Monthly Archive for February, 2011

Maine Laptop Program Offers Lessons in Ed-Tech Implementation

Published on February 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Jenna Zwang, in eSchool News

Nine years after it became the first state in the nation to initiate a 1-to-1 laptop program in its schools, Maine continues to innovate with technology and has hired technology integrators to help its schools move forward. Jeff Mao, director of learning technology for the state’s education department, recently reflected on the groundbreaking program and its lessons learned with eSchool News.

“What we are doing [is] relatively bleeding edge. … There isn’t a book to read, there isn’t really a manual that says this is how you do it … but you are kind of creating it on the fly, and from that perspective there’s a lot of invention,” said Mao.

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Google Versus Microsoft: The Battle for the K-12 Cloud Contract

Published on February 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Audrey Watters, in The New York Times

North versus South. Rural versus urban. Add to those delineations now, as schools and government agencies across the U.S. move to the cloud, Google versus Microsoft.

On the surface, at least, it’s a public relations battle. Google announces one state or school district has adopted its cloud offerings; and then it’s Microsoft’s turn to respond with a new list of cloud clients. Google touts 10 million Apps for Education users. Microsoft touts 15 million for its Live@edu.

Oregon Goes Google, Portland Public Schools Goes Microsoft

In this light, today’s announcement by Microsoft seems like a veritable coup. On the list of the 16 new cloud computing agreements it has signed is the Portland Public Schools, the largest school district in the state of Oregon with more than 46,000 students. Oregon, if you recall, was the first state to “go Google” in April 2010.

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Disruption, Delivery and Degrees

Published on February 25, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Doug Lederman, in Inside Higher Ed

Washington – Many college professors and administrators shudder at comparison between what they do and what, say, computer or automobile makers do. (And just watch how they bristle if you dare call higher education an “industry.”) But in a new report, the man who examined how technology has “disrupted” and reshaped those and other manufacturing industries has turned his gaze to higher education, arguing that it faces peril if it does not change to meet the challenge.

The report, “Disrupting College,” was also the subject of a panel discussion Tuesday at the Center for American Progress, which released the report along with the Innosight Institute. (A video recording of the event is available here.)

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How Your Username May Betray You

Published on February 14, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Robert Lemos in Technology Review:

By creating a distinctive username—and reusing it on multiple websites—you may be giving online marketers and scammers a simple way to track you. Four researchers from the French National Institute of Computer Science (INRIA) studied over 10 million usernames—collected from public Google profiles, eBay accounts, and several other sources. They found that about half of the usernames used on one site could be linked to another online profile, potentially allowing marketers and scammers to build a more complex picture the users.

“These results show that some users can be profiled just from their usernames,” says Claude Castelluccia, research director of the security and privacy research group at INRIA, and one of the authors of a paper on the work. “More specifically, a profiler could use usernames to identify all the site [profiles] that belong to the same user, and then use all the information contained in these sites to profile the victim.”

A scammer could use this information to build a profile of a person and then target them with convincing phishing messages—perhaps referring to specific purchases on another website. The INRIA researchers developed a way to determine how unique a username is, and a method of connecting usernames based on the information published to different sites.

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Stimulus Funding Brings Broadband to Rural Homes, Schools

Published on February 4, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From eSchoolNews

Up in rural northern Vermont, it took until the 1960s to run power lines to some towns—decades after the rest of America got turned on. These days, it’s the digital revolution that remains but a rumor in much of rural America.

Dial-up user Val Houde knows this as well as anybody. After moving to East Burke, Vt., four years ago, the 51-year-old mother of four took a correspondence course for medical transcription, hoping to work from home. She plunked down $800, took the course, then found out the software wasn’t compatible with dial-up internet, the only kind available to her.

Selling items on eBay, watching videos, playing games online? Forget it. The connection from her home computer is so slow, her online life is one of delays, degraded quality, and “buffering” warning messages. So she waits until the day a provider extends broadband to her house.

“I feel like these companies, they don’t care about these little pockets of places,” she said one night recently, showing a visitor her computer’s slow internet service. “And I know we’re not the only ones.”

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Emerging Digital Spaces in Contemporary Society: Properties of Technology

Published on February 1, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

Edited by Phillip Kalantzis-Cope and Karim Gherab-Martin

Analyzing the relationship between digital technologies and society, this book explores a wide range of complex social issues emerging in a new digital space. It examines both the vexing dilemmas with a critical eye as well as prompting readers to think constructively and strategically about exciting possibilities.

For more information…