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"The Year Ahead in IT, 2012 January 6, 2012 - 3:00am By Lev Gonick This series of annual Year Ahead articles on technology and education began on the eve of what we now know is one of the profound downturns in modern capitalism. When history is written, the impact of the deep economic recession of 2008-2012 will have been pivotal in the shifting balance of economic and political power around the world. Clear, too, is the reality that innovation and technology as it is applied to education is moving rapidly from its Anglo-American-centered roots to a now globally distributed dynamic generating disruptive activities that affect learners and institutions the world over. Seventy years ago, the Austrian-born Harvard lecturer and conservative political economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the now famous description of the logic of capitalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The opening of new markets, foreign or domestic … illustrate(s) the same process of industrial mutation - if I may use that biological term - that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. Our colleges and universities, especially those in the United States, are among the most conservative institutions in the world. The rollback of public investment in, pressure for access to, and indeterminate impact of globalization on postsecondary education all contribute to significant disorientation in our thinking about the future of the university. And then there are the disruptive impacts of information technology that only exacerbate the general set of contradictions that we associate with higher education. The faculty are autonomous and constrained, powerful and vulnerable, innovative at the margins yet conservative at the core, dedicated to education while demeaning teaching devoted to liberal arts and yet powerfully vocatio

"Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System October 13, 2011, 10:25 am By Josh Fischman One of the world's biggest education publishers has joined with one of the most dominant and iconic software companies on the planet to bring colleges a new-and free-learning-management system with the hopes of upending services that affect just about every instructor, student, and college in the country. Today Pearson, the publishing and learning technology group, has teamed up with the software giant Google to launch OpenClass, a free LMS that combines standard course-management tools with advanced social networking and community-building, and an open architecture that allows instructors to import whatever material they want, from e-books to YouTube videos. The program will launch through Google Apps for Education, a very popular e-mail, calendar, and document-sharing service that has more than 1,000 higher-education customers, and it will be hosted by Pearson with the intent of freeing institutions from the burden of providing resources to run it. It enters a market that has been dominated by costly institution-anchored services like Blackboard, and open-source but labor-intensive systems like Moodle. "Anytime Pearson and Google are used in the same sentence, it's going to get people's attention," says Don Smithmier, chief executive and founder of Sophia, another community-based learning system that is backed by Capella Education, the corporation behind the online educator Capella University. "I believe the world will be shifting away from a classic LMS approach defined by the institution. Openness and social education is a very powerful idea." Though nobody expects Pearson to take over the marketplace-Blackboard, Moodle and a few others had over 80 percent of it last year, according to the Campus Computing Survey, and Blackboard officials argue that OpenClass can't integrate with university systems the way their product

"January 31, 2012 'Change.edu' and the Problem With For-Profits 'Change.edu' and the Problem With For-Profits 1 Kaplan Andrew S. Rosen, chief executive of Kaplan and author of a new book on for-profit colleges Enlarge Image By Robert M. Shireman It is clear that Andrew Rosen, the chief executive of Kaplan, wants to leave readers of Change.edu with the idea that for-profit colleges are innovative, efficient, and effective in serving people left out by traditional higher education, and that their bad reputation is the result of unfair attacks. I picked up Rosen's book wanting to see how the power of the market can transform the enterprise and improve student learning. Instead, I am now more concerned about the hazards of for-profit colleges than I was before. The eye-opening, gasp-inducing elements involve Rosen's descriptions of the intense pressures on company executives to produce quick, huge profits for investors by shortchanging students. "An investor who wants to make a quick hit can, at least theoretically, buy an institution, rev up the recruitment engine, reduce investment in educational outcomes," and deliver "a dramatic return on investment." The nefarious temptation is not just theoretical, though, and Rosen says so when he introduces the case of abuses by the Career Education Corporation. "There will always be some leaders who choose to manage for the short term ... particularly when they hold the highly liquid equity stakes that the leadership of private-sector institutions sometimes receive as part of their compensation. This isn't a theoretical issue; it has happened." The word "always" concerns me. Always as in: This can't be fixed? And how many are the "some" who would eagerly dismiss student needs in the pursuit of a rapid, profitable expansion? I would have liked to hear that the contrasting example to CEC is the for-profit college where the investors are committed to the long term and never bring up the idea of a get-rich-quick scheme tha

