Techno-News Blog

By NovoEd, Sacramento Bee

NovoEd, the collaborative online social learning platform, has announced agreements with 16 institutions that span the higher education, research, and technology sectors. Through these relationships, NovoEd will provide the platform, tools, and services that enable its partners to offer both massive online open courses (MOOCs) and smaller private courses in a social, collaborative and connected environment. With this new technology, the world is now a connected, social classroom. NovoEd’s extensive list of partners now includes Stanford, Princeton, University of Michigan, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, Babson Global, the Aresty Institute of Executive Education at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, among others.

http://www.sacbee.com/2014/02/13/6154861/leading-institutions-work-with.html

By: Ellen Lee, CNBC.com

Massive online open courses (MOOCs) are supposed to change the face of higher education. Early success, though, has been easier to find among corporations.Yahoo! employees can take any classes from Coursera’s “Signature Track”—not even limited only to specific job function edification—from macroeconomic principles to genetics and evolution. Yahoo! employees can be reimbursed for the cost, around $30 to $100 per course. Udacity launched its “Open Education Alliance” last fall, partnering with businesses such as Google and AT&T to develop skills-based classes.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101415252

by Oregon State University

Oregon State University is helping its faculty members develop textbooks in their fields that will be freely accessible online to any student in the world. The open textbook initiative is a collaboration between OSU Libraries, OSU Press and OSU Extended Campus that provides financial, technical and editorial support for faculty members to create “open” texts that aim to reduce costs for students and further position Oregon State as a leader in research and teaching. “I can’t remember a single year where I haven’t had a student advocacy group come to me and say we need to do something about the cost of textbooks,” said Faye Chadwell, the director of OSU Press and the Donald and Delpha Campbell University Librarian. “That’s really the driving factor here.”

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2014/feb/osu-open-textbook-initiative-aims-reduce-student-costs-enhance-learning

by Cromwell Schubarth, Silicon Valley Business Journal

Curious.com, which runs an online marketplace where hundreds of teachers offer video lessons, has raised $15 million in Series B funding. The Menlo Park company led by CEO Justin Kitch said the round was led by GSV Capital. Previous investors who participated include Redpoint Ventures, Bill Campbell, and Jesse Rogers. GSV Chairman and CEO Michael Moe is joining the Curious.com board. The company now offers more than 5,000 lessons from more than 700 teachers. With the new funding it is adding two new ways for teachers to make money.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/02/12/online-learning-startup-curiouscom.html

by Barry Levine, Venture Beat

What does Microsoft have in mind for the Internet of things? That question pops to mind following news that the tech giant is beefing up its Internet of things team. A report from ZDNet on Tuesday said that the team, formerly known as Microsoft Embedded, appears to be broadening its focus beyond it previous scope of enterprise/industrial customers to now include consumers — a sector research firm IDC predicts will reach $8.9 trillion by 2020. The evidence includes movement of the former Embedded team from the Windows Server group to the operating system division. Hints also come from the LinkedIn profiles of several new team members, including the Internet of thing team’s director of program management (as of December), Steve Teixeira who noted in his updated profile that the team’s role is to develop Internet of things software for “industry devices, wearables, automobiles, consumer electronics, etc.”

http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/11/microsoft-suits-up-for-the-internet-of-things/

By Miguel Guhlin, CIO Advisor

Team leaders, I’m told, take responsibility for their team’s failures. You know, when the Titanic hit the iceberg, and it sank, the Captain went down with the ship. I recently found that I fumbled on a project. Here are some tips I came up with to avoid having it occur again. As I read these, I realize that they are obvious. I can’t help but ask, Why didn’t I do this in the first place? The reality is that everyone missteps and other factors can force your hand.

http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&entryid=7157

by GlobeNewswire

College has developed a new pathway that allows students to complete an Associate in Science in Business Administration degree by taking free, open, online courses from the Saylor Foundation that are aligned with the college’s prior learning assessment program. “In the past two years, there has been much debate about how open online courses benefit students,” said Marc Singer, vice provost of the college’s Center for the Assessment of Learning. “Our program enables students to take high-quality open courses at no cost and then apply what they learned in those open courses by taking our assessments. This process allows them to earn credit that can be applied to a degree program at Thomas Edison State College.”

