Hasta La Gadget!

It’s a new school year, which means it’s time for the bright-eyed youth of our fine country to move into their dorm rooms, fire up their laptops, and take advantage of the blazing-fast, weapons-grade campus Internet to torrent the movies and music they missed over the summer. Which colleges and universities have the biggest BitTorrent habit?

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LinkedIn has already branched out a bit with its own blogging and following features for select groups, and now the popular social networking site has introduced a tool geared towards students. Aptly dubbed University Pages, LinkedIn describes the new service as one that’s part of its strategy to help college-bound pupils “at every critical milestone from campus to fulfilling successful careers.”

Beginning September 12th, LinkedIn’s set to welcome high school students on its network and provide access to the new University Pages, allowing them to explore and rub elbows with about 200 participating universities, both in the US and abroad. Users will then be able to do things such as receive regular updates about campus news / activities and view notable members of each college’s alumni. If one of your favorite schools isn’t there just yet, fret not — LinkedIn says “thousands more” will be given access over the next few weeks.

Filed under: Networking, Internet

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Source: LinkedIn

When you connect a bunch of young college kids together on the Internet, any meeting eventually devolves into a crying mess of memes, Internet hall of fame pictures and a whole lot of trolling. So when students in Stanford’s computer science program realized that e-mailing one address would contact EVERY student, well, you bet it got real fun real fast. People were dropping tubgirl, rickrolls, meatspin and because it’s Stanford and it’s computer science, offering jobs at startups. More »

Working alongside college professors at San Jose State, online course start-up Udacity will launch a pilot program for remedial and college-level algebra. Importantly, these classes won’t simply result in a nice certificate, but genuine college credit. Students will have to stump up $150 for each three-unit course, with the intake limited to 300; half will come from San Jose State, while the remaining places will be given to those attending nearby community colleges and high schools. The online course start-up, founded by former Stanford professor Sebastian Thurn, says that its own mentors will assist university staff in administering the course, which will include instructional video and web-based quizzes.

MIT and Harvard’s similar EdX course saw promising results during its own pilot tests at San Jose. While 40 percent in the traditional class arrangement got a C grade or lower, only 9 percent using the blended online course picked up the same grades. California Governor Jerry Brown hopes that the courses might help reduce barriers to college education entry — more than 50 percent of entrants are unable to meet the college’s basic requirements in math and English.

Filed under: Misc, Internet

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Via: The Verge

Source: New York Times

NYU recently sent out a seemingly innocuous e-mail to all of its students asking them to opt for paperless forms. People in college get those kinds of e-mails all the time! But when one student decided to ask his mom if he should enable the paperless forms, he accidentally triggered a method that allowed him (and every other student) to reply all to all 39,979 students on the e-mail list. Which meant, any student could send an e-mail to every single student at NYU. And as things in college goes, things quickly got out of hand. More »