Posts tagged College at Switched

Posts with tag college

Startup Develops iPhone Apps for Universities

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Nov 30th 2008 at 9:15AM

We'd estimate that 99.9 percent of the programs in the App Store are little more than a waste of time. So we get excited when a developer starts showing off tools for the iPhone and iPod touch that look genuinely useful.

A small startup, called TerriblyClever, is testing out a suite of applications aimed at universities that, if it becomes widespread, might make the Apple handhelds an indisposable tool for college students. The app is being given a trial run at Stanford University and is appropriately (and unoriginally) called iStanford. It consists of five tools that allow students to add and drop classes, plan a schedule, pay bills, look up contact info in the school directory, find locations on a campus map, and get up-to-date scores from school sports teams.

TerriblyClever hopes to expand its list of client schools and its suite of apps over the ensuing months. This could also be a great delivery method for news about class cancellations and campus alerts. Much better than the text message based CUNY (City University of New York) system which sends out useless messages like:

"FRM:NY-Alert Administrator
SUBJ:NY-Alert
MSG:CUNY Alert:College of Staten Island aΔ"

(that is not a typo)

[From: The Industry Standard, Via: Textually.org]

College Applications Negatively Affected By Facebook Profiles, Study Finds

by Tim Stevens, posted Nov 9th 2008 at 2:24PM

If you thought your Facebook and MySpace pages were just good for keeping in touch with friends, think again. We've shown how they can impact how potential employers perceive you, and so it should be no surprise that college admissions officers, the people who decide whether you're in or out, are also doing some profile surfing before deciding on accepting or rejecting a given candidate.

According to recent survey at 500 colleges by education company Kaplan, 10-percent of the admissions officers headed on over to Facebook and MySpace to see what they could learn about a given candidate. More troubling (at least for those with questionable goods on their profiles) is that 38-percent of those officers said their impressions of the students in question were "negatively affected" after looking at the profiles on Facebook or MySpace, potentially preventing the receipt of a fat admission letter from the school.

Some might question whether this practice is legal or ethical, since social-networking profiles aren't the same as recommendations sent in voluntarily by college applicants. While the practice is ethical or not is up for debate, but it's certainly legal. Anything you post up for all to see on Facebook is out there in the public, so if it's used against you, there's nobody to blame but yourself. [From: The Wall Street Journal]

Facebook Photos Used to Sabotage College Applicants

by Kaiser Hwang, posted Oct 25th 2008 at 10:27AM

The proliferation and acceptance of social-networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace (fine, Friendster, too...) for both business and personal use has its ups and downs. On the one hand, they make staying in contact with people around the world a breeze -- even if that means whittling down communication to pokes and nudges. They're also useful for recruiters, bands, and just about anything else you can think of that would benefit from a group of connected people.

On the other hand, putting up personal information on the Internet and making it easy for someone to Google your name can be dangerous, particularly if you've been posting photos and information that falls under the "TMI" category. Then again, people get arrested for all sorts of random reasons. The point is, the more of you that's out there on the Web, the more there is for everyone to use against you if they so please.

To wit: A report from the Chicago Tribune says that students are now sending letters to the colleges they're competing to get into that contain links to incriminating Facebook photos of their fellow peers (read: competition), with hopes that the evidence will lessen the person's chances of getting accepted, and raise theirs in the process. This new trend of "Facebook Sabotage" is actually more common than anyone expected, with a high school guidance counselor admitting that she received over a dozen replies after asking on a college admissions message board if anyone was receiving these types of letters.

While there are clearly ways to reduce the amount of data used against you (y'know, like not posting that drunk photo of yourself on Facebook), no one can deny that online exposure can also be beneficial in the right context. Our advice? Just use some common sense, people! [From: ReadWriteWeb]

Oxford and Cambridge Universities to Offer iPod Lectures

by Evan Shamoon, posted Oct 9th 2008 at 8:47AM

In what is sure to be seen as yet another argument for college students not to attend class (or college, for that matter), England's venerable Oxford and Cambridge universities launched a service earlier this week that allows lectures, videos and podcasts to be downloaded from the iTunes store. The goal is to make the elite institutions more accessible to people across the world (particularly those who have iPods/iPhones).

