If you answered "yes," there's a lot of data to back you up. Online universities like the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, AIU, and Ashford are fully accredited, and thanks to heavy marketing pushes, they're becoming household names. And to shore up their offerings, most of the higher-ranked online schools offer hybrid classroom/online coursework. Just as important to gaining legitimacy, the online model is increasingly embraced - albeit in limited form - for classes at more prestigious traditional schools, from the California State University system to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

Getting Beyond The Sketchy History Of Online U

But there are still big problems with the digital classroom, and graduates of online universities garner little respect.

The industry's sketchy past is one factor. Once upon a time, distance learning was the domain of Sally Struthers and the ICS correspondence school, where you could "learn gun repair by mail!"

That's changed, of course. Products like Saba LMS. Moodle, and even iTunes U have brought e-learning into the mainstream, and most major universities now allow at least some portion of coursework to be completed online. In a world where Skype conference calls are the new business normal, is there any logical reason why the best of the new online universities can't rival their traditional counterparts?

Yes, but not for the reasons you might expect.

The most common, most quantifiable criticisms lobbed at online universities concern lackluster graduation rates, test scores and post-graduation employment statistics. But many employers are willing to hire from traditional schools whose stats are no better than the online outfits, so what's the problem with the Internet schools?

Why Online Grads Still Don't Get Respect

To get some real-world perspective, I spoke with a San Francisco-based recruiter for a large government agency and an executive recruiter for Washington, DC-area nonprofits - both of whom asked for their names not to be used. Their opinions weren't particularly promising for online schools and students.

According to the government recruiter, "For a decent job with upward mobility here, a University of Phoenix degree wouldn't get someone through the door unless they had something else really good on their resume. A recent USC grad with no experience could get an interview, but I'd be shocked to see a recent online grad get the same."

The nonprofit recruiter was a bit more forgiving, but she agreed. "In the not-for-profit world, employees' most important assets are their relationships, so I wouldn't discard a good candidate based on an online degree. Still," she admitted, "it's not ideal. It doesn't set a baseline expectation, for me or for the people he or she will meet in the field. If I just need to check off a 'degree' box on a requirements form, online will do, but if two candidates are similar, I'm going with the one from Stanford or UVA."

Brand And Social Interaction

When pressed for the reasons behind their opinions, both recruiters felt the differences between online and traditional schools boiled down to two things: brand and social interaction. Most traditional schools – from the local community college to the University of Chicago – have clearly understood reputations, strengths and weaknesses. An engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon or a veterinary science degree from UC Davis carry the weight of an established program with a history of results. Without historical data and a history of success or failure, the online schools' GPAs, class standing and other performance metrics seem like arbitrary numbers.

Ultimately, education is a promise, rather than a product.

Academia is not like the business world, in which an online startup can trounce an established business by building in the cloud and delivering commodity goods with less overhead. Reputation and consistency matter when building trust in hard-to-quantify-results. Ironically, innovation, lower costs, inclusion and reduced barriers to entry can actually hurt the prestige of online schools. One of the key functions of a selective college is to do some pre-sorting of applicants: "if you got into Yale you must be smart." Giant online schools that accept pretty much everyone may be democratizing education, but they're not helping employers or anyone else separate out the best and the brightest. 

Accreditation is a step, and elearning is a tool, but they aren't sufficient on their own. Over time, the best online schools have to build portfolios of successful clients and amass enough alumni performance data to distinguish themselves from diploma mills.

In short, online colleges have to build their reputations just like offline schools do. It's taken centuries for the top schools to cement their positions, it'll take decades at least for online schools to do the same. Until that happens, recruiters would rather play it safe and go with the well-known brands.

Are The Social Issues Solvable?

Recruiters also worry that online schools can't reproduce the critical social environment of traditional colleges. According to the government recruiter, hiring decisions are about more than weighted scores, and college provides a lot of soft-skills training that is just as important as test-driven learning.

"There's more to getting an education than completing a class. Social interactions, extracurricular activities, just being able to get yourself out of bed and into class every day – these are all learning experiences with a direct effect on someone's ability to become a productive employee and work on a team." Online education doesn't really address any of these factors - at least not right now.

When I mentioned that even Harvard was already offering blended learning degrees, the recruiter was quick to point out that those degrees were limited to Harvard's Extension School, and the University's most prestigious schools go out of their way to underscore the power of communal, face-to-face learning.

"I hate to sound like a snob, but call me back when Harvard Business School offers an online MBA."

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Though the robots themselves are still rare and exotic, the telepresence concept is very simple: basically Apple’s FaceTime videconferencing feature on a mobile, self-propelled, motorized platform. The idea is to make them cheap and easy-to-use stand-ins for people in school, office and other settings.

Today's typical telepresence robot has a display, video camera, microphone and speakers on a stalk attached to a two- or four-wheel platform. The devices are still severely limited in their abilities but are beginning to find homes in health care to stretch resources, in businesses to enable remote meetings and other interactions for telecommuters and in education.

In Seneca, N.Y., and Knox City, Texas, an elementary and a high school student are each using Vgo robots to attend classes and socialize with friends. Both suffer from rare diseases that prevent them from leaving their homes. They control their mechanical surrogates from a personal computer.

Prices Coming Down

Right now, most telepresence robots cost thousands of dollars, but manufacturers like MantaroBot and Double Robotics are trying to change that by leveraging existing consumer technologies. The companies are building robots that use an Android tablet or Apple iPad for the video conferencing functionality. Just like the more expensive models, a remote worker can attend meetings and move the robot from one conference room to another or "visit" with colleagues.

Despite using off-the-shelf technology, though, these devices still tend to be too expensive for consumers. The Vgo robots cost $5,000 each, while pre-orders of the slick looking Double Robotics product cost $2,000. (The price is scheduled to rise to $2,500 once the robot goes on sale in early 2013.)

At those prices, the products are likely consigned to a niche within the telepresence market that is expected to reach $13.1 billion worldwide by the end of 2016, according to ABI Research. To try to take mobile telepresence to the masses, entrepreneurs are turning to Kickstarter to raise money to build smartphone-toting robots that would cost just a couple of hundred dollars.

Telepresence Robots For $200?

Examples include Botiful, developed by roboticist Claire Delaunay of Silicon Valley, and Helios, invented by Tian Long Wang, an electrical and electronic engineer of Princeton, N.J. Both robots are essentially wheelbases with a smartphone cradle that can tilt up or down for better viewing.

While the entrepreneurs deserve credit for trying, these low-priced gadgets may not be successful in the mass market. That's because they do not offer much more than what a person can do holding a smartphone or tablet in their hand. The inventions are essentially novelties - with no real problem to fix. "It's not something that most people really need or really want," said Phil Solis, analyst for ABI Research. At this stage, cheap telepresence robots are more likely bought as fun Christmas gifts than for everyday use.

The Future

Nevertheless, these early devices will help build awareness of the use of robots in the home. Apart from the Roomba vacuum cleaners, the vast majority of robots today are found in factories, with the auto industry alone accounting for half of the products sold. That could change as aging baby boomers look to robots for assistance in order to remain independent in their homes when human helpers become too expensive. "It's an evolution," Solis predicted.

Eventually, telepresence could be incorporated into security robots that a homeowner could control while on vacation to check their house, rather than have multiple cameras fixed throughout the building, Solis says. While such robots have been used in commercial buildings and mansions, the introduction of new technologies could help drive prices low enough for the mass market.

In the short term, a few makers of telepresence robots will fill a niche, while others will come and go. But , someone will use the technology in something useful and inexpensive, and to the victor will go the spoils.

The Basics

In the mid-2000s, faculty members from the MIT Media Research Lab set out to "to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education." By 2006, the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) had created the XO, a rugged, low-power laptop with a number of innovative features, including ad hoc, peer-to-peer wireless networking, water-resistant keyboards and a solid-state hard drive. By running a Linux variant (highly customized for education) and a using unique, low-cost screen, OLPC was able to reduce the price of the XO to $200 – just within the reach of cash-strapped governments in developing nations.

OLPC's mission was simple: "To empower the world's poorest children through education." To that end, it worked with education ministries around the world, and have distributed more than 2 million XOs in 42 countries. While Uruguay was the first participating country, the largest deployment by far has been in Peru, involving more than 8,300 schools and 980,000 laptops.

The Problem

The XOs have been in the field now for several years, and the numbers are starting to come in. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be working – at least not well enough to justify the expense.

The Economist called the project "a disappointing return from an investment," noting that after Peru put $225 million of XO laptops in the field, an Inter-American Development Bank study found no measurable improvement in math, reading, motivation or time spent on homework. Specifically, the study found that "although many countries are aggressively implementing the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, there is a lack of empirical evidence on its effects."

OLPC has never leaned heavily on empirical evidence. According to its website, "the best preparation for children is to develop the passion for learning and the ability to learn how to learn." And the IDB study admits that "some positive effects are found, however, in general cognitive skills."

But as the Economist pointed out, any improvements just weren't worth the cost. ROI might seem like a cold measure for an educational program, but every dollar spent on XOs is a dollar not spent training teachers, building schools or subsidizing transportation, meals and other programs that encourage children to attend class. In the world's poorest regions (OLPC's target market), where average spending per student is just $48 per year and the cost of an XO could feed a family for months, ROI is essential.

