Brad Parbs

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• FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced Connect to Compete, a new non-profit initiative that brings private industry and the non-profit sector together to help expand broadband adoption and promote digital literacy. The initiative aims to help boost education, health and employment in disadvantaged communities in the U.S. and aims to address some of the obstacles to broadband adoption — in terms of cost, access, relevance, and digital literacy.
• In order to help address some of the frustrations teachers and students face with school filters blocking YouTube, Google has launched a pilot program that will allow schools to redirect all educational content to YouTube.com/education. The program will also block all YouTube comments and make sure that any videos that show up as “related” are also educational.
• Google also launched YouTube Space Lab this week, a special channel that, in cooperation with Lenovo, Space Adventures, NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will provide space-related video content as well as provide an opportunity for students to design experiments to be conducted in space.
• California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed SB547, a piece of legislation that would have changed the way in which the state handled school accountability. Although the bill would have shifted emphasis away from standardized testing, Brown blasted the reform: “SB547 nowhere mentions good character or love of learning. It does allude to student excitement and creativity, but does not take these qualities seriously because they can’t be placed in a data stream. Lost in the bill’s turgid mandates is any recognition that quality is fundamentally different from quantity.”
• Governor Brown did sign into legislation the California “Dream Act,” allowing illegal immigrants who graduated from high school in the state to apply to its public universities as residents and to receive state financial aid for college.
• Rey Junco continues to publish interesting research on how Facebook is impacting students’ academic performance. Among his latest findings: “Time spent on Facebook was negatively related to overall college GPA. The average time students spent on Facebook was 106 minutes per day. Each increase of 93 minutes beyond the mean decreased GPA by .12 points in the model. Therefore, I conclude that although this was a significant finding, the real-world impact of the relationship between time spent on Facebook and grades is negligible at best.”
• Last year, the National Federation of the Blind filed a complaint against Penn State, charging that the school’s adoption of Google Apps for Education was discriminatory. Google has worked to address many of the accessibility issues, and The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the issue was resolved “without any admission of wrongdoing.”
• According to Inside Higher Ed, the University of California lecturers’ union has stated that it will use its collective bargaining power to block the university system’s expansion of online course offerings unless the “move to distance education is done in a fair and just way for our members.”
• E-book provider Overdrive reports that e-book checkouts from libraries are up over 200% from last year.
• Adam Duran, a participant in a two-month long summer program at the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center in Stanford, has developed a touchscreen Braille writer for tablets. Not a reader. A wirter. As the Stanford News describes it, the tool works like such: “They did not create virtual keys that the fingertips must find; they made keys that find the fingertips. The user simply touches eight fingertips to the glass, and the keys orient themselves to the fingers. If the user becomes disoriented, a reset is as easy as lifting all eight fingers off the glass and putting them down again.
• The Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons have launched a new website, LMRI.net to provide information about the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative. It’s an effort to create a common language for metadata for educational content, which in turn should ease both its publishing and the discovery.
• The Wall Street Journal reports that Renaissance Learning has rebuffed a takeover offer by Plato Learning, even though that offer is some $41 million higher than the offer it has accepted from the European private-equity firm Permira.
• The investment firm NewSchools Venture Fund has released an Ed Tech Map, a “visual representation of ventures currently operating in the education technology market.”
• Pearson announced this week that it plans to release a free learning management system aimed at the higher education market. Although the education giant currently only holds about 1% of the LMS market at the higher ed level, it clearly hopes that offering a free service will help woo schools away from some of the incumbent players in the space.
• According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, James Madison University will begin offering credit to online students who complete a 16-week introductory conversational Spanish course. What makes this newsworthy? That class is produced by language learning software maker Rosetta Stone.
• Adaptive learning company Knewton announced a massive round of fundraising: $33 million. While initially focusing on test prep, Knewton has recently expanded into universities, where its adaptive learning platform is used in some remedial classes, helping tailor coursework for students in math. The company says it plans to expand to the K-12 grades as well and hopes to open up its platform so that educational publishers can take advantage of the platform. Among its investors in this round: Pearson.

• Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday at age 56. The memorials and tributes continue to pour in, and it feels impossible to overstate the impact that he had on shaping our lives — both in and out of the classroom.
• Education lost another leader this week too: Derrick Bell. Bell was a legal scholar whose 1973 book Race, Racism and American Law was an important textbook in law schools everywhere. He was a founder of critical race theory and an incredible storyteller.
• The Department of Education released statistics this week on the state of online education among U.S. undergratuates between 2000 and 2008 (PDF). The data finds, not surprisingly perhaps, an incredible increase in the percentage of students taking online classes — from 8% to 20% over that time period. According to the Department of Education data, computer science and business students, along with adults with jobs, enroll in online classes at a higher-than-average rate.
• The Open University announced that it had become the number one site for downloads in iTunesU, Apple’s educational content delivery platform. Open University now boasts 40 million downloads from iTunes.
• Several low-cost tablets hit the market this week. Researchers from the Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID), a joint program of Rice University in Houston and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have created a solar-powered I-slate they expect to cost less than $50. And the Indian government announced its plans to subsidize the costs for villagers to access cheap tablet computers. With government aid, these Android tablets will cost roughly $35 per unit.
• Bots High, a documentary about high school robotics, was released this week. The film chronicles three robotics teams, two of which are all-female. Look for screenings in your area. The DVD is also available for sale online.
• The State of California signed into law the Reader Privacy Act which updates reader privacy law to include e-books and online bookstores. ReadWriteWeb has a good look at the new legislation, arguing that it is “still not enough.”
• Library e-book provider OverDrive updated its privacy policies this week, a response in part to the new availability of Kindle books via library loans. INFODocket continues to ask smart questions about how privacy really works between a library, a patron, and an online retail bookstore.
• The Gates Foundation-funded Next Generation Learning Challenges announced its latest round of grant opportunities, with up to $12 million available. This third wave of grants will still focus on college readiness and college completion — just as the previous wave have. But this round is asking for “whole-program or whole-institution breakthrough delivery models, as opposed to particular technology-enabled ‘building blocks.’”
• One of the great treatises in informal learning, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking is finally available as an e-book. What took so long? The New York Times has a fascinating story in the technological constraints in digitizing a cookbook.
• In an unprecedented move, Wikipedia temporarily pulled its Italian-language version this week. The decision by the Italian Wikipedia volunteers was supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and was done in protest to proposed legislation in Italy that would extend wiretapping laws to websites and demand they pull content deemed “detrimental” to anyone’s image.
• Boasts of user counts and downloads make fairly boring blog fodder. But Google Earth achieved a notable marker this week, now boasting over one billion downloads of Google Earth. That’s billion with a B. It’s a big number and a big deal for education as its celebratory blog post notes, pointing to the work of the beloved Google Lit Trips and projects like www.OneWorldManyStories.com that take advantage of the Google Earth platform.
• A win for UCLA this week when U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall decided to dismiss a lawsuit against the university, charging it had violated copyright law by streaming Shakespeare plays to faculty and students. As PaidContent.org suggests, this isn’t necessarily a “win” for fair use. The judge dismissed the case because he claimed the university benefited from “sovereign immunity.” But PaidContent does suggest this same doctrine may help those universities who’ve recently been sued by the Authors Guild for their work in making digitized “orphan works” available.
• What would you consider the “essential reads” of educational blogging? Someone asked Shelly Blake-Plock of TeachPaperless.com that question and he deferred — to all of us. Submit your choices — what they are and why they matter — here.
• Digital textbook maker Kno announced that it would provide the platform for the second edition of Collaborative Statistics. It’s a noteworthy announcement as the textbook is the work of the 20 Million Minds Foundation and is an open source textbook. It’s available for free as a PDF or for $20 as an “enhanced version.”

