First-generation university student Shanti Chura had never used a computer until she went to college. The tribal girl who came top of the first ever intake for the commerce degree at Indira Gandhi National Tribal University in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, is among the millions of students India’s education ministry wants to reach with its ‘$35 laptop’.

“This is part of the national initiative to take forward inclusive education. The solutions for tomorrow will emerge from India,” said Education Minister Kapil Sibal unveiling the prototype of the low-cost laptop in July.

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Google goes after Microsoft on two fronts, with cloudbook and Android tablet Microsoft denies slow start to sales of WP7 devices

One of the great ironies of this year is that Google and Oracle – now owner of Sun and Java – are locked in legal combat. The irony stems from the fact that, even as they bicker, the concept they did more than anyone else to create is back in the limelight. This is what we used to call the thin client, which then morphed into the netbook and now the cloudbook.

In previous iterations, the vision was stymied by the lack of reliable broadband connectivity everywhere, and effectively hijacked by Microsoft. Will the Windows giant, this time around, lose out to the approach conceived by Sun, Oracle and Google – a stripped-down device with long battery life and minimal local storage or apps, connecting for its data and services to the cloud (which we used to call the server)? Google pitched its latest definition of the thin client, with the launch of Chrome OS and a next generation netbook, just after Microsoft shipped its latest – and probably strongest – attempt at finally gaining a position in the mobile world, where the cloud will increasingly have its heart.

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José van Dijck of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands argues that search engines in general, and Google Scholar in particular, have become significant co-producers of academic knowledge, rather than neutral tools. Google Scholar is a service claims to search diverse sources from one convenient place, to find information in a range of formats (articles, theses, books, abstracts or court opinions) and help to locate these through a library or online.

To date, little empirical or ethnographic research is available on how students actually go about open searches. But surveys do prove that students performing topic searches for scholarly papers overwhelmingly choose search engines, rather than library-based research discovery networks, as their preferred starting-point. Many students view library services as an ‘add-on’ to Google Scholar, rather than the other way around.

One of the key points about search engines’ ranking and profiling systems, according to van Dijck, is that these are not open to the same rules as traditional library scholarship methods in the public domain. “Automated search systems developed by commercial Internet giants like Google tap into public values scaffolding the library system and yet, when looking beneath this surface, core values such as transparency and openness are hard to find,” she explains.

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The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. The simple setup demonstrated a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere. In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up. Today, at its 20th anniversary, the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity.

The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of theWorld Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

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New York – The “Edupunks” will inherit the Earth … or at least some attention.

Those in higher education who continue hand-wringing over the relative merits of online learning and other technology-driven platforms will soon find themselves left in the dust of an up-and-coming generation of students who are seeking knowledge outside academe. Such was an emerging consensus view here Monday, as college leaders gathered for the TIAA-CREF Institute’s 2010 Higher Education Leadership Conference.

“We’re still trying to fit the Web into our educational paradigm.… I just don’t think that’s going to work,” said Mary Spilde, president of Lane Community College, in Eugene, Ore.

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More information will be added to this document as it is made available so please check back for updates.

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Evanston, IL – If any of the 70 undergraduates in Prof. Bill White’s “Organizational Behavior” course here at Northwestern University are late for class, or not paying attention, he will know without having to scan the lecture hall.

Their “clickers” will tell him.

Every student in Mr. White’s class has been assigned a palm-size, wireless device that looks like a TV remote but has a far less entertaining purpose. With their clickers in hand, the students in Mr. White’s class automatically clock in as “present” as they walk into class.

They then use the numbered buttons on the devices to answer multiple-choice quizzes that count for nearly 20 percent of their grade, and that always begin precisely one minute into class. Later, with a click, they can signal to their teacher without raising a hand that they are confused by the day’s lesson.

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Kaplan—a name that should be familiar to anyone who’s studied for a college admissions test—may be known more for its ubiquitous test prep books and courses than for game development, but it’s teaming up with game publisher Aspyr Media to change that. The two companies have released FutureU, one of the industry’s first SAT test prep video games, for iOS.

FutureU, originally developed in 2008 for Nintendo DS, PC and Mac, is based on Kaplan’s popular test prep content and methodologies. More than just a series of drills and test strategies, FutureU is designed to provide an interactive, engaging, and fun supplemental test prep resources for students preparing for the SAT—the standardized admissions test required for admission to most US colleges.

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To boost computer science education and help middle and high school students strengthen their science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills before they enter college and the workforce, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded TopCoder a $5.57 million contract to develop a new virtual community featuring competitions and educational resources.

TopCoder is a worldwide software development community known for its computer coding contests. DARPA representatives said they hope TopCoder’s new virtual community, focusing on computer science education, will entice students in grades 6-12 to pursue a computer science degree or other STEM-related fields.

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Catherine Wangeci Thuo (Kariuki), a Kenyan National, is the Project Manager of the AfDB/UNDP Multinational Support Project at the African Virtual University. She is an education specialist who has worked with the AVU at various capacities since January 2004. Catherine has extensive experience in education and training having worked as a Training Manager with a training organization, MSC Africa, in Rwanda. Amongst other contributions to academic citizenship, Catherine has co-authored a chapter; Quality Assurance in the African Virtual University: A Case Study, in a Commonwealth of Learning book, Towards a Culture of Quality (2007) and has written a thesis, Investigating the Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Primary Teacher Training Colleges in Kenya (2006). She is currently a Doctoral student of Education, Curriculum Studies (ICT in Education) at the University of South Africa. Catherine has a passion for the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education and is convinced that the use of these technologies in education will leapfrog Africa into a position of fair competition in the global economy.

For more information about the other plenary speakers participating in the Ubiquitous Learning Conference, please click here.