At its heart, the problem comes from the top. In the video above, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte lays out a radical educational vision for disadvantaged regions that might not require teachers at all:

"What is transformation? It's not making the classroom better. It's not trying to do traditional educational technology. It's actually using the kids – and I really mean the word using the kids – as the agents of change."

Doing an end-run around lousy infrastructure and poorly-trained teachers might actually work with the right support to guide the child's learning. Unfortunately, Negroponte has also stated that you actually can give a kid a laptop and walk away.

According to Jeff Patzer, a former OLPC intern, that's precisely what they did in Peru. Hardware degraded faster than expected, and OLPC allowed Peru to build its own branch of the system software that was incompatible with patches. Interns were not prepared to educate teachers, and teachers were not prepared to use the XO to teach students.

"The only thing that happens is the laptops get opened, turned on, kids and teachers get frustrated by hardware and software bugs, don’t understand what to do, and promptly box them up to put back in the corner." Patzer explained.

In an interview with the Associated Press, a Ministry of Education official admitted that, "In essence, what we did was deliver the computers without preparing the teachers…The Ministry is not going to do another macro project of this type. It is not going to make multimillion-dollar purchases and distribute (computers) like candy."

OLPC may be a noble organization with a valid cause, but its methods just don't seem to be moving the needle. Like many people, I truly wanted OLPC to work - wanted to believe that it made sense. But there's no evidence that this kind of investment makes sense for poverty-stricken countries. It's time to try something new.

The Prognosis

The next few years will be rough. Internet access will continue to lag in the world's poorest areas, greatly diminishing the XO's utility, and Peru's difficulties may cause other countries to rethink the true cost of building and maintaining an ecosystem to support the devices.

At the same time, more powerful (if less rugged) hardware using standard software has come down in price and will challenge the XO in wealthier markets. Perhaps more significant, as low-cost smartphones flood the developing world, the XO will have to justify itself as more than a media consumption device. It's highly unlikely that we'll see many more large-scale installations.

Can OLPC Be Saved?

To survive, OLPC needs to take a step back to consider the "why." Its mission was based on a fuzzy notion that giving every child a laptop would magically make things better. But if the organization can accept a more involved role as an educational consultant (or find partners to do so), it could conceivably still play a part in global educational reform.

Previous Technology Deathwatches

In-House Data Centers: No change

Point-and-Shoot Cameras: No change

Video Game Consoles: The utility of bundles apps like Netflix and Vudu seems to be slipping. An NPD Study showed that one in five consumers who view streaming video on their TVs do so without a peripheral device.

Blu-Ray: The same NPD study reveals that "online video is maturing” as users migrate to watching streaming media on their TVs.

QR Codes: It's been a mixed bag. While Bank of America is testing QR codes for mobile payments (good news for the technology), a security researcher demonstrated how a malicious QR code could be used to wipe a Samsung smartphone.

Company Deathwatches

For an update on our baker's dozen of company Deathwatches, check out our updated ReadWriteWeb DeathWatch Update: The Unlucky 13.

As a college instructor, I have seen students with otherwise strict ethical codes panic and turn in work that doesn't belong to them, just because something in their world blew up and they thought getting something in on time was more important than doing their own work.

The Weapons Of War

Personally, plagiarism is not especially hard for me to detect. Years of professional writing and editing experience makes it pretty easy for me to detect a sudden change in voice. And in my current class there's not a lot of written assignments, so keeping up with the workload is not that hard.

But for my colleagues in other parts of the college, I know that is not the case. Essays and theses are more prevalent, and grading them can be very time consuming part of the job. Which is why online plagiarism checkers look very attractive to many professors.

Search-and-comparison engines are relatively common at the class, department or even school level at various global institutes for higher learning. The basic premise of these tools - such as Turnitin, PlagTracker.com and Dustball's The Plagiarism Checker - is the the same: a teacher uploads the document and the program checks the results against the vendor's database of submitted works and online sources. If a paper has passages that were also found somewhere else, it flags those passages for the teacher to deal with appropriately.

Sounds good, right?

Perhaps, but not everyone is convinced.

The Problems With The Solution

First, there is the cost. Turnitin, which is widely acknowledged to have the most extensive database, does not post its prices, using a private quote system instead. But anecdotal evidence can be found on the Internet: the Financial Times most recently pegged the cost at $2 per student per year. That doesn't sound like a lot, but if I were to use this service for all the sections of the class I co-teach, that's $1,400 peracademic year for one class.

Dustball's Premium service is $8 per month, for 50 uses, with each additional use costing $.25. Back to my class, assuming one essay per semester, that's a more manageable $246 per year, with subscription costs. Three essays per semester would run $311.

PlagTracker.com? Free of charge, at least for now. Presumably the Ukrainian-based service is building up its content database for monetization later.

There's also an ethical issue with plagiarism checkers - the questionable use of students' work as a money maker for these services. Sort of like Facebook, Turnitin and the other services are making money off of content that they did not create. Perhaps worse, unlike Facebook where the content owner typically uploads it willingly, students have no say in whether their paper is uploaded by the teacher to the plagiarism checker.

Many students and teachers are less than thrilled by this idea. Turnitin has specifically claimed fair use in defense of its use of this content, and in 2008 Turnitin's parent company iParadigms won a lawsuit brought against the company by four students claiming copyright violation. In its ruling, the court agreed that the content's use was indeed fair.

"It is clear that iParadigms' use of the Plaintiff's works has caused no harm to the market value of these works," Judge Claude Hilton ruled at the time.

That has not stopped faculty and students from having qualms about the use of students' papers in a for-profit enterprise.

Setting Up For Failure

The final issue is the atmosphere of distrust that routine use of plagiarism checkers can create. Assuming all students are guilty until proven innocent is not a healthy start to the student-teacher relationship. It might actually encourage an adversarial environment that pushes sneakier students towards getting more creative with their plagiarism while alienating students that never had any intention of plagiarizing.

"While some plagiarism detection software is conceived as helping students identify their own peccadilloes - as if committed inadvertently - the technological campaign to monitor and root out plagiarism is reminiscent of the war on drugs, where a large investment in cameras and dog-squads yields negligible returns in expunging the abhorred dependency," wrote Robert Nelson, Associate Director Student Experience at Monash University, Australia. "We chase students as if they are crooks instead of looking at why students are tempted to plagiarise."

Is There A Better Way?

Nelson's point echoes strongly with me. I am no naif, and I am fully aware that there will be cheaters every once in a while in my class. I live in a world where essay mills like this one exist; how could I not know bad choices are getting made?

When I approach my students' works, though, I don't go in thinking about catching a cheater. If there is an issue, it's usually that something jumps out at me and then I start checking.

I have the Honor Code conversation with students at the start of every semester, and I always try to separate ethical concerns from the conversation, just to shake them up. Even in an amoral situation, there's no long-term percentage in cheating. By skipping the work, all they might get (if they aren't caught) is a decent grade. But the thoughts they might have had if they had done the work on their own? Never happened.

That's a much greater loss than getting a bad grade.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Lumosity has created several dozen online brain-training excercises that it claims can improve cognitive functions not the least of which is memory.

Its mobile app has been downloaded more than 10 million times and is often at the top of the heap in Apple's educational-gaming category.

The games can be described as curious or even condescending by the more skeptical, but they continue to bring in new investors. In August, Lumosity got $31.5 million in funding from, among others, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Discovery Communications, which owns Discovery Channel. The company has raised $70 million since its founding five years ago.

Those are all respectable numbers, so I decided to ... what was I saying? Oh, yeah. I wanted to put my skeptical mind to Lumosity's tests. They were developed in partnership with researchers and neuroscientists at Stanford University and University of California-San Francisco, so, surely there must be some value.   

I logged in and set my sights on a realisti goal: Remembering people's first names when I meet them. Nothing too fancy; something that is a problem for me, yet small enough to be improved. In theory.

I answered a few questions based on what I designated as my learning priorities (memory, speed and attention), created an account for free, and was immediately sent a training program via email.

The whole program lasts five weeks, and each week you're supposed to improve on a factor in Lumosity's so-called "brain performance index." The chart looked like a lot of arbitrary numbers. It's hard to put the index in context, so it's even harder to judge where you stand on it.

It turns out the program's not exactly free. Only the first three days of of it are free. Subscriptions run $15 a month or $80 a year. Not enough to break the bank, but I wanted to be convinced before I took out my wallet. 

Day one, I completed a speed-match exercise -- pairing shapes and symbols, a memory matrix -- matching tiles to work on my spatial recall, and eagle-eye attention exercises that force you to track and recall the location of birds and numbers popping up around the screen. 

When I was done with the games, I got a score, a few inspirational quotes and told to return the next day. I didn't feel that inspired, and I wasn't sure if my brain was really exercise, so I decided to go out and test myself in the real world. 

I went to the market, a place full of enough distractions to jar even the most screwed-on head.

I needed bread (the kind you eat) and asked an employee for help as I glanced at his name tag, then tried to recall the name as I checked out.

I did remember it (Jon), but I don't think it was because of the game. I think it was more because of my concentrated effort to remember.

