Via the New York Times, Tufts University has changed its admission policy to allow would-be students to include YouTube videos about themselves as part of their application:
Lee Coffin, the dean of undergraduate admissions, said the idea came to him last spring, when watching a YouTube video someone had sent him. “I thought, ‘If this kid applied to Tufts, I’d admit him in a minute, without anything else,’” Mr. Coffin said.
For their videos, some students sat in their bedroom and talked earnestly into the camera, while others made day-in-the-life montages, featuring buddies, burgers and lacrosse practice. A budding D.J. sent clips from one of his raves, with a suggestion that such parties might be welcome at Tufts.
The New York Times examines an interesting school bus experiment in Arizona:
Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).
But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.
Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.
The Internet bus is part of a larger movement endorsed by the Department of Education to extend learning beyond school walls.
Today’s New York Times looks at the expansion of broadband on language education services:
With the growth of broadband connectivity and social networks, companies have introduced a wide range of Internet-based language learning products, both free and fee-based, that allow students to interact in real time with instructors in other countries, gain access to their lesson plans wherever they are in the world, and communicate with like-minded virtual pen pals who are also trying to remember if bambino means baby.
Technology can be scary — especially to those who can’t quite understand it. First there was the town of Gastonbury, England, which protested against receiving a Wi-Fi network after some residents blamed it for dizziness, headaches, and other ailments. Now there’s the garlic farmer in Victoria Harbour, Nova Scotia, who is trying to stop the village from receiving high-speed Internet. Reports CBC News:
Lenny Levine, who has been planting and harvesting garlic by hand on his Annapolis Valley land since the 1970s, is afraid his organic crop could be irradiated if EastLink builds a microwave tower for wireless high-speed internet access a few hundred metres from his farm.
“I think over a period of time it will change the DNA of the garlic because it shakes up the molecules,” he said Tuesday.
It’s easy to laugh at people who fear technology — especially when their fears are based around changing the DNA of garlic — but their protests highlight the need for education when it comes to rolling out technology. Any country looking to bring broadband to all its citizens needs to be able to assure people that the Internet can be a secure, and truly beneficial, tool for their everyday lives. After all, what’s the point of providing access if people don’t want — or are scared to — use it?
Debbie Goldman, Telecommunications Policy Director for Communications Workers of America, discusses the perspective of telecommunications workers and the economic and education benefits of broadband for all Americans.
Australia’s education department recently installed filters on school computers in order to block objectionable content. Unfortunately, the new filter didn’t quite work as planned:
George Cochrane said his school-aged son and daughter, who study by distance education from their farm in Grenfell, were horrified by the sites they could access.
Other educational sites and harmless web pages for the local member of parliament - and even Education Minister Verity Firth’s own site - have been blocked by the filter.
The Department of Education and Training confirmed that the filter would be used on thousands of laptops for high school students. It is also currently used on all computers in schools.
“My daughter typed in ‘swallow’, as in the bird, and it blocked access to a documentary on swallowing toothpaste but gave you access to a male site talking about inappropriate material,” Mr Cochrane said.
As you’d expect, the education department is moving quickly to correct the error.
Jodi Lyons, Executive Director of SeniorNet, discusses the importance of teaching senior citizens how to use the Internet, and how broadband stimulus money will affect adoption among people over 65.
In a move to cut spending, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is phasing out school textbooks and embracing online education. Reports the BBC:
From the beginning of the next school year in August, maths and science students in California’s high schools will have access to online texts that have passed an academic standards review.
The governor says digital textbooks can be updated easily - so learning keeps pace with progress.
Cellphones and other distractions have long been the scourge of educators. But one professor at the University of Texas at Dallas is embracing, of all things, Twitter. Read Write Web has the scoop:
Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom.
Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying.
From the vantage point of 2008, the 94 percent of U.S. schools with Internet access use almost exclusively broadband connections, but residentially-based broadband in rural areas continues to lag the availability in metropolitan regions.
Robert LaRose et. al., “Closing the Rural Broadband Gap,” Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media, Michigan State University. November 30, 2008.
