Category: Education

Culture Education Tablet

LA school officials shift from free iPads to laptops and hybrids

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As reported on Engadget. BY MAT SMITH  An iPad for every student was the plan. Then, some students were too smart for their own good, quickly enabling their for-learnin’ iPads to access to anything on the web, including Twitter, Facebook and all that other fun stuff. LA’s school district now plans to differentiate what it offers its students, authorizing purchases for one of six different devices, including laptops and hybrids such as Chromebooks, Microsoft’s Surface Pro 2 and…

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Culture Education Engineering

University library starts ‘drone loan’ program for students

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As reported on Engadget. BY STEVE DENT  There’s good news if you’re a broke University of South Florida student who’d like to take an $1,195 DJI Phantom 2 Vision UAV for a spin: you can now sign one out from the library. Before you start preparing some kind of water balloon-dropping scheme, however, there are a few caveats. First off, all use will be supervised by library staff and you’ll have to take a course in drone operation…

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Application Education

Quick Key, The Quiz Scanning App For Teachers, Raises Over $250,000

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As reported on TechCrunch. by John Biggs When we last saw Quick Key, founder Walter Duncan was working to get his quiz grading appinto schools across the country. Now they’ve announced a $250,000 raise to help expand their reach and improve the product. The app, which streamlines the grading process utilizing optical character recognition, has so far been used to scan 300,000 quizzes. One teacher, Younis Aydin, in Istanbul, wrote that the app helped him grade 400 exams…

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Education

Essay generator can spew out BS, still get you an ‘A’

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As reported on Engadget. BY STEVE DENT While automated essay-grading machines can tackle 16,000 essays in 20 seconds, are they any good compared to a human? Online course administrators in the machine camp think so, but retired MIT prof Les Perelman has shown that such bots aren’t about to pass aTuring test anytime soon. His proof is the Babel Generator, aka the Basic Automatic BS Essay Language Generator. In less than two seconds, the software can spit out…

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Education

The Anvil Problem

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As reported on TechCrunch. by John Biggs Over a decade ago I was a happy man. In about 2002 I bought an Archos Jukebox. It was a 6GB monstrosity, clad in metal and full of huge batteries, and it contained a clicking, whirring 2.5-inch hard drive. I used it to listen to music and even hacked it to run a home-brew operating system complete with games and media controls. For a while I was quite content…

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Education Google

Google’s Eric Schmidt On Critics Who Say College Isn’t Worth It: “They’re Just Wrong”

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Gregory Ferenstein Google Chairman Eric Schmidt took a not-so-subtle swipe at tech critics who say that college is overrated. “There are various people who run around and make claims that higher education is not a good use of your time: they’re just wrong,” he told the audience at the SXSW conference, where he was on stage promoting his book The New Digital Age. The average college loan racks up $30,000worth of debt and the…

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Art Design Education

Watch this: Bill Nye debates evolution with the founder of the Creation Museum

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As reported on The Verge. By Casey Newton Bill Nye debated the founder of the Creation Museum tonight in a move that he hopes will promote scientific literacy in the United States. The popular science enthusiast and television host agreed to argue the origin of species with Ken Ham in an event livestreamed on YouTube and CNN.com. Naturally, Nye will be taking the side of evolution. Nye faced criticism over his decision to participate in the debate, with some scientists…

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Culture Education Film

The science of ‘Her’: we’re going to start falling in love with our computers

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As reported on The Verge. By Ben Popper Why do humans become emotionally intimate with AI? In the new Spike Jonze film, Her, a man falls in love with his operating system. In some ways it’s a commentary on modern society and our increasingly intimate relationship to technology; it’s about the smartphones we bring to bed and the computers we wear to work. But there is also a lot of truth to the idea that people might fall…

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Business Education

Meet Lesson.ly, A Training-As-A-Service Startup That Is Clocking Quick Revenue Growth

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Alex Wilhelm If you work for a large company, you likely dealt with an onboarding process. Perhaps little quizzes or pamphlets. I recently enjoyed this precise exercise while joining TechCrunch a few months ago, given that our corporate boss AOL is a fan of all things ancient. The gist is that corporate training is a pain in the ass for the poor schmuck on the receiving end, as well as for…

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Culture Education

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

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As reported on Wired. BY JOSHUA DAVIS These students in Matamoros, Mexico, didn’t have reliable Internet access, steady electricity, or much hope—until a radical new teaching method unlocked their potential.  Peter Yang José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it’s not…

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