A physics PhD and startup founder explains how entrepreneurs can get the most basic business advice all wrong | Strategy - Business Inside

• Happy Numbers is an artificial intelligence-enabled math education platform.
• CEO Evgeny Milyutin said the biggest lesson he's learned in his time in startups is the importance of knowing your customer.
• This is pretty common business advice — but he's probably not the only founder who initially went about following it all wrong.
• It took him a while to realize that meant visiting the classrooms where students and teachers would be using his product, talking to them, and watching them use it.

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Photo: Shana Lebowitz

Shana Lebowitz, strategy reporter for Business Insider summarizes "When the iPad debuted in 2010, Evgeny Milyutin was a 26-year-old physics PhD student in France." 

It was tough going at first. Evgeny Milyutin, right, and Ivan Kolomoets are the founders of Happy Numbers.
Photo: Courtesy of Evgeny Milyutin

On the side, he and his longtime friend Ivan Kolomoets had been tutoring their friends' kids in math. It occurred to them then that there was a prime opportunity to improve the quality of math education with emerging digital technologies.

At the time, this was a truly novel idea: It was still seven years before Netflix CEO Reed Hastings would invest in a math education startup called DreamBox Learning.

Today, Milyutin and Kolomoets are the founders of Happy Numbers, an artificial intelligence-enabled math education platform. The goal is to help teachers personalize education: Milyutin described the program as a "virtual teaching assistant."

Students are set up with iPads or laptops and plug away at interactive math exercises; then the 
program delivers feedback to the teacher based on the students' performance.

Milyutin — who confesses that he struggled with math in primary school — cited a 1984 review by the late Benjamin Bloom, which reports that students who received one-on-one tutoring performed better than 98% of students taught in a conventional classroom.

"It would be great to have one teacher for every student, but it's not always realistic," Milyutin said. "So this is where I feel technology can come into the game."

Individual schools or school districts can purchase subscriptions to Happy Numbers (though Milyutin said he's also sold a few subscriptions directly to consumers). In the last year, Milyutin said, there have been 17 million exercises solved on Happy Numbers. 
Read more... 

Source: Business Insider

Reflections on the ASU Convening on the Future Learning in the Digital Age | Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed

Follow on Twitter as @joshmkim

"Quietly unconferencing the unconference" notes Dr. Joshua Kim, Director of Digital Learning Initiatives at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL).

Photo: Angela Gunder, and illustration by Karina Mullen Branson, conversketch.com.

We may be at an academic conference inflection point. 

Higher education gatherings seem to be evolving away from conferencing and towards unconferencing. 

We may get to the point where we drop the “un” in “unconference”, much like we’ve dropped the digital from digital from photography. (Come to think of it, we should probably drop the “digital” from digital learning as well - it is all just learning). 

Last week I attended an ASU unconference on the future of learning in the digital age. The best place to catch up with what was discussed at the event is probably by scrolling through #shapingedu.

Academic unconferences differ from traditional professional meetings in at least 3 ways. 

First, they are usually small. There were 129 people at the event, with representatives from the of academic technology, online learning, media, consulting, instructional design, library, futurists, faculty, and edtech company tribes.

Second, they are often held on campuses - as opposed to at hotels or conference / convention venues. The location at ASU’s EdPlus offices was amazing, largely because anyone interested in the future of higher education needs to spend time with the people at EdPlus. 

Third, and most importantly, the participants of an unconference largely create the agenda as the gathering unfolds. The event featured a few talks, but mostly the host and convener of the event Lev Gonick (ASU’s CIO) energetically funneled the time into conversations (or neighborhoods) around specific topics.
Read more...

Source: Inside Higher Ed (blog)

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß Google doodle honors mathematician known as the ‘Prince of Mathematicians’ | Search Engine Land

"The celebrated mathematician made contributions across several mathematical fields" inform Amy Gesenhues, Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter.

Photo: Search Engine Land

Today’s Google doodle marks the 241st birthday of Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß, the German mathematician often credited as the “Prince of Mathematicians” or the “Greatest mathematician since antiquity.”

Born on this date in Braunschweig, Germany, Gauß (translated as Gauss) was a child prodigy, making complex mathematical calculations as early as 8 years old. At 21, he wrote “Disquisitiones Arithmeticae,” a number theory textbook defined by Yale Press University as the “… source of ideas from which number theory was developed.”