Now that the insanely popular Harry Potter series has ended, British publisher Bloomsbury is re-inventing itself—and turning altruistic in the process. The Guardian reports the publisher has started a new venture which will deliver science textbooks online, for free:
The series will be the first from Bloomsbury’s new venture, Bloomsbury Academic, launched late last year as part of the publisher’s post-Harry Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons licences, the intention is for titles in the imprint to be available for free online for non-commercial use, with revenue to be generated from the hard copies that will be printed via print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies.
Nobel prize winner Sir John Sulston—one of the men behind the Human Genome Project—is a partner on the project.
Hoping to help kids stay safe on the Internet, the Department of Homeland Security is reaching out to schools. USA Today reports:
The pioneering program, to be announced today at the RSA security conference here, will teach youngsters not just to be wary of online predators and bullies but alert to the tricks of data thieves and scam artists.
Michael Kaiser, executive director of the nonprofit National Cyber Security Alliance that will administer the program, said the larger goal is to prompt schools nationwide to “embrace a comprehensive approach to teaching cybersecurity, cybersafety, and cyber ethics.”
Science Applications International Corp. will begin sending volunteer instructors into schools in Maryland this week, and tech giant EMC will do likewise in coming weeks in schools in California and Massachusetts. Microsoft, Symantec, Cisco and other tech firms support the program financially.
Based on research, the education push is rather necessary:
According to surveys by NCSA and the Pew Internet American Life Project, 79% of teens who use the Internet are not careful about sharing personal information, yet only 3% of state school curriculums includes lessons about smart use of social networks and chat rooms.
The website TurnItIn.com offers a web-based plagiarism detection service used by teachers to keep students honest. As part of the service, the site adds full term papers to a database, where it’s used for future plagiarism checks.
The database led to students from Virginia and Arizona to sue TurnItIn. The accusation was copyright infringement. But now, via Ars Technica, comes word that after two years of arguing the lawsuit has been thrown out:
TurnItIn has known for years that this would be a sensitive issue, and in 2002 commissioned an opinion from law firm Foley & Lardner. The group concluded that the use of the papers constituted fair use, but admitted that “the archival of a submitted work is perhaps the most legally sensitive aspect of the TURNITIN system.” The lawyers argue that because the text is not displayed or distributed to anyone, it can hardly be called “infringement.” Fair use should allow TurnItIn to do what it does.
A federal court agreed that this was legal, for two reasons. First, TurnItIn required students to enter into a “binding agreement” when they uploaded papers to the site. Second, TurnItIn’s use was “fair” according to the four factors found in US copyright law, with most weight being given to the “transformative” nature of what TurnItIn was doing with the papers.
Nearly half of high school graduates who had computers and Internet access at home went on to college. Among students who didn’t have computers and Internet access, the college enrollment rate fell to one in four.
“Bringing Broadband to the Urban Poor,” CIO Today, January 5, 2009.
One of the benefits of utilizing broadband technology in education is it can allow students to learn and participate from anywhere — not to mention, skip out on painfully early classes.
Now, thanks to the just-launched YouTube EDU, non-students can enjoy — or try to keep with — free lectures from the brightest minds at MIT and Yale, Harvard and Stanford. Here’s one on something called “Advanced Finite Elements Analysis.”
For more information on broadband and education, check out IIA’s Broadband Fact Book.
British school children may soon be learning less about Queen Victoria and more about blogs at Twitter. Via the Guardian:
Children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum, the Guardian has learned.
However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what youngsters should be concentrating on in classes.
The proposed curriculum, which would mark the biggest change to primary schooling in a decade, strips away hundreds of specifications about the scientific, geographical and historical knowledge pupils must accumulate before they are 11 to allow schools greater flexibility in what they teach.
Nearly half of high school graduates who had computers and Internet access at home went on to college. Among students who didn’t have computers and Internet access, the college enrollment rate fell to one in four.
“Bringing Broadband to the Urban Poor,” CIO Today, January 5, 2009.
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