• President Obama offered his “back-to-school” remarks this week at Benjamin Banneker High School in Washington DC. The President had a few words of encouragement: “Be the best student that you can be. Now, that doesn’t always mean that you have to have a perfect score on every assignment. It doesn’t mean that you’ve got to get straight As all the time — although that’s not a bad goal to have. It means that you have to stay at it. You have to be determined and you have to persevere. It means you’ve got to work as hard as you know how to work. And it means that you’ve got to take some risks once in a while. You can’t avoid the class that you think might be hard because you’re worried about getting the best grade if that’s a subject that you think you need to prepare you for your future. You’ve got to wonder. You’ve got to question. You’ve got to explore. And every once in a while, you need to color outside of the lines.”
• Wikipedia announced a cool new project this week that’s bound to please fans of QR codes. QRpedia will allow anyone to access a complete and mobile-friendly version of a Wikipedia article, simply by scanning a QR code with your phone.
• With the advent of Wikipedia, of course, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there are other encyclopedias out there. But the Encyclopedia Britannica sure doesn’t want us to forget, and it’ll soon be available in its entirety as an iPad app. The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg has the details, including the subscription fee which will run you $2 a month, or $24 a year. That compares with $70 a year for the Web version and about $1,400 for the “venerable print version.” Worth it?
• It’s Banned Books Week, the annual event when libraries and bookstores around the country highlight the continuing problem of censorship by displaying challenged books. It’s a good reminder that even with the promise of greater access to materials thanks to the Internet, that there are still lots of places where content — both print and digital — is restricted. The blog Hack Library School has a great discussion about intellectual freedom and kids.
• Amazon unveiled its much-anticipated Android tablet, the Kindle Fire, this week. The tablet will be WiFi-only and it won’t have a camera or a microphone, but it will give consumers access to the Amazon Android App Store, as well as to the full range of digital content — e-books, movies, and music — that Amazon sells. The price point is less than half the least expensive iPad — $199.
• Harrisburg University of Science and Technology has reprised its social media blackout for the second year in a row. The school has blocked campus Internet access to several popular Web sites, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn, as well as text-messaging sites. The blackout is supposed to prompt students, faculty and staff to think about how, when, and where they use social media. “We believe that technology is not inherently good or bad,” says executive vice president and provost Eric Darr. “Rather, technology becomes useful or destructive in the hands of users.” Read an interview with Darr about his reasons for instituting the blackout last year.
• The oral history project Storycorps is collecting stories about teachers and teaching. Its National Teachers Initiative aims to record some 600 stories — stories about and interviews with teachers. Some of these stories will be broadcast on NPR and all of them will be archived in the Library of Congress.
• Princeton University‘s faculty has voted to adopt an open-access policy. This means that faculty’s published research is authorized to be made freely, openly and publicly available, even if it is being published in a “closed” or subscription-only journal. Faculty can publish their articles on their websites, for example, or in some other institutional repository. The move is part of larger efforts to help ensure that scholarly research is available and accessible — across disciplines as well as outside the walls of the university.
• Facebook has been challenging a variety of Web sites that are using the words “face” or “book” in their names. One of its earliest trademark infringement targets was Teachbook, an online community for teachers. Although Teachbook looks nothing like the now-classic white and blue of Facebook, the social networking giant contends that the use of “book” in its name could be confusing. Teachbook has argued that the word “book” is generic, but a judge this week refused to throw out Facebook’s complaint.