The celebrated mathematician is noted for a number of contributions across multiple fields of study, including number theory, algebra, statistics, geometry, geophysics, magnetic fields and astronomy. Among his many discoveries was the construction of the heptadecagon and proof of the quadratic reciprocity law. According to Leonard Bruno and Lawrence Baker’s “Math and Mathematicians: The History of Math Discoveries Around the World,” Gauß determined the orbit of the asteroid Ceres in 1801.
Read more...

Additional resources

Photo: Carl Friedrich Gauß (1777–1855), painted by Christian Albrecht Jensen

Carl Friedrich Gauss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Search Engine Land

Distance learning? For these students near Mumbai, school is a one-hour walk away | Hindustan Times

Photo: Yesha Kotak

Yesha Kotak, Community Reporter at Hindustan Times reports, "With kuchha road and no modes of transport, students from 16 tribal hamlets in Thane are forced to take the long walk to reach school."

Girls on their to school Patlipada in Thane.
Photo: Pratik Chorge/HT Photo

Lalita Dhole, a domestic help, dreams of providing the best education to her children. Her biggest worry is not how they will perform in their exams, but their safety. Her apprehension stems from the fact that her children have to meander through a rut road and a forest for an hour before reaching school.

Dhole is not from one of the BIMARU states, but a satellite town of Mumbai, Thane, which boasts of world-class educational institutes and a throbbing commercial apparatus.

The anxiety is shared by parents, most of them illiterate, from 16 tribal hamlets in Thane, whose children have to overcome several obstacles. 

“No vehicles enter our area due to the kuchha road. There are no streetlights, which make us worried that animals may attack our children. During the monsoon, it becomes impossible to send them to schools because of waterlogging,” says Dhole.

Amid talks of making Maharashtra a trillion-dollar economy by 2025, education seems to be a luxury, not a basic right for students from tribal hamlets in Kasar Vadavali at Ghodbunder Road and Yeoor Hills. Even the Right to Education Act, passed nine years ago, has not nudged the Thane authorities to make education more accessible by building roads and ironing out other mobility issues.

However, Takadapada and Paankhanda villages, which are 3km-4km from the hamlets, have schools till Class 8.

Most hilly padas are home to Warli tribes, with no access to electricity and water. One of the tribal hamlets in Kasar Vadavali, Pachvadpada, which is half an hour away from Thane station, overlooks high-rises. Seventy families living in the pada are labourers or work as house helps in these high-rises.

“As our parents never sent us to school, we don’t want this thing to happen to our children. Though we have enrolled them in schools, there are various problems, which make it difficult for them to continue education,” says Anita Dhandekar, resident of Pachvadpada. The nearest school for Anita’s son is at Takadapada, and he leaves an hour before the school time...

‘College is a dream’
Vasant Gavit, village head at Pachvadpada, said apart from his children, there are only two boys who have studied till Class 12 in his pada.

“Notwithstanding our proximity to Mumbai, we do not get enough facilities,” complains Gavit. Gavit informs that a few village heads have acquired five-and-a-half acres of land from the collector. A part of the land is likely to be used to open a small school or a balwadi. The plan may take more than three years before it comes to fruition.

“None of the children from our pada has studied in college. Boys mostly leave studies after Class 8 owing to the distance, while girls are expected to stay at home. College seems like a distant dream for the children,” Gavit contends...

Yesha Kotak states in the the end of the article: "What the law says"
According to the Right to Education Act, 2009, for Class1-5 students, the nearest school must be within a km.

Schools for Class 6-8 students must be within a radius of three kilometres.

If schools are farther the prescribed limit, the authorities need provide free transportation, mandates the Act.
Read more... 

Source: Hindustan Times 

E-Book Revenues Decline Again | Technology - Forbes

Photo: Ellen Duffer

"E-books keep losing steam" inform Ellen Duffer, managing editor of Ploughshares, the literary journal and publisher based in Boston. 

