February 9, 2012, 05:42 PM ET
Social-Networking Experiment at Ohio State Hands Students Control of the Recruiting Message
Right now, college recruiters are blitzing
high-school juniors with marketing e-mails and brochures—many of
them much the same. Students often ignore them. "None of us is
naïve enough to hope for 10 percent of the population to open an
e-mail," says Allen Kraus, Ohio State's point person on
communications to prospective students. So Ohio State decided to
try a different approach to piercing the clutter. On Sunday night,
the university e-mailed more than 100,000 high-school students with
this pitch: Why not get to know "the real Ohio State"
by connecting with
a current student who does not work for the admissions office? In
the experiment, these would-be-Buckeyes can e-mail,
instant-message, or telephone any of 68 Ohio State students who
work for a start-up company called CollegeSolved. They can drill
down into the company's online network to find chat partners with
common interests,...
February 8, 2012, 06:28 PM ET
After Uproar Over Anti-Piracy Bill, a Movie Studio Courts Law Professors
Just weeks after a Web-fueled
backlash stopped a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills from
advancing in Congress, one movie studio is trying to cool the
debate by courting law professors and asking them to hold
conversations about how to prevent copyright infringement. In a
letter sent to dozens of law professors last week, Paramount
Pictures' vice president of worldwide content protection and
outreach, Alfred C. Perry, wrote that the company was “humbled” by
the strong public opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the
Protect IP Act, two bills that sparked worldwide protests in
mid-January. The backlash surprised the company, the letter states,
and Mr. Perry asked professors to consider inviting representatives
for campus discussions of intellectual-property laws. The goal
would be to “exchange ideas about content theft, its challenges,
and possible ways to address it,�...
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February 7, 2012, 05:32 PM ET
Panel Ponders Future of Open-Education Resources
Washington --
Open-education efforts like the free lecture materials at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and producing free online
textbooks are relatively new, and advocates face questions about
how to pay for such projects and how to maintain their quality. A
panel of higher-education experts gathered
on Tuesday to discuss those issues and the future of the
movement. Earlier in the day, Rice University
announced that its open-education platform, Connexions, would
soon offer free online textbooks for five popular courses. At the
meeting, Martha J. Kanter, U.S. under secretary of education, said
her experience as chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community
College District, in California, had taught her how high prices can
put textbooks out of reach for many students. Her institution
offered training for aspiring emergency medical technicians, but
the textbook cost $500, she ...
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February 7, 2012, 09:20 AM ET
Temple U. Project Ditches Textbooks for Homemade Digital Alternatives
When students groan about buying
traditional textbooks, their grievances follow a familiar refrain:
They’re expensive and usually boring. So this fall, a team of
Temple University professors heeded those complaints and abandoned
the old-fashioned texts for low-cost alternatives that they built
from scratch. The
pilot project gave 11 faculty members $1,000 each to create a
digital alternative to a traditional textbook. To enliven their
students’ reading, the instructors pulled together primary-source
documents and material culled from library archives. Steven J.
Bell, the associate university librarian for research and
instructional services at Temple, said the project tried to create
new kinds of learning experiences while saving students money at
the same time. The textbooks covered a variety of subjects,
including biomechanics, writing, and marketing. The Temple program
mirrors a
...
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February 6, 2012, 03:23 PM ET
MIT's New Free Courses May Threaten (and Improve) the Traditional Model, Program's Leader Says
The
recent announcement that Massachusetts Institute of Technology
would give certificates around free online course materials has
fueled further debate about whether employers may soon welcome new
kinds of low-cost credentials. Questions remain about how MIT's new
service will work, and what it means for traditional college
programs. On Monday The Chronicle posed some of those
questions to two leaders of the new project: L. Rafael Reif, MIT's
provost, and Anant Agarwal, director of MIT's Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. They stressed that the new
project, called MITx, will be run separately from the institute's
longstanding effort to put materials from its traditional courses
online. That project, called OpenCourseWare, will continue just as
before, while MITx will focus on creating new courses designed to
be delivered entirely online. All MITx materials will...