"The Disruption Is Here September 15, 2011 - 3:00am Michael Staton A recent essay here by Robert Archibald and David Feldman challenged the idea of a "higher education bubble." They argued that a degree, even an expensive degree, is still worth it. They correctly pointed out that a degree is not an asset that responds to supply and demand like other markets. Their point that "on average most of us are average, and the data show that college is a very good investment for the average person," is true enough. But their real message was: there's no need to panic, the status quo is still working. I disagree. Said essay is part of a broader continuing discussion, this round set off by Peter Thiel's statements surrounding his 20 Under 20 Program encouraging students to "stop out" of college - with the idea that they are more likely to achieve entrepreneurial breakthroughs on their own than with more formal education. Thiel is a managing partner at one of the venture investors, Founders Fund, in my company, Inigral. Ironically, Inigral serves educational institutions with our Schools App, and most of our clients are traditional colleges and universities. (Schools App is a community platform inside Facebook and on mobile devices that helps to welcome the incoming class during the admissions, orientation, and first-year experience, making sure students find their "fit" and get off on the right foot.) So my company helps keep students in college while Thiel is going around talking about the potential value of "stopping out." Given this irony, people often ask me what I think about Thiel's comments suggesting that higher education is in a bubble. Here's what I think: He is mostly right, but the future prospects for education are more optimistic than Thiel suggests for two primary reasons: 1) Though it looks like an economic bubble, it's unlikely that there will be a precise moment in which the market crashes. Instead, there will be a slow market shift towards amor

"January 22, 2012 MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency James Yang for The Chronicle By Kevin Carey The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things-radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It's called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained. MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations-more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far. Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together-free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­-and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. In doing this, MIT has cracked one of the fundamental problems retarding the growth of free online higher education as a force for human progress. The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something-you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it. The best way to solve that problem is for a world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputat

Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman The "Great Recession" of 2009 has brought an unprecedented level of financial chaos to public higher education in America. Programs are being reduced, furloughs and layoffs are widespread, class sizes are increasing, sections are being cut, and students can't get into classes needed for graduation. Enrollment losses upwards of several hundred thousand are being reported-and only time will tell whether the situation is even worse. Reports of budget cuts in public institutions in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent (Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Florida, and California) are becoming common. Halfway through the 2009-2010 fiscal year, 48 states were projecting deficits for 2011 and 2012 (NASBO, 2009). Although states are reluctant to raise taxes, they evidently have less of a problem letting tuitions go up. And up they are going-California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Wisconsin, and Florida announced increases ranging from 10 to 33 percent. The normally tuition-resistant Florida legislature has authorized annual increases in undergraduate tuitions of 15 percent per year until they reach national averages for public four-year institutions. Around the country, the increases are setting off student protests reminiscent of the 1960's, variously directed at campuses, system boards, legislatures, and governors-complete with reports of violence and arrests. The New Normal Higher education has been through tough times before. The pattern of the last two decades has been a zigzag of reductions in state funds for higher education during times of recession, followed by a return to revenue growth about two years after the state coffers refill. But resources have not returned to pre-recession levels. So the overall pattern has been a modest but continuous decline in state revenues. Caption: Percent Change in Appropriations for Higher Education, 1960-2006

"'Social Teaching' Company Gets Buy-In From Capella Education February 4, 2011, 4:27 pm By Josh Fischman What happened to music because of the Internet-going from few creators to many-is going to happen to education very soon, says Don Smithmier, and his new "social teaching" Web site, Sophia, is going to be part of that change. That's a big claim for a small start-up now in beta testing, but it seems more plausible the first week of February, after Capella Education, the corporation behind the online educator Capella University, made a substantial investment in his company. "The money is going to let us scale up," Mr. Smithmier says. "And they have 38,000 learners in their system, so it lets us pilot studies of our technology." Michael Walsh, a Capella spokesoman, said the company could not disclose the amount of money, because they were in a so-called "quiet period" required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Officials did say in a prepared statement that they viewed Sophia as a strategic investment. The basic idea behind Sophia is to identify the best teachers for any concept, put their instruction for that concept online, and students all over the world can use these "learning packets" free of charge. For example, a professor who has a really great lesson on how to factor polynomials can package that lesson-complete with video and any other materials-on Sophia, and search engines like Google will let students find it and use it. But who decides what makes a lesson really great? Or even accurate? Mr. Smithmier says the site has two levels of quality assurance. One is votes from users. Currently there are about 1,100 of them, and more than half are educators at the college level. They get to rate each learning packet with a 5-star system. The second level is a rating of academic soundness. "People on Sophia identify themselves as someone with an advanced degree in a particular subject, and then they rate the packets