Where day one felt like getting to know you, day two was time to roll our sleeves up.

I played "word bubbles rising," where the goal is to type words based on the stem of a word. I did pretty well on this tip-of-the-tongue exercise, but then again I have a B.A. in creative writing and a master's in journalism (finally paying dividends -- take that, Sallie Mae!).

I made a total of 40 words in the timed session, and was honestly feeling pretty good about myself. The next game was a math test called "raindrops." Arithmetic. My best area of math, but still math, my worst subject area bar none (and like many others before me, possibly the reason I became a writer).

To my own surprise I solved 62 equations with a 97% accuracy rate (hear that, Mr. Frenn, eighth grade math teacher?).

Maybe I was just on a high from my score ... but I was starting to believe. They were simple math exercises that can be make you more confident and compentent in every-day tasks, like estimating tips.

Next was speed-matching, and I finished with a 94% accuracy, but it didn't matter. I had seen enough.

I had changed. 

Not sure if my brain had changed, but my skepticism did. I don't know if this is the Gold's Gym of brains, but I was convinced that these exercises could be tools for a variety of people.

Yes, the games felt patronizing (which was, honestly, my own early stumbling block, but with the need for quick thinking increasingly in demand, it was easy for me to see how this could work. 

Photo by tellatic

Note: Earlier this month, Brian Proffitt’s post explaining Why Wikipedia Doesn’t Belong In The Classroom garnered strong reactions both pro and con. Here, guest author Jonathan Obar, PhD, like Proffitt a practicing academic, takes the opposite point of view.

In the 80s, Neil Postman wrote, “You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.” To Postman, television was a medium that privileged entertainment, whose decontextualized method of communicating the ephemeral at blazing speeds made linear argument and true learning impossible.

I find it fascinating that while educators work feverishly to incorporate YouTube, video games and other video-based technologies into classrooms, Wikipedia, a text-heavy technology that privileges old-fashioned reading and writing, still befuddles members of the academic establishment.

Wikipedia remains misunderstood because many educators have yet to recognize the distinction between Wikipedia as a tool for teaching and Wikipedia as a tool for research. Unfortunately, fear of the latter has blinded most to the possibilities of the former. I believe Wikipedia to be an effective tool for both.

Wikipedia As A Tool for Teaching

Since 2010, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working hard opening closed-minds, connecting thousands of students at more than 50 schools across the U.S., including Harvard, Yale and UC Berkeley to the Wikipedia Education Program. Thousands more have participated at top universities in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, India, Egypt and in more than 10 European countries. Law schools, social science, health science, engineering, psychology and humanities departments (among others) have participated. The University of Toronto’s medical school is considering having its residency program participate as part of its community outreach requirement. The Association for Psychological Science and the American Sociology Association are concurrently running their own programs and every semester we discover new professors teaching with Wikipedia on their own, happenings common to open-source projects.

Clearly the professors at these schools are overcoming what some might call new media myopia. But how and why?

Wikipedia Education Program professors incorporate Wikipedia into courses by having students collaborate with the community of Wikipedia editors (“Wikipedians”) to write course-related Wikipedia articles, replacing traditional term papers. Student preference for the Wikipedia-way has been demonstrated, and the incentives are clear:

* Similar benefits to traditional writing assignments - as students are still researching and analyzing sources, and writing-up material on course content.

- Digital literacy training. Profs now teach two-courses-in-one as students learn how to use wiki-technology, engage in wiki-culture and collaborate with a virtual social network. They will likely need to know about wikis when they graduate as wikis are everywhere these days, including the corporate world, government (heard of the CIA’s Intellipedia?) and NGOs.

- Multi-layered feedback. Professors and assistants can provide feedback and engage in debate with students, as can the community of Wikipedians. Students are thrust into an intense game of literary dodgeball considering feedback on content, style and presentation from users of varying levels of expertise on content and wikis.

- Students learn to write in an encyclopedic style. A welcome change from argumentative writing, expanding their writing abilities.

- Student favorite: Getting some exposure. In years past, the student and professor would be the only two readers of a term paper. Wikipedia articles remain online indefinitely and contribute to the information available online about course content. We’ve had students tell us they’ve used Google searches to show their grandmothers their work over Thanksgiving. Then there’s Patrick Friedel from Georgetown University who re-wrote the article on the National Democratic Party (Egypt) in fall 2010, an article that since has received more than 160,000 hits. Not bad for a term paper that would normally have ended up in the drawer or the garbage.

Taken a step further, when we introduce Wikipedia into the classroom as a teaching tool, we provide students with a space to reflect and learn about the nature of knowledge and its evolution, about the normative ideals of participatory democracy and about the role of information in societal development. Oh, and did I mention that it’s free?

Wikipedia As A Tool for Research

Brian Proffitt’s article recommended against Wikipedia’s use in the classroom. His argument was straightforward and in two parts:

Argument One (paraphrased): Wikipedia content is amateurish (i.e. crowdsourced), is defined by illogical policies and a variety of indoctrinated (in some instances eccentric) editors, and as a result, shouldn’t be trusted as a reputable source for academic writing.

My response focuses not on the fact that Wikipedia is the largest collaborative project known to humankind, containing more than 4 million articles, 24 million project pages, nearly 800,000 images, a social network of 17 million users (and that’s just the English-language Wikipedia, there are 284 other Wikipedias operating in different languages), or the fact that Wikipedia is currently the sixth most popular site on the net according to Alexa, receiving 450 million+ unique hits and 6 billion+ total hits monthly according to comScore, or that Professor William Cronon, President of the American Historical Association, said last February, “I don’t believe there’s much doubt that Wikipedia is the largest, most comprehensive, copiously detailed, stunningly useful encyclopedia in all of human history.”

Instead, my response to Proffitt will address an incentive for using Wikipedia as a tool for teaching (and research) – teaching our students to be informed consumers of information, or information literate.

When I teach my students about information literacy, I often begin by describing the place of debate in knowledge creation. This idea certainly isn’t new to academics; in fact it’s perhaps one of our oldest and most cherished ideals. Debate can happen in a variety of places; for example, between individuals on a Wikipedia talk page and even within one’s own mind while considering which sources to use when writing an academic paper.

Unfortunately, when students are debating which sources to work with, they must traverse a dangerous terrain. No matter where they look, there are mistakes everywhere. There is bias everywhere. There is missing information everywhere. What this means is that no source should be regarded as the source on any given topic. That includes Wikipedia and the Britannica, the popular press, and even the academic literature - I won’t bother getting into the challenges associated with annual reports, the trade press and reports released by government agencies. In addition to the landmines that we encourage our students to consider, whether we like it or not, students are going to use answers.com, Yahoo!Answers and a myriad of sites just like them.

The answer is not to ban Wikipedia. The answer is to teach students how to use sources appropriately. Teach students to be informed consumers of information. Teach them how the encyclopedia ought to be used in academic writing, as well as how to use blogs, tweets and Facebook posts. Teach them not to feel safe anywhere when it comes to our high standards. Teaching information literacy will empower our students to navigate and benefit from the greatest technology of abundance the world has ever known.

Argument Two (paraphrased): Academics do not like Wikipedia. It is often the source of plagiarism, and shouldn’t be cited in academic work.

The popularity of the Education Program and related initiatives suggests that some academics do support Wikipedia. Every semester we have to turn people away because a volunteer army can support only so many classes.

I will not claim to have the answer to the problem of plagiarism, which existed long before Wikipedia. But I say again, banning Wikipedia is not the appropriate response. My answers to the plagiarism and citation charges are the same – engagement. That’s what drives social media, that’s what should drive our teaching.

Teach students that the act of writing in any setting is defined by both form and content. I don’t let my students cite Wikipedia in their academic papers (GASP!) because I don’t believe it to be proper academic form. I don’t let them cite the Britannica or dictionary either. In an effort to shape informed consumers of information I teach them how Wikipedia should and should not be used. I agree with Proffitt when he says it’s a great place to start and a terrible place to finish. Though in some academic circles, the tide is turning.

Wikipedia remains a shining example of what has been made possible by the greatest technology of access and abundance the world has ever known. The power of the network can be intimidating. As educators we can choose to ignore our ever-changing reality or attempt to harness its power.

“Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge” - words once spoken by Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales. We must teach our students to navigate the information torrent as informed consumers, and recognize how user content-generation, especially through interactive Web 2.0 technologies, can lead to tremendous active-learning outcomes. In doing so, we will be offering our students the benefits of a 21st-century education, and preparing them for success in the ever-changing brave new world that awaits them outside the university walls.

Jonathan Obar, PhD is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University, and Associate Director of the Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law. He also works as a research fellow in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. He continues to volunteer as a member of the Wikipedia Education Program, which he joined in fall 2010.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

As a part-time college teacher at the University of Notre Dame, my own position is clear: Wikipedia has no place in my classroom. (For more on Brian Proffitt's technology experiences in academia, see MIllennials: They Aren't So Tech Savvy After All.)

Mistakes Are Not The Problem

The gripes against Wikipedia are woven well into our urban fabric. Many is the tale of some silly mistake creeping into a Wikipedia entry - either through an honest error or a case of Wiki-vandalism. But errors are natural, and definitely human. Is that reason enough to prevent Wikipedia from being used as an educational tool?

