Techno-News Blog

by Peta Lee, University World News

Britain’s high-powered Commission on the Future of Higher Education last week called for vocationally focused ‘fee only’ degrees for local students, a new postgraduate student loans system and credit recognition for MOOCs, among many other recommendations. In its report, A Critical Path: Securing the future of higher education in England, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) commission – chaired by University of Warwick Vice-chancellor Nigel Thrift – acknowledged the tough economic conditions and the transformation over the past half century of higher education in Britain. However, it suggested a raft of reforms and expansions to ensure that the sector continued to play a pivotal role in the country’s economic and social renewal.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20130614065052260

By Carrie Hopkins, from Top5OnlineColleges.org

The proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other forms of online education has changed the landscape of guided learning for both students and teachers. Professors who once stood in front of classrooms filled with dozens of students now stand in front of webcams in front of thousands or tens of thousands of logged-in users. Grading papers, scoring tests, and giving personalized feedback are all totally different pursuits in an online environment, and technology companies are rushing to build the tools that make online learning easier, more effective, and more enjoyable for teachers and their students.

http://classroom-aid.com/2013/06/15/99-resources-and-tools-for-digital-learning/

by Debbie Morrison,Online Learning Insights

To provide an illustrative framework for this review, I’ve created a MOOC quality scorecard review, that is [loosely] based on a quality scorecard approach and my   course design experience. To put this course review into context, following is the course description for Sports & Society. I want to emphasize that they were no objectives, goals or purposes outlined for the course, which made defining the scope of the course a challenge, as well as determining my learning goals.

http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/a-mooc-quality-scorecard-applied-to-coursera-course/

By JOHN FAWCETT, Wired

Earlier this year, I hosted an algorithmic finance Meetup, and I met two students who were enrolled as part-time off-campus students. They were taking the bare minimum number of classes required at the university, at the cheapest price they could, and only “spending” those on requirements for their majors. All of their education and enrichment beyond their requirements was through massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs are free non-degree online courses with open global engagement that have exploded in popularity over the last few months. These two students were choosing to build their own education through outside resources both to save money – they said the cost was way less, even though it would take 6 years instead of 4 to earn a degree – and for the material. According to them, the MOOCs had far more options for advanced material. I was blown away by the steel-trap optimization these two students were applying to their own education.

http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/06/hacking-your-education-the-next-generation-of-students/

by Stephen Carson, MIT News

The MIT Office of Digital Learning has announced a collaboration between MITx, edX and the City of Chicago that will bring a six week MOOC-style course to that city’s high school students during the Chicago Summer of Learning. The course, A Taste of Python Programming, was developed under the leadership of Professor John Guttag and is based on materials from the popular MITx offering 6.00x Introduction to Computer Science and Programming. A Taste of Python Programming will run from June 25th to August 2nd and covers the first four weeks of materials from 6.00x.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/mitx-edx-team-up-with-city-of-chicago-to-bring-high-school-students-mooc-style-learning.html

by Associated Press

A week after President Barack Obama’s call for U.S. schools to be outfitted with high-speed Internet within five years, an independent panel that studied the lack of technology at school says digital learning, including the super-fast Internet connections, can be introduced even sooner. The LEAD Commission is finalizing a five-point plan to speed the adoption of digital learning in schools by 2016. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the panel’s blueprint on Wednesday; the full plan is expected to be formally released in the coming weeks. The commission was created in March 2012 to research the state of and figure out how to speech the introduction of technology in U.S. schools. The president of Columbia University and a former U.S. education secretary are among the panel’s four co-chairmen.

http://www.fox11online.com/dpp/news/national/Panel-backs-introduction-of-digital-learning-in-US_62596369

by Sara Plummer, Tulsa World

Administrators at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa say there are benefits to taking a college course in a classroom, and they are willing to put money on it. Starting in the fall, OSU-Tulsa will offer $250 tuition waivers to undergraduate and graduate students in an effort to get people to take more classes on campus instead of online. The “Get Here” tuition waiver is available for undergraduate students with a 2.0 grade-point average and taking at least 15 hours on campus and graduate students with a 3.0 grade-point average taking nine hours on campus.

http://www.tulsaworld.com/article.aspx/OSU_Tulsa_willing_to_make_it_worth_students_while_to/20130612_11_a9_cutlin216006?subj=1

by Udacity

Save the date! You’re invited to join the Udacity community as we gather for our Second Annual Global Meetup Day on Saturday, July 20th at 2pm PDT. The theme of the event will be to bring Udacians together on a single day worldwide to celebrate our community and our mission to educate and empower people to advance their education and careers in technology. Cities across the world will hear from one or more of Udacity’s founders and instructors. We’ll be formally organizing five official U.S. meetup locations in Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and New York.