"Adapting to Developmental Ed March 10, 2011 With public higher education systems under political pressure to increase completion rates, and foundations offering grants to colleges that are using new technologies to help usher students through to a degree, education technology companies are seeing a ripe market of potential buyers for new e-learning products - in particular, software aimed at high school graduates who lack the basic reading, writing, and math skills to succeed at the college level. Technology geared toward helping students "catch up" has been around for a while, but only recently has it achieved a potentially game-changing level of sophistication, according to Carol Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation. "These products that 10 years ago were sort of iffy, at best, have now become remarkably mature and high quality products," she says. And while public higher ed systems are seeing their budgets cut, developmental education is in such bad shape that many colleges are prepared to spend - often with foundation support - on products they think could help bring them more in line with state and national completion goals. There are many contracts to be won, Twigg says. The education tech industry is responding by mobilizing teams to tweak and re-brand existing software for the developmental market and begin developing new products to sell to desperate colleges. Most companies are offering variations on a theme: "adaptive" technology that learns the strengths and weaknesses of individual students and tailors its tutorials to address their needs. Unlike a traditional sequence of instructions in a learning exercise, adaptive software adjusts to how well a student appears to understand different concepts. If a student struggles to learn a skill when it is presented one way, the software will detect her confusion and present it another way. The model is highly individualized instruction, without the many instr

"January 23, 2012 Invisible Gorillas Are Everywhere By William Pannapacker By now most everyone has heard about an experiment that goes something like this: Students dressed in black or white bounce a ball back and forth, and observers are asked to keep track of the bounces to team members in white shirts. While that's happening, another student dressed in a gorilla suit wanders into their midst, looks around, thumps his chest, then walks off, apparently unseen by most observers because they were so focused on the bouncing ball. Voilà: attention blindness. The invisible-gorilla experiment is featured in Cathy Davidson's new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking, 2011). Davidson is a founder of a nearly 7,000-member organization called Hastac, or the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, that was started in 2002 to promote the use of digital technology in academe. It is closely affiliated with the digital humanities and reflects that movement's emphasis on collaboration among academics, technologists, publishers, and librarians. Last month I attended Hastac's fifth conference, held at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Davidson's keynote lecture emphasized that many of our educational practices are not supported by what we know about human cognition. At one point, she asked members of the audience to answer a question: "What three things do students need to know in this century?" Without further prompting, everyone started writing down answers, as if taking a test. While we listed familiar concepts such as "information literacy" and "creativity," no one questioned the process of working silently and alone. And noticing that invisible gorilla was the real point of the exercise. Most of us are, presumably, the products of compulsory educational practices that were developed during the Industrial Revolution. And the way most of us teach is a relic of the s

"January 17, 2012 Investors Backed by Publishing Giant Team Up With Calif. University to Start a Bilingual College By Goldie Blumenstyk A $100-million investment fund backed by the German publishing and media giant Bertelsmann and the endowment for two Texas public university systems is jumping into higher education with two ventures aimed key markets. One is a new bilingual college aimed at Hispanic students, in partnership with an affiliate of Chapman University. The other is a new London-based distance-education company that will assist European universities in creating, marketing, and managing online courses and degree programs. For the yet-to-be-named Hispanic-serving college, the new fund, called University Ventures, will form a partnership with Brandman University, an 11,000-student nonprofit institution now known for serving working adult students at its 25 campuses in California (plus one in Washington State) through online and face-to-face courses. Once known as Chapman University College, it was separately accredited from Chapman three years ago and renamed for a benefactor, the Brandman Foundation, in April. Gary Brahm, Brandman's chancellor, said his institution has a good record in serving and graduating Hispanic students, who make up more than a quarter of Brandman's enrollment. (It claims a six-year graduation rate for students, all of whom now enter with at least 12 credits, of 68 percent.) The new partnership with University Ventures presents a chance "to do something very significant in higher education and to do something very significant in California," he said in an interview on Monday. The program will be aimed at the many students from Spanish-speaking homes who have learned enough English to graduate from high school but either are too intimidated or too inadequately prepared to get through traditional college programs taught fully in English. "This has the opportunity to significantly improve their success," he said. Together, Unive