That's part of it, but not the main reason I avoid using Wikipedia in the classroom. The biggest complaint for me is that Wikipedia's method of crowdsourcing the truth is often the very thing that trips up the service.

On the one hand, you have the idea of crowdsourcing: put enough humans in a room and they'll eventually produce something like Wikipedia. The problem is, they will also produce something like those tabloids you see in the checkout line at the grocery store.

One person's truth is another person's lie… which is why a project like Wikipedia has to be reviewed by a hierarchical system of editors who have the power to overrule things that are believed (such as the 37% of Americans who believe in UFOs) versus things that are true (that pesky speed-of-light limit Einstein came up with). Otherwise, in a purely crowdsourced Wikipedia, Elvis would still be alive and rocking out from his Area 51 fortress of solitude.

"Citogenesis" Leads To Trouble

But even that editorial framework is not enough. Because Wikipedia's editors rely heavily on cited material to back up the veracity of the material in Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is still instantly published, you can get phenomena like what XKCD artist Randall Munroe calls "Citogenesis."

Citogenesis may be behind what happened to distinguished author Philip Roth last week. The author of the novel The Human Stain found himself in the unique position of trying to change a factual error about this book in its Wikipedia entry… only to have his efforts rebuffed because Roth didn't have a second citable source. That's worth repeating: the author of the book - the ultimate source in this case - needed corroboration from someone else about what had inspired him. Yikes! According to an open letter from Roth published in the New York, s a Wikipedia administrator responded to his request saying: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources.”

It is this kind of circular reasoning and blind spots that forms the basis of my avoidance of Wikipedia as a tool in the classroom: it's not just that Wikipedia is sometimes wrong, it's also that its error-correcting system can get so wound up in itself that it loses touch with common sense about fact-finding.

Other Professors Agree

According to Dr. Teresa Fishman, Director of the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI), I am not alone in my opinion of Wikipedia. Fishman - speaking only from her own experiences as director of the ICAI - said that "most instructors are not in favor of citing Wikipedia, and some would rather see it not used as a source at all."

That doesn't mean Wikipedia has no place in academia, though. Fishman related some innovative ways instructors at the college level have used Wikipedia to demonstrate how wikis work as a source of crowd-based content. Fishman described how one professor assigned his class to heavily revise or create new Wikipedia entries, working within the Wikipedia system to have the entry posted and ideally approved by the Wikipedia editors and peers.

This method demonstrates to students pretty quickly the advantages and limitations of Wikipedia, and how the system can be subverted at times. Fishman believes that this method is better than simply banning Wikipedia outright, since it gives students a chance to see for themselves how it works.

The Plagiarism Question

Critics also charge that Wikipedia is too often the souce of plagiarism in academic settings. In its annual survey of students, the ICAI has not determined if that's the case, but recent surveys have shown that many students, particularly those coming up from high school, see nothing wrong with using material from communally authored sources without citation in their own school work.

"The assumption is they are just common knowledge," Fishman explained. To combat this issue, "we hope that teachers will have students hold to the same standards of Wikipedia and cite the source of their thoughts."

Is Wikipedia poisoning the minds of our children? Hardly. Wikipedia is a good place to start research, I tell my students, but for academic work, it is not a good place to end.

Or cite.

I was fortunate to be selected as one of this year's judges for the contest. I got to see more than a dozen of the teams as part of the process and meet dozens more students during my stay in Sydney. The teams that advanced from round to round all had several things in common:

• Basic English communication skills. The contest was conducted in English. Given that many of the contestants didn't speak English as their native language, this presented a challenge, and some of the teams relied on their best English speakers to be presenters and translate the questions from the judges. If the developer wasn't fluent in English, some things got lost in the translation. If founders have an accent or aren't comfortable with speaking in front of an audience, they should make sure to get lots of practice.
• Great presentation skills. Each team had just minutes to present its slides and demonstrate its solution. The better teams structured their presentation to match the judging requirements and also rehearsed their speeches to make sure they could deliver them in the allotted time. On the other end of the spectrum, some presenters sat in their chairs when addressing the judges. Entrepreneurs who aren't polished presenters should go to their local Toastmasters branch or take a course in public speaking at a community college.
• They got to the point, quickly. Some of the losing teams took too long to set up their solution, focusing on matters that weren't germane to the judging criteria. Founders need to be ruthless when trimming slide decks to make them as crisp as possible. When you are pitching an investor or potential partner, make sure you hone your own presentations so that they are succinct and on-point. Think Twitter: If you can't formulate your message in less than 140 characters, work on another message.
• Solid video production skills.  Video is very compelling and should be a part of any startup's marketing effort. But a bad video is worse than no video at all. The first judging round had each team submit a short video that explained their solution. Some of the videos were very slick - almost too slick: They didn't really explain the actual solution and focused on pretty images and annoying background music that drowned out the narration. Don't get so enamored with video production that you lose sight of what you are trying to accomplish.
• They understood how to put together code. Some of the teams put an architecture diagram in their slide decks that didn't make any sense whatsoever. Others took the time to show their code when questioned by the judges, and prove that their demos weren't all smoke and mirrors. Don't be afraid to dive in if your audience wants to know the bits and the bytes.
• They knew what business they were in. One team that didn't make it into the finals couldn't decide what business they were in: Were they going to sell their solution directly or use a reseller? Another team didn't understand what a balance sheet was or how they were going to make money. I have seen lots of entrepreneurs who make these same mistakes. Make sure to clearly state your financial assumptions and what you are asking from your audience.
• They had fewer moving parts. Many of the teams put together some very elaborate demonstration systems involving a laptop PC, a Kinect motion sensor, a mobile phone and code running in the cloud, which may be intellectually interesting but also quite fragile if something breaks or if Internet access goes wonky. Resist the urge to add nonessential pieces and follow Thoreau's advice to simplify your solution.

Watching all these brainy kids was a real treat and a great learning experience in itself. Here is a video of the Singapore team that is working on a way to help people with dementia:

Disclosure: As a judge, my travel expenses to the event were covered by Microsoft.

The Basics

Barnes & Noble was the king of the book superstore. In the early 1990s, the company revolutionized the book industry by going big, wiping out the little guys with economies of scale. At the end of the decade, as Amazon lured users with its online logistics edge, Barnes & Noble clawed back to a strong second spot with streamlined operations and an online push.

And when e-readers hit the market, Barnes & Noble had the foresight to launch its own device, the Nook, while its closest competitor, Borders, sold third-party devices. The decision worked for Barnes & Noble, which built the Nook into a nearly $2 billion business, while Borders has stumbled into bankruptcy.

In April 2012, Barnes & Noble and Microsoft entered into an agreement to create “Newco,” a Nook-centric company that would combine educational and digital business lines, and create new, complementary products. Microsoft reportedly paid more than $300 million up front for a 17.6% stake, pledging an additional $300 million over time.

The Problem

Barnes & Noble is a one-trick pony in an industry full of device, platform and content convergence. For the most part, Barnes & Noble has remained a bookseller, and that narrow focus has relegated the former goliath to a bit player.

Microsoft’s infusion of cash into “NewCo” after yet another quarterly loss has helped the company deal with amped-up competition from the Kindle Fire and other e-readers. Still, like another prominent Number Two player, Barnes & Noble’s financial woes have forced the company into an unbalanced relationship with its Seattle benefactor. Microsoft gets a physical presence and access to the growing educational market – a traditional Apple stronghold. Barnes & Noble almost certainly gets pressured to build a low-margin Windows-based Nook, so Microsoft has something to compete with the Kindle Fire and the new Google Nexus 7 tablets.

Physical bookstores are dying, and content sales are becoming more device-dependent. Google and Amazon have deep enough pockets to aggressively market loss-leading tablets. Barnes & Noble doesn’t. Microsoft does, but who knows if it will cut its losses and run if the going gets rough - or if it decides to focus on Windows tablets like the Surface. For Microsoft, the education market is just a nice-to-have. Barnes & Noble doesn’t have that luxury.

The Players

Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch gets digital retail. He’s run e-commerce for Palm, Gifts.com and HSN.com, and unlike the Riggio brothers (Founder and Chairman Leonard and Vice Chair and former CEO Steve), Lynch isn’t hamstrung by an emotional attachment to paper books. He also understands the opportunities of Barnes & Noble’s physical stores, like linking book reviews into Nooks via NFC chips. He has a rough road ahead, but Lynch may be Barnes & Noble’s greatest asset.

The Prognosis

The Nook, as an entertainment and collaboration device, is not on par with competitive tablets. That may be fine for consumers who just want to read e-books, but over time it’s likely to lose out to inexpensive yet full-fledged tablets. With Newco, Barnes & Noble and Microsoft might have a shot at capturing a solid chunk of the nascent educational e-book market, but they’ll have to demonstrate success relatively quickly or Microsoft could decide the push isn’t worth the effort. Barnes & Noble may not fold anytime soon, but it’s on a path toward increasing irrelevance.

Can This Company Be Saved?

