The center of gravity at the university appears to have shifted. The school now looks like a giant tech incubator with a football team.

– Nicholas Thompson, in a New Yorker article entitled, “The End of Stanford?”

The big change addresses student labor. It has long been a common practice among the third-party manufacturing companies known in industry parlance as Original Device Manufacturers or ODMs, to employ students to meet temporary spikes in work at factories. Schools are sometimes ordered to put their students to work by local governments.

HP has pretty much put its foot down on this, saying that all work must be voluntary, and students should be free to choose not to work, or to quit if they’re unhappy. Additionally, when any students do work, the job must be relevant to their studies. The number of student workers has also been limited.

As the electronics industry has shifted to use manufacturing companies in China, Western companies from countries with tougher labor standards have been under pressure from human rights groups to improve conditions of workers there.

Apple has over the years taken a great deal of heat for its relationship with Foxconn, the company that manufactures the iPad and iPhone. Apple responded by pressing Foxconn for changes, and has published an annual review documenting workplace violations of its standards, and actions taken to correct them.

HP said the suppliers were told of the new guidelines today, and are being asked to comply with them immediately, and that it will audit their compliance regularly.

But StudyHall, which launches today, is taking a populist approach with its system: Students only, no professors allowed.

StudyHall users can create Facebook-like profiles with pictures of themselves and a list of groups and interests. The site, which is free to join, suggests potential buddies both on campus and at other schools that students might want to link up with.

Unlike Facebook, StudyHall’s goal is to focus less on social and more on academics, with digital notebooks indicating which courses users are taking and which books they’re using.

There’s a designated Notes section, in which users can post their class notes and control who they’d like to share them with; and, naturally, users can schedule a Study Hall — a collaborative online work session.

StudyHall is the brainchild of entrepreneurs Ben Winter and Ross Blankenship, who have received around $500,000 in early funding from a group of undisclosed investors.

Winter and Blankenship envision StudyHall becoming a peer-to-peer book-selling market as well, with StudyHall getting a small percentage of each transaction made.

While StudyHall has officially launched, it’s currently not available to any and all college students. Winter and Blankenship have been trying to get the word out through campus officials and orientation leaders, and say they hope to roll the site out by mid-September to five (elite) schools: Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Middlebury and Cornell.

It’s hardly the first company to try to offer an alternative to Blackboard. And it could face some interesting hurdles as it looks to grow.

Blackboard first launched in 1997, and for the past decade or so has been the leading Web site for students and teachers to access coursework and share notes. Its legacy product, Blackboard Learn, is currently used by more than 3,200 colleges and universities across the U.S., the company says, and has a large international footprint, as well.

After Blackboard went private last year, it began to focus on growth through acquisition — most recently by buying Moodlerooms — and has made some inroads in the K-12 market.

Blackboard also introduced mobile apps across all platforms, seeing that more and more students were using iPads and smartphones as study tools.

An example of a StudyHall profile.

StudyHall currently doesn’t have any mobile apps to offer, but says both iOS and Android apps are in the works.

More importantly, Blackboard is set up through client agreements with institutions, which then make Blackboard available to professors and students at the course level. Basically, where Blackboard is available, it’s got the administrative seal of approval, whereas StudyHall is looking to eschew the administrative process by making the site a destination for students only.

“We want StudyHall to be a place where students can post, ‘Hey, did you understand what the professor was saying today?’ or ‘Did anyone take good notes? I was hungover and missed class,’ without repercussion,” Winter said in an interview.

Winter and Blankenship concede that a legitimate concern is StudyHall becoming a forum for cheating, and that some administrators they’ve met with bristle at the words “collaborative” and “student-only” for that reason.

“We’re going to be very proactive removing content that’s flagged as fraudulent, and if a school reached out to us looking for a digital footprint of a student accused of cheating, we would, in a controlled manner, help them with that issue,” Winter said.

He also pointed out that the academic property of universities — which includes syllabi — can’t be uploaded to StudyHall, and that such restrictions will be clearly marked to students.

And, for argument’s sake, let’s say it is. But not because doing so will save schools much money. At least not anytime soon.

Here’s a report from the FCC that compares costs, per student, for a traditional classroom and one that uses tablets. You can see all of the assumptions on the first page of the document, most of which come from an education/tech consortium, but the important things to note are:

• The model assumes that the tablets the students use cost $250 apiece today, and will drop in price to $150 in the “future.” Presumably this assumes that device makers end up working some kind of bulk purchase price with school districts.
• But even as hardware costs drop, other costs won’t. Which means that while a school that equips its kids with a tablet and a mobile data plan will theoretically save $34 a student per year today, those savings creep up to only $60 a student in the “future,” even though tablet costs will have dropped by $100.

