Tag: online

University Offers High-Tech Homework That’s Tailored To Students

By Gabrielle Russon, Orlando Sentinel (TNS)

ORLANDO, Fla. — Tiffani Harper’s online homework seemed to have a mind of its own. It knew that she learned best by watching videos and detected what topics she struggled to grasp.

“It’s teaching me the best way to study,” said Harper, 32, a UCF student from Sanford.

Harper’s nursing class is part of a growing pilot program that uses cutting-edge technology to personalize online homework for students. The University of Central Florida is one of a handful of schools in the country using the adaptive-style learning for several online courses, school officials said.

At a school as large as UCF — one of the biggest in the country with 63,000 students enrolled — the program is especially important, they said.

“It personalizes a learning experience for a student who could potentially be in a large class. It won’t feel large. … They get the help they need,” said Thomas Cavanagh, who oversees the university’s online learning. “It’s a really nice way to mitigate the size issue.”

As part of the class, assistant professor Julie Hinkle monitors the students’ online homework to see where they need help and detecting where they succeed or fail. The software even tells her how much time Harper spent studying — eight hours and 22 minutes for one recent section.

Armed with that knowledge, Hinkle might change her lectures for her students in class or send out emails and hold more office hours for her online-only students.

The material itself can change, giving students more review when they get problems wrong. The homework also adapts to fit learning styles.

One day, for instance, Harper watched a YouTube video of a doctor explaining a complex chemistry lesson on a kidney disorder. Others might learn better if they read a text or look at a diagram.

So far, some psychology and nursing classes are part of the adaptive learning pilot, but Cavanagh said it will expand in upcoming months to include certain math classes and the final two years of a bachelor’s degree in applied science.

So far, UCF has invested about $37,000 on the software, training and startup costs for the pilot, which began last school year.

“For some of the basic courses or technical degrees, I think it makes a lot of sense,” Cavanagh said. “If we’re serious about student success, I think we have to look at it. It’s sort of incumbent on us to try these kinds of experiments and see if they work.”

But he also acknowledges the pilot program isn’t a natural fit for every class, like English, where there is no easy computer logarithm to score essays.

On a recent day, Harper sought refuge in a cubicle in the quiet room at the UCF College of Nursing.

She is a college student who experienced life before she ever arrived on campus by joining the work force, getting married, becoming a mom.

But when her husband’s grandmother was dying, Harper saw the tenderness of how a hospice nurse put Chapstick on the sick woman’s lips, and how the nurse cared enough to explain the dying process to the family. That motivated her to enroll in nursing school.

In the quiet room, Harper started her online homework by answering a question about how much she knew about the kidneys in the human body.

“A reasonable amount,” Harper clicked, remembering her previous anatomy class.

That was the starting block. From there, the homework could generate easier — or more difficult — questions, depending on the student. If she got one wrong, there could be more readings, more diagrams, more videos that Harper could study on her laptop screen.

Like anything in education, students take away what they put in.

“I’d rather get it wrong than a lucky guess because I want it to teach me the material,” Harper said.

The online homework was a first taste of the material, but the stakes were not that high. If Harper got it wrong, she could go back and try different questions to improve her score or study more before her exam.

“Well done!” flashed on her screen as Harper answered a question right and moved to the next part.

©2015 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Tiffani Harper, a nursing student at the University of Central Florida, takes notes as she demonstrates her Personalized Learning web courses at UCF on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2015. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)

 

LA Times Names Internet Strategist Nicco Mele Deputy Publisher

LA Times Names Internet Strategist Nicco Mele Deputy Publisher

By Russ Mitchell, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — Nicco Mele, the Internet strategist credited with pushing political campaigns into the digital era, has been named deputy publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

“We intend to be one of the great journalism organizations of the 21st century, not just the 20th,” Times Publisher Austin Beutner said Monday. “With Nicco, we truly have a digital native to help us reimagine our business and develop new digital revenue streams.”

Mele’s primary role will be to craft business strategy across all digital platforms, Beutner said.

“We have a brand that stands for quality and integrity,” Beutner said. Mele “believes in high-quality journalism. At an organization like ours, we need people who believe in the mission.”

Mele, 37, is co-founder of Internet consulting firm Echo & Co., a Harvard University faculty member and author of the 2013 book “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath.”

Mele said he’s up for the enormous challenge the new job poses. “The basic business dynamics are a little scary and need to be reinvented,” Mele said. “Right now, overwhelmingly, the revenue is from print, but it’s clear that over time the future is digital.”

Above all, Mele said, he plans to ensure that the Times’ reputation remains intact as he helps guide the ongoing transition from print to digital.

“Nicco’s not a journalist, but he hears the music,” said longtime newspaperman John Carroll, who served as Times editor from 2000 to 2005, when the paper won 13 Pulitzer Prizes. Mele “believes in the social mission of journalism.”