A man reads a book at a book store on World Book Day and Copyright Day in Beijing on April 23, 2018.
Photo: WANG ZHAO/AFP/Getty Images

In the first eleven months of 2017 (the most recently released data by the American Association of Publishers), e-book revenues dropped 5.5% over the same period in 2016, while hardback revenues increased by 3.3% .

It's worth noting that paperback and mass market revenues decreased, as well, by 1.7%. Paperback and mass market titles are generally considerably cheaper than hardback books, whereas e-books can be priced comparably to hardbacks if accompanying a first-run printing (though, of course, e-book pricing varies widely).
Read more... 

Source: Forbes

Curiosity is key to early childhood success in math and reading | Child Development News - Science Daily

Summary: Curious children are better able to grasp basic math and reading, according to a new study investigating a possible link between curiosity and early academic success among young children

Photo: Lum3n.com from Pexels

Curious children are better able to grasp basic math and reading. This is according to a group of researchers from the University of Michigan, led by Prachi Shah. The study in the journal Pediatric Research, which is published by Springer Nature, is the first to investigate a possible link between curiosity and early academic success among young children. In addition, the researchers found that for children from poorer communities, curiosity is even more important for higher academic achievement than for children from more well-off backgrounds, and may serve as a potential target of intervention to close the achievement gap associated with poverty.

Children who have developed a wide range of socio-emotional skills are generally more successful when they start school. These skills include invention, imagination, persistence, attentiveness to tasks, as well as the ability to form relationships and manage feelings. According to Shah, most current early learning interventions focus on improving a child's effortful control which includes their ability to concentrate or control impulses. Very few interventions aim to cultivate curiosity in young children -- a trait that Shah describes as the joy of discovery, and the motivation to seek answers to the unknown.

Data for the current study were drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort. This nationally representative population-based study sponsored by the US Department of Education has followed thousands of children since their birth in 2001. Their parents were interviewed during home visits and the children were assessed when they were nine months and two years old, and again when they entered preschool and kindergarten. In 2006 and 2007, the reading and math skills and behavior of 6200 of these children then in kindergarten were measured.

"Our results suggest that after controlling for other factors associated with higher achievement, curiosity continues to make a small but meaningful contribution to academic achievement," explains Shah.

This trait was found to be as important as effortful control in promoting reading and math academic achievement at kindergarten age. This was especially true for children who showed an eagerness to learn new things. The relationship between a child's curiosity and academic achievement was not related to a child's gender or levels of effortful control.
Read more...

Journal Reference 
Prachi E. Shah, Heidi M. Weeks, Blair Richards, Niko Kaciroti. Early childhood curiosity and kindergarten reading and math academic achievement. Pediatric Research, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41390-018-0039-3   

Source: Science Daily

Amateur mathematician partially solves 60-year-old problem | Mathematics - Phys.Org

"Professional biologist and amateur mathematician Aubrey de Grey has partially solved the Hadwiger-Nelson problem, which has vexed mathematicians since 1950. He has published a paper describing the solution on the arXiv preprint server" notes Bob Yirka, Phys.org. 

The Hadwiger-Nelson problem came about when Edward Nelson and Hugo Hadwiger wondered about the smallest number of colors necessary to color all of the points on a graph, with no two connected points using the same color. Over the years, mathematicians have attacked the problem, and have narrowed the possibilities down to four, five, six or seven. Now, de Grey has eliminated the possibility of four colors as the solution.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-04-amateur-mathematician-partially-year-old-problem.html#jCp

The 1581-vertex, non-4-colourable unit-distance graph G.
Photo: arXiv:1804.02385 [math.CO]

The Hadwiger-Nelson problem came about when Edward Nelson and Hugo Hadwiger wondered about the smallest number of colors necessary to color all of the points on a graph, with no two connected points using the same color. Over the years, mathematicians have attacked the problem, and have narrowed the possibilities down to four, five, six or seven. Now, de Grey has eliminated the possibility of four colors as the solution.

Interestingly, de Grey is well known for his work in his primary field, biology. More specifically, he has made public comments suggesting that some people alive today will live to be a thousand years old due incipient medical breakthroughs. He has established a foundation dedicated to reversing aging and continues working on the problem. His journey to math puzzle solver, he notes, has roots in his love of the game Othello. He used to be a competitive player, through which he befriended a group of mathematicians. They wound up teaching him some math theory, which he began to explore as a means of unwinding after a hard day at work. 
Read more... 

