The Great Geek Manual News

More than 100 schools have partnered with YouTube to make an official channel, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Yale. There are promotional videos like campus tours, but the more interesting content is straight from the classroom or lecture hall. Many schools have posted videos of guest lecturers, introductory classes and even a full course.

College too expensive? Try YouTube.

It might seem counterintuitive to look for higher education alongside Avril Lavigne music videos, but the video-sharing site has become a major reservoir of college content.

The Google Inc.-owned YouTube has for the last few years been forging partnerships with universities and colleges. The site recently gathered these video channels under the banner YouTube EDU (http://www.youtube.com/edu).

More than 100 schools have partnered with YouTube to make an official channel, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale and the first university to join YouTube: UC Berkeley.

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Source: News Factor

What’s the point of running a university computer lab when all the students bring laptops anyway? That’s a question that schools have been asking themselves as computer ownership rates among incoming freshmen routinely top 90 percent. Schools like the University of Virginia have concluded that the time has come to dismantle the community computer labs and put that money to more productive uses.

According to the school’s Information Technology & Communication department, 3,117 freshmen enrolled in 2007, and 3,113 of them owned their own computer. Nearly all of the machines were laptops, with 72 percent running Windows and 26 percent running Mac OS X (six hardy souls ran Linux).

Compared to a decade ago, the increase in student computing hardware is little short of amazing. In 1997, 74 percent of incoming freshmen owned computers, but only 16 percent of these machines were laptops. The Windows chokehold on operating systems looked complete, appearing on 93.4 percent of all machines and leaving only 6.6 percent for the Mac.

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Source: Ars Technica

You’re unbelievably good at using Facebook (Facebook reviews) and Twitter (Twitter reviews), but no one is taking you seriously because you don’t have papers to prove it? Birmingham City University can solve your problems; as of next year, it’ll offer a course in social networking sites as communications and marketing tools.

The one year course will earn you a master’s degree at the cost of 4,400 pounds (6 239 dollars). “During the course we will consider what people can do on Facebook and Twitter, and how they can be used for communication and marketing purposes,” says the course convener Jon Hickman, adding that “There has been significant interest in the course already, and it will definitely appeal to students looking to go into professions including journalism and PR.”

Of course, there’s the question of how deep such a course should go; some students have already described the course as too basic. Finding expert teachers on the subject might be a problem, since many students are already very good at using social networking and social media sites. However, there’s nothing wrong with the idea; there are courses in TV and media, and social media and social networking are definitely worthy subjects, especially if you’re studying communications, journalism, PR or marketing.

Source: Mashable

Google and NASA are among those involved with the new Singularity University, which wants to draw elite students for short courses to help solve the world’s big problems.

Launched yesterday at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Long Beach, Singularity University is going to be an institution with a difference. Its chancellor will be futurist Ray Kurzweil, whose 2005 book gave the place its name.

It will be housed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and Google has donated $1 million to help fund it, while other big companies have also given money. But the tuition for the nine-week course will be a very hefty $25,000.

The course will be split into three parts. For the first three weeks, students will study in 10 different fields, including artificial intelligence and computing. For the second stretch of three weeks they’ll do more work in one of the fields, while the final three weeks will be spent on a special project. Those who complete the course will receive a certificate. The university is taking applications from graduate and postgrad students.

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Source: Digital Trends

For as long as anyone can remember, introductory physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was taught in a vast windowless amphitheater known by its number, 26-100.

Squeezed into the rows of hard, folding wooden seats, as many as 300 freshmen anxiously took notes while the professor covered multiple blackboards with mathematical formulas and explained the principles of Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism.

But now, with physicists across the country pushing for universities to do a better job of teaching science, M.I.T. has made a striking change.

The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

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Source: The New York Times

A UFO group in Hong Kong has condemned the city’s largest university for canceling a course on ufology because, it said, of faculty objections to the subject.

The course was set to begin last September as an optional subject for University of Hong Kong students in a joint project between the university and the Hong Kong Institute of Ufology, local newspaper Apple Daily reported Monday.

The course was delayed and discussions were held on offering it at a later date after some academics expressed reservations about its content, Moon Fong, a committee member of the institute, told AFP.