Marcus Kwan

• President Obama will release details on his plans to roll back pieces of No Child Left Behind legislation today. States that want to seek waivers for NCLB will have to demonstrate that they have adopted “college- and career-ready standards” in math and language arts and have established ways for measuring teacher effectiveness.
• Google launched a new channel on YouTube called YouTube/Teachers. The channel will be a resource for teachers to help use YouTube in the classroom. YouTube.com/Teachers is an addition to YouTube EDU, the higher education-focused channel that showcases video-taped lecture content from universities around the world.
• Apple donated some 9000 iPads to Teach for America this week. The company has been soliciting people to turn in their old iPads to Apple stores in lieu of selling them. Steve Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell, sits on the board of directors for TFA.
• Glam Media says that it’s buying the social network site Ning. No word on how this will impact those teachers who use the site for free under the special deal Ning struck with Pearson. [UPDATE]: Christina Lee from Ning wrote the following in our comments: “We have no plan to change our service and any participation in Glam Media’s ad network would be entirely optional.”
• As the company announced it would do earlier this spring, Amazon announced that some 11,000 public libraries in the company would now be able to loan e-books for Kindles. Amazon is partnering with OverDrive in this effort, a company that already handles the digital distribution of content to many libraries throughout the country.
• Abilene Christian University reported on its research based on the school’s adoption of iPads and iPods. Among its findings, “students who used an iPad to annotate text performed at a rate 25 percent higher on questions regarding transfer of information than their counterparts who used only paper.” The university, which provides iPads to incoming freshmen, said that the students who used the devices reported high levels of satisfaction with them, particularly when doing research and collaborating in class.
• Among the winners of this year’s MacArthur fellowships — the “genius grants” — is Harvard professor Roland Fryer, whose work addresses issues of race, inequality and educational achievement. You can read more about Fryer in this NPR profile.
• Google unveiled a number of updates to Google Hangouts, the video conferencing feature of its new social network Google+. These include the ability to broadcast your Hangout over the air so that others can watch online, as well as the ability to share screens and collaborate on Google Docs together while in a Hangout. These all make Hangouts an even better tool for teachers, although unfortunately, Google+ is still not integrated with Google Apps for Education.
• The Knight Foundation released the results of a national study it conducted on students’ understanding of the First Amendment. It found an interesting correlation between high school students’ social media usage and their appreciation for free speech. Among the findings, “Fully 91 percent of students who use social networking daily to get news and information agree that ‘people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions.’ But only 77 percent of those who never use social networks to get news agree that unpopular opinions should be allowed.”
• The Pew Research Center released its latest study on American adults’ technology usage (PDF). It found that 31% of those surveyed say they prefer text-messaging to phone calls. And no surprise, young adults remain the most avid texters, sending an average of 109.5 text messages a day.
• The Internet provider Comcast now offers its Internet Essentials program nationwide. The program offers low-income families in its service territory high speed Internet for $9.99 a month, as well as access to $150 computers. Any child of a family that qualifies for a free or reduced lunch at school qualifies for the Comcast program, which was mandated by the government when it approved its acquisition of NBC.
• The social learning and test prep company Grockit announced a major shift in its business model this week. In what it’s described as Grockit for Good the company will donate a one-year subscription to a student in need for every one premium account it sells. Customers will get to choose a non-profit organization through which the donation will be made.
• The New York Times held its Schools for Tomorrow conference in New York this week. Speakers included columnist David Brooks and Harvard University president Larry Summers. A video archive of the presentations is available online.
• A new company called Origo launched this week that plans to build a 3D printer for kids. “Right now, I am just an idea,” the blog explains. But “I will be as easy to use as an Xbox or Wii. I’ll be as big as three Xbox 360s and as expensive as three Xbox 360s. I will sit on your desk and quietly build your ideas, drawings and dreams.” (I want one!)

Bert Kimura

• Pearson, the world’s largest education company announced this week that it had acquired Connections Education, an online virtual school provider. About 40,000 students in 21 states attend the schools, which are funded by the states and districts and free to parents in places where virtual school counts as a public education.
• On Monday, McGraw-Hill announced that it would be splitting into two companies. One would focus on its education division, now second only in size to Pearson, and the other would handle the company’s financial business, including its ownership of Standard & Poors. On Thursday, the company announced it had led the investment in a first round of funding for Unigo, an online resource for college students. The New York-based startup will now power the student review section of the U.S. News & World Report‘s college rankings.
• The U.S. Department of Education released new figures on the student loan default rate. No surprise in an economic downturn, the default rates have risen, up to 8.8% in 2009 from 7% in 2008. Rates differed between public, private, and for-profit universities (7.2%, 4.6% and 15$ respectively) but in all cases, the default rates were up.
• The College Board released statistics about the latest round of SAT test-takers: scores are down. The average math score hit its lowest point since 1995. and critical reading scores hit an all time low. The College Board tried to downplay the news, as scores may be declining in part because of the changing and expanding demographic of those taking the test. Some have pushed back on the news, including Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing who argues that the continually declining test scores show a broader failure in the emphasis on high-stakes testing throughout students’ school careers, not just come SAT time.
• Mozilla officially announced its Open Badges Project at an event in Washington DC. We’ve covered the project and its aims to rethink how we recognize digital skills. Mozilla, along with HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation, announced today that this year’s Digital Media and Learning Competition would address badges for lifelong learning. At stake are some $2 million in grants.
• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released its annual Education at a Glance report this week, with more than 500 pages of educational data from around the world: how many students finish secondary school, how much money is spent per student, how does educational attainment impact participation in the labor market, how much time do teachers spend teaching, and much much more. For education data geeks, this is an important resource, and the report is free to download.
• Actor, author, and literacy advocate Levar Burton announced this week that the much beloved Reading Rainbow television show would be transformed into a new company RRKidz. Reading Rainbow went off the air in 2009, but Burton’s new venture, in partnership with Buffalo’s WNED-TV — the rights owner of the long-running PBS show — will bring the concept of teaching a love of reading to iOS and Android with an e-book app.
• The FTC has released its proposed updates to COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The act prevents companies from gathering the personal information of people under the age of 13 without a parent’s permission. Updated language in the FCC’s proposal would also restrict mobile and GPS data, as well as prevent children under the age of 13 uploading photos of themselves without parental consent. Public comments are open through November 28.
• Google unveiled a number of improvements for accessibility to its suite of productivity and social tools. Google Hangout now have a “Take the floor” feature. Currently Hangouts focus on the person who’s speaking, but the new feature will allow those using sign language to be able to “control the camera,” if you will, and show up as the featured speaker in the larger screen. Google also said it made Google Docs, Calendar, and Sites more accessible to the blind through more keyboard shortcuts and support for screen readers.
• Indiana University‘s pilot project whereby students purchase e-textbooks at a greatly discounted rate (as the university itself is the buyer, not the students) can now boast participation from some of the major textbook publishers, including McGraw-Hill, Wiley & Sons, Bedford, W.W. Norton, and Flat World Knowledge. The university announced this week that it has negotiated new contracts with the publishers, not only reducing the costs for students, but extending the period by which students will have access to the digital textbooks.

