Education Archive

  • Shock: Students using mobile phones to cheat

    Shock: Students using mobile phones to cheat

    Posted on June 10, 2010 | No Comments
    There was a report on the local news here yesterday about students using their mobile phones to cheat in school. My first reaction was, yeah, duh. Kids have been cheating in school since the beginning of time. The tools they use to cheat isn't all that interesting. Whether it's writing answers on the palm of their hand, filling a graphic calculator with programs to automatically perform physics equations, using Google on their iPhone to check Wikipedia, or simply whispering to the kid behind them, students cheat. Not exactly breaking news there.

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  • Scitable: a social network for science research and education

    Scitable: a social network for science research and education

    Posted on May 6, 2010 | No Comments
    Social networks are a dime a dozen. Many of them focus on the social, or the networking, independent of other aspects that might bring people together. It's no big surprise that many of these social networks fail, or only reach specific niche audiences. As such, it was with a bit of skepticism that I approached Scitable.com, a social network for science research and education from the folks at Nature Publishing Group. A quick examination of the site reveals a vibrant community of educators and learners. I had the opportunity to speak with Vikram Savkar, SVP & Publishing Director at Nature Publishing Group, who is currently spearheading the Scitable.com initiative, to learn more about it.

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  • iPad banned from several American universities over ’security’ concerns

    iPad banned from several American universities over ’security’ concerns

    Posted on April 16, 2010 | No Comments
    Three high-profile American universities, Cornell University, Princeton University, and George Washington University, have banned the iPad from their campuses. George Washington University and Princeton University call the device a "security risk," while Cornell is concerned about students chewing through too much bandwidth. So much for the iPad being the darling of higher education.

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  • Terrible grammar? Blame Twitter.

    Terrible grammar? Blame Twitter.

    Posted on February 1, 2010 | No Comments
    Who didn't see this coming? Waterloo University, a fine institution of higher learning, in Canada, has found that 30 percent of incoming freshman cannot pass a "simple" English test. New communication methods, primarily Twitter, texting, and social networking sites like Facebook, are to blame. To quote a classic line from The Simpsons, "Me fail English? That's unpossible."

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  • School district buys 131 iPod touches, for education

    School district buys 131 iPod touches, for education

    Posted on January 11, 2010 | No Comments
    A school district in North Carolina just placed an order for 131 iPod touches to be used to help kids with their readin' and writin'. The money to buy the Apple devices came from a combination of grants and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as "the stimulus."

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  • Recession slows the sales, adoption of Intel’s Classmate PC

    Recession slows the sales, adoption of Intel’s Classmate PC

    Posted on September 30, 2009 | No Comments
    The worldwide recession looks to have taken a bite out of sales of Intel's Classmate PC, a computer that was supposed to bring the power of, um, computers to the developing world. Since governments have been devoting resources (read: money) to fighting the recession, they have less money to buy “superfluous” items like computers for kids.

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