The two met when Mele volunteered for the News Literacy Project, where Carroll is chairman of the board. The program helps middle and high school students sort fact from fiction and spin in the digital age. “He did it free and in good spirit,” Carroll said. “He’s not just a technologist or a guy who only wants to make money.”

Although print circulation at the Times has stabilized, ad sales remain under pressure. Ads will long remain an essential part of the mix, Mele said, but “squeezing precious dollars from many revenue sources simultaneously” will be required to ensure the future success of the news operation. That means more emphasis on subscriptions, new products and services, and corporate sponsorships for events and “certain content.”

Mele was born in Ghana, the son of a diplomat for the United States Information Agency. After years overseas, he attended William & Mary College. He took his first job as a webmaster for Common Cause, an advocacy group that seeks greater transparency and accountability in government.

In 2003, at age 26, Mele became webmaster for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Dean was largely ignored by the national media until Mele and his team employed the Internet to fuel a grass-roots campaign that catapulted the former Vermont governor to front-runner status.

The campaign was the first high-profile political contest to use the Internet to connect supporters through early forms of social media and to raise significant donations from small donors. “He was the brains behind that,” Carroll said.

Publicist Hillary Rosen, who also worked on the Dean campaign, said “Nicco was the guru” for Internet strategy. “We hung on every word.”

Mele next ran Internet strategy for Barack Obama’s successful 2004 race for Illinois senator, and founded what is now called Echo & Co., which has worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies and other institutions on Internet strategy. He also teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School and sits on the board of the university’s journalism-oriented Nieman Foundation.

Mele is a computer programmer and Internet enthusiast, but he veers from the utopian view of technology popular in Silicon Valley and other tech centers. “The thesis of my book is that the end of big institutions is profoundly dangerous to our democracy,” Mele said.

Although he accepts that legions of Internet-powered Davids will continue to disrupt government, business, media and other large institutions, Mele also believes that big institutions remain essential for the smooth functioning of society and the economy — and that the need to adapt to new technology to stay alive and relevant is urgent.

“We can’t fetishize technology and say ‘to hell with our institutions’ without suffering terrible consequences,” he writes. If large media organizations like the Times falter, he said, “we might well leave ourselves open to corruption and abuses of power the likes of which we have never seen.”

Mele is married with two young boys and a baby on the way. A self-professed nerd and “maker dad,” he owns a personal 3-D printer on which he and the boys print toys.

His family will move from Boston to Los Angeles when he starts in January. He has roots in Southern California on his mother’s side, and called L.A. “one of the most exciting cities in America. It is culturally vibrant in a way that other cities just aren’t.”

Also, L.A. is “probably one of the only cities in America that (my wife) would get excited about moving to.”

Photo via GeorgeLouis via WikiCommons

Lewinsky Says She’s ‘Patient Zero’ For Cyberbullying

Lewinsky Says She’s ‘Patient Zero’ For Cyberbullying

By Stephanie Farr, Philadelphia Daily News

PHILADELPHIA — Monica Lewinsky called herself “patient zero,” the first person to ever have her reputation “completely destroyed worldwide via the Internet.”
It’s unknown what patient number Tyler Clementi was when, 12 years later, he took his own life out of embarrassment after his freshman roommate at Rutgers University secretly videotaped him kissing another man and streamed it online.
While Clementi’s death hit home with Lewinsky, it hit her mother even more.
“I wondered why,” Lewinsky said. “Eventually, it dawned on me: She was back in 1998, back to a time when I was periodically suicidal, when she might have easily lost me, when I too might have been humiliated to death.”
In her first major public speaking engagement, at the Forbes Under 30 Summit at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Monday, Lewinsky was poised, confident and, at times, emotional, as she talked to 1,500 young leaders about reputation, cyberbullying and the online community’s “compassion deficit and empathy crisis.”
In 1995, at age 22, Lewinsky, a White House intern, began an affair with her then-boss, President Bill Clinton.
“At that time, it was my everything,” she told the crowd, that is, until the affair became public in 1998. It spurred an impeachment trial for Clinton and a public shaming for Lewinsky that made the scarlet letter appear rosy pink in contrast.
Although the media frenzy was pre-Google, pre-Facebook, and pre-Twitter, Lewinsky said the traditional media were for the first time “usurped by the Internet,” especially by sites like the Drudge Report.
“Around the world this story went, a viral phenomenon that you could argue was the first moment of truly social media,” she said.
Lewinsky did not recognize the woman she was portrayed as, “the creature from the media lagoon.”
“I lost my sense of self. Lost it,” she said. “Or, I had it stolen because, in a way, it was a form of identity theft.”
Lewinsky went through anxiety, depression and self-loathing. Her mantra was: “I want to die.”
“When I ask myself how best to describe how the last 16 years have felt I always come back to that word: shame,” she said. “My own personal shame, shame that befell my family and shame that befell my country. Our country.”
Lewinsky said cyberbullying is a vast, expansive territory.
“There is no way to wrap your mind around where the humiliation ends. There are no borders,” she said. “It honestly feels like the whole world is laughing at you. I know. I lived it.”
What got her through was the compassion shown to her by her friends and family.
“We shared a lot of gallows humor,” she said. “A lot.”
Lewinsky told the room filled with young people of good repute that she was there, in part, to illustrate how delicate a construct reputation is, especially in the Internet age.
“It’s been said it takes a lifetime to build a good reputation but you can lose it in a minute,” she said. “That’s never been more true than today.”
Lewinsky said she’s chosen to speak out now because somehow — “who the hell knows how?” — she has survived one of the worst public shamings of the digital age.
“Having survived it myself, what I want to do now is help other victims of the shame game survive, too,” she said. “I want to put my suffering to good use and give purpose to my past.”
Although many attendees of the summit came into yesterday morning’s session wondering why Lewinsky was on the bill, few questioned it when she was done. She received a standing ovation.
Elaine Hsiao, 28, a Forbes 30 Under 30 winner in the Science and Health Care division, said she and her friend Leon Hong, 28, both of Los Angeles, were impressed by Lewinsky.
“It was just so personal,” Hong said. “We kind of came in here thinking, ‘Oh, why is Monica Lewinsky coming?’ and then came out thinking, ‘Oh, that was the most important talk of the morning.’ ”

