Educational Technology

By Joshua Bolkan, Campus Technology

Worldwide IT spending will reach $3.7 trillion this year, according to the latest forecast from market research firm Gartner. The company’s latest estimate forecasts a two percent growth rate, down just over two percent from their previous quarter’s prediction of 4.1 percent, due mostly to changes in the dollar’s exchange rate. “Exchange rate movements, and a reduction in our 2013 forecast for devices, account for the bulk of the downward revision of the 2013 growth,” said Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner, in a prepared statement. “Regionally, 2013 constant-currency spending growth in most regions has been lowered. However, Western Europe’s constant-currency growth has been inched up slightly as strategic IT initiatives in the region will continue despite a poor economic outlook.” Growth in all categories will improve in 2014, according to the company, when global IT spending will reach $4.1 trillion.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/07/10/it-spending-approaches-4-trillion.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

A computer science professor from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville has just earned a million dollar grant to explore the next generation of high performance computing. Jack Dongarra, who’s also affiliated with the University of Manchester and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, received the three-year grant from the United States Department of Energy to better understand the changes that will be required in the software for exascale supercomputers, as they’re called. This new generation of supercomputers will be capable of a quintillion floating point operations per second or one exaflop — equivalent to a thousand petaflops. Today’s fastest supercomputer, China’s Tianhe-2, performs at about 34 petaflops per second; Cray’s Titan supercomputer was benchmarked at 18 petaflops per second. Exascale computing is expected to be reached much later in this decade.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/07/10/u-tennessee-prof-takes-on-exascale-computing.aspx

By David Nagel, Campus Technology

Year-over-year shipments of PCs fell off worldwide for the fifth consecutive quarter, the longest sustained decline in the history of personal computing, dropping by 9 million units in the second quarter of 2013. And the picture might have been even more bleak had it not been for the relative strength of the professional market. According to a report released by market research firm Gartner, consumers across the globe seem to be shifting their purchases away from traditional desktops and laptops and toward media consumption devices like the iPad. But while their impact is being felt, these devices aren’t solely responsible for the decline. “The sharp decline in the second quarter of 2013 was partly due to the shift in usage patterns away from notebooks to tablets, and partly because the PC market was exposed to inventory reductions in the channel due to the start of the transition to new Haswell-based products,” said Isabelle Durand, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a statement released to coincide with the quarterly results report.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/07/15/pcs-see-longest-sustained-decline-in-history.aspx

by the Huffington Post

According to the University of Maryland Office of the Provost, a blended learning course combines both face-to-face interaction and online resources for a both individualized and collaborative learning experience. “Culture is changing. There is a growing recognition that it is a good idea to innovate our class structure, just as we innovate our research and all other things we do,” said Ben Bederson, Special Advisor to the Provost on Technology and Educational Transformation at the University of Maryland. According to Bederson, the University of Maryland chose to initiate blended leaning options for ten courses in 2011, an effort put forth by a group of faculty and administrators who saw the potential Blended Leaning offered, especially in contrast to more ineffective lectures.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/uloop/blended-learning-college-_b_3598718.html

By Joshua Bolkan, THE Journal

Bank Street College of Education will launch a fully online fieldwork and advisement pilot for its graduate math education program. Currently, students in Bank Street’s Leadership in Mathematics Education master’s degree program take courses at the school’s New York campus each July over three years and perform their fieldwork at the schools they work at during the academic year. Work on adapting those courses to a distance-learning format has already begun, making the fieldwork and advisement piece “the final element needed to provide students the option of earning the master’s degree entirely online,” according to a news release about the pilot. Work on the new program, which will maintain a 7-1 student-to-advisor ratio, will begin in the fall, and the pilot will formally launch in the spring of 2014. In order to refine the program over the course of the pilot, math teachers will be connected “with Bank Street experts online over the course of a semester,” according to information released by the school.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2013/07/16/education-college-pilots-fully-online-student-fieldwork-and-advisement.aspx

By Amber Johnson, Teach Hub

It’s Google’s world, we’re just teaching in it. Now, we can use it a little more easily. With classes, homework, and projects–not to mention your social life–time is truly at a premium for all teachers, so why not take advantage of the wide world that Google has to offer? From super-effective search tricks to Google tools specifically for education to tricks and tips for using Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar, these tricks will surely save you some precious time.