Absolutely, but it’s going to take a lot of work and a bunch of luck. Google’s new tablet will hurt Nook’s direct sales, and Barnes & Noble will need to find new ways to get users into its ecosystem - for example, aggressive bundling of devices with textbooks. The company’s future may boil down to how much help Microsoft chooses to give. If the Surface and other products promote the Nook store, and if Microsoft cuts a licensing deal for low-cost Nook devices with the power to challenge Google, Barnes & Noble has a decent shot at long-term survival. If the competition gets ugly and Microsoft cuts and runs, as it has before, Barnes & Noble will likely fade away. Even if Lynch plays all his cards right, he might still lose the game.

DeathWatch Victims So Far

Research In Motion: Things are hurtling downhill even faster than expected. Massive losses - more than 11 times worse than expected - and new delays in its Hail Mary BlackBerry 10 operating system update have made the company's dire situation even harder to ignore.

HP: No change in status

Nokia: No change in status

38 Studios: No change in status

Even as millennials (those born and raised around the turn of the century) enter college with far more exposure to computer and mobile technology than their parents ever did, professors are increasingly finding that their students' comfort zone is often limited to social media and Internet apps that don’t do much in the way of productivity. One professor at the University of Notre Dame, for example, reports that many of his students don't even know how to navigate menus in productivity applications. 

Spreadsheets Go Begging

In U.S. high schools, students usually get some exposure to word processing and presentation applications, but spreadsheet skills often go untaught. And Web skills - including basic HTML coding techniques - are even more rare.

Some students, of course, like to figure out such skills on their own or attend schools that make computer productivity part of the curriculum. But there are surprisingly few of them.

According to the fall 2011 release of UCLA’s annual Freshman Survey, only 38.1% of incoming college freshmen self-identified themselves as above average in computer skills, compared to people their age. A paltry 3.2% of students identified a computer-related planned field of study.

Instead, most Millennials use technology for fun and games. That same survey revealed that 94.8% of the freshmen were on online networks like Facebook for some duration during their last year of high school.

Time to Get Serious?

Why is there such a gap in serious technology skills? Schools are hard-pressed to provide the required equipment and software for computer training, not to mention adequately trained teachers and staff to deliver effective courses. And when skills are taught, they’re mostly limited to productivity-level tools, not more technically challenging Web development and programming.

Rapid innovation is another issue. As technology continues to advance, slow-moving educational institutions can’t keep up. So many schools end up teaching outmoded courses based on products and technologies no longer in wide use.

The private sector, sensing the widening chasm between technology use versus real skill, is stepping in to fill this gap. Udacity offers free online courses in computer science, physics and artificial intelligence. Treehouse offers low-cost access to courses on Web programming and design, as well as iOS development. Codecademy runs free classes on Web fundamentals and Javascript, among other topics.

This is a big deal. Today’s students face a job market that increasingly clamors for real technology skills, not just the ability to post party pictures on Facebook.

Schools and colleges will do their best to adjust to meet the need, and private alternatives will continue to flower. But the real answer is for the great majority of students to recognize the importance of technology productivity, not just amusement. Only then will Millennials find the tools they need to live up to their reputation as technology leaders.

For additional information on learning computer and programming skills, check out: 

Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy

Ladies Learning Code Team Aims to Fix Programmer Education - One City at a Time

This quiet but uncomfortable truth permeates the discussion of technology use across many sectors. A report released Monday by the State Educational Technology Directors Association called "The Broadband Imperative" specifically identifies the need for more external broadband in today’s schools, citing “at least 100Mbps per 1,000 students/staff” as a 2014-15 school year target, and 1Gbps per 1,000 students/staff for the 2017-18 academic year.

The report called for even higher internal networking specs: The minimum internal WAN connections between schools and the district should be 1Gbps/1,000 for 2014-15, and 10Gbps/1,000 for the 2017-18 target. Most schools, of course, don’t even approach those speeds. Nearly 80% of survey respondents said their school’s broadband connections were inadequate to meet their current needs.

The reason for the need in schools? The increase in online curriculum and multimedia content that the organization expects will be delivered to the classroom.

Widespread Bottlenecks

The bandwidth squeeze in schools is hardly unique. The problem is being felt in the enterprise as well. As more organizations move their infrastructure to the cloud and replace traditional software with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, the extra network demands are saturating networks and actually slowing down the user experience.

But nowhere is the bottleneck of networks and wide-area network (WAN) connectivity being felt as strongly as the big data sector.

MapR’s Jack Norris sees this pain all the time. MapR, like Cloudera and Hortonworks, is a commercial vendor of Apache Hadoop, the open source clustering storage tool that so many associate with big data. MapR works with companies every day to improve data processes.

“For many organizations, it takes longer to move the data across the network from the storage clusters to the compute servers than it does to perform the analysis,” Norris, MapR’s VP of marketing said. “Particularly when dealing with large data such as clickstreams, sensor data, credit card transactions, ad impressions, genomic data, etc. It makes more sense to perform data and compute together and send the results over the network.”

Fortunately, Hadoop does not typically replace existing data infrastructure, like relational databases and data warehouses. Rather, Hadoop augments these existing tools. This is helpful to the network bottleneck problem, because more data is staying put and being processed in situ within Hadoop, thus reducing network traffic.

Even Hadoop Can’t Save Us

But even with Hadoop doing more heavy lifting, big data infrastructures are starting to take network performance hits.

Cloud computing, SaaS and big data will all feel the weight of network capacity limits, brought on by much more data, aging networking technology and edge-of-network problems like bufferbloat. (For more on this issue, check out Jim Gettys' blog.)

It’s a problem that engineers at networking companies like Cisco are working hard to address, by rethinking the way networks work, using traffic classification and engineering methods.

Until a solution arrives, however, the potential benefits of cloud computing and big data solutions will be compromised by the reality of the networks used to access them.

But if Harvard and MIT hold true to their commitment to share the technology and the wisdom they get by developing online learning platforms, there could be a bigger benefit for higher education as a whole: a drastic improvement in the six-year graduation rate.

The Problem: A Primer on Six-Year Graduation Rates

Six-year graduation rates are the measuring stick of choice for how well a school does in converting students into alumni. Congress mandated in 1990 that colleges begin reporting the numbers as a way for people to compare one school to another.

People outside of higher education are always a bit shocked when they hear that the national average is 56.5%, meaning just over one out of two people who entered college in 2006-07 will have graduated by the end of this year’s commencement season.

The bigger burden - and one presidential candidates may want to touch on as they continue to debate student loans - is that many of those people who don’t make it through college in six years are paying back (or defaulting on) student loans that they would have conceivably had an easier time paying off with the higher income a college degree is supposed to provide.

I teach part-time at Bridgewater State University, a publicly supported school in Massachusetts that has a six-year graduation rate of 54%: in line with the national average but significantly lower than the state average of 69.2% (which was the highest of any state in the country in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available).

Harvard, incidentally, has a six-year graduation rate of 97%. MIT checks in at 93%. 

Six-year graduation rates are influenced by a wide range of factors, but one of the biggest predictors is first-year retention rates. In other words, get a student through that freshman year and there is a good chance he or she will eventually graduate. In most of the 10 semesters I've been at Bridgewater State, I have taught at least one section of the two-part first-year writing class that all students are required to take. This is a make-or-break course for first-year students at any school, and often a key indicator of whether or not a student is going to make it through his or her freshman year.

How the Harvard and MIT Initiative Can Help Improve Six-Year Graduation Rates

Theoretically, freshman writing at any school is designed to help prepare students for the writing assignments they will face in college. But it also serves as an inadvertent weeding-out process: Generally speaking, if a student struggles in that class, there’s a good chance I won’t bump into him or her in what should have been sophomore year.

But what if students could take that crucial class for free, online, in the summer - or even the school year before they arrived on campus? What if they could get a taste of what they were getting themselves into before they signed student loan agreements and committed to moving across state or across country? 

The first MIT classes accommodated 120,000 students. Conceivably, at a school like Bridgewater State - where undergraduate enrollment is about 10,000 - the entire incoming freshman class could arrive on campus having already completed their first course. But the class also could have served as a warning for students who were coming to college ill-prepared.

I’m not, and never will be, in the “college isn’t for everyone” camp, but I am convinced that college isn’t for every 18-year-old. It’s not always a maturity thing, either: whereas a lot of people have traditionally gone to college to figure out what they want to do, it increasingly makes sense for students to take a year or two - or five - after high school to figure out what they want to do, and then figure out how college can help them obtain those goals.

Failing a class in a free, lower-stakes environment may be the wake-up call some students and parents need before they realize they’re not quite ready for college. Or it may be the incentive students need to get extra help and preparation before they move into their dorms.

For the students that pass, it would build their confidence to tackle other classes, and they would arrive on campus with three credits and one requirement already out of the way.

Getting a Leg Up

There’s a benefit to mid-tier schools like Bridgewater State that essentially give away a free class. As George Siemens, who teaches at the publicly supported online Canadian university Athabasca University, told The New York Times, increased access to online classes from the Ivies and other top schools - plus the ever-increasing pressure from for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix - mean mid-tier schools may be losing their niche demographic.

“If I were president of a mid-tier university, I would be looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading university offers a free circuits course, it becomes a real question whether other universities need to develop a circuits course,” Siemens said.