“Some members of the university’s science faculty were concerned that the course would present only the views of the UFO experts,” Fong said.

“But we believed that they were just worried about the possibility of ufology becoming a mainstream discipline at the university,” she said.

Fong said her institute was disappointed to see the course dropped and said it amounted to a suppression of ufologists, which she said was a common problem at academic institutions overseas.

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Source: Phys Org

Each year, the Computing Research Association does an enrollment survey of US-based, PhD-granting academic computer science programs. For the last five years, the number of undergraduate students involved in these programs has been plunging. Fans of CS should take heart, however—the latest survey shows that the declining numbers may have finally leveled off.

Those figures were extracted from a survey performed by the Higher Education Research Institute. The CRA’s take on the numbers is pessimistic, noting that the hangover from the recent lack of interest in CS has caused a continued drop in the total number of people that have chosen it as their major. But that drop hides a difference in the 2007 data: for the first time since the dot-com bubble burst, more students chose computer science as their major than in the previous year (although the increase is less than a percent).

New enrollments of CS majors had peaked in 2000, with 16,000 freshmen nationwide picking a major that, at the time, seemed to promise challenges, excitement, and the possibility of retiring young. As the bubble burst, that number dropped slowly for a couple of years, then dropped quite a bit faster as the decade wore on. By 2005, less than 8,000 new students were opting for CS degrees; due to the lag between declaring a major and graduating, the total number of degrees granted peaked in 2004, but dropped by over 40 percent in the past three years.

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Source: Ars Technica

T. Hayden Barnes opposed his university’s plan to build two large parking garages with $30 million from students’ mandatory fees. So last spring, he did what any student activist would do: He posted fliers criticizing the plan, wrote mass e-mails to students, sent letters to administrators and wrote a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper. While that kind of campaign might be enough to annoy university officials, Barnes never thought it would get him expelled.

Rather than ignore him or set up a meeting with concerned students, Valdosta State University, in Georgia, informed Barnes, then a sophomore, that he had been “administratively withdrawn” effective May 7, 2007. In a letter apparently slipped under his dorm room door, Ronald Zaccari, the university’s president, wrote that he “present[ed] a clear and present danger to this campus” and referred to the “attached threatening document,” a printout of an image from an album on Barnes’s Facebook profile. The collage featured a picture of a parking garage, a photo of Zaccari, a bulldozer, the words “No Blood for Oil” and the title “S.A.V.E.-Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage,” a reference to a campus environmental group and Barnes’s contention that the president sought to make the structures part of his legacy at the university.

The letter also said that in order to return as a student, a non-university psychiatrist would have to certify that Barnes was not a threat to himself or anyone else, and that he would receive “on-going therapy.” After he appealed, with endorsements from a psychiatrist and a professor, the Georgia Board of Regents “didn’t do the right thing and reverse the expulsion,” said William Creeley, a senior program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit organization that defends students’ free expression rights and helped Barnes secure legal counsel.

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Source: Inside Higher Ed

As more Briton youths sign up on social networking sites, Cambridge University’s admissions tutor admitted to discreetly peeking into the Facebook profile of student applicants. But the university, the second oldest in the English-speaking world, stressed it only uses academic benchmarks in selecting students.

Dr. Richard Barnes, senior tutor at Emmanuel College, told a college magazine he joined Facebook to see what was going on among young Britons and to check discreetly on applicants for college. “I had been alerted to the value of this by some of our members in the City,” he wrote. Emmanuel College is one of Cambridge’s 31 colleges founded in 1584 as an educational institution for Protestant preachers.

Cambridge said its main basis in accepting students were the candidate’s interview results, academic record and a personal statement that outlined their interests and reasons for applying for a specific course. Wes Streeting, vice president for education of the National Union of Students said Barnes’ comments were unfortunate and flippant.

“I would be quite concerned if it was college policy to check up on applicants through Facebook… It is a given that candidates are judged fairly and equally. That wouldn’t be the case if a tutor was using Facebook profiles,” Streeting said.

A Facebook profile has personal data including photos, status of relationships and even sexuality. Its safety features include limiting the view of these information to friends.

