Baltimore – Howard Besser, a New York University archivist, recently got into a shouting match at an Occupy protest, making a case for why the activists should preserve records of their activities.
“Within the Occupy movement there’s a huge suspicion of traditional organizations, including libraries and universities,” Mr. Besser explained Monday at the spring meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information.
The shouting match was an extreme moment, but Mr. Besser and other archivists on a panel here explained that they have had to take unusual steps to try to gather a snapshot for future scholars of the nationwide Occupy protests, which call attention to income inequality in the United States. Those steps—including distributing postcards promoting archiving at protests, developing automated systems to download photos posted online, and asking participants to vote on…
A Texas professor asked for enemies on Facebook, and he got them.
Earlier this week, The Chronicle broke the story of a Facebook app called EnemyGraph, which lets users of the popular network declare enemies. The word is intended to be meant loosely, according to its creator, Dean Terry, who is director of the emerging-media program at the University of Texas at Dallas. He says he intended to spark discussion about how Facebook shapes social interactions, and it seems to have worked.
That discussion raged this week, as the story got picked up in dozens of blogs and newspapers across the globe. A week ago, only about 300 people had installed the app, but today that number stands at more than 20,000, said Mr. Terry in an e-mail interview. “The rapid growth of the user base has also been somewhat surprising, but we are excited about it,” he said.
Free online courses for the masses are all the rage—and many are being run by start-ups hoping to profit by selling related materials and services. Jim Groom thinks that’s too commercial, so he’s raising money for the online course he co-teaches at the University of Mary Washington using Kickstarter, the popular “crowd funding” service.
In a campaign released today, the professor makes his plea in an irreverent video that mixes in clips from a 90s true-crime show, and video interviews with students and professors shot from unusual angles. He explains that last year he ran the course, which is on digital storytelling and is called DS106, using his own equipment. But the class has grown so large that he needs a new server to keep it going, and he estimates that will cost him $2,900.
He’s asking for contributions ranging from $1 to $3,000, and those who give will get…
For years, colleges looking for course-management software considered a choice between Blackboard’s dominant commercial product or an open-source alternative such as Moodle or Sakai. Now Blackboard essentially owns the open-source alternatives as well.
On Monday, Blackboard officials announced that the company has purchased two leading supporters of Moodle, Moodlerooms and NetSpot. Both deals are complete, though officials would not disclose the sale prices. The company also hired one of the founders of the Sakai project to lead its efforts to support colleges using that open-source software. The moves are part of the company’s newly announced Blackboard Education Open Source Services group.
In the past Blackboard has purchased competitors and then either disbanded them, as it did with Prometheus, or merged the competing product with its own, as it did with WebCT. This time…
Austin, Tex. — Companies are increasingly able to follow the digital breadcrumbs users leave behind online, and what they can deduce from those trails can be surprising. Several panels and speakers at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival talked about the growing ability to analyze “big data” to shape political campaigns, advertising, and education.
Some online marketers that analyze user behavior can even tell when female customers are ovulating to help target ads accordingly, according to Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual-reality technology who is critical of many new trends in digital technology, including Web 2.0. He did not name any companies that used such analysis, but a recent New York Times article focused on how retail giants like Target seek to tailor ads to customers who are pregnant, since that is a time people are starting to buy baby-related items and…
The nonprofit group called TED, known for streaming 18-minute video lectures about big ideas, today opened a new YouTube channel designed for teachers and professors, with videos that are even shorter.
The new channel, called TED-Ed, was announced a year ago, but its leaders are only now unveiling the project’s first videos. There are only 11 as of today, but the goal is to add new ones regularly. Within three months from now, a new video could appear each day, said Chris Anderson, TED’s curator, in a conference call with reporters late last week.
To produce the new videos, the group is connecting content experts with professional animators to create highly illustrated productions. The average length of these videos is about five minutes, and Mr. Anderson said he envisions a teacher playing one in class at the start of a lesson “to ignite excitement” about the topic.
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…
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.
Last week Apple released free software to make e-books for the iPad, declaring that the company intended to “reinvent the textbook.” Apple also updated its iTunesU service, first released four years ago, to make it possible for professors to put syllabi, lecture videos and audio recordings, and e-textbooks into one spot for students.College administrators and professors had mixed reactions to the news: some said it could spur far greater adoption of digital textbooks, while others criticized the product for relying too heavily on Apple products, leaving out key support for PC’s and tablets running Android software.
Below are some points made by campus leaders, in interviews or on their blogs:
Making it easy-to-create books will help authors keep textbooks more up-to-date.
“Providing constant content updates through the Cloud is key,” argues Jed Macosko, associate professor of…
New York — Apple managed to make news simply by announcing that it would hold a press conference on the topic of education. All week long, other education-technology companies have seized the moment to push out their own announcements, trying to ride a wave of mainstream attention to how technology is changing education.
This morning starting at 10 a.m. EST, the company is set to make its announcement, and The Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, along with the ProfHacker blog, will be there, posting live updates.
The MIT Press and other critics say proposed legislation to
limit public access to the results of some studies would work
against the open exchange of ideas.
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A Texas professor asked for enemies on Facebook, and he got them.
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 
Last week Apple 
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Stay up-to-date on the latest news, information, trends and commentary on new and evolving technologies focusing on classroom teaching, scholarship and research, and admissions management.