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"April 17, 2011 5 Myths About the 'Information Age' By Robert Darnton Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace, we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of proverbial non-wisdom. Five stand out: 1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain-"Super Thursday," last October 1-800 new works were published. The latest figures for the United States cover only 2009, and they do not distinguish between new books and new editions of old books. But the total number, 288,355, suggests a healthy market, and the growth in 2010 and 2011 is likely to be much greater. Moreover, these figures, furnished by Bowker, do not include the explosion in the output of "nontraditional" books-a further 764,448 titles produced by self-publishing authors and "micro-niche" print-on-demand enterprises. And the book business is booming in developing countries like China and Brazil. However it is measured, the population of books is increasing, not decreasing, and certainly not dying. 2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in Gutenberg's day, but it is misleading to construe that change as unprecedented. 3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less di

June 19, 2011 The Economic Upside to Ending Tenure By Naomi Schaefer Riley In her new book, The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Paid For (Ivan R. Dee), Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that faculty tenure is among the factors contributing to the decline of higher education in the United States. Here is an excerpt from the book. If colleges were to eliminate tenure tomorrow, they'd have to pay faculty higher salaries. That's what most economists-and common sense-will tell you. Lifetime job security is a perk, like health insurance or a company car. If you take it away, you'll have to compensate in another way to get the same quality of employees. Tenure means not having to worry about having to find new employment in middle age, and that means a lot to professors. As the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen explains, "In a lot of academia, once you're over 50 it's hard to get another job, even if you've done well." He compares it to being a computer programmer, where age seems to be a disadvantage no matter how talented you are. Taking an academic job without the promise of tenure is what Cowen calls "a massive risk." So there would have to be a lot of money on the front end to make up for it. In the long term, though, the costs might even out. Higher education would have a more sensible-looking labor market, in which colleges could ensure that all the faculty members were pulling their weight. This is particularly important for small colleges, says Bruce Johnstone, who has served as president of Buffalo State College and a vice president at the University of Pennsylvania. Large universities, in his experience, "tend to have ways of cushioning the existing departmental configurations a bit better than community colleges or small private colleges." Johnstone, who has also been a trustee at a small, independent college, says smaller institutions "need to add and subtract programs much faster and therefore need

"College Students Lead in Internet Use and Tech Gadgets, Study Finds July 19, 2011, 12:39 pm By Jie Jenny Zou A study by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project confirms the idea that young adults-particularly undergraduate and graduate students-are more likely to use the Internet and own tech devices than is the rest of the general population. But nonstudents ages 18 to 24 were more active on social networks than were college students, sending more updates to Facebook and Twitter. The study was compiled using data collected from the Pew Internet Project surveys throughout 2010, and it featured a sample size of nearly 10,000 respondents. Regardless of educational background, young adults ages 18 to 24 were generally much more likely to be Internet users, to engage in social media, and to own Web-enabled devices like laptops and smartphones. Undergraduate and graduate students were the most likely to have speedy Internet connections, with 93 percent to 95 percent citing home access to broadband. Community-college students showed a slight edge in mobile Internet use over undergraduates and graduate students, which Aaron W. Smith, a Pew senior research specialist who compiled the study, attributed to a trend among lower socioeconomic groups to use mobile phones as their primary mode of Internet access, a finding of a previous Pew report. The researchers were surprised by how ubiquitous the Internet has become for young people, said Mr. Smith. Nearly 100 percent of college students and 92 percent of nonstudents in the 18-24 age range were Internet users. By comparison, only 75 percent of adults nationally report using the Internet."

