Ray Schroeder's Blog
YouTube reaches one billion monthly users
by the BBC
YouTube, the video sharing site owned by Google, has announced it has passed one billion regular users. Announcing the milestone on its blog, the site said a recent growth in smartphones had helped boost the numbers visiting the site every month. YouTube’s popularity provides Google with a lucrative channel through which to sell advertising, alongside its core search business. YouTube was launched in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21874329
IT Resumes: Keeping Them Truthful
By Corinne Bernstein, eWeek
On the train the other day, I overheard one rider asking another if it was OK to fib a little—or at least embellish the truth—on a resume. As the train rattled quickly and loudly to my stop, I missed the response, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the question. Lying on a resume isn’t illegal, but it’s certainly unethical and grounds for dismissal for those who get caught—not to mention embarrassing for the companies that hired them. The tech sector hasn’t been immune to resume scandals. The resume flap last year concerning the credentials of Scott Thompson, ex-CEO of Yahoo, certainly didn’t help the company’s image. How honest are most IT pros about their credentials? Stretching the truth is common, according to a recent survey conducted by TEKsystems. The technology staffing firm found that 63 percent of IT professionals and 77 percent of IT leaders said most IT resumes exaggerate job seekers’ work experience. What’s more, 35 percent of IT leaders and 39 percent of IT pros say most IT resumes contain “outright lies,” the study showed.
http://www.eweek.com/blogs/careers/it-resumes-keeping-them-truthful.html/
Android Security: 10 Ways to Protect Your Device From Malware, Theft
By Don Reisinger, eWeek
Android is the world’s most popular smartphone OS, but it’s also the platform that hackers love to attack most. Android security is constantly in a state of flux. Despite Google’s continued claims that its operating system is secure, it’s getting hit hard by malicious hackers around the world who have found countless openings to exploit with malware. Android has become such a magnet for malware that security firm Trend Micro believes that the amount of malware to hit Android this year could top 1 million threats. In other words, the post-PC malware threat is here, and it’s targeting Android.
http://www.eweek.com/mobile/android-security-10-ways-to-protect-your-device-from-malware-theft/
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By Pedro Hernandez, eWeek
Tepid sales of Microsoft’s tablet have industry watchers wondering if Surface is off to a slow start or if the Surface is a repeat of the ill-fated Zune media player. The last time Microsoft tried to play catch-up with hardware from Apple, it was forced to pull the plug on its Zune player. This time around, analysts fear that the Surface may suffer a similar fate. Bloomberg is reporting that according to sales insiders, Microsoft sold an underwhelming number of Surface Pro tablets since the buzzed-about Windows 8 Pro slate launched Feb. 9. “Microsoft has sold little more than a million of the Surface RT version and about 400,000 Surface Pros since their debuts, according to three people, who asked not to be named because sales haven’t yet been made public,” said the report. To date, Microsoft has sold 1.5 million Surface units (both RT and Pro), far less than the company anticipated. Microsoft reportedly ordered about 3 million Surface RT tablets expecting sales of 2 million during the holidays.
http://www.eweek.com/mobile/is-microsofts-surface-doomed-like-zune/
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by Daniel Luzer, Washington Monthly
Last week a California legislator, Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, introduced legislation to begin offering community college classes via massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are designed for large-scale participation and open access via the Internet. All University of California and California State University campuses would have to accept those courses for credit, as they currently do for courses earned at California community colleges. Many proclaimed this legislation a positive development, but some professors find this occurrence troublesome. The leaders of the University of California’s academic senate released a letter Friday expressing “grave concerns about the MOOC legislation.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/california_professors_express.php
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BY MIA SHAW, Daily Californian
The Academic Senate of the University of California signed an open letter last Friday condemning a California State Senate bill requiring the state’s public colleges and universities to accept faculty-approved online college courses for credit. SB 520, authored by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, would make the 50 most oversubscribed lower-division courses in California’s higher education system available online. The open letter criticizes the bill’s inclusion of private corporate interests as well as its exaggeration of issues with undergraduate student success. According to SB 520, courses eligible for credit may be provided by private, third-party providers like edX, Coursera and Udacity, which offer massive open online courses. The Academic Senate wrote in the letter that this may allow corporate interests to replace faculty control over online curricula. “There is no possibility that UC faculty will shirk its responsibility to our students by ceding authority over courses to any outside agency,” the letter stated.