Cambridge will make available more than 300 lectures, short films and interviews with academics (some of which are Nobel Prize winners, it should be noted). Oxford, on the other hand, will offer more than 150 hours of audio and video podcasts, including interviews with experts in genomics and the economics of climate change.

Students hoping to apply to the universities can also find helpful videos to help them through the process. Sadly, none of these appear to be a guide on how to change the grades on your high school report cards. [From: DailyMail]

Are Anti-Virus Programs Useless?

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Sep 16th 2008 at 9:54AM

In a computer lab at Sonoma State University, George Ledin is teaching his students how to beat the expensive anti-virus packages from top security software manufacturers like Symantec and McAfee. Students are learning to best these pricey products on closed networks where they can't harm other computers or the Internet. But that hasn't stopped security companies from condemning Ledin's work. Some have even vowed not to hire the professor's students.

Ledin says his work is important to help improve security software, however, arguing that the only way to beat malicious hackers is to understand their techniques and tools, as well as the weaknesses of current anti-virus suites. Security companies essentially accuse Ledin of handing over national security secrets, though they are quick to point out that Ledin is breaking older versions of the software and that new security techniques that watch for suspicious activity rather than just known malicious code are much harder to defeat.

Still, the ease with which Ledin and his college students are able to defeat many of the expensive security packages should worry anyone who cherishes their computer and personal information. Is anti-virus software useless? No, but we can't figure out any reason to drop $150 on McAfee's package when free tools like AVG do just as good a job. [From: Newsweek]

Professors Posting Pricey Textbooks on the Web

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Sep 15th 2008 at 2:32PM

Those of you who have been out of school for a while may not realize just how expensive college textbooks have become. Truth is, most college students could probably feed themselves fillet mignon for a year with what they pay for textbooks.

The costly textbook market is starting to come under pressure from both the academics who author the texts and groups who believe knowledge and information should be free and available to all. They're taking inspiration from a number of Internet phenomena such as peer-to-peer file sharing, Wikipedia, and the open source movement.

Professor R. Preston McAfee, from Cal Tech, has authored an introductory tome on economics that he has made available online for free. The book is also being offered in print from multiple outlets for a fraction of the price of normal textbooks -- $11 at its cheapest. The book, 'Introduction to Economic Analysis,' is even being used at Harvard.

But McAfee's free e-text book is just the beginning. Connexions is a tool for making what amount to textbook mash-ups. Authors can submit full length texts of individual sections (called modules) that can than be edited, mixed and mashed, as long as the original author is credited according to the Creative Commons license.

Connexions is just one way in which the open source movement is influencing the education market. Perhaps even more impressive is MIT's OpenCourseWare, which since being announced in 2001 has made lectures, assignments, and reading material for over 1,800 classes available online to the general public.

Textbook publishers are now rushing to join the 21st century before they can be blindsided and replaced (as record stores and printed encyclopedias have been) by these new Internet-powered movements. CourseSmart was formed by a consortium of academic publishers who have made over 4,000 textbooks available online or as digital downloads for less than their print options. But even these discounted offerings are pricey and lack flexibility, offering students the option to either download, or read online, not both.

These new free and community based educational offerings are quite a ways from deposing the academic publishing powerhouses, but they will likely find a niche amongst the more technologically savvy and experimental professors and students. [From: The New York Times]

University of Kentucky Ditching Land Lines for Cell Phones

by Tim Stevens, posted Sep 12th 2008 at 9:02AM

http://www.uky.edu/uksb07/assets/background.jpg

It's hard to find similarities across any random selection of college students, with each having different backgrounds, goals, and preferred alcoholic beverages. There is, however, one commonality: cell phones. A study at the University of Kentucky recently found that 98.2-percent of UK students had cell phones that they relied on for their primary means of communication, findings that have spurred the school to ditch land-lines in dorms, a move that will save the school $840,000-per-year.

