US: Bringing Reluctant Professors into the 21st Century
Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom
By Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education
7/24/10
Every semester a lot of professors' lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods.
That frustrates Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University, who argues that clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice.
"If you were going to see a doctor and the doctor said, 'I've been really busy since I got out of medical school, and so I'm going to treat you with the techniques I learned back then,' you'd be rightly incensed," he told me recently. "Yet there are a lot of faculty who say with a straight face, 'I don't need to change my teaching,' as if nothing has been learned about teaching since they had been prepared to do it—if they've ever been prepared to."
US: Nixty Enters Open Education Playing Field
Online Course Construction Gets a 'Do-It-Yourself' Web Site
By Sophia Li, Chronicle of Higher Education
7/23/10
A new player entered the field of open online education last week: Nixty, a Web site that allows any user to take and create courses for free.
The new learning platform started up with over 200 course offerings culled from open-source content already available online, such as courses from the Khan Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare Project. Nixty's users have begun developing about 120 new courses since its launch, said Glen Moriarty, the company's chief executive.
INDIA: Bringing the Cost of Laptops Down to Lowest Ever
India Develops 35-dollar 'Laptop' for Schools
By AFP
7/24/10
NEW DELHI — India has come up with a 35-dollar touch-screen "laptop" -- a computing prototype that it aims to make available to students from elementary schools to universities.
The gadget, developed by the elite Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science, is part of a push to give students a better education and technical skills needed to boost India's economic growth.
The first users are expected to be university students with introduction of the Linux-based computing device targeted for next year.
The ministry is going to install broadband Internet at all of its 22,000 colleges so students can use the 1,500-rupee (35-dollar) device, government spokeswoman Mamta Verma told AFP on Friday in New Delhi.