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February 1, 2012, 02:58 PM ET
New Media Consortium Names 10 Top 'Metatrends' Shaping Educational Technology
A group of education leaders gathered
last week to discuss the most important technology innovations of
the last decade, and their findings suggest the classroom of the
future will be open, mobile, and flexible enough to reach
individual students—while free online tools will challenge the
authority of traditional institutions. The retreat celebrated the
10th anniversary of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon
Project, whose annual report provides a road map of the
education-technology landscape. One hundred experts from higher
education, K-12, and museum education identified 28 “metatrends”
that will influence education in the future. The 10 most important,
according to a New Media Consortium
announcement about the retreat, include global adoption of
mobile devices, the rise of cloud computing, and transparency
movements that call into question traditional notions of content...
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January 30, 2012, 06:50 PM ET
Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics
Elsevier, the global publishing company, is responsible for The
Lancet, Cell, and about 2,000 other important
journals; the iconic reference work Gray's Anatomy, along
with 20,000 other books—and one fed-up, award-winning
mathematician. Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who
won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of
Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access
to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a
boycott in a
blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the
boycott's Web site The
Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900 scientists have signed
up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any
Elsevier journal. The company has sinned in three areas, according
to the boycotters: It charges too much for its journals; it bundles
subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable...
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January 30, 2012, 05:56 PM ET
Stalled 'Hubble Telescope of Supercomputers' Resumes Construction
A
football-field-size computer room at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign has been sitting nearly empty for months, waiting
for parts, in a stalled effort to build what researchers are
calling the
"Hubble telescope of supercomputers." IBM, the original
supplier,
abruptly withdrew from the project last summer just as it was
to deliver racks of computer servers, forcing the university to
shop for new parts for the unique project. Last week dozens of
computer servers began arriving—this time from Cray, the project's
new supplier. IBM had fallen behind its original schedule to have
the supercomputer up and running sometime in 2011. Officials at
Urbana-Champaign say that Cray will now deliver a computer more
quickly than IBM actually could have, and that the resulting
machine is expected to be faster and 10 percent cheaper to build.
"It will be much more attractive to the...
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January 25, 2012, 06:16 PM ET
Some Associations, Scholars Protest Bill That Would Curb Public Access to Research
Opposition to the Research
Works Act continues to spread. In a statement posted today on its
Web site, the Modern Language Association said it opposes the bill,
HR 3699, which would
prevent federal agencies from requiring researchers to make the
published results of federally supported research available to the
public without publishers' consent. That would undo public-access
mandates such as the National Institute of Health's, under which
federal-grant recipients must deposit copies of their papers in the
PubMed Central repository within a year of publication.
"Unnecessary limits on the free flow of ideas compromise a robust
exchange of information and knowledge," the MLA's president,
Michael Bérubé, said in the statement. "In reviewing the language
of the Research Works Act and considering the implications of its
provisions, the MLA concludes that this legislation has significant
...
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January 25, 2012, 09:32 AM ET
Fair-Use Guide Seeks to Solve Librarians' VHS-Cassette Problem
The Association of
Research Libraries might have a solution to what some librarians
call “the VHS-cassette problem.” Here’s the scenario: An academic
library has a collection of video tapes that is slowly
deteriorating, thanks to the fragile nature of analog media. A
librarian would like to digitize the collection for future use, but
avoids making the copies out of fear that doing so would violate
copyright law. And the institution’s attorneys have advised the
librarian that the fair-use principle, which might offer a way to
make copies legally, is too flexible to rely on. When the
Association of Research Libraries and a team of fair-use advocates
surveyed librarians to find out how they navigate copyright issues,
many of them described that exact conundrum. But they may soon have
a way out. Tomorrow the group will announce a code
of best practices designed to outline ways...
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Each day on Wired Campus, The Chronicle's technology reporters highlight key IT developments and put them in perspective.