The robots are coming, and they want our jobs, InformationWeek reports. That’s progress. In the 20th century, they wanted our women. Actually, the robots don’t want all of our jobs. They’re said to be capable of competing for about 47% of them, at least in the US, given current technological expectations. So only half of us will need to retrain. The other option is to join the Resistance. Who knew The Terminator was an employment double entendre? The other half of us should get used to being lonely on the job, which may evolve into making sure our mechanized colleagues don’t malfunction or do something unexpected. Small consolation though it may be, if you’re the last human on the factory floor, you won’t need to worry about turning out the lights when you leave. That’s the sort of task robots do very well…
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3 big Facebook policy changes
Facebook users beware: Your posts and likes can be turned into ads shown to your friends and others, depending on your privacy settings, InformationWeek reports. Facebook announced that it has moved forward with changes to its Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which were first announced in August. By owning a Facebook account, you’re allowing the company to use your posts and other personal data for advertising. Shortly after Facebook revealed the proposed changes to its policies this summer, privacy advocates chastised the social network and petitioned for the FTC to step in and block it. The changes, privacy advocates said, violated Facebook’s policies and the 2011 Facebook settlement with the FTC. That settlement stated that the social network deceived consumers by failing to keep privacy promises…
…Read MoreOpen Educational Resources: Smart policy
Education faces many challenges today, and those challenges are growing, InformationWeek reports. While there is unprecedented demand for education, the constraints of cost, quality and access sometimes seem insurmountable. At a time when we need to deliver better and more accessible learning opportunities, budgets are being cut severely. But what if there were a way to provide high quality education to everyone in the world at a marginal cost of near zero? It may sound fanciful, but this opportunity exists. By using 21st century technical and licensing tools to make educational content freely available, everyone everywhere could affordably access the high quality educational resources they want…
…Read MoreStudy: Blended learning improves test scores
A new study by the RAND Corporation and the Department of Education gives new credibility to the popular notion that blended learning — a combination of traditional classroom methods with computer-mediated activities — can improve students’ test scores, InformationWeek reports. The study was one of the largest of its kind, involving 18,000 students in 147 urban, suburban and rural high schools and middle schools in seven states. It demonstrated the success of blended learning in a high school algebra curriculum…
…Read MoreAutomated essay grading software stirs debate
Technology automates. It does other things, too, but its main value, and the thing we fear about it, is its ability to automate, InformationWeek reports. Every time we automate something new, it sparks ecstasy and terror. That’s true even for something as mundane as automated essay grading, which has been around for a while, but was added to the EdX platform earlier this year and then heralded in a New York Times article. The National Council of Teachers of English responded with a statement, “Machine Scoring Fails the Test,” listing nine reasons computers can’t teach writing. The English teachers manifesto was vivid, emotive and foolish. They miss the point entirely. Automated essay grading needs to happen, and English teachers should be screaming for it, especially in K-12…
…Read MoreDo we need a U.S. Department Of Technology?
Tech industries grow because of the availability of research and development dollars, a high-quality education system, a tech-savvy workforce, a large local technology marketplace and government incentives, InformationWeek reports. The U.S. has no intrinsic advantage in the technology industry. Past wins have been a function of dollars invested, bipartisan leadership and lack of global competition. However, now the global competition is heating up — just ask Apple, HP, Ericsson and Boeing, and they’ll tell you Samsung, Lenovo, Huawei and Airbus are tough global competitors. South Korea, China and the European Union governments are investing heavily in the growth of the tech industry…
…Read MoreFor algebra, spreadsheets beat newer teaching tools
If you do a search on “from arithmetic to algebra” as a verbatim phrase, you’ll get about 600 hits, with the ones from Google Books reaching back into the nineteenth century, InformationWeek reports. About three out of every four will be about helping students make the transition from arithmetic to algebra — it has been known for a very long time that that’s where we lose many people who are never able to advance much further in math. As I noted before, 25 years ago RAND surveyed the then-nascent field of educational software and found many effective arithmetic teaching programs and practically nothing that taught any of the important aspects of algebra (abstract relations, strategy, fundamental concepts and so on)…
…Read More20 people who changed tech: The internet pioneers
My father wasn’t much for gardening, InformationWeek reports. Our house had a lawn of about 12 feet by 10 feet. He didn’t like to mow it and neither did I, so every year he cemented over a little more of it, saying: “A fool and his lawnmower are soon united.” But he was voted Man of The Year by the American Concrete Institute. I bring up this tangential point only because if you asked me what the Most Outstanding Development in Technology has been over the past 200 years, I would have to say the internet and the world wide web. President Obama has the original patent application and telegraph key from Samuel Morse in the Oval Office, and he tells visitors that “the internet started here,” and of course he’s right. But the internet really was a cumulative and collaborative effort…
…Read MoreOriginal iPhone nears obsolete status
Even at its 2007 launch, the original Apple iPhone was not a cutting-edge product, InformationWeek reports. Sure, it ushered in a new era of smartphone design and touch-based user interfaces, but the hardware offered mediocre specs in several key areas. At the time, wireless network operators around the world were about midway through deploying their 3G networks. In the U.S., AT&T was just getting its HSUPA network, which offered speeds up to 1.8 Mbps, in place…
…Read MoreEducation data: Privacy backlash begins
As increasing amounts of student, class and school data are captured and analyzed, some people have started to sound alarms about potential privacy violations and other kinds of misuse, InformationWeek reports. “I think it’s totally illegitimate to take kids’ data without parental consent,” said Leonie Haimson, a parent activist and executive director of Class Size Matters, a nonprofit organization that wants smaller classes in New York City’s public schools and the nation as a whole. “If these exact same records were in a doctor’s office or hospital, it would be illegal to collect them without parental consent,” she told InformationWeek in a phone interview…
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