educational

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

There's no reason to be worried that your kids are using Facebook. After all, the age limit is 13, so Facebook's expert surveillance tools will, like a fine barkeep, immediately spot an underage participator and toss him into purgatory for a year or two.

Or not quite.

A new survey suggests, in fact, that 38 percent of the kids on Facebook are not alright by Facebook's age rules. For they are aged 12 or younger.

The survey perpetrated by a company called Minor Monitor -- yes, you can see the self-interest in these finding wafting in the … Read more

What if kids with special needs had their own robot to work with them every day in school, guiding them toward long-term educational goals that develop not only their cognitive and social skills but also healthy habits such as exercise?

A team of 17 principal investigators from Yale, Stanford, MIT, and the University of Southern California think that with their expertise in computer science, robotics, educational theory, and development psychology, they can do just that.

So does the National Science Foundation, which just handed the team a $10 million Expeditions in Computing award -- one of the agency's largest … Read more

Intel has crafted a tablet built for students. Dubbed the Studybook, this charming 7-inch tablet has been built to withstand fingerpaint and can be powered either by Android or Windows 7.

The specs for this slate are fairly modest, no doubt designed so that schools can afford to buy big boxes of the things, and pay for replacements when kids inevitably hurl the Studybook into the class fish tank.

The 7-inch display has a 1,024x600-pixel resolution, and this tablet weighs 525 grams (about 1.2 pounds). There's a 2-megapixel camera glued to the back for taking photos of … Read more