There are more than 49 million students in public elementary and secondary schools in the U.S., so $60 a student per year is still real money — nearly $3 billion. But based on the math in these charts, that’s still less than 2 percent of the outlay per student per year. Which means there had better be lots of other reasons to make the switch.

CopyofFCC-COSTMODELFINAL.ppt

The group includes Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot; and the family foundations of Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel Corp.; and Mark Leslie, founder of the former Veritas Software Corp. Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, has for years supported undocumented students through her organizations that help low-income high-school students.

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The purchase price was not disclosed but a person familiar with the matter said the tutoring Web site was profitable and enjoyed high margins since it only has five full time employees.

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The Cupertino, Calif.-based company will hold an event dubbed “Back to the Mac,” a reference to its line of laptop and desktop computers. The event, which comes just two days after Apple’s planned fourth-quarter earnings release, will feature new bells and whistles in the software that powers Macs and possibly new computer models.

The event comes amid Apple’s rapid transformation. Once known for computers popular with students and graphic designers, the company morphed into a mobile-device giant as its iPod, iPhone and iPad products took off with consumers. Now, those devices are proving popular with business executives, driving Apple to aggressively move into the corporate market.

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The Wikimedia Foundation, which finances and oversees the nonprofit site, received a $1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation to work with academic experts on Wikipedia articles related to public policy, which could include everything from political theory to legislative history and issues such as health reform and science.

The goal is to get professors–and, in turn, their students–involved in producing more articles on public policy and improving the quality of the articles that already exist, said Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh. He said the site expects experts to both vet Wikipedia existing entries and point out entire topics of importance to public policy that haven’t been addressed on the site.

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In China, the search giant is battling hackers and the government, who may be one and the same. In Europe, the company is being hauled in front of an antitrust review. And Italy? Total disaster.

Yesterday, an Italian court convicted three Google (GOOG) executives of privacy violations in a case that stems from a clip uploaded to Google Video in 2006. The executives, who include former CFO George Reyes, have been sentenced to six-month prison sentences.

And that verdict follows a December ruling whereby an Italian court found the company guilty of copyright violations on YouTube, the video site it bought in 2006. Mediaset, the broadcaster that brought the suit–and which is controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi–is looking for more than $730 million in damages.

Google has responded to the video convictions with an outraged blog post. Note that the language is more forceful than the company used to describe its China problem. But also note that the company isn’t threatening to pull out of Italy altogether. Maybe it should.

Serious threat to the web in Italy
2/24/2010 01:57:00 AM
In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that’s where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees–David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants–David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes–for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them–every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video–then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

Posted by Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel–Europe, Middle East and Africa

“As a company deeply involved in the digitization of education and business information, we were as interested as anyone in the launch of the new device, although we were never part of the launch event and never in a position to confirm details about the device ahead of time,” Steven Weiss, VP of Corporate Communications for The McGraw-Hill Companies said in a statement given to Digital Daily.

“On Tuesday afternoon Mr. McGraw appeared on CNBC in a wide ranging interview to discuss our earnings announcement and growth projections for 2010. His speculative comments about Apple’s pending launch, which he shared earlier in the day in a call with investors, were simply intended to suggest that if the new device were to use iPhone applications, many of our education products would be compatible with the technology and could be made easily available on it.”

Concluding, Weiss wrote, “Unfortunately, it seems that many mistakenly interpreted his comments as being more specific to yesterday’s announcement. It is also important to note that only the products of trade publishers were featured in the launch event. Our digital education programs are not in that category and were never part of those negotiations.”

It would seem, then, that contrary to other reports making the rounds, McGraw-Hill was not abruptly excised from Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs’s presentation yesterday after Terry McGraw’s disclosure on CNBC. And indeed, multiple sources close to the situation say that the CEO was not given a demo of the iPad before its launch and that McGraw-Hill (MHP) was never intended to be part of iPad launch event in San Francisco.

In retrospect, all McGraw really did on CNBC was to recycle and recast some comments made during the company’s Tuesday morning earnings conference call. Reading over those remarks, it seems plausible that he was simply excitedly regurgitating the same collection of rumor and speculation we all were during the run-up to the launch event.
 