http://blog.udacity.com/2013/06/announcing-second-annual-udacity-global.html

By David Rotman, Technology Review

Economic theory and government policy will have to be rethought if technology is indeed destroying jobs faster than it is creating new ones. Given his calm and reasoned academic demeanor, it is easy to miss just how provocative Erik Brynjolfsson’s contention really is. ­Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/

By BOBBY CERVANTES, Politico

Education and tech leaders on Wednesday lauded the Obama administration’s efforts to open the science, technology, engineering and math fields to more students — but said the resource challenges in underfunded schools remain a major hurdle. Tom Kalil, the White House’s deputy director for technology and innovation, said the Obama administration’s efforts include preparing and recruiting 100,000 new STEM teachers and opening opportunities to get more younger students interested in STEM. Asked about whether Congress needs to take steps to boost STEM education, Kalil said, “They are hearing not just the administration, but they’re also hearing from the private sector.” “We have open jobs. We could be hiring more people if we had workers” coming from the schools, he said at POLITICO Pro’s Tech Deep Dive: STEM Policy’s Next Steps.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/tech-education-leaders-talk-stem-challenges-92631.html

by Vanessa Castañeda, MenloPark-Atherton Patch

Stanford online coursework will be available starting this summer on a new open-source platform, OpenEdX, the university announced Tuesday. Among the first programs to run on the OpenEdX platform will be Stanford’s popular “Three Books” summer reading program for incoming Stanford freshmen, along with two public courses now open for registration – one using contemporary health topics to teach statistics and another helping K-12 teachers and parents change the way students approach math. Courses from Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering are among those that will run on the platform beginning this fall.

http://menlopark-atherton.patch.com/groups/schools/p/stanford-makes-coursework-available-on-new-opensource-platform

by MAX NISEN, Australian Business Insider

Colleges around the country should be worried. The quality of online courses is catching up fast. Kevin Carey, the director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation put it to the test, spending four months taking two MOOCs, from start to finish. One, a Coursera Introduction to Philosophy was everything critics dislike, he says. Too brief, and with none of the problem sets, essays, or tests that make sure you absorb and apply the information. The second, an MIT introductory biology course hosted by edX, was an entirely different animal. After taking the course, Carey admits that while not every course can transition online for less money and at a higher level of quality than what most students experience, the amount that can is “a lot more than people realise or want to admit.” That’s going to lead to a lot of disruption, and many lost jobs. But there’s a lot of upside, as well.

http://au.businessinsider.com/online-courses-are-challenging-college-classes-2013-6

By Allan Metcalf, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The 50th anniversary of the Third passed in 2011 with still no Fourth in sight. So it was a happy surprise this year to learn that all of a sudden, available online from the publisher was a new Merriam-Webster Unabridged. The print version would have had to wait until it was finished, years hence. The online version allows access to the revision as it is being born. If you subscribe to the Unabridged for $29.95 a year, you’ll get something new: 5,000 new entries (like anonymize, crowdsourcing and alt-country music) along with 107,000 new example sentences.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/06/12/unabridged-online/

by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

One of the biggest (yet newest) names in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is edX. In case you’re new to the MOOC or Edudemic world, edX is basically a consortium of schools that have banded together to assemble a robust library of online courses. From Physics to History to Computer Science, many of the world’s largest universities and colleges have come together to use the edX online learning platform. And now the edX platform is yours. The edX team made their code open source as of June 1, 2013 and are actively encouraging developers around the world to remix, rethink, and build onto the platform. After all, what better way to develop a product than to have countless people around the world add to it, use it, and continuously test it. The model has worked for a ton of major web tools like WordPress and Wikipedia.

http://www.edudemic.com/2013/06/edx-wants-you-to-improve-their-online-learning-platform/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

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

By David Nagel, Campus Technology

Smart phones are expected to overtake feature phones in worldwide shipments for the first time this year. According to a new forecast released by market research firm IDC, year-over-year growth in smart phones will approach 33 percent in 2013 and continue strong for the next five years. “2013 will mark a watershed year for smartphones,” said Ramon Llamas, research manager for IDC’s Mobile Phones program, in a prepared statement. “If you look at the number of vendors who support both feature phones and smartphones, many of them have not only successfully transitioned their product portfolios to highlight smartphones, but smartphones have become their primary value proposition going forward. In some cases, smartphones have accounted for well over 50 percent of their quarterly shipment volume. Looking ahead, we expect the gulf between smartphones and features phones to grow ever wider.”

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/06/11/smart-phones-set-to-overtake-feature-phones-this-year.aspx

By David Nagel, Campus Technology

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

By Shawn Francis Peters, Chronicle of Higher Ed

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/

by Kimon Keramidas, Chronicle of Higher Ed

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

By Lauren Ingeno, Inside Higher Ed

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