One way around the problem is to embrace the technology and be a leader in its implementation before it becomes a problem or a threat. Another is to boost student goodwill by letting them use it to their advantage and before they even arrive on campus. If such a system can indeed boost those six-year graduation rates (and educators won’t know until someone tries it and studies it), there’s a good chance more affordable schools like Bridgewater State could maintain their competitive edge.

At the start of the 2011-2012 school year, I spoke to the faculty of Mass Maritime Academy about ways they could incorporate social media into their teaching. My instructions were clear: It’s only something you should do if you are 100% comfortable with the technology, and whether you were having students watch YouTube videos relevant to the course or tweet questions and discussion points in class, social media had to be a tool, not a distraction.

The reaction was lukewarm at best, with some instructors outright dismissive of what I was saying and others at least curious in hearing more. That tends to be the general attitude in higher education, where some professors will take away smartphones if they see a student giving it a wayward glance and others, like me, will actively encourage students to tweet throughout my lectures and our class discussions.

Evidence that Social Media Boosts Learning Outcomes, But No Best Practices (Yet)

There is a growing body of scholarly research suggesting that, when used properly, social media can boost both learning outcomes and student engagement. The key phrase in that sentence is “when used properly.” The problem is that research in this area is still relatively limited, and most of what is being done in classrooms is experimental. No one has figured out definitively what does and does not work.

While prior to this year I had used social media to informally connect with students and discuss class material, this was the first year I made some form of social media a core component of the English and communication studies classes I taught.

How social media was used depended on the class. The freshman writing class was encouraged to use Google+ to peer edit papers and discuss group projects. A film class used Twitter to ask questions and make comments during in-class screenings. An intro to journalism class live-tweeted events on campus, used Storify to analyze the coverage of major news events and performed a Twitter scavenger hunt to test their reporting skills as part of a final exam.

I started the year using Google+ and Twitter, but simply found students reluctant to use Google+ which was still just three months old at the time. I ran into problems with a freshman writing class in the fall semester (at the time, Google required users to be 18 or older, and I had several 17-year-old students who couldn’t sign up for the service).

Professors Aren’t the Only Ones Reluctant to Use Social Media

While the views are rapidly shifting, there is still a creep factor when it comes to professors friending students and vice versa on Facebook, which was one of the primary reasons I focused on Twitter. Even if students had a Twitter account they didn’t want their professor creeping on, they could easily create a second account for class-use only.

Most students were indifferent. Some loved the idea. But others outright hated it. The reactions included “It’s just not my thing,” “I hate that Twitter [expletive deleted],” and “I don’t get it.” It was that last group that ended up being most problematic: They required extra help, and going forward I need to work more “how-to” instruction into the classes at the beginning of the semester.

With a few exceptions, I did not factor Twitter participation into the grade. But students who were reluctant to use it, for whatever reason, tended to struggle in classes where there were high rates of adoption by other students. I made a point of never making crucial announcements or giving important information over Twitter, but in classes that were truly engaged, there were a lot of useful supplemental discussions happening on the back channel. Students who didn’t participate soon found themselves behind their classmates.

On one hand, I can equate Twitter to reading assignments, in that it’s ultimately the student’s decision to read or not read material that will help them understand the class material. But, at the same time, students presumably know how to read, and read well, when they arrive to my class. That isn’t always going to be the case with social media.

Simple and Not-So-Simple Ways to Increase Engagement

Each of my classes had a hashtag for posting class-related tweets: #COMM240, for example, was the hashtag used by my Intro to Journalism classes. One of the simplest ways to increase in-class Twitter use was to simply write the hashtag on the whiteboard at the start of every class.

I also needed to change my role from professor to participant when we were on the back channel. In the film class, my instinct was to over-tweet when I felt the discussion was lagging. Over time, however, I started to notice that student participation increased when I backed off. I would answer questions and insert a few discussion points when it was warranted, but the biggest key for increasing engagement was to let the students run with the conversation.

The best way to increase engagement, however, was to show how important social media has become. A lot of people - students or otherwise - still view social media as a way of connecting with friends and colleagues. Outside of tech and, to a lesser extent, journalism and demographic studies, the impact of the huge cultural shift is lessened.

Students who had been reluctant to learn social media skills by and large got more engaged after I spent a class discussing how people were using social media in Mexico to track the drug cartels, sometimes risking their own safety to tell stories on blogs and Twitter that the mainstream media was not covering. Other reluctant classroom adopters got on board after we discussed how student journalists at Virginia Tech were able to share information about a shooting on campus in December, even as the campus was locked down. A guest speaker who was just a few years out of college herself and was already doing quite well managing the social media strategy for a successful tech company also increased student interest.

Don’t Just Believe Me

As mentioned, there’s a growing body of research that says we at least need to explore ways to use social media in the college classroom. That’s a fairly huge cultural shift on college campuses, where professors operate with full academic freedom and many remain dismissive of the technology.

For further reading, here are some of the articles that influenced my own jump into incorporating social media into every class I teach:

The best place to start is a fairly comprehensive literature review of social media in higher education, including suggested research directions, by researchers from the University of Arizona and Claremont Graduate College.

“Tweeting For Class” by researchers at Stanford and Cornell is also a useful read, showing how students who “co-constructed” lectures by using Twitter were more engaged. Some 90% of students who participated in the research recommended the instructors use the method again: I haven’t finished my end-of-semester reviews, but I’m certain 90% is a higher endorsement than any of the techniques I tried will get.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The terms of the deal have Microsoft settling its suit with B&N, giving the company a royalty-bearing patent license for the Nook line. Microsoft is putting a $300 million investment into "newco," an as-yet-unnamed subsidiary, in exchange for a nearly 18% equity stake in the company. B&N will own the rest of the company, which will have an "ongoing relationship" with B&N's retail stores. The company will also include the B&N college business. There will be a Nook app for Windows 8 as part of the deal, as well.

Last March, Microsoft sued Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec, claiming that they were infringing on five Microsoft patents. Rather than caving, as many other companies have done, B&N went on the offensive, describing Microsoft's strong-arm tactics (PDF) for wringing licensing fees out of companies using Android.

The case was stayed last June, (PDF) pending the outcome of an International Trade Commission (ITC) decision. That decision was expected on April 27th, and didn't look good for Microsoft.

Microsoft Saves Face, B&N Gets a Boost

So, despite the fact that the deal took many industry watchers by surprise, it shouldn't have been a total shock. Microsoft wasn't about to let a losing case go to trial that might jeopardize its Android cash cow.

By settling with B&N, Microsoft avoids an ugly court battle that might not have been decided in its favor. Like most companies that wield patents as weapons, the goal is to prevent competition and maximize royalties. Microsoft has no dog in the e-reader fight, so the partnership with B&N makes sense for Microsoft anyway.

Since Microsoft's patent license for B&N is a royalty-bearing one, it means that Microsoft may well make back its investment and wind up with a portion of the Newco to boot.

Winners and Losers

The big winner here is Microsoft, make no mistake. While the ITC decision was not a lock for B&N to win the case, it should have carried quite a bit of weight.

Barnes & Noble avoids a protracted legal battle with a company with much more legal firepower. The best case for B&N was to fend off Microsoft's suit, which still meant spending a lot of time and money when it's busy trying to compete with Amazon and Microsoft. Having the Microsoft suit cleared off the deck, with some cash to boot, is a win for B&N in the short term. Investors certainly seem to like the deal: Barnes & Noble's stock price is up by more than 60% since the news hit the wires this morning.

This is a loss for Android, though. Once again, patent FUD remains strong in the absence of actual legal decisions. Microsoft can point to the deal and claim, once again, that another company has found its patent claims compelling. It also doesn't have to deal with trial testimony that echoes its back-room patent negotiating tactics, which B&N seemed very willing to disclose.

Whether this helps B&N compete more effectively with Amazon is open to interpretation. So far, Amazon's results with college students have been weak. There's a lot of room for improvement for educaional uses of e-books.

Is it a win for users? It's hard to see how. As usual in patent cases, nothing in the announcement points to any innovation taking place, just two large corporations trying to decide how to carve out market share and avoid real competition.

The market for this type of device may only be in its infancy, but it's already becoming clear how it will revolutionize certain aspects our lives. Education is a huge one, as recent developments have demonstrated.

In January, Apple made good on its late CEO's vision to enter the digital textbook market with the launch of iBooks 2 and the iBooks Author production tool for e-books. That early effort was met with mixed reactions. While some were excited to see Apple move into a space that's ripe for disruption, others pointed out the inherent limitations in Apple's model, which for starters, will be cost-prohibitive for many school districts.

The iPad: An Obvious Use Case for Education

In a way, Apple didn't enter the education market. Rather, it followed its customers there. By the time iBooks 2 landed in the App Store, many people had already seen the potential the iPad has to change education. A growing number of college students have, on their own accord, made the device a mainstay of their backpacks. More importantly, several school districts wasted no time launching pilot programs to use the iPad in the classroom in a more official way.

Chicago's public school district was one of those early adopters, having brought iPads into a number of its classrooms and even allowing students to take them home. While programs like this can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement, they can ultimately save districts money on textbooks, since e-books are cheaper than their printed counterparts. And of course, an iPad is considerably lighter than a bag full of textbooks.