Additional resources 
The chromatic number of the plane is at least 5, arXiv:1804.02385 [math.CO] arxiv.org/abs/1804.02385

Journal reference  
arXiv

Source: Phys.Org

How Poetry and Math Intersect | Smithsonian

"Both require economy and precision—and each perspective can enhance the other" says Evelyn Lamb, Smithsonian.com.

 

Artists and poets have long been inspired by the mathematical patterns found in nature—for instance, the remarkable fact that a sunflower’s seeds follow the Fibonacci sequence. But there are myriad other ways that the realms of poetry and mathematics can intersect.
Photo: DILEEP CHANDRAN / Alamy

 

April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, so a few years ago science writer Stephen Ornes dubbed it Math Poetry Month. If the words “math” and “poetry” don’t intuitively make sense to you as a pair, poet and mathematician JoAnne Growney’s blog Intersections—Poetry with Mathematics is a perfect place to start expanding your math-poetic horizons. The blog includes a broad range of poems with mathematical themes or built using mathematical rules. 

 

Take “Geometry,” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove:

I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.
—from “Geometry” by Rita Dove

Or “In Praise of Fractals” by Emily Grosholz, published in The Stars of Earth: New and Selected Poems (2017, Word Galaxy Press):

Euclid’s geometry cannot describe,
nor Apollonius’, the shape of mountains,
puddles, clouds, peninsulas or trees.
Clouds are never spheres,
nor mountains cones, nor Ponderosa pines;
bark is not smooth; and where the land and sea
so variously lie about each other
and lightly kiss, is no hyperbola.
Compared with Euclid’s elementary forms,
Nature, loosening her hair, exhibits patterns
(sweetly disarrayed, afloat, uncombed)
not simply of a higher degree n
but rather of an altogether different
level of complexity:
the number of the scales of distances
describing her is almost infinite.
—from “In Praise of Fractals” by Emily Grosholz

Growney casts a wide net on her blog, which begins with the words: ″Mathematical language can heighten the imagery of a poem; mathematical structure can deepen its effect.” Some poems she features, like “Geometry,” use mathematical themes or images; some are by mathematicians or math students. Growney has also gotten interested in the mathematics of poetic forms and poetic forms that employ mathematics.

Of course, sonnets and haiku are famous for employing strict counts on lines and syllables. But she is also interested in newer forms, often inspired by the constrained writing exercises of the French Oulipo group, which was founded by mathematicians and poets. 
Read more...

Source: Smithsonian

Indiana education officials are taking another look at regulating virtual charter schools | Chalkbeat Indiana

Follow on Twitter as @ShainaRC

"Nearly five months after Gov. Eric Holcomb called for “immediate attention and action” on Indiana’s subpar online charter schools, state education officials might soon take steps to address them — although they could fall short of the sweeping changes virtual school critics are pushing for" writes Shaina Cavazos, Reporter & Community Editor.

A Hoosier Academy Virtual teacher keeps track of answers during a math review game. 
Photo: Shaina Cavazos

The Indiana State Board of Education is expected to vote Wednesday on forming a committee that could become Indiana’s first effort in recent years to strengthen virtual charter school oversight. State board member Gordon Hendry would lead the committee. Hendry said it’s the state board’s responsibility to ensure online charter schools are performing and are managed properly, especially when Hoosier tax dollars support them.

He also added that if lawmakers won’t step in and take more immediate, decisive action — which they’ve been hesitant to do — the state board needs to add regulation. The Republican-dominated legislature killed three bills this year that would have regulated charter schools and declined to address virtual charter schools, which are public schools that allow students to attend school online from home.

“I have had my reservations about the poor performance of many of these schools,” said Hendry, a Democrat who has been on the board since 2013. “So I hope that we can draw some attention to the issue, bring in some of our thought leaders both in Indiana and nationally and try to solve some of the problems in a constructive way.”
Read more...

Source: Chalkbeat Indiana 

‘Distance learning need of hour’ | Islamabad - The News International

Pakistan needs skills development and vocational training programmes through distance learning initiatives, said Prof Dr Nabi Bux Jummani, former dean of Faculty of Social Sciences, International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI).