Facebook is the U.K.’s most popular social networking website. It has 6.5 million registered Britons, edging out MySpace which had only 6.3 million users by August 2007.

Source: All Headline News

Move over “Leave Britney Alone Guy.” And all those cute kitten videos, too. The University of California, Berkeley, is posting course lectures and other campus happenings on YouTube.

“To a teacher who has a passion for teaching, this is enormously exciting,” said physics professor Richard A. Muller, whose “Physics for Future Presidents,” is among courses available online. “My students are everywhere and I don’t have to give them exams.”

Berkeley and other universities have been broadcasting a variety of courses on the Web for some time, including an arrangement Berkeley started in 2006 with YouTube’s parent company Google Inc. The agreement with YouTube was formally announced Wednesday.

Watching the videos is free and for the joy of information only. You won’t get course credit.

“It’s not meant as a substitute for going to class. You can’t interact; you can’t be part of that dialogue,” said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of webcast.berkeley, a local site delivering course and event content as podcasts and streaming video.

But Muller gets e-mail from all over the world — “Even Timbuktu!” — and Hubbard said course videos previously distributed online through Google scored more than a million hits and about 700,000 downloads.

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Source: The Associated Press via Yahoo! News

The number of college students taking courses online is surging, creating a tough dilemma for educators who want to prevent cheating.

Do you trust students to take an exam on their own computer from home or work, even though it may be easy to sneak a peek at the textbook? Or do you force them to trek to a proctored test center, detracting from the convenience that drew them to online classes in the first place?

The dilemma is one reason many online programs do little testing at all. But some new technology that places a camera inside students’ homes may be the way of the future — as long as students don’t find it too creepy.

This fall, Troy University in Alabama will begin rolling out the new camera technology for many of its approximately 11,000 online students, about a third of whom are at U.S. military installations around the world.

The device, made by Cambridge, Mass.-based Software Secure, is similar in many respects to other test-taking software. It locks down a computer while the test is being taken, preventing students from searching files or the Internet. The latest version also includes fingerprint authentication, to help ensure the person taking the test isn’t a ringer.

But the new development is a small Web cam and microphone that is set up where a student takes the exam. The camera points into a reflective ball, which allows it to capture a full 360-degree image. (The first prototype was made with a Christmas ornament.)

When the exam begins, the device records audio and video. Software detects significant noises and motions and flags them in the recording. An instructor can go back and watch only the portions flagged by the software to see if anything untoward is going on — a student making a phone call, leaving the room — and if there is a sudden surge in performance afterward.

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Source: Yahoo! News

Computer experts on Monday unveiled a digital reproduction of ancient Rome as it appeared at the peak of its power in A.D. 320 _ what they called the largest and most complete simulation of a historic city ever created.

Visitors to virtual Rome will be able to do even more than ancient Romans did: They can crawl through the bowels of the Colosseum, filled with lion cages and primitive elevators, and fly up for a detailed look at bas-reliefs and inscriptions atop triumphal arches.

“This is the first step in the creation of a virtual time machine, which our children and grandchildren will use to study the history of Rome and many other great cities around the world,” said Bernard Frischer of the University of Virginia, who led the project.

The $2 million simulation will be used by scientists to run experiments _ such as determining the crowd capacity of ancient buildings and as a scholarly journal that will be updated at each new discovery of one of Rome’s marvels.

Frischer also said students and tourists can also use the program to learn about ancient Rome.

Check out the Simulation at the University of Virginia
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Source: The Washington Post

Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious — students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning cell phones, realizing students could text message the answers to each other.

Now, schools across the country are targeting digital media players as a potential cheating device. Devices including Apple Inc. iPods and Microsoft Corp. Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say.

“It doesn’t take long to get out of the loop with teenagers,” said Mountain View High School Principal Aaron Maybon. “They come up with new and creative ways to cheat pretty fast.”

Mountain View recently enacted a ban on digital media players after school officials realized some students were downloading formulas and other material onto the players.

“A teacher overheard a couple of kids talking about it,” said Maybon.

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Source: The Associated Press via Yahoo! News