Author Archives: Jeffrey R. Young
January 9, 2012, 5:07 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
Last month we asked for your help in identifying the top technology innovators in higher education. The response has been exciting. So far we received more than 200 nominations, pointing us to groundbreaking professors and administrators in various areas of education technology. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
We wanted to provide a quick update on our project. A team of reporters and editors here held a series of meetings to narrow down the list of innovators. We’ve selected 12 to profile in an upcoming issue of The Chronicle. As we said in our previous post, our goal is to focus on some of the most influential new ideas out there and to provide a sense of who their champions are.
Chronicle reporters are in the process of writing those profiles, which we hope to publish next month. We also plan to organize all the online nominations and share those in an easy-to-read format….
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December 20, 2011, 2:21 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
October 25, 2011, 12:32 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had discussed plans to shake up the textbook industry, including an effort that would have included free textbooks with iPads, according to a biography released this week.
“Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform,” says a passage in the new book, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. It notes that Jobs said he had met with several major textbook publishers, including Pearson. It appears that his primary focus was on the K-12 textbook market. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” Mr. Jobs is quoted as saying. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”
Mr. Jobs was less…
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October 20, 2011, 4:09 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
Philadelphia—When Pearson officials talk about their new learning-management system, OpenClass, they like to mention Google. They note that the software is distributed through Google’s App marketplace, and say that it was inspired by Google’s popular e-mail and Web services platform. Pearson drops the company’s name so much that many college officials assume that Google is jointly building the new system, something that officials have long speculated that the search company might one day do.
But other than routine help it gives to any app in its marketplace, Google is not directly involved with the new learning-management system, and Google officials say they have no plan to jump into developing learning software.
“There were some misleading headlines with the Pearson’s announcement,” said Tim Drinan, a Google spokesman, when asked to clarify the nature of the…
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October 19, 2011, 12:01 am
By Jeffrey R. Young
Professors who use Blackboard’s software have long been forced to lock their course materials in an area effectively marked, “For Registered Students Only,” while using the system. Today the company announced plans to add a “Share” button that will let professors make those learning materials free and open online.
The move may be the biggest sign yet that the idea of “open educational materials” is going mainstream, nearly 10 years after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first began giving away lecture notes online. Blackboard made the change after college officials complained that the company’s software, which more than half the colleges in the country use for their online-course materials, was holding them back from trying open-education projects.
The president of Blackboard’s learning division, Ray Henderson, plans to send an e-mail to customers today that effectively …
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October 17, 2011, 6:15 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
One sign of the growing presence of technology on college campuses is the rising numbers at the annual meeting of Educause, which kicks off Tuesday in Philadelphia. This year more than 7,300 people are signed up to attend, up from 6,500 at last year’s meeting.
The bulk of the attendees work as technology leaders on campuses, though many others represent the 266 tech companies setting up booths at the show to persuade colleges to use their products to support teaching, research, or administrative functions. (This year’s attendance is not technically the largest ever, but officials say it is “near peak,” which in this economy, counts as a kind of record.)
The Chronicle’s Wired Campus team will be there to file reports on new ideas, as will representatives of the ProfHacker blog.
All week long, the conference will offer sessions on campus technology trends—so many that…
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October 4, 2011, 11:00 am
By Jeffrey R. Young
Internet2 was formed to help colleges wire superfast networks, but now it is shifting attention to the cloud. This morning the group announced that it has brokered discounts with Hewlett-Packard and two other tech companies for computing services, such as renting processor time on high-speed computers over the Internet, to help researchers.
The deals are the first of a new project called Internet2 Net+ Services. The idea is that the group, which counts 235 college members, can negotiate better prices and contract terms than any individual college could. Eleven colleges are running tests of the arrangement, which will be made available to other Internet2 members beginning early next year.
HP’s new CEO, Meg Whitman, addressed Internet2′s member meeting this morning via videoconference to announce her company’s participation in the program. Together with a company called SHI…
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September 28, 2011, 3:26 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
Today Amazon unveiled a new tablet computer, the company’s long-awaited competitor to Apple’s iPad. Though it won’t go on sale until November, some gadget-happy college professors and administrators are already speculating about the impact it will have on campuses.
The big surprise in today’s announcement was the tablet’s price: $199. That’s far less than the lowest-cost iPad, which sells for $499. Amazon named its new gadget the Kindle Fire, and it is smaller than the iPad, measuring about 7 inches (compared with the iPad’s 10-inch screen), so it more easily fits in one hand. It is powered by a processor on par with the chip in Apple’s iPad 2, and it runs a modified version of Google’s Android-tablet operating system. Amazon’s offering is missing some features of the iPad, though. For instance, it has no camera (there are two on the iPad 2) and no 3G antenna (which is an option…
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September 16, 2011, 6:46 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
The high-profile lawsuit by music-industry officials against Joel Tenenbaum, who downloaded and made available to others thousands of copyrighted songs over the Internet while he was an undergraduate at Goucher College, took a new turn on Friday, when a U.S. appeals court restored a $675,000 fine against the student—for now. In July a federal judge ruled that that fine, awarded by a jury in the summer of 2009, was “unconstitutionally excessive.” But a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit said that the judge did not follow proper procedure in making the decision to reduce the fine by 90 percent. The new ruling said the issue of whether the fine was excessive should be reviewed again on different grounds. Copyright-reform advocates are watching the case closely, and have argued that large fines in such cases could chill innovation.
September 15, 2011, 7:00 am
By Jeffrey R. Young
A game-changing e-textbook project at Indiana University—in which the university requires certain students to purchase e-textbooks and negotiates unusually low prices by promising publishers large numbers of sales—now has the participation of major textbook publishers, and university officials plan to expand the effort.
Today McGraw-Hill Higher Education announced that it has agreed to join the project, which has been in a pilot stage for more than a year. A handful of other publishers—John Wiley & Sons; Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group; W.W. Norton; and Flat World Knowledge—have signed on to the effort as well.
Here’s how it works: Students in a select group of courses are required to pay a materials fee, which gets them access to the assigned electronic textbooks or other readings for the course. The university essentially becomes the broker of the textbook sales…
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