education

School principals seem to be struggling with their Facebook principles.

Only last week, a British school principal threatened to report parents of underage Facebookers to child protective services.

And now a story emerges from Missouri of a high school head who is accused of creating a fake Facebook profile in order "friend" her students.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the profile in question -- of a girl called "Suzy Harriston" -- is now gone. However, so is Clayton High School Principal Louise Losos.

The Post-Dispatch says that a former school quarterback accused Losos publicly of … Read more

NYU's advanced audio production course is offered to both master's and undergraduate students. They work in 10 recording and computer music studios, listening rooms, and research labs where more than 40 music technology courses are taught.

The night I attended the class, the students were preparing to record a large jazz band, with horns, piano, keyboards, electric guitar, bass, and drums. One of the students, Charles DeChants, currently works in a studio in Brooklyn; he hopes to eventually make records for a living. "That's the dream, and that's why I came out here, so I … Read more

Some might imagine that the mere existence of Facebook promotes a certain infantilism.

However, one school principal thinks that there are so many underage kids on Facebook and other social-networking sites that the parents need to face official consequences.

Paul Woodward, the principal of St. Whites School in the Forest of Dean, England, believes that 60 percent of the kids in his school use social networks. The trouble is that his school caters only to children between the ages of 4 and 11. Facebook's minimum age is 13.

So, as the Daily Mail relates it, he wants to report … Read more

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today launched an initiative to make its education material available online for free.

Through an initiative called edX, the two storied learning institutions will develop an open-source software platform and offer some of their courses online starting this fall. Harvard and MIT will govern the not-for-profit joint venture and dedicate $30 million each in grants and institutional support.

With edX, Harvard and MIT are seeking to learn about online education to enhance how they offer classes online, both to remote students and students on campus, university officials said at a press conference … Read more

There was something about the Mama Bear family tech conference a week ago that creeped me out. I am the father of a 5-year-old boy, and perhaps a third of the people at this conference were trying to build apps for him. All the apps were well-intentioned. All were, at some level, educational.

Still, all the apps felt wrong to me. I wanted my son to have nothing to do with any of them.

I've been trying to understand why these educational apps were getting under my skin to this extent. It's not like I'm anti-technology when … Read more

Calm down, already. NASA swears that the Earth absolutely, definitely will not be annihilated by a massive flaming belch from the sun this year.

But just in case you're still a little worried, you'll no doubt be reassured to know the august space agency is holding nothing back in its efforts to study the sun's activity in 2012. In fact, it's even gone so far as to enlist the help of a very, very serious group of high school students, equipped with that most serious of scientific instruments: the rubber chicken.

Yes, students of Bishop Union High in Bishop, Calif. -- along with their mentor, Science@NASA's Tony Phillips, and a group of fifth-grade assistants -- recently launched a rubber chicken into the stratosphere during the most intense solar radiation storm since 2003.

Don't post a nasty, budget-related comment just yet, though. This wasn't any old astrorubberchicken; this was Camilla -- the mascot of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory -- and she was wearing a specially knitted spacesuit complete with high-tech sensors for measuring radiation. She was also accompanied by a specially modified lunchbox equipped with four cameras, two GPS trackers, a cryogenic thermometer, two-dozen sunflower seeds, and seven insects.… Read more

We all struggle with our priorities daily.

Who, therefore, cannot hold loving hands with the fine, struggling minds at the University of Florida? For they have searched their souls and deduced that quite a lot of its Computer And Information Science and Engineering Department might be surplus to requirements.

I was initially grateful to Forbes for offering this disturbing information.

Forbes said that the school -- faced with the need to cut budgets -- sees insufficient use for teaching assistants in computer science, so it intends to chop them out. The graduate and research programs? Oh, what can they possibly … Read more

Editors' note, August 21, 2012: Updated to include information on EdX.

Seeking out higher education is certainly admirable, but it can also be a serious drain on the pocketbook. If you don't need the letters after your name, there are many terrific, free online sites that offer coursework on everything from algebra to zoology. Here are some of the best:

EdX. New for fall 2012, EdX is a joint venture of MIT and Harvard and offers what is currently a limited number of ambitious courses. UC Berkeley has signed on to provide content, and if the experiment succeeds, we … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--While older generations simply had to memorize facts at school, today's children and young adults learn best by playing, often with digital gadgets, according to experts at the Sandbox Summit.

Held at the MIT Media Lab, the conference brings together educators and technologists seeking ways to better reach Generations Y and Z--groups ranging from toddlers to 20 somethings--and equip them with skills for the digital lifestyle of the 21st century. In additional to making compelling online games and educational content, they are also trying to design toys which bridge offline play with online apps.

New technology, particularly … Read more