http://www.itnewsonline.com/news/Earning-Credit-Through-Open-Courses-and-Prior-Learning-Assessment/31850/6/3

By Brian Zinchuk, Battleford News Optimist

For years we’ve heard how the Internet will shake up education with online learning. For a long time it was nothing but blah, blah blah, whatever. Instead of reading a textbook, you were reading it on your screen. But in the past couple years, that changed, and now the world will never be the same. The adoption of video in online tutorials, workshops and webinars has been absolutely remarkable in its impact for those who seek them out. It’s taken a while, but the Internet has finally matured to become an extremely powerful learning tool. It’s ironic that to do so, it had to start acting like a classroom in real life.

http://www.newsoptimist.ca/article/20140212/BATTLEFORD0304/302129998/-1/BATTLEFORD/online-learning-comes-of-age

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

When schools need technology and districts can’t provide it, sometimes the only way to find the funds is to get creative. The Tech Search Party was one parent’s idea for generating the money his kids’ schools needed to get their hands on technology. But it’s not the only way that people are raising the funds they need to buy new gear and training to add technology into the classroom. A teacher in Oregon used crowdfunding site DonorsChoose to generate some of the funding she needed to bring Chromebooks into her fourth grade; and a seventh grade English teacher in Memphis used PledgeCents, a lesser known crowdfunding site, to raise the money to buy a new classroom projector. In each case the district couldn’t provide the technology budget needed for these acquisitions, so individuals took on the job of doing it themselves. The lesson they’ve all learned: If they can do it, the rest of us can too.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2014/02/12/3-ways-to-raise-money-for-tech-in-the-classroom.aspx

By Jason Anderson, Edudemic

Gamification can enhance learning in college-level coursework. Using characteristic elements that play a significant role in gameplay can create a more dynamic learning environment where students more fully understand targeted concepts. To examine this, I have been researching Twitter as a vehicle that would resonate with the course objectives in a course that I teach on Open Source Intelligence, particularly for a module regarding social media intelligence. In From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining ‘Gamification’ Sebastian Deterding defines gamification as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts. To understand gamification in academic terms, the task is to determine how to situate gamified applications in relation to existing course context and what elements belong.

http://www.edudemic.com/dynamic-learning-environments-using-gamification/

by R.A. London, the Economist

Students will soon find that for very low prices they can get a much broader array of course choices, most of which offer superior instruction with much more flexibility: you can view the lectures when you want, as many times as you want, wherever you want. It will not be long before completion of particular MOOCs earn students enough credit at “real” universities to enable students to get a “real” degree. The stigma associated with MOOC learning should quickly flip to status signalling, since anyone who can do an entire degree online is probably disciplined and self-motivated. It is very easy to see how elite universities survive this, as they provide a fundamentally different experience. It is equally easy to see how large segments of the world of higher education are rendered unnecessary: where, within a decade or two, all that will remain of hundreds or thousands of less-selective universities will be the buildings—and a skilled teacher or two who built courses that prospered in online markets.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/online-education

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Would you let a startup track your social media accounts and credit-card transactions in exchange for cash? Data about our likes and habits is captured in abundance, but we reap only a small portion of the resulting value. A startup called Datacoup is far from the only tech company hoping to get rich by selling insights mined from your personal data. But it may be the only one offering to give you money for that information. atacoup is running a beta trial in which people get $8 a month in return for access to a combination of their social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, and the feed of transactions from a credit or debit card. The New York City-based startup plans to make money by charging companies for access to trends found in that information, after it has been removed of personally identifying details.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524621/sell-your-personal-data-for-8-a-month/

By Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Cornell University and the University of Texas at Austin may have trumpeted their partnerships with — and pledged millions to — the massive open online course provider edX, but to no avail: Their students don’t seem to understand why. “The university hasn’t laid out long-term goals for the MOOCs, and the numbers don’t bode particularly well for the courses’ overall success,” the editorial reads. “We’re confused as to why an unproven and unused educational experiment that isn’t even aimed at UT students is something the system feels they should continue funding.”