AFP Photo/Peter Kramer

Want more political news and analysis? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Supreme Court Hears Arguments In Aereo Online TV Case

Supreme Court Hears Arguments In Aereo Online TV Case

By Vera Bergengruen, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices seemed torn Tuesday as they listened to the arguments in a complex technological case involving copyright law, the rights of TV broadcasters and a video startup called Aereo that is upending how viewers access television.

While skeptical of Aereo’s service, which is based on a technological loophole to get around copyright laws, the justices worried that siding with broadcasters could endanger the same Internet cloud services that millions of people use to access and store all kinds of digital files.

Aereo lets users in 11 cities stream local broadcast TV to their computers, phones and tablets by renting them a tiny antenna and cloud storage for a small fee. Broadcasters including ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox claim that Aereo’s service illegally steals their copyrighted content. If the court rules in favor of the startup, it could threaten the lucrative fees the networks receive from cable companies to transmit their content. Broadcasters want Aereo to either pay similar fees or shut down.

“Your technological model is based solely on circumventing legal prohibitions that you don’t want to comply with,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. told Aereo’s lawyer, David Frederick.

“There’s no reason for you to have 10,000 dime-sized antennas except to get around the Copyright Act,” Roberts said.

The entire case hinges on whether Aereo is engaging in a “public” or “private” performance when it transmits content. Aereo has a data center in each city where it operate thousands of dime-size antennas. When a subscriber wants to watch a show live or record it, the company temporarily assigns the customer an antenna and transmits the programming to the subscriber’s tablet, phone or Internet TV.

Since the potential audience is only one person, it should be considered a private performance, not a public performance regulated by the Copyright Act, Aereo argued.

Lawyers on both sides used analogies ranging from valet parking to coat checks to clarify the complex technological issues at hand. The broadcasters’ counsel explained that Aereo’s users aren’t accessing the service to watch something online that they have already bought — they are using it to get that content in the first place.

“I show up at the car dealership without a car, I’m going to be able to get a car. If I show up at the valet parking service and I don’t own a car, it’s not going to end well for me,” the broadcasters’ counsel, Paul Clement, a former U.S. solicitor general, said to laughter in the packed courtroom.

Just as disturbing to some of the justices, however, are the unintended and far-reaching implications an Aereo loss could have on the cloud services industry.

“Are we somehow catching other things that really will change life but shouldn’t, such as the cloud?” asked Justice Stephen Breyer.

The “cloud” storage Aereo provides lets users record and store programs on a remote server instead of directly on their computer, where they can access their shows anytime, from anywhere.

Technology groups have expressed their concern that a ruling against Aereo would stifle innovation and endanger popular apps such as Google Drive, iCloud and Dropbox. Since those services are also used to remotely access copyrighted content, like legally purchased songs or movies, they could end up in murky legal territory if Aereo loses, some groups say. There isn’t any fresh copyright law regarding the new cloud services that are springing up.

“The cloud industry is freaked out about this case,” said Frederick, the lawyer for Aereo.

Clement insisted that the justices should not try to “solve the problem of the cloud once and for all” in this case, but instead focus on the plain violation of copyright law in front of them.

If Aereo’s service is really based on innovative technology it will survive anyway, argued Clement.

“If all they have is a gimmick, then they probably will go out of business and nobody should cry a tear over that,” he said.

The Supreme Court is expected to reach a decision by early summer.

AFP Photo/Saul Loeb