"January 1, 2012 Tenure's Dirty Little Secret Tenure's Dirty Little Secret 1 Tim Foley for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Milton Greenberg It seems that tenure is always in the news. Long an article of faith for most faculty members, tenure is being put on the defensive almost everywhere, including within the academy itself. During the past decade, the numbers of tenured and tenure-track professors have sharply declined from nearly one-half of the faculty to about one-third. Most courses in four-year colleges and universities as well as community colleges are now taught by contingent faculty, including part-time adjuncts, graduate students, and holders of full-time nontenure-track positions. Does anyone care? Tenure is rooted in the American Association of University Professors statement on academic freedom and tenure that for many faculty members has become tantamount to religious dogma, impervious to forces of change, regardless of source. The dogma is that the common good is served by the free pursuit of truth under the principles of academic freedom, buttressed by the lifetime job security of tenure. While an individual's tenure may be revoked for cause, this rarely used action is protected by extraordinary and lengthy procedural requirements equivalent to a trial. If tenure is so vital, why is it on the defensive and, in fact, seriously losing ground? Where is the public outrage? There is none outside the confines of higher education, and even there it is hardly universal. Three factors are in play. First, the large expansion of higher education in the United States during the past 50 years has stripped the academy of its mystery as a cloistered monastery. The curtain has been opened, revealing the meaning and consequences of the tenure system. As with any dogma, religious or secular, once its status as truth is questioned and its claims considered dubious, true believers are left with a leap of faith. Second, colleges-public and private-are firmly e

"The Single Most Important Experiment in Higher Education By Jordan Weissmann Jul 18 2012, 8:00 AM ET 130 Online education platform Coursera wants to drag elite education into the 21st century. Now, it's getting buy-in from the academy. 615_Harvard_Student_Online_Computers_Reuters.jpg (Reuters) As of yesterday, a year-old startup may well have become the most important experiment yet aimed at remaking higher education for the Internet age. At the very least, it became the biggest. A dozen major universities announced that they would begin providing content to Coursera, an innovative platform that makes interactive college classes available to the public free on the web. Next fall, it will offer at least 100 massive open online courses -- otherwise known as MOOCs*-- designed by professors from schools such as Princeton, CalTech, and Duke that will be capable of delivering lessons to more than 100,000 students at a time. Founded by Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, Coursera is one of a handful of efforts aimed at using the web's cost savings to bring Ivy League-quality courses to the masses. Its peers include the joint Harvard-MIT project edX and Udacity, a free online university created by Google executive and former Stanford professor Sebstian Thrun. (Another high-profile startup, Minerva, is attempting to create an actual "online Ivy" that students will pay to attend.) But the deals Coursera announced Tuesday may well prove to be an inflection point for online education, a sector that has traditionally been dominated by for-profit colleges known mostly for their noxious recruitment practices and poor results. That's because the new partnerships represent an embrace of web-based learning from across the top tier of U.S. universities. And where the elite colleges go, so goes the rest of academia. Coursera has previously teamed with Stanford, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Michigan to offer 43 courses,

"The Brand in the Classroom December 14, 2010, 12:19 pm By Mark Bauerlein An interesting survey by Harris Interactive came out this month, one that may have quirky implications for teachers, particularly at the secondary level. It's called the Youth EquiTrends Study, a poll of 5,077 8- to 24-year olds administered last August. The sample was drawn from 13- to 24-year-olds by online means, 8- to 12-year-olds through the parents. The researchers aimed to identify "brand equity" among the young, that is, a brand's overall strength as judged "by a calculation of Familiarity, Quality, and Purchase Consideration." Respondents were asked to rate between 98 and 125 popular brands of goods, relaying how well they know them, how high is their quality, and would they buy them. For 8- to 12-year-olds, the findings aren't surprising. It's all entertainment and junk food: 1. Nintendo Wii 2. Doritos 3. Oreo's 4. M&Ms 5. Disney Channel 6. Nickelodeon 7. Nintendo DS 8. McDonald's 9. Toys R Us 10. Cartoon Network Lots of screen time here, all for play and diversion. At least Nintendo gets them off the couch and burns some of those Oreo's calories. For the next age group, 13- to 17-year-olds, a different screen time emerges, along with a drop in junk food (although one of them still tops the list). 1. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups 2. iPod 3. Google 4. M&Ms 5. Oreo's 6. Subway 7. Hershey's Milk Chocolate 8. Target 9. Sprite 10. Microsoft Note the appearance of Google at Number 3. It isn't something you buy or eat or watch, really. It's not a show or a TV channel, and you don't shop for it in a store. It's something you do. Most importantly for teachers, Google is a central learning resource in and out of the classroom. For their homework, especially research assignments, students go to Google as their first resort. Is this the first time ever that young people have given brand loyalty to a tool so much a part of their schoolwork? The

