April 25, 2012, 1:18 pm
By Marc Parry
Milwaukee — Digital natives? The idea that students are superengaged finders of online learning materials once struck Glenda Morgan, e-learning strategist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as “a load of hooey.” Students, she figured, probably stick with the textbooks and other content they’re assigned in class.
Not quite. The preliminary results of a multiyear study of undergraduates’ online study habits, presented by Ms. Morgan at a conference on blended learning here this week, show that most students shop around for digital texts and videos beyond the boundaries of what professors assign them in class.
“It’s almost like they want to find the content by themselves,” Ms. Morgan said in an interview after her talk, which took place in a packed room at the 9th Annual Sloan Consortium Blended Learning Conference & Workshop.
It’s nothing new to…
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April 17, 2012, 4:24 pm
By Marc Parry
Scottsdale, Ariz. — We’re used to personalization on the consumer Web, from book recommendations on Amazon to the news feed on Facebook.
But what will it mean for learning as colleges, too, increasingly mine data to shape the student experience? What does educational personalization look like? How finely should technologists try to parse it—down to individual learning styles? How will personalization conflict with existing regulations? And what are the risks?
Debating those questions was the focus of a panel this morning at an education innovation conference hosted by Arizona State University. Some 700 people—companies, investors, educators—are convening here over the next two days, many of them hoping to ride the surge of investment in education technology.
“We’re entering a world that is going to be so data-mined it will be unrecognizable to us in 20 years, the …
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March 7, 2012, 7:44 pm
By Marc Parry
Atlanta — Higher education’s spin on the Silicon Valley garage. That was the vision laid out in September, when the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new lab for disruptive ideas, the Center for 21st Century Universities. During a visit to Atlanta last week, I checked in to see how things were going, sitting down with Richard A. DeMillo, the center’s director and Georgia Tech’s former dean of computing, and Paul M.A. Baker, the center’s associate director. We talked about challenges and opportunities facing colleges at a time of economic pain and technological change—among them the chance that many universities might follow Borders Bookstores into oblivion.
Q. You recently wrote that universities are “bystanders” at the revolution happening around them, even as they think they’re at the center of it. How so?
Mr. DeMillo: It’s the same idea as the news…
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March 6, 2012, 2:25 pm
By Marc Parry
Florida State University has resolved a lawsuit that was brought by two blind students who accused the university of discrimination due to inaccessible technology. Under the settlement, the university agreed to pay each student $75,000 and “to continue its efforts to make courses accessible to all students,” according to a news release issued by the National Federation of the Blind, which helped the students bring their lawsuit last summer. Florida State did not admit liability or wrongdoing.
The students, Christopher S. Toth and Jamie A. Principato, had argued that a mathematics course relied on e-learning systems that were inaccessible to people with disabilities. The students could not access software that was used for homework and tests, their lawsuit said. The course also relied on inaccessible “clickers,” remote-control-like devices that allow students to answer…
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February 23, 2012, 4:28 pm
By Marc Parry
When it comes to which movies deserve an Oscar this Sunday, are fans and the official voters divided?
The public would have picked Avatar over The Hurt Locker in 2010, some say. But this is “The Age of Big Data,” as The New York Times put it recently. Which means computers can help settle this film-buff debate, courtesy of a new tool co-developed by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab.
The lab’s “Oscar Senti-meter” mines millions of Twitter messages to chart how much people are talking about the nominated films, and, more important, whether that chatter is positive or negative. The inside dope among industry types holds that The Artist will win best picture. And Twitter fans, too, are showing the silent film a lot of love, says Jonathan Taplin, director of the new USC lab.
“The dark horse, from our point of view, is Midnight in Paris, which also…
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February 13, 2012, 12:01 am
By Marc Parry
Want to learn the basics of what goes inside your smartphone and computer?
You can get a better grasp of that gadgetry in a free online course announced today by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the first class to open in the institute’s closely watched new interactive online learning venture, MITx. And if you pass the course, MIT will award you a certificate for free.
The prototype class, “6.002x: Circuits and Electronics,” opens for enrollment today (sign up here). The course will run from March 5 to June 8. Modeled on an introductory class typically offered to between 100 and 250 undergraduates on campus, the course will help students make the transition from physics to electrical engineering and computer science. Teaching it will be Anant Agarwal and Chris Terman, co-directors of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Piotr Mitros, a…
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February 10, 2012, 12:56 pm
By Marc Parry
A Texas jury on Thursday sided against the University of California in a major fight over patents to interactive Web technology, Wired reports. The case revolved around Michael Doyle, a Chicago-based biologist who asserted that, while working at the university’s San Francisco campus in 1993, he invented the first program that enabled users to interact with pictures within a Web browser. Mr. Doyle’s patent-holding company, Eolas Technologies, and its partner, the University of California, claimed that their ideas underlie key Internet functions such as pop-up search suggestions, music clips, and maps.
But Eolas’s ownership claims were invalidated by the Texas jury’s decision on Thursday. According to Wired, that move canceled upcoming patent-infringement trials against eight technology companies, including giants like Google and Amazon. Mr. Doyle’s company had been seeking more than $…
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February 9, 2012, 5:42 pm
By Marc Parry
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…
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January 5, 2012, 12:35 pm
By Marc Parry
Stanford University got lots of attention for inviting the public to participate in a series of free online computer-science classes. One thing that’s drawn less notice is how some of the technologies that help facilitate those mega-classes are changing the experience for Stanford students learning the same subjects. Now a Stanford student is provoking a debate on those innovations, with a blog post critiquing the rigor and format of the “flipped classroom” teaching method deployed in his machine-learning course.
In one version of that course offered to Stanford students, the traditional teaching format was inverted, with lectures presented through online videos and optional once-a-week class meetings devoted to problem solving with the professor. The videos, plus auto-graded assignments, were also offered to the public in the free online version of the machine-learning class. As of…
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December 21, 2011, 12:30 pm
By Marc Parry
Earlier this year, The Chronicle reported on a controversy that arose when a team of Harvard researchers downloaded some 1,700 Facebook profiles from one college class without asking the students’ permission.
So what can scholars learn from a giant archive of Facebook data?
This week the Harvard sociologists published some of their Facebook findings in a new paper that explores how people pick friends and what part friendship plays in spreading cultural tastes and ideas.
The researchers found that “friends befriended others with whom they shared interests,” but “they did not generally adopt new interests” because they had developed new friends, according to a news release from the National Science Foundation, which supported the research.
What’s more, the scholars report that “tastes in books don’t seem to influence Facebook friendship formation in the same way as tastes …
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