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"Amazon says Kindle books are outselling hardcovers By Joseph Galante Tuesday, Jul 20, 2010 Washington Post Amazon.com said Monday that growth in sales of its Kindle digital reader accelerated every month in the second quarter and that it's selling more electronic books than hardcover editions. The pace of Kindle sales also has tripled since the Internet retail giant cut the price on the device to $189 from $259, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said in a statement. Announced last month, the 27 percent price cut was aimed at helping Amazon fend off a threat from Apple's iPad tablet computer, which includes book-reading tools. Amazon hasn't disclosed Kindle sales since releasing the device in 2007, saying only that it has sold millions. Its release of growth figures may be aimed at quelling concern that the iPad has crimped Kindle demand, according to Dmitriy Molchanov, an analyst at Yankee Group. "There's a real perception that the iPad has completely squashed the e-reader space and that's really not the case," said Molchanov. "Amazon is doing really well and both companies can profit at the same time." Amazon said it sold more than triple the number of Kindle books in the first half of the year as it did in the comparable period last year. More than 81 percent of its 630,000 electronic books cost $9.99 or less. "We've reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle," Bezos said in the statement. "Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books -- astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months." "

"Outsourced Ed: Colleges Hire Companies to Build Their Online Courses Michael Tricoli, a manager at a medical-device company who has a young daughter, wanted an M.B.A. He got one online from Northeastern U., which outsourced much of his college experience to a private company. By Marc Parry Michael Tricoli was a middle manager looking for a leg up in his career, so he got an online M.B.A. from Northeastern University. Well, not only from Northeastern. Much of his college experience was outsourced to a private company. The company, Embanet, put up millions to start the online business program. Its developers helped build the courses. Its staff talked Mr. Tricoli through the application. It even pays-and, in rare cases, refers for possible hiring-the assistants who help teach students. In exchange, Embanet gets what Northeastern's business dean calls "a sizable piece" of the tuition revenue. He won't say how much. But Embanet's chief executive says its share can swell to a whopping 85 percent. As more colleges dip their toes into the booming online-education business, they're increasingly taking those steps hand-in-hand with companies like Embanet. For nonprofit universities trying to compete in an online market aggressively targeted by for-profit colleges, the partnerships can rapidly bring in many students and millions of dollars in new revenue. That's becoming irresistible to an increasingly prominent set of clients. George Washington University, Boston University, and the University of Southern California, to pick just three, all work with online-service companies. But the new breed of online collaboration can tread into delicate academic territory, blurring the lines between college and corporation. Derek C. Bok, a former president of Harvard University and author of a book on the commercialization of academe, questions companies' encroachment into teaching. He worries that bottom-line thinking will drive decisions about how colleges deliver courses.

"Brands are a mighty force in this complicated world. They provide clarity and predictability, a way of quickly categorizing information. Branding seems a natural fit with the predominant method of organizing and governing higher education: creating institutions. Institutions have deep roots in our society and collective consciousness. They create tribes whose markings last a lifetime. The more people around the world who need and desire higher education, the more important institutional brands appear to be. Yet brands fit the reality of higher education less snugly than they seem to. Every Banana Republic in America will sell you the same merino sweater. Even closer parallels in the intellectual-property business have identifiable standards. A randomly selected album issued by Matador Records will almost surely feature fine indie rock. So too with Basic Books, with its roster of nonfiction books by distinguished authors, or the Met, with its renowned operas. What you get from a college, by contrast, varies wildly from department to department, professor to professor, and course to course. The idea implicit in college brands-that every course reflects certain institutional values and standards-is mostly a fraud. In reality, there are both great and terrible courses at the most esteemed and at the most denigrated institutions."

"A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube Are his 10-minute lectures the future? Salman Khan, a former financial analyst, has created 1,400 educational videos and posted them to YouTube. "My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he says. By Jeffrey R. Young The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet. This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon-and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system. "My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently. The resulting videos don't look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short-about 10 minutes each. And they're low-tech: Viewers see only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates."