Photo: Pexels

Talking to ‘The News’, he said that distance education can bring about a change in the society if it is in line with the industry. He said media and the appliances associated with it are helpful in promotion of distance learning.
Read more...

Source: The News International (blog)

Distance learning: AIOU postgrad exams start May 14 | The Express Tribune

"The final examinations of Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) postgraduate programmes will start simultaneously from May 14 across the country, said an AIOU press release on Friday" reports News Desk. 

The programmes include: BS (microbiology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, statistics, environmental sciences and accounting), PGD, MA, MSc, MS, MPhil and PhD in different disciplines. Roll number slips have been sent to all the enrolled students for the Autumn 2017 Semester at their postal addresses. The same have also been placed at the university’s website www.aiou.edu.pk the press release said. To facilitate the students at their door-steps, exams centres have been set up at district and tehsil level. The students can also download their roll number slips from the university’s website for appearing in these exams. Students are also advised to read the instructions mentioned on roll number slip carefully before entering the examination centre.

Source: The Express Tribune

Did Math Kill God? | New Republic

Photo: Josephine Livingstone

Josephine Livingstone, culture staff writer at The New Republic inform, "A new book on Renaissance mathematics makes a bold case."

Photo: New Republic

One upon a time, a great Italian published a work called the Siderius Nuncius. Galileo had seen the moons of Jupiter through his telescope. He had seen Venus moving. So, in 1606, he endorsed the ideas Copernicus had written down a half-century earlier in the De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. The earth moves around the sun, Galileo said. On February 24, 1616, the Qualifiers of the Inquisition declared heliocentrism heretical. After a trial Galileo was sentenced to house arrest in 1633. There he stayed ever after, moving indeed around a sun, but stuck indoors while thinking about it.

You have likely heard this tale many times. But what does the story mean? For children it shows that you should stick to your guns when you know you’re right—especially if you’re a scientist. For adults it represents a key moment in the development of astronomy and the sciences in general. And those two lessons bind into a bigger story that we use to define who we are, in our time. The Galileo Affair becomes part of a metanarrative, or, in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s term, a Grand Narrative. It says that early seventeenth-century Europe hung at a crux, with religion pulling it backward into medieval ignorance and science straining to push time forward into modernity. Against the benighted church Galileo labored, alongside the other great thinkers of the sixteenth century who gave rise to our rational modern age.

As many scholars have observed in the past century or so, this is a deeply suspicious way to think about events from the past. When Lyotard coined his term, he was observing the tendency to conceive of knowledge in the form of story-telling. Such narratives legitimize certain ideas, he argued. The story of Jesus is not merely a biography, but legitimizes Christianity as a social norm. In the same way, history and science are driven by narrative. When we learn about physics in class, we do not ourselves perform every experiment. We hear the narrative about forces exerting themselves in an equal and opposite direction, and we believe it. When those narratives culminate in a meta-narrative, we see a result that seems almost pre-determined. We see things as pursuing a teleology.

The Great Rift:
Literacy, Numeracy,
and the Religion-Science Divide

In a new book called The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide, Michael E. Hobart offers a new twist on a huge old metanarrative: the death of God...

Josephine Livingstone ends her article with following: "Although it is impossible to fault the passion with which he has ventured into historical mathematics’ every daunting nook and baffling cranny, the speed and the sweep of Hobart’s argument makes it hard for a reader suspicious of metanarrative to remain unsuspicious of his book. Technological determinism is perhaps the great intellectual temptation of our decade—try not to fall for it."
Read more... 

Source: New Republic

Meet The Millennial Entrepreneurs Slaying the eCommerce Game | Forbes

"With female entrepreneurship on the rise -- women now make up 40% of new entrepreneurs in the United States -- it’s no surprise that digitally savvy millennials are excelling in the eCommerce space" says Kate Talbot,  freelance content marketer, author, and entrepreneur who helps brands engage millennials. I wrote a best-selling book,"Oh Snap! You Can Use Snapchat for Business".

Photo: Storyblocks.com

Millennials are turning their side hustles into full-time endeavors using social media platforms and web integrations to acquire customers and build communities.

Meet, three millennial entrepreneurs who are embracing the digital space by utilizing Instagram, Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify to successfully scale their businesses.

