Hasta La Gadget!

Massive open online courses have the potential to alter how we teach and learn as a society, but unlike other methods that are steeped in centuries of trial and error, the MOOC concept remains experimental and unproven — often criticized as better suited for edification than rigorous education. Like edX, Coursera is working to challenge that assumption, and today the online course provider announced partnerships with ten public university systems that’ll integrate lessons from Coursera into the classroom. Most notably, The State University of New York is participating, which boasts 64 campuses and an enrollment of nearly half a million students. While its implementation remains up in the air, SUNY aims to introduce Coursera materials this fall and over the next few years as part of its Open SUNY initiative.

Like SUNY, all partner schools may adapt lessons from Coursera as they see fit, and professors will have the opportunity to develop online courses for Coursera. Most significantly, the pilot programs will give universities an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of Coursera material, which could go a long way toward legitimizing the MOOC concept. As another happy consequence, universities may choose to offer for-credit courses from Coursera to non-matriculated students. For a greater understanding of this grand experiment, just hit up the source links.

[Image credit: Dave Herholz / Flickr]

Filed under: Internet

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Via: The Verge, InformationWeek

Source: Coursera, SUNY

The $35/$25 Raspberry Pi microcomputer is being used by hardware hackers to power all sorts of creative projects. Including, in the above instance, a Raspberry Pi powered laptop, created by developer Eric Chou — principally by tying in the Motorola Atrix laptop dock. Which surely must be the coolest use of that piece of kit to date.

The smartphone that the dock was intended to be hooked up to has since been discontinued but as Adafruit Industries points out in the below ‘how to’ video, the laptop dock can still be picked up via various online outlets. Its Micro USB and Micro HDMI jacks offer a neat, relatively straightfoward way to turn a Pi into a laptop. Adafruit’s video shows which connectors to get and how to splice them together to plug in the Pi and get the DIY laptop working.

Chou, meanwhile, has costed out his version of the Pi laptop hack — including an optional Airlink WiFi module. In total the components costs around $125, plus the cost of the Pi — making it cheaper overall than the build costs of the XO ‘One laptop per child’ laptop (the XO apparently costs around $200 to make). It’s also a lot more accessible to individuals and small groups, being as the latter machine has to be ordered by the thousand so is generally restricted to government-backed mass education projects. Go the Pi-powered DIY route and so long as you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do a little hacking, much smaller batches of low cost laptops can be put together and put to work where they’re really needed.

The Raspberry Pi’s potential as a low cost computing platform for developing countries is pretty exciting. Pis are already being used to power a school computing lab in rural Cameroon, thanks to a Belgian volunteer project which involved a suitcase full of the microcomputers being taken out to Africa and set up with monitors and keyboards acquired locally. It’s a great fixed-location learning solution, but couple in a bit of kit like the Atrix dock and portability could really extend the usefulness of the device.

A Pi-powered laptop wouldn’t need to be tethered to a classroom location, but could be taken home by kids so they can carry on learning (the dock also contains a battery so even without any electricity at home it would offer some hours of use). The not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, which created the Pi with the hope of getting more U.K. kids learning to code, has said it is keen to look for ways to get more Pis out to developing countries this year, where the need for a low cost computing solution is even greater.

Samsung’s Exynos 5-based Chromebook may have been available since last October, but how about one equipped with WiMAX radio? Graced with the presence of Google and Samsung reps in Kuala Lumpur (including a video message from Google SVP Sundar Pichai), today Malaysian carrier Yes 4G unveiled this rather special laptop for the local consumers. In fact, we should have seen this coming as Google’s official blog did hint this last month, but we failed to catch that blurred “Yes 4G” logo on the laptop in the blog’s photo.

As Google mentioned, the ultimate goal here is to help transform Malaysia’s education using the Chromebook. And now we know that this ambition will be backed by Yes 4G’s rapidly growing WiMAX network — from the initial 1,200 base stations in 2010 to today’s 4,000, covering 85 percent of the peninsula; and the carrier will expand into the eastern side with 700 more sites by the end of this year. This is especially important for the rural areas, where many schools still lack access to water and electricity. As a partner of the Malaysian Ministry of Education’s 1BestariNet project, Yes 4G’s parent company YTL Communications has so far ensured that 7,000 local state schools are covered by its WiMAX network, with the remaining 3,000 to be connected over the next six months.

Filed under: Laptops, Samsung

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Source: Yes

It wouldn’t be Google I/O if the company didn’t talk about all the fun stuff that they’re doing for education. Luckily, they announced Google Play for Education, which is a new section in Google Play that includes apps and games that are meant specifically for the classroom in order to help students learn in a more interactive way.

Google says that Google Play for Education includes apps that have been recommended by teachers themselves, so other teachers will know right off the bat that every app in the Education section has some sort of value in the classroom, and having teachers approve and recommend the apps also cuts down on inappropriate apps from making their way in.

Educators and students can browse apps based on different categories that have been set in place, including searching for apps by type, age, etc. The new platform also integrates Google+ groups, so when a teacher downloads an app for his/her students to try, they can push the app to all of the students in the classroom at once.

Individual schools or even school systems can also create a central Google billing account, so when teachers go to buy apps, they’ll be automatically charged to that central account, which cuts down the need to have teachers buy the apps themselves and be reimbursed for them, which can be confusing, and it saves a lot of hassle in the long run.

It’s not just limited to apps and games, though. Teachers can also purchases books and movies that are of educational use. Currently, six schools in New Jersey are trying out Google Play for Education, and it seems to be working out quite well, as over 500 apps were downloaded and used in a single day. Google plans to release the new platform in the fall in time for the start of the school year.

Google Play for Education brings Android to the classroom is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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We’ve seen software and even TV shows that teach younger kids about technology, but we haven’t really seen ready-made educational robots for that age group — and no, AIBO and Furby don’t count. Play-i, a new startup involving former Apple and Google employees, thinks it’s time that the younger set receives some truly helpful mechanical companions. The company tells AllThingsD that it’s developing robots that 5 to 8 year olds can program through mobile devices, teaching them about code in a more tangible way than a device screen would allow. While details of the robots are scarce, the team is shooting for sub-$100 prices that parents could afford: these bots may not be limited to classrooms. We’ll hopefully discover more when Play-i starts a crowdfunding campaign in the summer, although it will still be a long while before we’re picking up Junior’s First Automaton.

[Image credit: Alonso Inostrosa Psijas, Flickr]

Filed under: Robots

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Source: AllThingsD