Posts tagged future

If we are ever going to meet the scholarly and public challenges we face, we may want to abandon disciplines. How else will scholars learn to think beyond old boundaries?

The All E-Book Diet

When it comes to saving money on textbooks, students can help themselves by renting their books or buying them used. Professors can help students by only upgrading to new editions when they have to. Federal regulators can help both groups make well-informed choices by requiring textbook publishers to give their customers the information they need to be frugal. But what can the colleges themselves do?

Daytona State College thinks it has the answer: eliminate the used-book and rental markets on campus and have all students buy e-books.

By doing so, the college could save its students as much as 80 percent on course materials, says Rand S. Spiwak, its chief financial officer.

» via Inside Higher Ed

In a world where people read on electronic devices, books may become mash-ups of media, including music, video, and possibly advertising. (Advertising in ebooks is of particular concern if we distribute them for “free” or nearly free.) An electronic, interactive Alice in Wonderland is an incredible thing, and I’m intrigued by the possibilities of the technology. But the electronic Alice may be closer to a video game than to Lewis Carroll’s original. So perhaps I simply have a problem with the vocabulary: can something that is not bound, not made of paper, and not necessarily meant to be read –– can that thing still be called a book?

Your Library is Dying

Everywhere, libraries are collapsing under their own weight, though this isn’t a matter of a tight budget restricting libraries from expensive information machines. Most libraries have all but done away with costly microfilm and microfiche readers and replaced them with inexpensive scanning and digital retrieval technology. Accessible technology has made it easier for a library to keep itself abreast of modern methods of information delivery. The issue with this universal accessibility to information is that this material is now available to the average library patron via their broadband Internet connections at home. There’s less and less reason to maintain a public building which functions as a locus of information when these things can be done from a Starbucks or a bedroom. As technology progresses, librarians are reduced from purveyors of organized information to glorified video store clerks. That is, for anyone who doesn’t already have Netflix.

» via Splice Today

F.C.C. Considers Rules for Wireless Internet Traffic

Federal communications regulators said Wednesday that they were considering whether wireless devices should be subject to different Internet traffic rules than telephone and cable lines, in a potential victory for carriers.

At issue is net neutrality, a term that means high-speed Internet providers should not block or slow information, or make Web sites pay to reach users more quickly.

» via The New York Times

If universities of the future are to survive, he argues, they will have to capture their students’ imaginations. ‘The part [of edupunk] that resonates most with me is that learning has to start with the learner’s desire to learn, and until that’s awakened, you’re putting people on a conveyor belt,’ he says.

‘If that spirit is missing from the university, then the university has to find a way to recapture that spirit and to be a platform for it.’

Radical alternative education a la Gardner Campbell, director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning at Baylor University in Waco, Texas (via utnereader)

In things I love today …

(via sasquatchmedia)

Google’s Earth

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

» via The New York Times

Destructive cultural trends lurk behind the decline of readerly ambition and student stamina. One is the expanding cultural bias in all writerly media toward clipped, hit-friendly brevity—no longer the soul of wit, but metric-driven pith in lieu of wit. Everywhere they turn, but particularly in mainstream, sophisticated venues—where middle-aged fogies desperately seek to stay ahead of the tech curve—young people hear, through the apotheosis of tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates, and sound bites as the core of communication, that short is always smarter and better than long, even though most everyone knows it’s usually dumber and worse.

Internet phasing out printed Oxford Dictionary - Yahoo! News

techspotlight:

LONDON – It’s been in print for over a century, but in future the Oxford English Dictionary — the authoritative guide to the English language — may only be available online.

Oxford University Press, the publisher, said Sunday that burgeoning demand for the dictionary’s online version has far outpaced demand for the printed versions.

By the time the lexicographers behind the dictionary finish revising and updating the latest edition — a gargantuan task that will take many more years — publishers are doubtful there will still be a market for the printed form. The online Oxford English Dictionary now gets 2 million hits a month from subscribers. The current printed edition — a hefty 20-volume, 750 pound ($1,165) set published in 1989 — has sold about 30,000 sets in total.

Phone Numbers Are Dead, They Just Don’t Know It Yet

I’m certain my grandkids will never dial a phone number, or even have one. It’s time to say goodbye to ten digits along with the world’s oldest social network.  While we’re at it, let’s kill phone-tree mazes, do-not-call lists…everything associated with phone numbers.

Don’t misconstrue what I’m saying. This isn’t the demise of phone calls.  Far from it.  People will still talk on their phones.  They just want the service to be simple and fun, which won’t entail punching digits into a device to start a conversation.

» via TechCrunch

This Is What the Student Debt Crisis Looks Like

Consumers owe more on student debt than on credit cards, according to June 2010 figures from the Federal Reserve. It’s no wonder. As Niraj Chokshi reported, education costs are rising at a phenomenal clip, even faster than medical care.

» via The Atlantic

This Is What the Student Debt Crisis Looks Like

Consumers owe more on student debt than on credit cards, according to June 2010 figures from the Federal Reserve. It’s no wonder. As Niraj Chokshi reported, education costs are rising at a phenomenal clip, even faster than medical care.

» via The Atlantic

A Reset for Higher Education

Many of us have seen trouble coming for a long, long, time. Did we really believe that endowment growth, state support, and tuition dollars could or would provide an unchecked revenue stream, tempered only by short downturns in the economy, followed by fairly quick recoveries? Did we really believe that we could expand administrative structures and shortchange instruction, but still maintain quality institutions? Did we think that poor completion rates and the achievement gaps between whites and minority groups could be solved only with more money? Did we honestly believe that expensive amenities and increased financial aid for upper-middle-class and wealthy students could be sustained? Of course not.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

The College Admissions Crash

Hardest hit will be small, private colleges in the upper Midwest and on the East and West coasts. New York’s Utica College, for instance, is planning on a 7 percent decrease in enrollment over the next five years. Larger universities are not immune either. As Marc Harding, director of admission at Iowa State, puts it: “Any university interested in growing—or even stabilizing—its enrollment in the next few years will have to reach out to a more ethnically diverse population.”

» via The Daily Beast

Five billionth device about to plug into Internet

Sometime this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet. And in 10 years, that number will grow by more than a factor of four, according to IMS Research, which tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet.

» via NetworkWorld