http://www.teachhub.com/100-google-tricks-teachers

by the Economist

IN A small school on the South Side of Chicago, 40 children between the ages of five and six sit quietly learning in a classroom. In front of each of them is a computer running software called Reading Eggs. Some are reading a short story, others building sentences with words they are learning. The least advanced are capturing all the upper- and lower-case Bs that fly past in the sky. As they complete each task they move through a cartoon map that shows how far they have progressed in reading and writing. Along the way they collect eggs which they can use to buy objects in the game, such as items to furnish their avatar’s apartment. Now and then a child will be taken aside for scheduled reading periods with one of the two monitoring teachers. The director of North Kenwood-Oakland school says this sort of teaching, blending software with human intervention, helps her pupils learn faster.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21580136-new-technology-poised-disrupt-americas-schools-and-then-worlds-catching-last

by Jon Brodkin, ars technica
White space networks haven’t spread in quite the way some of its visionaries envisioned a few years ago, but the method of providing wireless Internet access over unused TV spectrum is slowly gaining a foothold. Companies like Microsoft and Google are using white spaces to bring the Web to underserved parts of the world, and a couple of commercial networks have been launched in the US. Now, white spaces may be about to gain traction in colleges and libraries. West Virginia University announced today that it is going to “use vacant broadcast TV channels to provide the campus and nearby areas with wireless broadband Internet services.” The initial rollout will provide free public Wi-Fi—yes, it really exists!—on a public transit tram system. West Virginia is setting its network up in conjunction with AIR.U, a consortium of colleges and universities aiming to deploy white space networks on campuses and surrounding areas.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/white-space-internet-may-finally-spread-through-us/

By Josh Funk, The Associated Press

A free online course that starts Monday will offer students the chance to learn about giving from Warren Buffett and help decide how to spend more than $100,000 of his sister’s money. More than 4,000 people have already signed up for the course that will also feature philanthropic advice from baseball legend Cal Ripken Jr. and the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. Boston Red Sox Chairman Tom Werner and journalist Soledad O’Brien are other featured guests. The amount being given away could grow if more students sign up. Buffett and his older sister, Doris Buffett, will be featured in the first class to talk about their motivation for philanthropy.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/14/19471333-in-online-course-buffett-others-teach-students-to-give-money-away

by Chuck Cohn, Edudemic

It’s no secret that interacting with students on an individual level can drastically improve the learning process. Having the capacity to reach all of your students one-on-one is certainly ideal, but large class sizes can understandably make this challenging. Moreover, the traditional teaching method — students sitting in class, taking notes, fighting to stay awake — is not conducive to an interactive style. So, how can you use your class time more efficiently?

http://www.edudemic.com/2013/07/flipping-education-freeing-up-class-time-for-interactive-learning/

by Alison George, New Scientist

Online learning is the biggest shake-up of education since the advent of the printing press, says Anant Agarwal, an MIT computing specialist, director of EdX which has a million students and is only one year old. Many universities now offer free online courses. What is driving the trend? The MOOC movement is democratising education. In the past, top universities had this funnel and admitted only the top few per cent of applicants. From the get-go, a lot of students without the right economic or language background were not able to get in. We’re flipping the funnel. We’re saying everybody can try. If you can cut it, we’ll give you a certificate of mastery. Universities like MIT charge students a lot of money.

http://21centuryedtech.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/e-curriculum-exploring-24-free-open-education-resources-oer-the-digital-curriculum-part-2/

By Alexander Hiam, eSchool News

It’s wonderful to hear President Obama call for a nationwide emphasis on innovation, but it raises an interesting challenge: Where will all those innovators come from? Currently, we are chasing testable competency in academic core skills. It is quite a different thing to try to educate future innovators. We don’t test for that. An innovation curriculum requires an emphasis on what I am going to call, for lack of a preexisting term, the Five I’s: Imagination, Inquiry, Invention, Implementation, and Initiative (the latter being a foundational trait that enables the other four). Here is my take on how to teach each of the Five I’s of innovation in our schools.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/02/01/how-and-why-to-teach-innovation-in-our-schools/

by Justin Ferriman, Learn Dash

Inevitably anyone who wants to cheat is going to find a way to do so, be it for an online course or in a normal classroom setting. While it cannot be completely controlled, you do have some strategies available to you that decreases the likelihood of cheating – or at least discourages it by making life a bit more difficult. Cheating can take many forms, but the majority of people will look to cheat on a quiz, especially an online quiz. Many educators find this to be challenging, but there are some steps you can take to limit the amount of cheating that takes place.

http://www.learndash.com/how-to-prevent-cheating-in-online-courses/

by EdSurge

Versal hopes to breath life and possibilities into what they see as a very limited set of tools that currently exist. Their course-building platform offers a set of pre-made gadgets that allow teachers to build interactive courses on their platform through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get drag and drop interface. To add interactivity beyond basic pictures, texts and embedded quizzes, Versal uses gadgets to create interactive graphs, simulations, and models. With these gadgets, teachers can build models or simulations that the students use to experience and manipulate the content they are learning. Examples include a 3-D model of a skeleton where students click on parts of the face that will then appear on the skeleton, and a simulation where students can set limits like population and and contact rate to see how disease spreads. Sharing courses with students is enabled via facebook, twitter, email, or direct links.

https://www.edsurge.com/n/2013-07-12-can-versal-take-online-course-beyond-the-chalk-and-talk

