Author Archives: Nick DeSantis
February 22, 2012, 6:54 pm
By Nick DeSantis
A licensing agreement between the publisher Cengage Learning and the e-textbook vendor Kno has gone sour. Details recently surfaced of a legal battle between the two companies over the publisher’s effort to terminate a contract to digitize its printed textbooks. Cengage accused Kno of copyright infringement, and now the start-up is suing the publisher for damages and the right to continue selling its partner’s e-textbooks.
In early January, Kno sued Cengage for trying to terminate its agreement to let Kno digitize and sell the publisher’s textbooks. News of the lawsuit was first reported last week by the social-networking news site Mashable. The case highlights potential problems that could arise as publishers work with third parties to create interactive textbooks.
The conflict began last August, when Kno introduced new features to its e-reader platform. One of those tools, …
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February 17, 2012, 3:56 pm
By Nick DeSantis
Apple’s recent release of free software to build e-textbooks has brought attention to custom publishing of academic materials. But Apple’s software, called iBooks Author, lacks easy tools for multiple authors to collaborate on a joint textbook project. Since most books aren’t written in isolation, two new publishing platforms seek to make that group collaboration easier.
The first, Booktype, is free and open-source. Once the platform is installed on a Web server, teams of authors can work together in their browsers to write sections of books and chat with each other in real time about revisions. Entire chapters can be imported and moved around by dragging and dropping. The finished product can be published in minutes on e-readers and tablets, or exported for on-demand printing. Booktype also comes with community features that let authors create profiles, join groups, and track…
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February 10, 2012, 3:11 pm
By Nick DeSantis
The market for free online courses is growing every week, with new companies emerging to offer open courses to anyone who wants them. Some of them have forgone the support of traditional institutions to try the for-profit waters instead. For anyone who might be struggling to keep track of the ever-growing field—the companies’ names can sound similar or stretch the bounds of the dictionary—below are four recently created start-ups challenging the traditional degree model with their free online courses:
- Udacity: The free education platform that grew out of Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun’s huge artificial-intelligence course has its own plans to expand. When Udacity appeared a few weeks ago, two courses—one on building a search engine and the other on programming a robotic car—were in the works. They start on February 20 and will last seven weeks. And now, Udacity’s Web …
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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,…
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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, …
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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 …
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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…
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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 …
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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…
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January 20, 2012, 11:54 am
By Nick DeSantis
Few rituals conjure a storm of emotions like the high-school prom. Some remember the night forever, and others try to forget it as soon as they leave the gym.
A team of students at the University of California at Santa Cruz saw opportunity in that pre-prom angst. They used their new artificial intelligence engine to build an online game that re-creates the prom and all of its attendant social scheming. The designers say their experiment, dubbed Prom Week, makes social interactions richer and less predictable than those of other games on the market.
In the game, players help high-school characters realize their prom-night dreams, such as claiming the prom king’s crown or brokering peace with a rival. Players lead characters through social interactions with their peers, and each choice influences how the characters’ relationships evolve. Prom Week lets players achieve their goals…
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