Between the creation of a social rating system and street cameras with facial recognition capabilities, technology reports coming out of China have raised serious concerns for privacy advocates. These concerns are only heightened as Chinese investors turn their attention to the United States education technology space acquiring companies with millions of public school users.
A particularly notable deal this year centers on Edmodo, a cross between a social networking platform and a learning management system for schools that boasts having upwards of 90 million users. Net Dragon, a Chinese gaming company that is building a significant education division, bought Edmodo for a combination of cash and equity valued at $137.5 million earlier this month.
Edmodo began shifting to an advertising model last year, after years of struggling to generate revenue. This has left critics wondering why the Chinese firm chose to acquire Edmodo at such a price, some have gone as far as to call the move a data grab.
as data becomes a tool that governments such as Russia and China could use to influence voting systems or induce citizens into espionage, more legislators are turning their attention to the acquisitions of early-stage technology startups.
NetDragon officials, however, say they have no interest in these types of activities. Their main goal in acquiring United States edtech companies lies in building profitability, says Pep So, NetDragon’s Director of Corporate Development.
In 2015, the firm acquired the education technology platform, Promethean, a company that creates interactive displays for schools. NetDragon executives say that the Edmodo acquisition rounds out their education product portfolio—meaning the company will have tools for supporting multiple aspects of learning including; preparation, instructional delivery, homework, assignment grading, communication with parents students and teachers and a content marketplace.
NetDragon’s monetization plan for Edmodo focuses on building out content that gets sold via its platform. Similar to tools like TeachersPayTeachers, So hopes to see users putting up content on the platform’s marketplace, some free and others for a fee (including some virtual reality content), so that the community can buy, sell and review available educational tools.
As far as data privacy is concerned, So notes that NetDragon is still learning what it can and cannot do. He noted that the company will comply with Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal regulation created in order to protect the privacy of children online, but says that the rules and regulations surrounding the law are confusing for all actors involved.
Historically, Chinese companies have faced trust and branding issues when moving into the United States market, and the reverse is also true for U.S. companies seeking to expand overseas. Companies have also struggled to learn the rules, regulations and operational procedures in place in other countries.
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Iran and Huawei top agenda as Pompeo meets Merkel for 45 minutes in Berlin
Our survey polled 232 faculty members across the country about their use of technology in the classroom, their likes and dislikes, their predictions for the future and more. The majority of respondents (68 percent) come from public institutions, with 28 percent from private nonprofits and 4 percent working at for-profit schools. Seventy-two percent work at four-year colleges or universities; 26 percent are at community colleges (the remaining 2 percent designated their institutional level as “other”).
Respondents represent institutions of a range of sizes, with about one-third (32 percent) working in colleges or universities with 2,500 to 9,999 students. Just under half (45 percent) of respondents are from institutions with 10,000 students or more.
Our respondents are veterans of higher education: The largest group (47 percent) has more than 20 years of experience, with 81 percent logging at least 11 years in the field.
The top three most common school and college types among our respondents are education (22 percent), business/business administration (17 percent) and liberal arts (12 percent). But overall, respondents work in a wide range of disciplines, from engineering and medicine to humanities and fine arts. The top 10 states with the most survey respondents are New York, Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
Indiana University explores that question by bringing together tech partners and university leaders to share ideas on how to design classrooms that make better use of faculty and student time.
Untether instructors from the room’s podium, allowing them control from anywhere in the room;
Streamline the start of class, including biometric login to the room’s technology, behind-the-scenes routing of course content to room displays, control of lights and automatic attendance taking;
Offer whiteboards that can be captured, routed to different displays in the room and saved for future viewing and editing;
Provide small-group collaboration displays and the ability to easily route content to and from these displays; and
Deliver these features through a simple, user-friendly and reliable room/technology interface.
Key players from Crestron, Google, Sony, Steelcase and Spectrum met with Indiana University faculty, technologists and architects to generate new ideas related to current and emerging technologies. Activities included collaborative brainstorming focusing on these questions:
What else can we do to create the classroom of the future?
What current technology exists to solve these problems?
What could be developed that doesn’t yet exist?
What’s next?
top five findings:
Screenless and biometric technology will play an important role in the evolution of classrooms in higher education. We plan to research how voice activation and other Internet of Things technologies can streamline the process for faculty and students.
The entire classroom will become a space for student activity and brainstorming; walls, windows, desks and all activities are easily captured to the cloud, allowing conversations to continue outside of class or at the next class meeting.
Technology will be leveraged to include advance automation for a variety of tasks, so the faculty member is released from duties to focus on teaching.
The technology will become invisible to the process and enhance and customize the experience for the learner.
Virtual assistants could play an important role in providing students with a supported experience throughout their entire campus career.