Bruno Girin

• Microsoft released the results of 2 STEM surveys this week — one among college students pursuing STEM degrees and one among parents of K-12 students. Among the findings: 93% of K-12 students believe that STEM education should be a priority in the U.S., only half (49%) agreed that it actually is a top priority for this country and less than 24% said they were “extremely willing” to spend extra money to help their children excel in math and science. Of the college students surveyed, nearly four in five STEM college students said they decided to study STEM in high school or earlier. One in five decided in middle school or earlier.
• According to The Loop, iTunes U, Apple’s lecture-podcast distribution network, has had more than 600 million downloads since it launched in 2007. More than 300 million of those occurred in the last year alone. The most popular downloads come from Open University and Stanford University, each with more than 30 million downloads. More than 30% of the iTunes U traffic is mobile, says Apple, and more than 60% of iTunes U users come from outside the U.S.
• Google wrapped up another Summer of Code this week. The program, now in its seventh year, had participation from 1115 university students from 68 countries. As part of Summer of Code, they wrote code for 175 open source organizations began writing code for 175 open source organizations. Summer of Code gives college students a chance to do real world work and to mentor with others in the open source community.
• National Louis University became the first university to offer a Groupon on tuition. This week’s daily deal offered a 57% discount on an introductory graduate level teaching course. (I recommend reading the fine print, however). The deal needs 15 students to tip; so far only 8 Groupons have been purchased.
• Hacking the Academy was published this week. The project is the result of one week’s worth of Tweets and blog posts from May of last year. The introduction to the book, written by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt from George Mason University, describes the process of crowdsourcing this sort of academic publication, one that elicited over 330 submissions from 177 authors. The book is freely available online.
• JSTOR, a database of academic journal articles, announced this week that it was making freely available its “Early Journal Content” — all articles published prior to 1923 in the U.S. and 1870 elsewhere in the world. Earlier this year, Internet activist Aaron Swartz was indicted for felony hacking for downloading some 4 million documents from the JSTOR database.
• The Department of Education released details on the requirements for Round Three of its Race to the Top funding program. The 9 finalists from the second round are eligible for the $200 million grant, provided they can meet the government’s various standards.
• Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced this week that he and his wife were forming the Biz and Livia Stone Foundation to invest in California education and conservation projects.
• Back to school for many college students means participating in the AlcoholEDU program. It’s been shown to help reduce binge drinking among college students, but according to research in Inside Higher Ed, those benefits have disappeared come spring semester.
• Michael Hart, the inventor of the e-book and the founder of Project Gutenberg, the free digital archive of over 36,000 books, died this week. The site has posted this obituary.