"Technology Is at Least 3 Years Away From Improving Student Success January 13, 2012, 7:34 am By Josh Fischman Las Vegas-At the very start of the Higher Ed Tech Summit here this week, James Applegate threw out a challenge. Mr. Applegate, vice president for program development at the Lumina Foundation, told an overflow crowd that the United States needed 60 percent of its adults to hold high-quality degrees and credentials by the year 2025. During the rest of the day, technology executives described programs that could improve graduation rates and learning, but won't be able to do so for several years. They collect many points of data on what professors and students do, but can't yet say what results in better grades and graduation rates. "We're beginning to get lots of data on things like time of task, but we don't have the outcomes yet to say what leads to a true learning moment. I think we are three to five years away from being about to do that," said Troy Williams, vice president and general manager of Macmillan New Ventures, which makes the classroom polling system called I-clicker. "These are really early days," agreed Matthew Pittinsky, who runs a digital transcript company called Parchment and was one of the founders of Blackboard. There's lots of technology out there that's outcome-related. For instance, at the meeting, which is part of the international Consumer Electronics Show, the interactive textbook publisher Kno announced a suite of new features. One of them, a performance gauge callled Kno Me, gives students information about how much time they spend on different sections of a book, the results of quizzes, and the kinds of notes they took. "With thousands of students using these books, we can show them which of these variables are related to students-anonymous, of course-who get A's, or B's, or C's, so students learn what kind of activity leads to the best results," said Osman Rashid, the company's chief ex

"Tue, Jan. 31, 2012, 3:01 AM Global contest will lead to help during heart attacks By Marie McCullough Inquirer Staff Writer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man´s life this month because he knew the location of an AED. MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man's life this month because he knew the location of an AED. Do you know where the nearest defibrillator is located? Yes No View results Post a comment RELATED STORIES Join the MyHeartMap challenge PHILLY.COM's TOP FIVE PICKS Mayor Nutter outraged at suspect's bail Media misled about whereabouts of Santorum daughter Parents: Disabled daughter's transplant could happen Where's the school choice, Chaput? Contest's 1st clue: Find the pig Around the world, the hunt is on for thousands of lifesaving portable medical devices that are hanging in public places - in Philadelphia. Why would someone in, say, Abu Dhabi care about finding devices in Philadelphia? Because a University of Pennsylvania project to map the locations of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) throughout the city has mushroomed into a global "crowdsourcing" competition fueled by the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones - and the chance to win cash prizes up to $10,000. The ultimate prize, of course, will be saving the lives of cardiac-arrest victims. Penn plans to create an interactive online AED registry that will, for the first time, enable the city's 911 system, emergency responders - and any bystander with a phone - to quickly locate an AED. Beginning Tuesday, participants in Philadelphia will use a free app downloaded to their phones to transmit photos and locations of the city's estimated 5,000 AEDs. These backpack-size machines can assess a cardiac-arrest victim and, if appropriate, deliver an electric shock to restart the heart. Studies show even sixth graders can follow an AED's step-by-step audio directions. But in this age of cyber collaboration, the contest, called "

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink January 6, 2011, 1:04 pm By Peter Wood The for-profit sector of higher education is in the political spotlight these days. Last year an Obama administration official launched an attack on the legitimacy of for-profit colleges and universities. Although that official subsequently resigned his position in the Department of Education, the measures he promoted took on a life of their own. Now the for-profits are faced with what could be an existential crisis. The legal challenges have driven down the stock prices of the publicly-traded institutions and a daunting new regulation is about to take effect. The story has been well-reported in the Chronicle. The former official who got the anti-for-profit ball rolling is Robert Shireman, who served as deputy undersecretary of education, until his resignation in July. Shireman jawboned the accrediting associations to be tougher on for-profits; called for a new system whereby each individual state in which an online university does business would have the right to regulate the enterprise; and pushed for the now notorious idea that for-profit colleges and universities (but not non-profits) would have to show high levels of "gainful employment" for their graduates in the fields they studied. His animus against the for-profits didn't seem to sit all that well with the rest of the Obama administration. On May 11, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to a policy forum held by the for-profit DeVry University and declared that the for-profits play a "vital role" in educating underserved populations. A week later, Shireman announced his impending departure. Shireman had played a key role in the Obama administration's successful effort to abolish the role of commercial lenders in making Title IV federally-guaranteed student loans and replacing that system with direct lending managed by the Department of Education. So his decision to head for the exit had more an air of victory than o