Does It Help Learning?

There's also some early evidence that an iPad could provide a more engaging learning experience and might even improve student performance. It's purely anecdotal, but students at Riverside Unified School District have said that using an iPad makes learning and doing homework more enjoyable. Their teachers confirmed that students seem more eager to participate thanks to the iPad. Anybody who's ever spent a long stretch of uninterrupted time reading or watching video on their iPad can see why this might be the case.

One small-scale study conducted at Riverside indicated that Algebra students using iPads tested at 90% proficiency, compared to 60% among their traditional textbook-toting counterparts.

"I think the iPad has enormous potential to positively impact education, but not by itself," says Mike Muir, an educator in Auburn, Maine.

Muir helped the Auburn School District implement a program that enabled every kindergarten student in the district to learn using iPads. The program is focused on enhancing literacy and math proficiency among students, Muir says.

Tablets are slowly finding their way into classrooms, but it will be some time before they're affordable and easily deployable enough to make the kind of widespread impact everybody envisions. Especially in urban school districts, where educational woes are often at their very worst, many schools can hardly afford basic school supplies, let alone $400 gadgets. There are also issues of safeguarding the devices, managing student distractions and determining who pays for and thus owns content like e-books and apps.

The Value for Self Education

In the meantime, the devices make a great tool for self-directed, independent learning. There's no shortage of one-off educational apps on any given subject, from American History to advanced biology. Anybody interested in learning music theory or brushing up on a particular instrument has a wide range of tablet-based tools to help them do so.

Alongside iBooks 2, Apple unveiled a dramatically overhauled iTunes U, which offers video lectures and full-fledged course materials from top universities. There's also an iPad app for Khan Academy, the wildly popular video learning site.

The device makes perfect sense for educational purposes, whether its self-learning or a more formal classroom setting. Some predict that tablets will outnumber desktop computers in schools before we know it. There are still some kinks to iron out before we get there, but it's hard to imagine the classroom of the future without a glass touchscreen on every desk.

Princeton; Stanford; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania will all offer courses on the platform for free to anyone in the world with Internet access. To help bring Coursera up to speed, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates have backed it with $16 million in venture funding.

"We see a future where world-renowned universities serve millions instead of thousands," says Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. "Our mission is to teach the world and make higher education available for everyone," says her partner, Andrew Ng.

"By partnering with the world's leading universities, we're making college-level classes more accessible to anyone who wants to learn," Koller says.

And it's not just learning by rote. Coursera is a platform for instruction, discussion and grading at Internet scale. It extends the influence of universities around the world, and it provides them data-driven insights into how to adapt higher education to the global promise of the Internet.

More Than an Afterthought

Many top universities, including Yale and MIT, offer lectures online for free. The Coursera cofounders call that "the afterthought model." It doesn't threaten the established order to put lecture videos up on iTunes, because the experiential and interpersonal parts of learning are missing.

Koller explains that the lecture model was invented out of technological necessity. In the medieval university, the professor read the only copy of the book aloud, and students took notes. That basic format persists today, even though the technological constraints seem absurd in today's classroom.

Coursera is an education technology born out of the practice of teaching. Cofounders Koller and Ng are Stanford computer science professors. Last fall, they developed what would become Coursera as Stanford's first online education platform. It offered two computer science classes online. 200,000 people enrolled. By this spring semester, over one million students around the world have enrolled in more of these courses.

The lecture is just one piece of a Coursera course, and it's not the most important. The two essential elements are peer grading of assignments and the class forum. These present the technical challenge to delivering a meaningful classroom experience at Internet scale.

The Coursera grading technology is good at crunching structured output. It was easier when the courses were focused on computer science and engineering because student work could be easily tested and quantified. But for this launch, Coursera has figured out how to implement its technology for humanities courses as well using peer grading.

The professor comes up with a grading rubric for an assignment and gives it to students - after they submit their work - along with practice grading exercises. Once the students have completed the training, they're qualified to grade each other. The process uses theory from crowdsourcing technology like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Coursera has demonstrated that its peer grading can be about as accurate as your typical university teaching assistant. But unlike the T.A., it can grade 200,000 papers.

The other key technology in Coursera is its forums. No manual system could moderate a class discussion with hundreds of thousands of people in it. Coursera's forum technology identifies and parses duplicate questions, and it auto-suggests related questions as students type. It also uses a Stack Overflow-style reputation system to surface the best conversations.

Is It Time to Use the Word "Disruptive?"

Clayton Christensen's notion of "disruptive innovation" gets tossed around in tech all the time, and it's usually too optimistic. That's especially the case in education technology. Education is too important - and its cultures are too deeply entrenched - to transform overnight with one idea.

We should save the D-word for when an innovation is demonstrably changing the world. But higher education's stagnant methods and skyrocketing price of access could certainly use some disruptive innovation.

The founders of Coursera recognize that online education is immature. There are essential curricular questions that haven't been answered yet. How much reading and writing should students be asked to do? How much social interaction is enough? Too much? What is the value of face-to-face learning versus interacting in a forum?

Doesn't every institution, every course and every instructor have a different balance of answers to these questions?

But that's exactly the value Coursera stands to offer. It will help online education scale. There's more data available at this free, worldwide level.

If 2,000 people get an answer wrong the same way, that's a strong signal to the professor that there's a conceptual problem in the instruction. In response, Coursera can automatically generate messages to students to correct that error.

This platform was designed by trained researchers in machine learning. Coursera is not just an innovative classroom model. It's a system for analyzing the effectiveness of college. It will be great to see the outcomes of this array of new, free, worldwide courses.

As for the on-campus experience, hopefully this new online classroom model will free up departments, instructors and students for more face-to-face work. The Internet is always present. Maybe the real value to being on campus, the one worth paying for, is the part that happens offline.

You can learn more and find the course offerings at Coursera.org.

Photos via Shutterstock

"I'm seeing kids skipping more traditional and print-based applications and going right to the Internet, and I'm seeing that as young as two years old." says Jennifer Jolly, digital lifestyle parenting editor for Tecca.com. "They are integrating the hands-on with the visual for a multi-sensory learning experience."

Many apps are designed specifically for the iPhone, while others work on both the Web and an iPhone, iPod and iPad. (There are plenty of apps for Android, but in this story we will focus on Apple iProducts.) And as kids and parents alike become more familiar with switching between multiple devices while storing their data on the cloud, they are also relying moreso on the Internet for instant answers.

Web apps such as SpaceyMath help kids put their math skills to the test, competing with other kids in a multiplayer space. Using an arcade-like, gameshow-esque format, this Web app encourages them to learn math skills while having fun.

"My daughter, who is in fifth grade, turns to the Internet for help," says Jolly. "Math isn't my strong suit. I can figure out the answers, but preteens today are doing math in a completely different way - in a way that integrates technology." For iPad math apps, check out MathsInsider.com.

Activity apps such as GeoPalz are an easy way for parents to keep track of how much and how often their kids are exercising. In an age of all screens, all the time, this could actually function less like parents-spying-on-kids and more like a good check to make sure that kids are getting up and moving around. GeoPalz is essentially a kid-friendly pedometer that parents clip to their kids' shoelaces. Kids earn free prizes the more they exercise. Aside from using Web apps to collaboratively work on math and exercise, another important element is collaborative creativity.

DoInk.com is a Web and iPad app that provides drawing and animation tools to nearly 500,000 preteen and teen users worldwide. To comply with the Childrens' Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), DoInk.com does not allow kids younger than 13 to engage in community conversation. The Web version has a community aspect to it, and is for kids 13 and up. The app is for all ages, precisely because it does not have a community component - kids cannot share and communicate on there. But they can still make images, like playing with an Etch-a-Sketch back in the day.

"It's interesting because so many schools have cut their arts budgets," says Karen Miller, co-founder of DoInk.com. "And so you get this group of very disenfranchised teens who have nowhere to go to create artistically."

While parents are clearly interested in how to keep their preteens safe online, there is also a self-expression aspect. How are preteens expressing their inner emotional worlds?

"For them to be able to jump in a website, whether its ours or some others, they can create, paint without messy cleanup, they can be expressive," says Miller. "And the No. 1 thing they're doing is expressing an emotion or telling a story."

Looking for more preteen-friendly apps? Check out this list of best apps for kids ages 9-11 on Common Sense Media.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The exhibit was based on something called Mathematica, which was created by the famed husband-and-wife design team Charles and Ray Eames on behalf of IBM. It was originally built for the California Museum of Science and Industry near downtown Los Angeles and was actually part of the museum from the early 1960s until 1998. The exhibit included playful animated films also created by the Eameses that offered two-minute lessons on symmetry, powers of numbers and other mathematical concepts.

Today IBM has released a free iPad app called Minds of Modern Mathematics. The app takes the photographs and other vintage materials that were used to create this exhibit and packages it into a nice, browsable collection. The app is being released during the centennial year of Ray Eames' birth.

You can look back on nearly a thousand years of major math events and timelines showing which mathematicians lived when. There is a lot of stuff to read and there are pictures of the mathematicians' accomplishments. It is all very well done, and to this once-undergraduate math major, it's still very exciting and interesting.