In September 2015, the back-then library dean (they change every 2-3 years) requested a committee of librarians to meet and discuss the remodeling of Miller Center 2018. By that time the SCSU CIO was asserting the BYOx as a new policy for SCSU. BYOx in essence means the necessity for stronger (wider) WiFI pipe. Based on that assertion, I, Plamen Miltenoff, was insisting to shift the cost of hardware (computers, laptops) to infrastructure (more WiFi nods in the room and around it) and prepare for the upcoming IoT by learning to remodel our syllabi for mobile devices and use those (students) mobile devices, rather squander University money on hardware. At least one faculty member from the committee honestly admitted she has no idea about IoT and respectively the merit of my proposal. Thus, my proposal was completely disregarded by the self-nominated chair of the committee of librarians, who pushed for her idea to replace the desktops with a cart of laptops (a very 2010 idea, which by 2015 was already passe). As per Kelly (2018) (second article above), it is obvious the failure of her proposal to the dean to choose laptops over mobile devices, considering that faculty DO see mobile devices completely replacing desktops and laptops; that faculty DO not see document cameras and overhead projectors as a tool to stay.
Here are the notes from September 2015 https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/09/25/mc218-remodel/
As are result, my IoT proposal as now reflected in the Johnston (2018) (first article above), did not make it even formally to the dean, hence the necessity to make it available through the blog.
The SCSU library thinking regarding physical remodeling of classrooms is behind its times and that costs money for the university, if that room needs to be remodeled again to be with the contemporary times.
China has started ranking citizens with a creepy ‘social credit’ system — here’s what you can do wrong, and the embarrassing, demeaning ways they can punish you
Red Hat, although not quite a household name, is an undeniably significant company, with lots of fingers in lots of pies, especially when it comes to cloud computing and the Linux ecosystem.
The gem in its crown is arguably the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider OpenShift, which directly competes with the Salesforce-owned Heroku and Google App Engine. It also owns and develops Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is employed across several commercial settings, including workstations, servers, and supercomputers.
Red Hat is an enthusiastic contributor to several major Linux projects, playing a role in developing Libre Office and GNOME, as well as the Kernel itself.
“Shifts in students’ learning style will prompt a shift to active construction of knowledge through mediated immersion.”-Chris Dede
The theory of constructivist-based learning, according to Dr. Seymour Papert, “is grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information ‘poured’ into their heads.”
Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, 3D modeling, creating spatial environments in virtual reality or building robots).”
Technologies like virtual reality, especially for Gen Z students’, provides avenues that allow them to engage in a social, collaborative, and active learning environment.
Virtual reality, especially when combined with powerful storytelling, allows the student to participate in the story, develop empathy to experiences outside their current realm of understanding and allows them to be fully immersed in their own exploration and learning.
Digital transformation (DX) is having a profound impact across all industries, but what does it mean for higher education? Join members of the EDUCAUSE Digital Transformation Task Force as they describe their efforts to understand what DX means for higher education and why institutions should be planning for change now.
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Explore how DX will impact higher education culture, workforce, and technology
Understand the importance of planning for digital transformation now
Learn about plans under way at EDUCAUSE to help institutions move forward with digital transformation initiative
“Netnography” has been developed for online community researchers. It is “net” plus “ethnography,” which is based on the traditional ethnography and combines with the qualitative analysis for online interactive contents forms of virtual community members. The aim of doing netnographic research is to study the subculture, interactive process and characteristics of collective behaviors of online communities (Kozinets 2009). Follow the development of Internet technology, the web–based method is more convenient and cost–effect in data collection. Members in virtual groups create a large number of interactive texts, pictures, network expressions and other original information over time, which provides an extremely rich database to researchers. Moreover, from the data collection’s point of view, this online observation method will not interfere with the whole research process, which is better than questionnaires and quantitative modeling (Moisander and Valtonen 2006). Additionally, Kozinets (2009) also pointed that netnogrpahy emphasize on the research background, observers not only focus on the text during communications but also need to pay attention to the characteristics of language, history, meaning and communication types. Even parse fonts, symbols, images and photo data. These content of studies are significant in social communication, which is called “Cultural Artifact.” On the other hand, netnography is based on traditional ethnography as a methodology; therefore it inherits the research processes of ethnographic method. Kozients (2009) reinterpreted these procedures for netnography as Firstly, to determine the research target and understand its cultural characteristics; Secondly, to collect and analyze information; Thirdly, to ensure the credibility of interpretation; Fourthly, pay attention to research ethics; Lastly, to obtain respondents feedbacks. To make my research adapting to this guidelines, I make my research process as 1. To target on Plymouth Chinese overseas students and to explain the Chinese guanxi; 2. To collect and analyze data through the existing WeChat group created by Plymouth Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA); 3. To confirm the identity of key influencers in this virtual group; 4. To get feedbacks from respondent as much as possible.