"Venture Fund for Traditional Colleges January 17, 2012 - 3:00am By Doug Lederman The space between nonprofit and for-profit higher education gets a little more crowded today. University Ventures Fund, a $100 million investment partnership founded by a quartet of veterans of the for-profit and nonprofit education sectors, is the latest entrant in a market that aims to use private capital to expand the reach and impact of traditional colleges and universities. The fund, whose two biggest investors are the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG and the University of Texas Investment Management Company, is focused on stimulating "innovation from within the academy," rather than competing with it from the outside, David Figuli, a lawyer and partner in University Ventures, said in an interview Monday. The projects will include helping institutions expand the scale of their academic programs, re-engineer how they deliver instruction, and better measure student outcomes; the first two investments, also announced today, will be creating a curriculum through Brandman University aimed at improving the educational outcomes of Hispanic students, and a company that helps universities in Britain and elsewhere in Europe deliver their courses online. "Most of the attempts to bring about innovation in higher education have come from people trying to buy their way in," Figuli said, citing the many takeovers of traditional institutions by for-profit colleges over the last decade (quite a few of which he helped engineer). "Our way is to find good ideas within the existing institutions and fund those." Figuli, a former general counsel for the South Dakota and Montana university systems, said he and his partners don't buy the critiques of traditional postsecondary institutions as unimaginative or fearful of change. "I've been in higher education for 30-some years, and most of the nonprofit institutions I've worked with have been frustrated by the fact that they're capital-constra

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink January 6, 2011, 1:04 pm By Peter Wood The for-profit sector of higher education is in the political spotlight these days. Last year an Obama administration official launched an attack on the legitimacy of for-profit colleges and universities. Although that official subsequently resigned his position in the Department of Education, the measures he promoted took on a life of their own. Now the for-profits are faced with what could be an existential crisis. The legal challenges have driven down the stock prices of the publicly-traded institutions and a daunting new regulation is about to take effect. The story has been well-reported in the Chronicle. The former official who got the anti-for-profit ball rolling is Robert Shireman, who served as deputy undersecretary of education, until his resignation in July. Shireman jawboned the accrediting associations to be tougher on for-profits; called for a new system whereby each individual state in which an online university does business would have the right to regulate the enterprise; and pushed for the now notorious idea that for-profit colleges and universities would have to show high levels of "gainful employment" for their graduates in the fields they studied. His animus against the for-profits didn't seem to sit all that well with the rest of the Obama administration. On May 11, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to a policy forum held by the for-profit DeVry University and declared that the for-profits play a "vital role" in educating underserved populations. Shireman had played a key role in the Obama administration's successful effort to abolish the role of commercial lenders in making Title IV federally-guaranteed student loans and replacing that system with direct lending managed by the Department of Education. So his decision to head for the exit had more an air of victory than of forced departure. The Chronicle, however, ran an in-depth analysis pointing to a

"How Will Students Communicate? January 6, 2011 Thus spake Zuckerberg: "We don't think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail." The Facebook founder said so in November, when his company unveiled its new messaging platform: a system, sans subject lines, designed on the assumption that in the future most electronic communication will be brief, informal bursts. In December, Zuckerberg's prognostication was essentially certified by the New York Times, which ran an article suggesting that among young people who are in college or about to be, e-mail is quickly going out of style. Meanwhile, learning-management platforms - notably Blackboard, the market leader among nonprofit institutions - have been building more just-in-time messaging features with an eye to becoming the hub for student-to-student and professor-to-student communications around academic coursework. All this has left campus technologists to ponder the future of institutional e-mail systems, which are still by and large the standard medium connecting colleges with their students. If students are in fact moving away from e-mail in their personal lives, institutionally provided student e-mail accounts will probably diminish in popularity over the next few years, campus technologists say, and that could force colleges to rethink the most reliable ways to stay in touch with their students. At the same time, several technologists contacted by Inside Higher Ed say that e-mail is unlikely to disappear, if only because it remains the most suitable medium for the sort of official communications routinely sent to students from non-peer, non-professor sources."

