Last Summer Kate reported on BYU's Education Startup MOOC, Ed Startup 101. Less publicized was the news BYU was launching its own Learning Management System.

The new homegrown product, called Learning Suite, combines five standalone tools that were already in use a the university:

Syllabus

Learning Outcomes (descriptions of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that learners should have after successfully completing a learning experience or program)

Digital Dialog (a multimedia discussion tool)

Mid-course evaluation tool

Flashcard tool (for faculty to learn the names and faces of students each semester)

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If this sounds familiar it should. Some EdLab equivalents over the years include:

- Live Syllabus
- Meety
- Vialogues
- Ednode

The BYU case differs in many ways from the mSchool example at TC. But I still think there is much we can learn about their approach, particularly the modularity of tools, a service-oriented architecture, data, and the service commitments.

Check out this story from the Times about fake academic journals and conferences.

The number of these journals and conferences has exploded in recent years as scientific publishing has shifted from a traditional business model for professional societies and organizations built almost entirely on subscription revenues to open access, which relies on authors or their backers to pay for the publication of papers online, where anyone can read them.

Given this trend we should make sure there are no imitators of the Teachers College Record or the National Study for the Study of Education.

Google has launched a new product that promises to be the best search experience ever: Google Nose. Check it out here.

Happy April everyone.

Check out this story about a graduate student suing her professor and Lehigh University for 1.3 million dollars for lost earnings.

The C-plus prevented Thode, an otherwise A student, from going on to the next class and advancing in her professional therapist studies, the newspaper reported. She wound up getting a master's degree in human development instead.

Human development!? The horror.

A few years ago I blogged about the departure of Douglas Bowman from Google as Visual Design Lead. Long story short, he left Google because of the emphasis on data and how he believed it was impacting design decisions (a "design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data"). Well, Google never did end up identifying a "grand leader of design." Instead, a small team of Google designers (UXA) laid our a vision for Google products that enabled various product teams to develop consistent design.

How did it this happen? According to the story, it all started when Larry Page became CEO in 2011 and Project Kennedy. Some highlights:

"Larry said ‘hey everyone, we’re going to redesign all of our products,’" recalls Jon Wiley, lead designer on Google Search. Wiley and co had just two months to give Google a fresh coat of paint, and to start thinking holistically about how Google as a whole was perceived. "We had a mandate to make this all look good," Wiley says."

Check out this story about the impact of the new Google ISP on entrepreneurship in Kansas City. In short, the one gigabyte per second internet speed is drawing growing interest from start-ups.

Learning Analytics Seminar Series
Ilya Goldin
Carnegie Mellon University

Title: Towards Effective Feedback for All: Learner Differences in Hint Processing

January 14, 2013
10:30am
Grace Dodge Hall 281
Teachers College, Columbia University

Abstract:
Because feedback affects learning, it is central to many educational technologies. We analyze the role of feedback in an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for high school geometry, finding that individual student differences play a significant role in modeling learner performance. Further, we find that students treat different feedback types differently. Our novel evaluation method is to build statistical models to compare the effectiveness of different types of feedback, accounting for student proficiency, skill difficulty, and prior practice. The work has implications for educational technology design, helping designers leverage individual learner differences to personalize future educational technologies.

Bio:
Ilya Goldin is a PostPIER Postdoctoral Trainee at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Ken Koedinger and Vincent Aleven.

At the first EdLab Seminar of 2013, the EdLab Founder/Indirector Professor Gary Natriello outlined 16 potential projects we could tackle this coming year.

In order to support this effort, I am posting directions for building EdLab Learning Glass. Now, to be fair I did not come up with these myself. They are from Rod Furlan, a self described "artificial intelligence researcher, quant, and Singularity University alumnus." (potential New Learning Times Profile?).

So without further ado, here they are.

Check out this infographic on the history of educational technology by edudemic.

It starts with oral "pedagogy" and music education in 40th and 50th century BC and concludes in the present day with some stats about university enrollment and current technologies.

Last week Guido van Rossum, the author of Python, announced he was leaving Google to join Dropbox as a full-time software engineer. This follows the departure of another famous Google employee back in April 2012. But don't fret lovers/investors of Google. The company just announced it was hiring futurist Ray Kurzweil. Who better than the author of The Singularity is Near to lead initiatives like Google Goggles and self-driving cars.