http://www.dailycal.org/2013/03/18/academic-senate-condemns-online-education-bill/
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by Tom Weber, Minnesota Public Radio
If you’re a Minnesota college student and you take an online course from an out-of-state entity, should you get credit for it? It’s a question all the more important for policymakers to answer with the growing popularity of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. These are courses anyone can take, offered by schools like Stanford. They’re often free or very inexpensive. States are debating whether college students enrolled in other schools should get credit for the classes on their transcripts. Last fall, Larry Pogemiller, director of Minnesota’s Office of Higher Education, told The Daily Circuit he’d seek legislation this spring to clarify the issue.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2013/03/18/daily-circuit-online-classes-pogemiller
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By Stephanie Hockridge, DPP
Schools all over the Valley offer online courses. But, what about an online P.E class? It’s an option one state lawmaker wants taken off the table. Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Boyer says kids need to get away from the computer screens, TV screens and cell phone screens and, instead, venture outside and get some exercise. On a beautiful day in Gilbert, the SWAT girls softball team is busy doing drills and learning proper technique. But, it’s that type of instruction that wouldn’t happen during an online physical education course. According to the Gilbert Public School’s website, the district offers three online P.E. courses, including bowling.
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by The Jackson Sun
The Juilliard School announced on Monday a new series of kindergarten through 12th-grade online music courses available to students nationwide. The initiative is called Juilliard eLearning and is powered by Connections Education. Connections will offer new arts education courses to more than 40,000 K-12 students enrolled in its national network. It will offer classes to educational institutions and directly to students and adults. During a live-streaming press event, Joseph Polisi, president of The Juilliard School, said school officials are anticipating primarily high school students to be enrolled, although the program is for elementary and middle school students as well. The online learning program will offer advanced course offerings such as advanced placement music theory.
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by THE MICHIGAN DAILY
On Wednesday, California state senators proposed a new bill that requires the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for completing massive open online courses, called MOOCs. The bill would create a system in which students can access courses virtually and receive credit at the University of California, California State University and California Community College campuses. A nine-member faculty council, composed of three faculty members selected by each system’s Academic Senate, would decide which courses can be taken for credit. They’ll also decide logistics such as prerequisites, instructional support and textbook accessibility. The bill will help allow students to bypass California’s overcrowded classrooms and lower the price tag attached to a college education by giving credit for MOOCs, which are often free to take.
http://www.michigandaily.com/opinion/03daily-moocing19
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by edX
EdX, the not-for-profit online learning enterprise founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), today released its XBlock SDK to the general public under the Affero GPL open source license. XBlock is the underlying architecture supporting the rich, interactive course content found in edX courses. With XBlock, educational institutions are able to go far beyond simple text and videos to deliver interactive learning built specifically for the Internet environment. The release of the XBlock source code marks the first step toward edX’s vision of creating an open online learning platform that mirrors the collaborative philosophy of MOOCs themselves and is an invitation to the global community of developers to work with edX to deliver the world’s best and most accessible online learning experience.
https://www.edx.org/press/xblock_announcement
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By Steven M. Baule, CIO Advisor
Wandering around the Internet somewhere, I came across the saying “Fairy dust and Grit.” I think it is a wonderful potential motto for many school IT departments in this time of really significant change for schools. Budgets are being cut, positions either eliminated or unfilled, and—at the same time—we are expecting more from our IT staff and technology in general. Ever since the Internet arrived on the scene some Boards of Education have looked at IT resources as a magical way to reduce dropout rates, increase test scores by engaging more students in learning, etc.
http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&entryid=5510
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Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed
If you wonder why your university hasn’t linked up with Coursera, the massively popular provider of free online classes, it may help to know the company is contractually obliged to turn away the vast majority of American universities. The Silicon Valley-based company said to be revolutionizing higher education says in a contract obtained by Inside Higher Ed that it will “only” offer classes from elite institutions – the members of the Association of American Universities or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America – unless Coursera’s advisory board agrees to waive the requirement.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/22/coursera-commits-admitting-only-elite-universities
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by School CIO
A recent Dell and Intel-commissioned Harris Interactive online survey of 203 US school system administrators and IT decision makers highlights the tablet management challenges faced by schools today. The results show that tablets are increasingly becoming a standard IT device (53 percent of IT decision makers surveyed have deployed them in their schools). However, other studies show some tablets can cost significantly more time and money to manage.