Land-lines are being deactivated at a savings of $25-per-student. This is money that will offset rising heating costs this year, meaning room and board fees will not increase as they otherwise would have. Students do have the option of having their lines enabled, but so far only seven out of 5,600 students living in on-campus housing have suffered the shame of doing so. In case of emergency, UK has a system that can contact students on their cell phones just as easily as land-lines, meaning everybody wins and everyone is safe -- except for old-school phone companies that haven't gotten with the times yet. [From: nky.com]

Queen Guitarist Brian May Writes Astrophysics Thesis

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Aug 5th 2008 at 6:15PM

For Brian May, playing guitar for legendary rock band Queen was just a distraction from his quest for a doctorate in Astrophysics. The guitar god's thesis titled 'A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud' examines the phenomena of Zodiacal light, a dim cone of light that can be seen in the western sky just after sunset and in the eastern sky before dawn.

The light is caused by the reflection of sunlight off of interplanetary debris and dust, though in dark rural areas the glow has been confused for the first light of dawn. May's thesis focused on a series of measurements taken in 1971 and 1972 by the The Fabry-Perot Spectrometer in the Canary Islands.

Of course, Brian May isn't the first musician to fly his geek flag or to spend time pursuing academic accomplishments. Here are a few more famous musicians who are probably smarter than you are:

Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine graduated From Harvard. As did Rivers Cuomo of Weezer.
All of the founding members of Devo attended Kent State University.
Colin Greenwood, bassist for Radiohead, graduated from Cambridge University.
John Mayer is an avid tech geek and Blackberry fiend.
Dexter Holland of Offspring was a PHD candidate in molecular biology at USC.
Art Garfunkel has both a BA in Art History and a Master's in Mathematics from Columbia University.

[Source: USA Today]

Campuses Moving Online to 'Second Life?'

by Terrence O'Brien, posted May 30th 2008 at 3:01PM

It used to be that getting a degree online was a joke. Internet colleges were the new mail-order diploma -- saying you got your degree online was like saying your diploma was found at the bottom of a Cracker-Jack box.

Times have changed. Not only is it now acceptable for classes to be taught online, but schools are considered behind the times if they don't have some online element. Dozens of reputable colleges offer online courses, Ivy league institutions like MIT and Yale offer lectures and course materials for free online and as downloads via iTunes.

San Jose State University has decided to take things even further, moving the entire campus online in the increasingly popular online world of 'Second Life.' Students interact, complete assignments, and give presentations all in a virtual class in a virtual world. San Jose State isn't the only university to buy up land in 'Second Life,' but it is one of the few that has developed it and put it to use.

Is 'Second Life' the future of the online classroom? Maybe, but probably not. Interacting with avatars is likely just a stepping stone to high quality streamed audio and video that makes taking a class online exactly like being there, though it will make it harder to discreetly make eye contact with the cute girl across the room. [Source: Yahoo! News]

Texting Students Force Professor to Walk Out of Class

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Apr 7th 2008 at 1:10PM

We've all had professors who had some absurdly strict class room rules, or a bizarre passive aggressive streak, but Syracuse University professor Laurence Thomas has combined both, much to the ire of his students and their parents.

The rule: No texting in class. A perfectly understandable rule. And one that really the students should have no problem following. But professor Thomas' way of dealing with texting students is more akin to an six year-old holding his breath until he gets that toy he so badly wants. No, Thomas isn't holding his breath at the front of the lecture hall until he simply passes out -- that would be hilarious. Instead, when professor Thomas catches a student texting, he simply walks out of class.

Naturally parents and students, who are spending over $30K a year on this education, are a little peeved. They claim that Thomas has a responsibility to teach or pay up. Thomas on the other hand seems to think his students need to learn a thing or two about respect.

Undeniably, the students shouldn't be texting during class, but the professor's sweeping punishment of the entire class for the actions of one student lead us to believe this guy was teaching sixth graders not that long ago. Then again, at least he's not reacting like the guy in the video above.

From Jossip

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