February 8, 2012, 6:28 pm
By Nick DeSantis
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,…
Read More
February 7, 2012, 5:32 pm
By Nick DeSantis
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, …
Read More
February 7, 2012, 9:20 am
By Nick DeSantis
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 …
Read More
February 6, 2012, 3:23 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
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…
Read More
February 1, 2012, 2:58 pm
By Nick DeSantis
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 own…
Read More
January 30, 2012, 6:50 pm
By Josh Fischman
The eminent mathematician Timothy Gowers vows to do no work for Elsevier.
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…
Read More
January 30, 2012, 5:56 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
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 …
Read More
January 25, 2012, 6:16 pm
By Jennifer Howard
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…
Read More
January 25, 2012, 9:32 am
By Nick DeSantis
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 …
Read More
January 23, 2012, 4:53 pm
By Nick DeSantis
The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial-intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his teaching position to aim for an even bigger audience.
Sebastian Thrun, a research professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he had given up his teaching role at the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital–Life–Design conference, in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters.
During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than “a camera, a pen, and a napkin.” Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos…
Read More
Follow Wired Campus through your favorite RSS reader.
Developing online and blended learning programs requires research and collaboration. Learn how top technology companies are partnering with campuses across the country to advance online learning as it becomes an increasingly important aspect of higher education.