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Brian Sin, SlashGear
When one door closes, another one opens, and that statement proves very true for Feedly. After Google’s shocking announcement that it’s going to shut down its Google Reader service, Feedly’s user base has increased phenomenally. The service has already gained over 500,000 new users in just 48 hours. Feedly has done a great job in enticing Google Reader users to convert to its service, and it has launched new servers and increased its bandwidth by 10 times in order to keep up with demand. Feedly announced that Google Reader users would be able to seamlessly migrate their RSS feeds over to its service. The service even offers similar features to Google Reader, alongside its own special features. The service allows you to view your RSS feed in a condensed style (Title View) for those of you who have so many updates in your Google Reader feed that you have no time to scan through them individually.
http://www.slashgear.com/500000-google-reader-users-convert-to-feedly-16274360/
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by Online Learning Insights
In this post I share my peer grading experience as a student in the e-learning and digital cultures course [edcmooc] offered through Coursera. I’ll provide readers a window into the student experience —how it works, guidelines provided by the instructors and assignment criteria. I’ll also share the assignment I submitted for this course and share the results—grades and comments provided by four students that evaluated my digital artefact. My last post delved into peer grading, the pedagogy and the learning theories behind the process of peer grading. I thought readers may find it useful to view the experience from the inside, viewing the process as a student would.
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by Jake New, Inside Higher Ed
A good grade in a class or a degree on a wall can’t always tell the whole story of what a student has learned. A journalism degree denotes that a student graduated from a journalism program, but not necessarily that she excels at finding sources through social media, for example. Now, after two years of development, Mozilla has released Open Badges 1.0, free software that allows for a new way to recognize learning: digital badges.
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By Nick Grantham, Fractus Learning
If you have not yet explored Udemy, I can’t urge you enough to just dive in and see what all the hype is about. With the the catchphrase of “Start Learning from the World’s Top Instructors“, the platform is a treasure trove for all life long learners. And with more than 350,000 students already enrolled in Udemy courses, it is a pretty big class to join. Why am I so enthusiastic you ask? Well, over the past week we have spent a lot of time in the platform, tweaking and perfecting our first Udemy course, “How to Use Online Video to Flip the Classroom“. What I really noticed once we started looking around is how many awesome Udemy courses are available on just about everything.
http://www.fractuslearning.com/2013/03/13/udemy-courses-for-teachers/
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by Emma Rich and Andy Miah, the Guardian
At the end of 2011, a few geeks in Sweden set up the Swedish Twitter University, which brought lectures in a series of tweets to a class of around 500 followers. It may have been the first time Twitter was used to deliver higher education, and given recent debate about massive open online courses (MOOCs), it seems apt that we reflect on what Twitter might do to transform the classroom and open up a new space for public education? Last month we put together an experiment that tested these limits, using a bespoke hashtag to bring together all of the content. Running a seminar in Twitter might sound like a relatively simple exercise: ensure students have devices through which to tweet, then position your visiting professor – aka Andy Miah of the University of the West of Scotland – in front of his computer and let rip, but there was a bit of prep time involved too.
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By Nathan Mooney, University of Southern Maine Free Press
“A threat and an opportunity,” USM Professor of Linguistics Wayne Cowart said of MOOCs. Though it sounds a bit like a cuddly science fiction creature, what Cowart was referring to is actually a hot topic in higher education lately –massive, open, online courses or MOOCs. For some, the idea of giving away university-created content in a free, albeit creditless, online setting is unsettling. However, the number of students that MOOCs attract — often hundreds of thousands sign up for a single course — has made it a topic that demands attention. “As scary as it sounds when Stanford says ‘We’re going to enroll 200,000,’ it’s very unclear just what the nature of the threat is to an institution like USM,” said Cowart. “We should respond in whatever way seems to be making sense.”
http://usmfreepress.org/2013/03/13/so-what-is-a-mooc-anyway/
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