Read more... 

Source: Forbes

The Hardest Students to Teach | Teaching Professor Blog

"Some students are more challenging to teach than others. They require pedagogical skills of a different and higher order" argues Maryellen Weimer, PhD.

Photo: The Teaching Professor Blog

Sometimes it’s easier to sigh and just turn away. And that’s legitimate in the sense that students (indeed, people of all sorts) have to figure things out for themselves. But many of us were such “works in progress” when we were in college, and a teacher (or several of them) ended up being instrumental in moving us in more productive directions. It’s for that reason I’d like us to consider some of these challenging students, each one a unique individual, but many displaying the same counterproductive attitudes and actions. Descriptions of these students come much more easily than solutions to what’s holding them back. Said more directly, my goal here is to start this conversation and ask for your wisdom, insights, and experiences with students who are tough to teach.

The Teaching Professor Blog

The Student Who’s Cruising – The one who is just going through the motions, doing coursework with the least amount of effort. Often these students are polite, sometimes even apologetic, but they’re fundamentally uninterested in learning what’s being taught in the course, and one strongly suspects they’re not interested in any of their courses. Can personal attention make a difference? Can showing you care inspire even a modicum of motivation? What about choice? “Is there a way you could do this assignment that would make it more interesting?” What about challenge? “Study hard for one exam—put your brain to the test so you know what it can accomplish.” What about confrontation, constructively framed, but still in the student’s face? “Why isn’t coursework part of your agenda in college?”...

Two points in summary: Maybe the best we can offer these challenging students is our vision of their potential, unclouded by their behaviors. And we may never know that we made a difference. Writer T. C. Boyle had three college teachers who were instrumental in his discovery that he could write. Of one of them, he observes, “He saw something in me—in my writing and my intelligence—and he tried to promote and encourage it.” Boyle says of this teacher who became his mentor, “I hurt him. I didn’t attend classes. I hung with the losers.” But that teacher’s vision caused Boyle to move in a new direction. He started to read books.
Read more...  

Source: The Teaching Professor Blog

Changing Mobile Learning Practices: A Multiyear Study 2012–2016 | EDUCAUSE Review

Student surveys on mobile technology usage highlight a need for better mobile integration in coursework and institutional strategy.

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"Since the first iPhone was invented in 2007, mobile devices have progressed from a convenience in our daily lives to a necessity" says Ryan Seilhamer, Baiyun Chen, Sue Bauer, Ashley Salter and Luke Bennett.
 

In higher education, the use of mobile technologies in learning has also increased rapidly over that 10-year period.1 Given mobile's changing nature and affordances, however, it is still unclear how to best integrate the technology into both coursework and institutional strategy. 

At the University of Central Florida (UCF), we conducted online surveys in 2012, 2014, and 2016 to gather student perspectives on mobile learning at the university. Our goal was to get an overview of students' mobile device ownership and learning activities over time and understand related trends. This article compares the results of the 2016 survey to the previous two surveys and addresses three research questions: 

1. What types of mobile devices do students use, and how has device ownership changed over time?
2. How do students use mobile devices and apps, and how has that usage changed over time?
3. What are students' beliefs about mobile usage, and how have those beliefs changed over time?

Mobile Technology and Education 
According to the ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2017, 95 percent of undergraduate students own a laptop or a smartphone and 30 percent own a laptop, a smartphone, and a tablet.² Mobile technology's high ownership has translated into increased usage to support student learning; this is particularly true with smartphones, which are conducive to agile tasks such as communication, easy information access, and photography.³

According to a recent survey, for example, 70–79 percent of University of Washington students reported using smartphones for academic purposes in at least one class.⁴ Other study results show that 78 percent of students consider their phones to be at least moderately important to their academic success,⁵ while 83 percent used a smartphone for course-related activities for one or more of their courses and 25 percent used a smartphone for all of their courses.⁶

Although usage for academic purposes has clearly increased, several challenges remain in implementing mobile technology in higher education. These challenges include a disconnect between student and instructor views of mobile technologies, a lack of pedagogical support or training for instructors, and a lack of effective technical support for mobile learning...