Most colleges want to do more with less. The University of Southern Maine had to. The institution has been facing dual crises: a deficit and a six-year graduation rate of 34 percent for first-time, full-time students, compared with 56 percent nationally. "We're hemorrhaging students each year," said Selma Botman, president of Southern Maine. So the university took a hard look at support for its almost 8,000 undergraduates. "We found that we had lots of stuff, but not much of it was coordinated in any way," said Susan M. Campbell, associate vice president for academic affairs. She led a major reorganization. On its three campuses, the university eliminated offices of academic advising, career services, and early student success, and laid off 21 employees. At the same time, it created a student-success center on each campus, in Gorham, Lewiston, and Portland, rehiring 11 people to run the one-stop shops. "The question was, Can we achieve savings through an integrated model?" Ms. Campbell said. The short answer: yes. The university has saved almost $370,000 in base salaries over all. But that move had another price: six age-discrimination complaints, still pending, from former employees who were not rehired.

"Annals of Higher Education Get Rich U. There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be? by Ken Auletta April 30, 2012 Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university's focus on interdisciplinary education. Photograph by Aaron Huey. inShare214 Print E-Mail Single Page Related Links Audio: Ken Auletta on Silicon Valley and Stanford University. Keywords Stanford University; Silicon Valley; John Hennessy; Education; Entrepreneurs; Distance Learning; Technology Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it's as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the "Stanford duck syndrome": students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley. Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. In early April, Facebook acquired the photo-sharing service Instagram, for a billion dollars; naturally, the co-founders of the two-year-old company are Stanford graduates in their late twe

"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 8, 2012 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas 1 Photo illustration by Bob McGrath for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Jeffrey R. Young The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today's fast-changing job market. Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of "badges" to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain-intentionally so-to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom. At the free online-education provider Khan Academy, for instance, students get a "Great Listener" badge for watching 30 minutes of videos from its collection of thousands of short educational clips. With enough of those badges, paired with badges earned for passing standardized tests administered on the site, users can earn the distinction of "Master of Algebra" or other "Challenge Patches." Traditional colleges and universities are considering badges and other alternative credentials as well. In December the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it will create MITx, a self-service learning system in which students can take online tests and earn certificates after watching the free lecture materials the university has long posted as part of its OpenCourseWare project. MIT also has an arrangement with a company called OpenStudy, which runs online study groups, to give online badges to students who give consistently useful answers in discussion forums set up around the university's free course materials. But the b

"Ready for Change.edu? January 11, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain Andrew S. Rosen takes the long view when talking about higher education. As CEO of Kaplan, Inc., he often defends the role of for-profit colleges in an evolving marketplace, peppering versions of his stump speech with tales about the creation of public universities and community colleges. His point is that some skepticism about for-profits is similar to the snobbery those older sectors faced from elite private higher education. Rosen goes further in his debut book, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, which attempts to paint a picture of higher education's future as well as its history. He also takes a turn as a journalist of sorts - an interesting twist for the former general counsel of the Washington Post Co. - writing about his campus visits to other institutions, a couple of which are Kaplan competitors. The book is ambitious in its scope, particularly for an author with obvious vested interests. But most reviewers have given Rosen high marks. Kirkus Reviews writes: "Incredibly, his argument never comes off as self-serving; the author's thorough exploration of 'Harvard Envy' and the rise of 'resort' campuses is both fascinating and enlightening." Rosen recently answered questions over e-mail about his book, which was released by Kaplan Publishing. Q: The book arrives amid a series of challenges for your industry. What did you hope to accomplish by writing it? A: I've spent most of my life studying or working in education, with students of all ages and preparation levels: top students from America's most elite institutions and working adults and low-income students who have few quality choices to change their lives. I've come to see how the American higher education system (as with K-12) is profoundly tilted in favor of those who already have advantages. Our society keeps investing more and more in the relatively small and unchanging number of students who have the privil

