washington with several key players with the goal of driving adoptions of digital textbooks in K-12 schools across the country.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vineet-madan/the-digital-transformatio_b_1457125.html

by Jim Carlton, Wall Street Journal

School districts across the country are turning to solar power to cut their electricity costs. With the money they’re saving, they are able to retain more teachers and programs in the face of budget cuts. As a bonus, some schools are using solar installations to teach kids about renewable energy. More than 500 K-12 schools in 43 states have installed solar panels, many of them over the past three years as solar-power costs have fallen by more than one-third, according to estimates by the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group in Washington, D.C., and GTM Research, a Greentech Media Inc. unit in Boston.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702303674004577433930635426386-lMyQjAxMTAyMDIwMDEyNDAyWj.html?mod=wsj_valetleft_email

By Jon Mitchell, ReadWriteWeb

Twitter’s new expanded tweets initiative does the highly improbable: It integrates photos, videos and music without disrupting the fast-paced Twitter experience. Expanded tweets make as much sense on mobile as they do on the desktop, and that’s a huge advantage for Twitter over other places for sharing pictures, videos and the rest. Expanded tweets are available only to some Twitter users, but you’ll probably start seeing them soon. Basically, the new initiative expands on Twitter cards, which offer a preview of the stuff on the other side of a link. You might have noticed YouTube videos, Instagram photos or App Store previews when looking at a tweet in “Details” view. Expanded tweets add features to this view.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/expanded-tweets-a-media-cornucopia-in-140-characters.php

by Alex Galarza, Inside Higher Ed

First, realize that the blog is not a genre but a platform. While students certainly bring a set of perceptions to a WordPress dashboard or how a blog post should read, the blog is simply a platform for text and media. Students can post long-form essays, poetry, or any other form you want, you just have to guide them. It is always a good idea to assess your students’ expectations of blogs and to discuss opportunities like developing an online persona, engaging with a public audience, or experimenting with something like a “Blessay” [blog+essay]. Let your course goals determine the blog assignment. You wouldn’t assign a paper without aligning it with your course goals, so think carefully of how a blog assignment will fit with the class objectives. A potential strength of a blog is to increase the visibility and readership of your students’ work, even if it is just within the confines of the course. This might be beneficial in a course on public history, for example. If you don’t want your students reading each others’ entries, you might just consider using something like dropbox to accept their documents online.

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/develop-and-implement-course-blog-0

By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

Microsoft jumping into the tablet market with the Surface is a good thing for education. Maybe a $500 tablet (although the Surface looks to be more expensive) is part of the productivity equation of higher ed. We can’t drive down tuition prices, but your computers that you do so much of your learning on will be cheaper. The tablet of tomorrow is the textbook and coursepack of today. Once tablets become powerful, cheap and ubiquitous we will finally be able to move from paper to digital text materials – curriculum that is multimedia, constantly up-to-date, and socially enabled. Digital textbooks should even be cheaper, as the publishers will no longer need to build into the price the losses they face in the used textbook market. Cheap and powrerul tablets might even open the door for new publishing models (bundled, open source), new players (beyond the publishing industrial complex), and niche authors and titles (the long tail of textbooks).

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/microsoft-thinking-about-education-surface

by K. Walsh, Emerging Ed Tech

Digital devices are all the rage among young people today, across all ages. Tablets top the youngest student’s wish lists, pre-teens crave smart phones, and high school students would love to have both plus a laptop computer! MP3 players and other electronic devices are also widely used by many of today’s students. Are digital devices plugging our children into experiences that actually fuel their creativity and make them consider the world beyond their neighborhood or are they robbing our children of some of the joys of childhood?

http://www.emergingedtech.com/2012/06/pros-and-cons-of-digital-devices-in-the-hands-of-young-students/