A think piece by CSU Northridge Provost Harry Hellenbrand about Learning Management Systems and how we need to think about them more holistically than just a commercial software package.

"Professors Consider Classroom Uses for Google Plus July 8, 2011, 5:43 pm By Jeff Young Google Plus LogoGoogle Plus, the social-networking platform, is so new that most Internet users are not yet able to see it-an invitation is required while the service is in its test phase. But some professors who have tried it say they already see possible uses for teaching and research if the service catches on. The new Google service, announced last week, is similar in many ways to Facebook. It provides a way to share updates, photos, and recommendations with friends and colleagues. One key difference is that Google Plus makes it easier to share information with isolated subgroups of contacts, rather than sending all updates to every online "friend." Facebook's default approach-sharing with everyone in your personal network-has created a dilemma for professors whose students want to be their online friends. Often the students inadvertently share their party pictures and other private material with their instructors on Facebook, giving some faculty members the feeling that they have crossed too far into students' personal space. Professors have also accidentally shared comments with students that they meant only for fellow instructors. Facebook does allow some selective sharing, but doing so is difficult to master. As a result, many professors have decided to reserve Facebook for personal communications rather than use it for teaching and research. "I don't friend my students, because the ability to share is so clunky on Facebook," says Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University. "This gives us ways to connect with people that we can't do on Facebook." In Google Plus, users can assign each new contact to a "circle" and can create as many circles as they like. Each time they post an update, they can easily select which circles get to see it. B.J. Fogg, director of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab a

"Microsoft Research Unveils Online Observatory of NASA Images of Mars By Jeff Young The crowd-science trend has reached Mars. Students and amateur scientists can now explore the Red Planet online, using software released today by Microsoft Resarch based on NASA images. Though many of the images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are already available on the space agency's Web site, Microsoft has now loaded them into its WorldWide Telescope interface, which creates a way for users to easily pan around the images to see them in context, and presents them in higher resolution than previously available online. "You can actually see rover tracks on the Martian surface," said Dan Fay, director of earth, energy, and environment for Microsoft Research, in an interview. The WorldWide Telescope software is free but only runs on Microsoft's Windows operating system. A Web interface of the system is available, but the Mars images are not yet available there. The company's research division teamed up with astronomers to build the Web-based telescope to experiment with better ways to manage and analyze large data sets (so the company can improve its Bing search engine and its software). Meanwhile, some professors and schoolteachers use the Web telescope in their classrooms, and anyone online is encouraged to scour the images to find unique features of Mars that professional researchers might have missed."

Here is a real example of a red balloon-like $25,000 prize offered by the Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge contest that was awarded to a Second Life learning environment featuring Mars at the Defense GameTech 2010 conference. The award went to the Mars Expedition Strategy Challenge that could incorporate Nasa images. It remains to be seen how technologies such as Worldwide Telescope can mash up into Virtual Environments. A worthy applied R&D topic for an academic DARPA group. This site has a Slidecast with audio narration explaining the project. http://ctusoftware.blogspot.com/2010/01/mars-expedition-strategy-challenge.html

"February 2, 2012 Multiyear Study of Community-College Practices Asks: What Helps Students Graduate? By Jennifer Gonzalez Community colleges are brimming with programs and policies designed to help students complete their studies. Practices like requiring orientation and establishing early-academic-warning systems have sprouted since 2009, when President Obama announced that he wanted to make the United States the best-educated country in the world by 2020. Now the questions for the nation's community colleges are: Which of the practices work and why? And perhaps most important, how do colleges expand them to cover all students? A new, multiyear project led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement will attempt to get some answers. The research organization plans to analyze data from four different but related surveys and produce reports annually for the next three years. The surveys represent responses from the perspective of entering and experienced students, faculty members, and institutions. Kay M. McClenney, the center's director and a senior lecturer in the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin, says the project will allow community colleges to make more-informed decisions about how they spend money and about the type of policies and programs they want to emphasize. The first of three reports, "A Matter of Degrees: Promising Practices for Community College Student Success" was released last week. It draws attention to 13 strategies for increasing retention and graduation rates, including fast-tracking remedial education, providing students with experiential learning, and requiring students to attend orientation. The strategies specified in the report are not new. In fact, many of them can be found at two-year colleges right now. But how well those strategies are working to help students stay in college and graduate is another matter. The report found peculiarities among responses on similar topics, sugges