The Eameses were responsible for many design innovations, including molded plywood chairs (see the lead photo) and other practical furniture. They were excellent communicators, and among other projects, they made short educational films - which many of us saw during science class back in the day when filmstrips and overhead projectors were in our classrooms. This was in the era before CGI and special effects, and yet the videos were powerful and simple efforts that got some very complex concepts across.

One of their most potent films was something they did in 1977, which I remember seeing for the first time in the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Tucked away amongst the old planes and rocketry was a small exhibit called "The Powers of Ten" and a movie that you can see below. We start with a picnic along Lake Michigan in Chicago and the camera angle is a square meter. Our point of view zooms into space and for every second, we increase the field of view by a power of ten. Soon we are moving into the outer reaches of our galaxy and then into what is largely empty space. We then return back to earth and go into the microscopic world, down to the atomic level.

I must have stood in front of that 10-minute film and watched it about 17 times, fascinated by the whole thing. IBM sponsored that particular film, too.

You can download the iPad app here. And if you are interested in learning more about the Eameses, check out the website EamesOffice.com. If you are in the New York or Boston area, the original exhibit can still be found in the cities' science museums. That to me shows how good the Eameses were: Something that can stand the test of more than 50 years is still educating present-day audiences.

It isn't fair for parents to monitor every move that their child makes - how will this child become their own person, know when to ask for help, and understand how to handle tricky social situations if a parent is keeping track of them 24/7? In an Internet world, constant surveillance is easy. Yet it's within the gray areas that both children and parents can learn the most - about themselves, and navigating their digital lives.

The Internet is a world of its own, one that can be used for good, positive learning experiences, or one that becomes a space for wasting energy, time and money. It is what you make of it. When it comes to actual monitoring tools, why not start the conversation from a place of trust?

"Parents really need to build a relationship with their kids around their online activities, just like you would if your child were playing soccer or going to a school dance," says Julia French, an American parent who also works with online monitoring service Secure.me. "As parents, involvement is key."

SafeKids.com offers a handy list of 10 kids rules for online safety, specifically aimed at preteens. They focus on building trust between parents and kids. Some of the key concepts for kids include telling a parent if they come across information that makes them feel uncomfortable, not giving out personal information, not agreeing to meet with someone they've met online, not sending images, setting up rules with parents about going online, and being a good online citizen. Nearly all of the rules laid out on the SafeKids list depend on children talking with their parents, and vice versa.

Outside of the communication element, services such as Secure.me and SafetyWeb.com can help parents keep an eye on potentially harmful content that a child might come across, especially on social networks.

"Secure.me monitors not just for potentially dangerous or sexual content, but also tracks posts for possible aggressive or cyber-bullying content and content posted by apps," says Secure.me Founder Christian Sigl. "The solution focuses on both physical and computer security, helping parents protect their children against Facebook-borne spam, identity theft and viruses. "

But the preteen group, ages 13 and under, does not actually have to think about Facebook. The world's largest social network requires that people be 13 years of age or older to sign up. According to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a "child" means an individual under the age of 13. COPPA details what a website operator must include in its privacy policy, how to seek verifiable consent from a parent or guardian, and responsibilities to protect the privacy of children specifically on marketing aimed at preteens. This law puts the brakes on collecting personal information from kids ages 13 and under. The real world begins on Facebook at age 13. Until then, there are a few Internet training wheels.

Facebook Training Wheels: Everloop

For preteens, practicing social networking on Everloop.com is one way to go about helping your child become familiar with the online social networking space. Everloop started in February 2011 as a way to empower girls, but quickly realized that it needed to expand beyond the one gender.

"Kids under 13 have multiple interests," says Everloop CMO Sandy Barger, who came from Disney. "It's a very fragmented world for them, and the biggest concern is kids' safety. They don't want to be bullied. We have been able to create a safe environment, to see what kids are interested in."

In preparation for the never-ending information flow of Facebook, Everloop has created a similar environment yet with safety guards in place for parents to potentially intervene and open up discussions with their kids based on IRL conversations.

In October of last year, Everloop launched EverText, a way for kids to directly text status updates to the network. Parents had the opportunity to moderate how many texts per month their kid is able to send. A moderation filter alerts parents to words, phrases and other content that could be deemed dangerous.

"If you think about kids today, they're all digital natives. They don't know any better, and the majority of parents that are raising under-13 kids are digital natives themselves," Everloop's COO Tobin Trevarthen told ReadWriteWeb. "As we evolve into social space, we saw an easy opportunity to educate a younger generation of digital natives."

Everloop also recently launched Facebook-like apps specifically for users of the site. Miniclip, integrated into Everloop's Game Channel, makes it possible for kids to play games like "Run Run Hamster" and "Monkey Kick Off." Everloop has also partnered with Mattel and National Geographic, launching two games closely associated with brands: Monster High and Animal Jam. The mixing of brands and games prepares kids for a world that's quite similar in that respect.

If you would rather closely analyze your child's online activity, try out the service SafetyWeb.com. We don't necessarily recommend it, as we are more interested in building good relationships between parent and child, but it could be useful if you're concerned that there is something negative going on with your child's online reputation and privacy.

"It's key to make your child understand that you're supervising them and use solutions to monitor his or her activities for no other reason than protecting your child," says Secure.me's Sigl. "Never monitor your child's activities secretly as this could harm the family's bond of trust. Social networking should be a topic discussed frequently and openly within the family. As a parent, encourage your child to talk to you and listen to your kid to learn about the risk he or she faces."

Teaching Kids to Be Responsible on Social Networks: BeSeen

Carnegie Mellon University's app BeSeen uses the template of a fictional social network to help kids learn how to interact positively and safely, and how to stand up for their peers. It offers kids various challenging situations, too, game-ifying the experience, and making it OK to report any questionable situations. It also suggests that even though kids can access information on social networks anytime from their phones, they shouldn't. And it also helps kids learn what types of photos they should and shouldn't upload. To win, players must "protect their online reputation, treat others with respect, watch for signs of trouble and defend their peers."

In short, this game app teaches players that their online profile should reflect them at their best. But should it? That's another conversation that we hope will happen offline.

And even though Facebook has rules that do not let preteens under 13 have accounts, there are plenty who join anyway. It's imperative for parents to teach their preteens about Facebook.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

In our always-on, mobile-focused world, it's easier to pay attention to text messages than those end-of-the-day notes that often get lost on the drive from school to home. KidReports, a digital and Web-based mobile service, delivers information via the one thing that leaves a parent's sight perhaps even less than a child: the smartphone.

The key idea behind KidReports is to seamlessly replace the daily paper activity reports, and also give parents an idea of what their kid is up to. It is available as a Web-only version, and an app for iOS or Android. Teachers can easily record and communicate what the kid is up to, and deliver it through the Web or an app via push notifications that function like text messages.

"As parents, we get these paper reports that are kind of worthless," says KidReports Co-Founder Dan Weaver. "Every day I come home from work and ask my daughter what she did during the day and she says 'play.' I wanted to have more information from the school. All the parents on the KidReports team have had some of the same frustrations."

KidReports real-time messaging echoes a group iMessage SMS or the group message platform Beluga, which was acquired last year by Facebook. But unlike text messages, which can often have a sense of urgency to them, KidReports is all contained in the mobile app. For parents who are at a computer all day, it's possible to just check via the Web version of KidReports.com.

"We wanted to create a more effective method of communication with our child care facilities," says Weaver. "To put it simply, we wanted to know what was happening with our kids in real time during the day."

Data-Driven Patterns Turn Your Kid's Daily Activity Into a Science

Aside from knowing what the kid is up to during the day, KidReports helps parents get a better idea of their child's activity patterns. Over time, this could help parents better utilize their time, syncing with their little one's napping cycles and making plans accordingly.

KidReports Co-Founder Leif Ullman is more interested in this sort of data-driven experience.

"One thing I was doing with my son is keeping these report sheets for a week or two and looking at the trends," says Ullman. "When is he sleeping or taking naps? I wanted to make sure what we were doing at home was lining up with the day care schedule. I could look at a chart or graph of sleep times and food intake. If I have access to this historical data, I can... get more data on what patterns are emerging for my kid."

Will this sort of added data take away the serendipitous aspect of having kids? And really, do parents want to know what their kids are doing at every moment of the day? Don't parents need a break from their kids from time to time?

"That's not the purpose of what we're doing," says Weaver. "We send push notifications on a phone or via email, saying that your kid played outside, took a nap, ate lunch. Then you get a photo along with that, too."

Nicole Robideau, one of the early BETA testers who works by day as an estimator at an auto-body shop in Denver, tells ReadWriteWeb about the ways that KidReports has helped her with her son, who is asthmatic. For her, KidReports helps her maintain his schedule on the weekends.

"Knowing what times he's sleeping and eating are incredibly helpful to me," she says. "I get all my alerts about everything I need to bring when he's out of stuff. It's just a little notification that shows up on my phone like a text message, and it's not at all disruptive to me."

Is this a matter of trust? Do parents not trust the day care facility where they leave their children?

"I trust his facility," says Robideau. "But it's just kind of nice to know what he's doing. It's a quick thing."

Says Weaver: "You receive a photo of your kid playing, and it really goes back to this peace of mind."