Technology is extremely important to our school district because we realize the tremendous impact that it can have on improving education opportunities,
we can focus on making education the best it can be for students and teachers
This opinion article attacks RIM (Blackberry) for the outage fiasco experienced earlier this week and it got me thinking about the server outages, latency, bandwidth issues that schools face routinely even when trying to upgrade their infrastructure to meet the demands of today's technology. If education adopts mobile devices as essential or central tools in the formal learning space, how might the frequency of "dead zones" or transmittal issues effect the synchronous advantage of using such devices in class? If RIM had issues, I guess maybe it just adds one more layer of complexity and consideration to the integration of mobile technology into the classroom that will have to be accounted for and more importantly - tolerated?
A good description of Udacity & Coursera. Says MOOCs work well for students who are self-motivated and already fairly well educated. Yet, worldwide, the poorest students still don't have the background (or the Internet bandwidth) to participate in a major way. It suggests that very selective colleges will continue to thrive, but those in the middle will need to work harder to justify their costs.