By Tara Bahrampour, Washington Post

A program of the AARP Foundation, an AARP-affiliated charity, is being administered in the city by Family Matters of Greater Washington, a social-services organization. Comcast is providing discounted Internet service, and Netgear is donating modems. So far, the 50 participants of the original group are still attending class, and not one device has been lost. For people born more than half a century before the advent of Hulu and Instagram, the iPad program, known as Connecting to Community, has been a revelation — and not only because it has opened them up to the world of videoconferencing, e-mail and adorable kittens. “This whole thing is about isolation — it’s more about that than anything else,” said Gwendolyn Coleman, a program director at Family Matters.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-senior-citizens-use-ipads-to-expand-social-interactions/2013/07/13/491fdb72-ea7a-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html

by MetroWestDaily

Students learn quickly that “online” does not mean “easy.”

“A few folks drop out the first week of classes because they learn once they see the syllabus … that this is not the cakewalk they had anticipated,” Edmonds says. Though they aren’t attending lectures, online students spend time reading assignments, watching videos and contributing to online discussions. Bruce Kingma, associate provost and professor at Syracuse University (syr.edu), says, “Online courses are definitely not the easy way out.” Online discussions are text-based and require more thought, input and participation by all students.

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/education/x1808713823/Internet-classes-take-discipline-motivation

by Ki Mae Heussner, GigaOM

With mounting competition in education technology, this week industry giant Blackboard laid out its plans for staying ahead. As the giant among learning management systems (LMS) for higher education, Blackboard is an easy target. And as its market share has dropped and newer, more innovative companies have entered the field over the past few years, Blackboard bashing has become a regular industry pastime. But the company’s critics might have less to knock if the company’s new CEO succeeds in putting Blackboard on a new path. With mounting competition from LMS providers like Instructure, Moodle and Desire2Learn, as well as MOOC platforms and other ed tech startups bringing new learning software to education, Blackboard is under more pressure than ever before. But here are four ways Bhatt seems to believe he can move the company ahead.

http://gigaom.com/2013/07/12/a-new-blackboard-4-ways-the-ed-tech-giants-new-ceo-hopes-to-win-back-market-share/

by Bernard Golden, CIO

It’s undeniable that the entire technology industry is shifting to cloud computing. Just as the ’80s was the era of the PC, and the ’90s (and ’00s, too) was the era of the Web, it’s inevitable that the ’10s will be the era of cloud computing. Endless words have been written about the technology underlying cloud computing. A number of orchestration products joust, each described by its company as the most complete, best performing product on the market. We’ve seen hybrid cloud products released by every vendor from Borneo to Nome, every one non pareil in tying together distributed orchestration products. One has even seen IBM describe its mainframe products as “truly a cloud” because mainframes, well…compute, I guess.

http://www.cio.com/article/735995/What_Economists_Can_Teach_Us_About_Cloud_Computing

by Voxxi

The United States’ image as a digital innovator does not match the level of high-tech educational opportunities offered in its classrooms. Namely, millions of students lack access to the high-speed broadband Internet that supports learning digital technology. Furthermore, less than 20 percent of educators across the country say their school’s Internet connection meets their teaching needs. While the nation was on the leading edge of web in the ‘90s, it has lagged behind as other nations invested in digital learning and technology education.President Barack Obama last month unveiled ConnectED, a new digital technology initiative that in five years aims to connect 99 percent of America’s students to the Internet through high-speed broadband and high-speed wireless.  The idea is the Federal Communications Commission [FCC] will modernize and leverage existing programs to deliver the intended connectivity.

by CIO

It’s undeniable that the entire technology industry is shifting to cloud computing. Just as the ’80s was the era of the PC, and the ’90s (and ’00s, too) was the era of the Web, it’s inevitable that the ’10s will be the era of cloud computing. Endless words have been written about the technology underlying cloud computing. A number of orchestration products joust, each described by its company as the most complete, best performing product on the market. We’ve seen hybrid cloud products released by every vendor from Borneo to Nome, every one non pareil in tying together distributed orchestration products. One has even seen IBM describe its mainframe products as “truly a cloud” because mainframes, well…compute, I guess.

http://www.cio.com/article/735995/What_Economists_Can_Teach_Us_About_Cloud_Computing

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

In a bid to become ubiquitous, Dropbox unveils tools to help developers sync apps across mobile platforms.  Dropbox, the fast-growing file-synching and file-sharing service, today announced new tools that could help the company become an indispensable ally to developers in an increasingly fragmented mobile ecosystem. The growth of smartphones and tablets spawned a whole new app economy, as well as a vexing problem for app developers: how to make an app that’s running on one device, such as a game on an Android smartphone, sync up with the same game running on every other device a person may use, from iPads to Linux laptops.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/516951/how-dropbox-could-rule-a-multi-platform-world/