"But Obama's health care and student loan victories overshadowed the collapse of another key domestic priority: helping more students graduate from college. Because of a last-minute-and maddeningly illogical-political development, the Obama administration allowed negotiators of the reconciliation bill to strip out a smart, progressive package of reforms that could have helped millions of low- and moderate-income students earn college degrees."

"They say that everything's relative, and this is certainly true in politics. Normally, the President signing a bill eliminating $87-billion in corporate student-loan welfare would be a huge deal. But when it happens in the same legislation that overhauls the entire American health-care system, people take less notice. And the successful student-loan reform, in turn, overshadowed the collapse of the Obama Administration's college-graduation agenda. That's the subject of an article I wrote for this week's New Republic."

"Middlebury College has been known for years for immersion-based language instruction and liberal arts education. So when the college announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with a for-profit company to build an online language program aimed at middle- and high-school students, it raised some eyebrows. The program, to be called Middlebury Interactive Languages, will open this summer with initial courses in Spanish and French. Middlebury professors and faculty at the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy - the college's highly touted summer program - will develop the online courses. They will be taught online by Middlebury professors , instructors affiliated with the Monterey Institute, and graduates of the language academy, according to Michael E. Geisler, vice president for language schools at Middlebury and director of the new program"

By Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U "Gemma and Eliana Singer are big iPhone fans. They love to explore the latest games, flip through photos, and watch YouTube videos while waiting at a restaurant, having their hair done, or between ballet and French lessons. But the Manhattan twins don't yet have their own phones, which is good, since they probably wouldn't be able to manage the monthly data plan: In November, they turned 3. When the Singer sisters were just 6 months old, they already preferred cell phones to almost any other toy, recalls their mom, Fiona Aboud Singer: "They loved to push the buttons and see it light up." The girls knew most of the alphabet by 18 months and are now starting to read, partly thanks to an iPhone app called First Words, which lets them move tiles along the screen to spell c-o-w and d-o-g. They sing along with the Old MacDonald app too, where they can move a bug-eyed cartoon sheep or rooster inside a corral, and they borrow Mom's tablet computer and photo-editing software for a 21st-century version of finger painting. "They just don't have that barrier that technology is hard or that they can't figure it out," Singer says. Gemma and Eliana belong to a generation that has never known a world without ubiquitous handheld and networked technology. American children now spend 7.5 hours a day absorbing and creating media -- as much time as they spend in school. Even more remarkably, they multitask across screens to cram 11 hours of content into those 7.5 hours. More and more of these activities are happening on smartphones equipped with audio, video, SMS, and hundreds of thousands of apps."

Colleges thought they were enhancing efficiency when they moved their course evaluations online, but an unintended consequence of the shift to evaluations not filled out in class is that students started skipping them altogether.

Gardner Campbell of Baylor examining technology literacy from different vantage points. Argues that everyone needs to be a visual artist. Reflects the frustrations of faculty at learning new technologies.

Here is a Sept '09 resource from JISC in Scotland that reports data from employer needs for graduates with digital literacies http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/bpllidav1.pdf

"Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out-often awkwardly-nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback. Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn't deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. "Our graders were great," she says, "but they were not experts in providing feedback." That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia."

"Is the "bundled" model of higher education outdated? Some higher-ed futurists think so. Choosing the academic program at a single university, they say, is a relic of a time before online education made it possible for a student in Oregon to take courses at a university in Florida if she wants. Since the online-education boom, the notion that students could cobble together a curriculum that includes courses designed and delivered by a variety of different institutions - including for-profit ones - has gained traction in some circles."

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.

Gates-funded project, 26 teachers across the country who have had uncommon success in helping remedial students. Goal of the project is to identify successful teaching strategies to achieve 80% success rates with remedial students.

Hilary Pennington, at the ACE Annual Meeting in March 2010, argues that we're moving toward a circumstance where wealthy and middle class students will attend public institutions, and increasingly poor students will attend higher priced for-profit institutions.

"Kotkin (The City) offers a well-researched-and very sunny-forecast for the American economy, arguing that despite its daunting current difficulties, the U.S. will emerge by midcentury as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history."

Liz Coleman (Oct 2007) describes the new curriculum, a series of design labs. It's a terrific paper on core values.