"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

"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 "

"U.S. goes from leading to lagging in young college graduates By Daniel de Vise Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 22, 2010; 6:07 AM The United States has fallen from first to 12th in the share of adults ages 25 to 34 with postsecondary degrees, according to a new report from the College Board. Canada is now the global leader in higher education among young adults, with 55.8 percent of that population holding an associate degree or better as of 2007, the year of the latest international ranking. The United States sits 11 places back, with 40.4 percent of young adults holding postsecondary credentials. The report, to be presented Thursday to Capitol Hill policymakers, is backed by a commission of highly placed educators who have set a goal for the United States to reclaim world leadership in college completion -- and attain a 55 percent completion rate -- by 2025. "

A Marriage Made in Indiana July 14, 2010 Just about everywhere you turn, state leaders are searching for a way to use online education to expand the reach of their public higher education systems at a time of diminished resources. The approaches vary: In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Pawlenty has heralded a future of "iCollege," while in Pennsylvania, the state college system envisions using distance learning to help its campuses sustain their offerings by sharing courses in underenrolled programs. California's community college system turned to a for-profit provider, Kaplan University, to work around its budget-related enrollment restrictions. And a grand experiment to create a fully online branch of the University of Illinois, meanwhile, crashed and burned last fall. Like those and other peers, Indiana's leaders have increasingly recognized that the state cannot thrive economically if it does not bolster college completion, particularly among adults (aged 29-49) who have historically been underrepresented in the state's seven public four-year universities. But they recognize that doing so at a time of (temporarily, if not permanently) diminished resources isn't easy -- and that online education is no panacea because, done right, it isn't cheap."

"A New Model Community College January 4, 2011 When for-profit companies team up with traditional colleges to offer instruction, many academics object. The Princeton Review inked a deal to offer a nursing program for a Massachusetts community college last year, and faculty unions scoffed that the high price students must pay for the program violated the traditional community college mission of open access and public accountability. Critics said the same about Kaplan's failed deal to take on California students locked out of financially strapped community colleges. In contrast, there has been relatively little controversy over a different kind of partnership between a company and a private college: a joint effort of Tiffin University, a small private institution in northeast Ohio, and Altius Education, a for-profit company based in San Francisco. In 2008, Tiffin and Altius opened Ivy Bridge College, an online community college that offers a general studies associate degree program targeted at traditional-age students who wish to transfer to four-year institutions. Though tuition for an academic year of full-time study is $9,450, which is considerably more than a typical community college would cost, financial aid is available. Tiffin handles the academics - its accreditation extends to Ivy Bridge - and Altius handles the enrollment management."

"October 11, 2010 New Initiative Will Advance the Best Uses of Technology to Improve College Readiness and Completion Multi-year "challenge" grant competition will identify and fund most promising innovations EDUCAUSE Marge Gammon Phone: +1.303.816.7431 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Phone: +1.206.709.3400 Email: media@gatesfoundation.org SEATTLE -- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced the Next Generation Learning Challenges, a collaborative, multi-year initiative, which aims to help dramatically improve college readiness and college completion in the United States through the use of technology. The program will provide grants to organizations and innovators to expand promising technology tools to more students, teachers, and schools. It is led by nonprofit EDUCAUSE, which works to advance higher education through the use of information technology. Next Generation Learning Challenges released the first of a series of RFPs today to solicit funding proposals for technology applications that can improve postsecondary education. This round of funding will total up to $20 million, including grants that range from $250,000 to $750,000. Applicants with top-rated proposals will receive funds to expand their programs and demonstrate effectiveness in serving larger numbers of students. Proposals are due November 19, 2010; winners are expected to be announced by March 31, 2011. "American education has been the best in the world, but we're falling below our own high standards of excellence for high school and college attainment," said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "We're living in a tremendous age of innovation. We should harness new technologies and innovation to help all students get the education they need to succeed." Next Generation Learning Challenges invites proposals from technologists and institutions within the education community, but also innovators and entrepreneurs outside the traditional educa