Next Steps 
Our mobile survey results offer a systematic view of mobile learning implementation and its implications for practice at UCF. Our hope is that it might also help other institutions promote and more systematically establish mobile learning practices of their own.

Among our short-term plans are to eliminate the disconnect between instructors and students through faculty training and pedagogical support. In addition to our stand-alone mobile training course, we intend to integrate learning concepts, such as universal design, into all training programs to help instructors design mobile-compatible online courses and assignments.

To support these mobile initiatives, UCF has created a new position, program director of mobile strategy, to focus on growth and awareness of mobile technologies.
Read more... 

Recommended Reading

Photo: leungchopan / Shutterstock © 2018

VR and AR: The Ethical Challenges Ahead by Emory Craig and Maya Georgieva.

Source: EDUCAUSE Review

Nvidia's amazing deep learning tool can reconstruct incomplete photos | TechRadar

Phil Hall, Photography Editor inform, "A glimpse into the near future of image editing."

Photo: TechRadar

It might look like witchcraft, but researchers at Nvidia have developed an advanced deep learning image-retouching tool that can intelligently reconstruct incomplete photos.

While removing unwanted artefacts in image editing is nothing new – Adobe Photoshop's Content-Aware tools are pretty much the industry standard – the prototype tool that Nvidia is showcasing looks incredibly impressive. 

Don't take our word for it – check out the two-minute video below to get a taste of what this new technology is capable off.

Research at NVIDIA: AI Reconstructs Photos with Realistic Results 
 

What differentiates Nvidia's new tool from something like Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop is that it analyzes the image and understands what the subject should actually look like; Content-Aware Fill relies on surrounding parts of the image to fill in what it thinks should be there. 
Read more...

Source: TechRadar and NVIDIA Channel (YouTube)

How Robots Are Helping MBA Students Be In Two Places At Once | BusinessBecause

"New technology lets b-schoolers attend classes and meet recruiters virtually via robots" summarizes Seb Murray at BusinessBecause.

Carey's “Gizmo”, one of three Segway robots at the business school
Photo: BusinessBecause

Albert Einstein once claimed that you can be in two places at once. The boffin was right—and you don’t need to be a quantum physicist to do it; merely a business school student. MBAs are attending campus classes using robots, controlled from halfway across the planet.  

Online learning has existed for decades, but schools are turning to newer forms of technology as the demand for digital degrees rockets and technology becomes increasingly prevalent in the workplace.

At Arizona’s W.P. Carey School of Business, MBA and Executive MBA students are able to attend classes virtually using “Gizmo”, one of three Segway robots with wheels that display a student’s face via an iPad strapped to the machine. A microphone and speaker enable conversations in real-time, while the wheels let students roam campus, interacting with anyone who crosses their path.

Lisa Bienstock says that she would not be able to get her Carey EMBA if it were not for technology such as Gizmo. “I’m a parent,” she says. “I also work full-time and I’m getting my Executive MBA all at the same time. I wouldn’t be able to do it if I didn’t have the support of ASU and technology like Gizmo to be in two places at once.”

She cites, as an example of how the robot has helped her, an instance in which she was attending a conference in Las Vegas but had to attend EMBA classes simultaneously in Arizona. “I was able to attend class through Gizmo, which was phenomenal as I didn’t miss anything,” says Lisa.

She controlled the Arizona-based bot from her Vegas hotel room using her laptop keyboard. “It’s great for parents or people who have sick children or disabilities — if you can’t get to class, you’re able to be there to participate [virtually],” Lisa says.

The robots may seem unusual but are now regularly roaming some campuses, with remote students routinely rolling into lecture theatres on wheeled machines, as well as meeting recruiters virtually using the devices.

MIT Sloan School of Management in Massachusetts, for instance, has been using robots designed by Double Robotics and Avaya Robotics since 2015, mostly in the executive education space where distance learning is more common than in MBAs.

Schools hope the robots mimic the feel of being on a buzzy campus, though nothing has truly replicated that experience yet. 
Read more... 

Recommended Reading: 

Photo: BusinessBecause

Be A Master Of Networking by Ania Zymelka at BusinessBecause.
"The ultimate guide to networking, from cycling clubs to lunching with CEOs. Plus how to write those pesky introductory emails."    

Source: BusinessBecause