Group items tagged

"Schools are buying tablets with a reckless ferocity. There are pronouncements of how iPads will revolutionize or transform education, without a coherent vision of what that might look like or a single example rooted in practice. The iPad provides an illusion of modernity with no real challenge to the nature of schooling-a win-win proposition unless you're a child. Add hysterical Web filtering, social media bans, and locked-down devices incapable of installing software, and the tablet becomes a tool of compliance, not empowerment. Tablets could have all the functionality of a laptop, but they don't. Until they do, I recommend that schools invest in laptops for student use."

"But I'm tired of reading blog post after blog post about how to "win the game" of social media from your friendly neighborhood guru. It's not a game. And there is no way to win at it. But lucky for us, there are plenty of ways to lose. Here are a few of the biggest offenders:"

"Postsecondary students in British Columbia may get a bit of a break when it comes time to buy their textbooks this fall. In the first move of its kind in Canada, the B.C. government said it will make available up to 20 free and open online textbooks for some of the most popular first- and second-year university and college courses. There's no guarantee that faculty will choose to assign the new textbooks, but proponents of the project are hoping that rigorous quality control measures and a little nudging from students will win them over. The textbooks also will be available to institutions, faculty and students across Canada to use at no charge."

Yes, I see that it is Canada, once again, leading the way.... :) If enough faculty adopt open online textbooks a new norm will be achieved! Of course, the quality must be equivalent....or, perhaps, better.

The state of Washington did it first. The Pacific North West leads the way.

THE SCHOOL DISTRICT of Philadelphia is getting into the cyber-school business this fall in an attempt to win back city students who attend cyber-charter schools, which cost the district more per pupil. The Philadelphia Virtual Academy, for kids in grades six through 12, would offer some real-life perks, such as a drop-in center where students can meet up with fellow students as well as a support team for each pupil. Every team includes a teacher and technical specialist.

"We force our youth into taking virtually all the same classes, subject them to the same standardized tests, and judge their future worth and potential off an average. In doing so, we bring smart students down to an average level, ignore average students, make under-achieving students feel absolutely hopeless, and leave brilliant students unchallenged and completely unmotivated. By destroying this natural variation we suppress the best parts of our human condition; the unique strengths and individualistic tendencies that lie within all of us."

Students could use some financial relief. According to an American Enterprise Institute analysis, the cost of textbooks has risen 812% since 1978, compared with a 250% increase in the consumer price index. As a point of reference, medical costs (often described as "spiraling out of control") are up 575% in the same period, according to AEI. The burden is significant enough that 7 in 10 students say they have skipped buying a textbook for a course, trying to make do without it because of the cost. OpenStax adopted a conventional editorial process because that was required to win acceptance in academia, Baraniuk said, but the books are still published in the same modular fashion. That means instructors have the option of creating their own versions, perhaps introducing their own edits or swapping in content from a different source, and assigning that remix. At last count, there were 41 altered versions of OpenStax Physics available in the Connexions repository.

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"The search giant is collaborating with the Saatchi Gallery in West London to host a number of looped moving images, displayed on giant TV screens, which it feels are worthy of public recognition. There's a hint of competitiveness, as a panel of judges (including His Artiness, Baz Luhrmann) will select a single winning GIF tonight. In the meantime, we've embedded the finalists from six different image categories after the break, ranked according to how much we like them and whether any of the artists are mates of ours."

"publication still wins the biggest prizes in academe. The demand for it is largely unexamined (we want it because everyone else does), and almost entirely unchecked (just look at how much graduate students need to publish just to be considered for a tenure-track job). It's not that teaching doesn't matter, but even many community colleges are looking for publication these days. It's the only credential that crosses institutional boundaries, so it's the easiest one for institutions to brag on."

"Dealing with all the complaints takes time and, as a PhD student, I had my own research to do. Evaluations, ironically, were not really my concern. Student evaluations are not that important in economics (unless you aspire to teach at a liberal arts college), or not nearly as important as publishing papers in a top journal. And despite pleas from the thwarted Goldman candidate, the future job prospects of students and the money they might some day donate to the university was furthest from my mind. I'd sooner worry about winning a research grant."

"Screenshots never used to be that powerful. Sharing one was largely reserved for epic videogame wins or error messages. But now people routinely take screenshots of funny/outrageous comments on social media to share with friends. Twitter users post grabs of things they're reading. College students take notes by screenshotting articles and books on their phones, tablets, and laptops."

"Welcome to the other side of the uncanny valley of profile photographs. The attention of generated imagery has so far focused on "deepfake videos," in which a real person's face is grafted semi-realistically (for now) onto someone else's body. There's a different impact with deep-learning AI-generated fake still-photo faces that look realistic but aren't attempting to match the appearance of any actual person. And they're so new that these images have yet to get a name-perhaps deepfaces will win out. Deepfaces have a greater potential to add to the noise of troll farms, social-media griefers, and outright scammers and fraudsters because they look legitimate and fail reverse-image searches. As Craig Silverman, a long-time exposer of online frauds and BuzzFeed media editor, says, "I think it presents a big challenge for some of the existing approaches used by investigators, journalists, and police and others to follow a breadcrumb trail.""

"Abilene Christian University (ACU) is in the process of porting all its online course content from Blackboard to Pearson's OpenClass, which will be its new standard come the fall semester."

"Roughly two years later, he's working as a barber in New York, a job he acquired entirely through Instagram."

""We're the parents of 'Success Kid' for goodness sake," Laney told The Daily Dot. "If anyone understands the power, the mass, and goodwill of the Internet, it's those of us lucky to experience it daily." A few newspapers got word of it, and soon a Redditor put the word out: "Calling All Redditors: Success Kid's Dad needs a Kidney. Donate Here." It went viral and in a few days, the campaign hit $100,000 - well over the target."