"For Many, College Isn't Worth It January 20, 2011 By Richard Vedder In this space last Friday, Anthony Carnevale strongly and lengthily argued that "college is still worth it." He implicitly criticized those, including me, who rely on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data showing that the number of college graduates exceeds the number of available jobs that require a college degree. While he says many things, he has two main points. First, "There's just one problem with the official BLS statistics: they're wrong." Second, he notes that "the most persuasive evidence that the BLS numbers are wrong are earnings data which show employers across the country pay a 'wage premium' for college graduates…." I will argue that the BLS data are, in fact, pretty good, and that while Carnevale is factually correct about the earnings data, his interpretation of it is, at the minimum, misleading. Moreover, I will further argue that what is involved here is a classic application of what economists over the age of 50 call "Say's Law" (i.e., the theory suggesting that supply creates its own demand; economists under 50 are largely ignorant of it because they have no knowledge of the evolution of their own discipline, reflecting the general abandonment of thorough teaching of the history of economic thought). Furthermore, I will argue that diplomas are a highly expensive and inefficient screening device used by employers who are afraid to test potential employee skills owing to a most unfortunate Supreme Court decision and related legislation. Finally, I will assert that Carnevale and others who argue "college has a high payoff" are comparing apples with oranges -- i.e., they are making totally inappropriate comparisons that lead to skewed conclusions. An even-handed interpretation of the data is that college is "worth it" for some significant number of young people, but is a far more problematic investment for others. The call by President O

"'Jaw-Dropping' Data on Black Male Student Achievement The Council of Great City Schools is today releasing what it calls "jaw-dropping" data on the achievement of black male students, The New York Times reported. While the data are primarily about K-12 achievement, they suggest strong links to subsequent gaps noted for black male students in college enrollment levels. The report argues that the achievement gaps start at young ages, noting that while 12 percent of black boys in the fourth grade are proficient in reading, 38 percent of white boys are proficient. In eighth grade, 12 percent of black boys and 44 percent of white boys are proficient in math. According to the report, poverty levels are only part of the equation because poor white boys (defined by eligibility for subsidized school lunches) are doing as well as black boys who do not live in poverty."

"Upstart Course-Management Provider Goes Open Source January 31, 2011, 10:27 pm By Josh Keller Instructure, a course-management software company that recently won a large contract in Utah, announced on Tuesday that it would make most of its software platform available for free under an open-source license. Instructure is one of a wave of new entrants into an increasingly competitive market for learning-management software in higher education. The company's year-old Canvas platform allows instructors and students to manage course materials, grades, and discussions online. In offering its basic software for free, the company could offer new competition for Moodle and Sakai, the two main existing open-source platforms. Like commercial arms of those platforms, Instructure intends to make money from colleges by supporting, hosting, and extending its software. In December, the company won a bid to provide software to a collection of Utah colleges that serve roughly 110,000 students, provoking a lawsuit from a competitor that lost that bid, Desire2Learn. The suit was quickly withdrawn. Instructure says it has signed contracts with a total of 25 colleges. Josh Coates, Instructure's chief executive, promoted the platform's ease of use and its integration with outside services like Facebook and Google Docs. "I don't consider what we've done at Instructure like rocket science," Mr. Coates said. "But it feels like it because we're sort of working in the context of the Stone Age.""