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The BloombergBusiness report about Amplify comes as tablet sales in education are declining in general, as Chromebooks gain sales and popularity in K-12 classrooms. It also comes on the eve of ISTE 2015—the largest gathering of education technology enthusiasts in the U.S. The company spokesman said Amplify will be well-represented at ISTE, although the company did not release advance press coverage about products that will be showcased there.

The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education. It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.

SG_Debug && SG_Debug.pagedebug && window.console && console.log && console.log('[' + (new Date()-SG_Debug.initialTime)/1000 + ']' + ' Bottom of header.jsp'); SlateEducationGetting schooled.Nov. 19 2013 11:43 AM The King of MOOCs Abdicates the Throne 7.3k 1.2k 101 Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s “pivot” toward corporate training. By Rebecca Schuman &nbsp; Sebastian Thrun speaks during the Digital Life Design conference on Jan. 23, 2012, in Munich. Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images requirejs(["jquery"], function($) { if ($(window).width() < 640) { $(".slate_image figure").width("100%"); } }); Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun—former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity—just admitted to Fast Company’s openly smitten Max Chafkin that his company’s courses are often a “lousy product.” Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate. Follow This is quite a “pivot” from the Sebastian Thrun, who less than two years ago crowed to Wired that the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the “lousiness” of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room wit

nd why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.

mix of iPads and tablets with detachable keyboards.

HP EliteBook Revolve 810 G3, a laptop-tablet hybrid

Some K-12 systems are moving away from iPads and on to Chromebooks. And many elementary schools use Kindles and tablets made by Samsung and Android rather than Apple iPads.

The Wi-Fi-only tablet also arrives equipped with more than a dozen tutorial videos that walk users through tasks such as connecting to Wi-Fi, using email, setting up accounts at social networks and using video chat services like Skype for virtual visits with far-flung relatives and grandkids. In addition, RealPad owners get access to free 24/7 customer service via an 800 number that's accessible with the touch of an icon at the bottom of the screen. Remote help is also available.

"We’re at the point where the Internet pretty much supplies everything we need. We don’t really need teachers in the same way anymore."

I was overwhelmed by the number of articles all confirming what I had suspected: The relatively recent emergence of the Internet, and the ever-increasing ease of access to web, has unmistakably usurped the teacher from the former role as dictator of subject content. These days, teachers are expected to concentrate on the "facilitation" of factual knowledge that is suddenly widely accessible.

all computing devices—from laptops to tablets to smartphones—are dismantling knowledge silos and are therefore transforming the role of a teacher into something that is more of a facilitator and coach.

We can’t just buy iPads (or any device), add water, and hope that strategy will usher schools to the leading edge of 21st century education. Technology, by itself, isn’t curative. Human agency shapes the path.

The social and economic world of today and tomorrow require people who can critically and creatively work in teams to solve problems.

All computing devices — from laptops to tablets to smartphones — are dismantling knowledge silos

There are programs and services you can use to make sure that you make the most out of your computer. Having a computer desktop that you can navigate quickly and efficiently is fast becoming more important than having a tidy desk.

digital literacy as ‘the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet’6. By this definition, digital skills are any skills related to being digitally literate. Anything from the ability to find out your high-score on Minesweeper to coding a website counts as a digital skill.

What Digital Skills do I Need for the Modern Workplace?

Today’s ability to oh-so-easily see and hear each other online is a double-edged sword: it can make electronic communication more personable, but it can also inject offline prejudices evoked by how someone looks or sounds.

Now, a lot of online communication is done synchronously, or nearly so: volunteers are online together, at the same time, talking together, and staff supporting those volunteers is often seeing their volunteering activities in real time.

People do not communicate primarily via e-mail anymore; they now talk together via online social networks and in the comments section of blogs, photo-sharing sites, and video-sharing sites. Some people send far more SMS messages than email messages.