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/12/ut-austin-and-cornell-u-students-question-their-institutions-investments-moocs

by Megan O’Neil, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Students arrive on college campuses with multiple mobile electronic devices. And a quick scan of the Apple Apps store turns up hundreds of note-taking, assignment-sharing, and textbook applications. In this ocean of options, what education technologies are students actually using to help them navigate their studies? The Chronicle sat down with a trio of graduate students in the communication, culture, and technology program at Georgetown University, and quizzed them about the technology tools that keep their academic lives humming.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/video-tech-tools-students-say-they-cant-live-without/50343

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Educators today often use a variety of pedagogical styles. Some are old, some are new(er), and some folks are out there innovating and trying new stuff of their own creation. While most teachers out there are probably piecing together a little bit of something with a touch of something else – different strokes for different folks, right? – There are some folks out there that we have to thank for some of the more common concrete pedagogical styles. So who are these folks? Many of us are familiar with the pedagogical concepts, but the people behind them are often less well-known. Take a look at the handy infographic linked below – it highlights six individuals that have made major contributions to what we modern folks know as pedagogy.

http://www.edudemic.com/how-to-teach/

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Technology is pretty much exploding these days. As a pretty average person who has a job and a life, it can be hard to keep up with all the cool stuff happening out there. Computers are getting faster and faster – that we all know. Our desktops and laptops do so much more today than they did just a couple of years ago. The handy infographic linked below takes a look at the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world. The amount of data that these computers can handle is absolutely mind boggling. So whether you’re speeding through your computer based work on a shiny new, super speedy machine or cursing a slow-as-molasses laptop that takes ten minutes to do anything, check out these awesome machines that will definitely put your computer to shame!

http://www.edudemic.com/supercomputers/

by BRUCE EDWARD WALKER, Heartlander

The concept of the traditional library continues to evolve from rooms teeming with musty books, dusty shelves and spinster librarians shushing patrons. The latest evolution involves offering online alternatives to high-school dropouts, allowing them the opportunity to earn a diploma rather than a General Equivalency Diploma (GED). On January 9, Cengage launched its Career Online High School program for public libraries. COHS blends online learning with academic coaches who assist students with career advice and curricula guidance.

http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2014/02/10/online-learning-libraries-targets-high-school-dropouts

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education

White House staff and tech executives talked about education in social media chats the day after the 2014 State of the Union address. In President Barack Obama’s address (transcript) on Tuesday, Jan. 28, he talked about high-speed broadband, high-tech manufacturing hubs, and science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Social-Media-Ed-Tech-Dialogue-State-of-the-Union.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education

In the virtual environment ProtoSphere, students can create content together, collaborate physically and virtually, and use various forms of media. Science teacher Vikki Smith said this virtual environment will help prepare students for global collaboration, both now and in their future careers. She’s hoping to continue collaboration within her classroom in this environment, but doesn’t plan to stop there. “What this 3-D virtual reality is going to do for me is that we can have students working with other students around the country, around the world and having conversations.”

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Collaborative-Learning-Spaces-Become-Virtual-Reality.html

by Joshua Kopstein, Daily Beast

Coursera, which offers free online courses so that “anyone around the world can learn without limits,” said last week that they were compelled to begin blocking IP addresses associated with the countries, after finding that their site was in violation of U.S. export laws. “Coursera is working very closely with the U.S. Department of State and Office of Foreign Assets Control to secure permissions to reinstate site access for students in sanctioned countries,” the company reassured on its blog. A few hours later, the site stopped blocking Syria after discovering that the country’s sanctions contain an exemption for non-government organizations focused on “extending access to education.” But around 2,000 students in Iran, Cuba, and Sudan remain cut off. The site now greets them with the following message:

“Our system indicates that you are trying to access the Coursera site from an IP address associated with a country currently subjected to US economic and trade sanctions. In order for Coursera to comply with US export controls, we cannot allow you to access to the site.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/09/how-american-economic-sanctions-are-hurting-innocent-students-in-iran-cuba-sudan.html

by RICHARD GARNER, the Independent

From nursery years onwards, education is to undergo a computer-driven revolution, technology expert tells ministers. Children in nurseries will soon be learning through Moocs (Massive Open Online Courses) as the internet revolution changes the face of learning, according to the man who first pioneered their use in higher education. Today’s two- and three-year-olds have been born with keyboards “pinned to their fingers”, Dr Anant Agarwal, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, insists. As a result, it makes sense to utilise the skills they had acquired and give them a basic start to literacy and numeracy through computer games in the kindergarten or nursery schools.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/online-learning-is-the-blackboard-of-the-future-9117075.html