“In the near future, you will undoubtedly see a McGraw-Hill e-book for the college market running on an Apple tablet,” McGraw said during the company’s earnings call. “All our titles on CourseSmart, the industry e-book consortium, are already available to students on an iPhone operating system. That’s because CourseSmart developed an iPhone application last summer with support from Apple. The goal was to have core educational content available on the iPhone operating system, which also makes it possible for e-books to run on new Apple devices using that system.”
 
Continuing, McGraw said, “Consider then the Apple tablet computer, which will be introduced shortly. There is a lot of secrecy about the introduction, but many expect that the Apple device will use the iPhone operating system. If that’s the case, we are confident that our CourseSmart e-books should run well right out of the box on any Apple Tablet. Stay tuned.”

Similar to what he told CNBC, right? Thing is, McGraw spoke with quite a bit more certainty during that interview. He said:

“Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable.”

Those remarks don’t seem entirely speculative to me. Still, what was McGraw saying that we hadn’t already heard before? Maybe he reads the rumor sites too.

A: Your wait is over. Major e-book readers I’ve tested, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader Daily Edition, already allow highlighting. In other words, you can select any section of text in a book and give it a gray background so it stands out from the rest of the text, persistently. It’s not yellow or any other color, because the screens are grayscale and don’t display colors, but it is highlighting. You can also add notes on e-readers.

I have a Mac laptop that I use at home with Safari and Firefox installed. My office environment uses Windows and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8. One of the features of IE8 that I really like and often use are “Accelerators.” I would like to know if there are accelerators available for download for the most up-to-date versions of either Safari or Firefox.

A: Accelerators are a particular feature of IE8 that allows users to perform an action on a highlighted portion of a Web page—like mapping an address or translating a word—even using services provided by companies that compete with Microsoft. Microsoft has put a system in place for companies to write accelerators and users to download them.

Firefox, on both Windows and Mac, has a massive collection of add-ons, some of which work in a manner similar to Accelerators, but it doesn’t have a directly competing feature. Safari on your Mac also can accommodate added features from third-party companies, some of which can work like accelerators, but it also lacks a feature that specifically goes head to head with IE8′s Accelerators.

I am going to law school in the fall, and I was wondering which laptop you would suggest I get for this three- to four-year time period of my life?

A: It really depends on your priorities, resources and environment. If you’re on a tight budget, value lots of choice, and enjoy playing games during breaks from work, you might pick a modestly-priced Windows 7 laptop. However, I’d stay away from netbooks, which can be cramped for writing long documents. If you have more to spend, and value freedom from malware, great built-in software and the convenience of dedicated stores, you might buy an Apple MacBook or MacBook Pro. But I would also recommend asking the school and current students, since it can be advantageous, or even necessary, to be using a laptop that the school prefers or that runs any special software the school requires.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

The site lets college students rate their professors on such traits as easiness, helpfulness, clarity and “hotness,” and its popularity has prompted a slew of news articles quoting teachers maligned or flattered by their anonymous reviews. Last month, the New York Times’s (NYT) Ethicist column addressed an unnamed instructor who asked whether it’s appropriate to suggest that satisfied students post a rating to improve his profile.

“Universities have always done professor evaluations, but that information was kept private,” said Carlo DiMarco, vice president of university relations at MTV Networks, whose MTVu division bought RateMyProfessors in 2007. The site helps students “seek the wisdom of a much larger group,” he said, when figuring out which classes they should be taking, a process that used to happen via word-of-mouth with a handful of classmates.

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But there’s a new, free Web site that, while overseen by paid editors, is built on lively content submitted by current students at the colleges. The information isn’t just words and numbers, but includes numerous photos and videos for most schools. You also can create a small social network of people interested in the same schools or who share other common traits.

In other words, this is a college-information resource built for the age of YouTube and Facebook.

The site, Unigo.com, costs nothing to use and supports itself with ads. Although it’s only a few months old, it already covers about 250 colleges and universities, and claims to average dozens of student-created reviews, photos and videos for each college. Its sophisticated search engine lets applicants comb all this material to find just what applies to them. For example, Unigo would let you see all content relevant to an Asian-American female applicant with conservative political views.

I’ve been testing Unigo, and I like it. In the sampling of college profiles I read, the site seems to have struck a good balance between the immediacy and candor of student submissions, and the professionalism needed to weed out wildly biased or inaccurate claims.

The site, founded by a 26-year-old who formerly created printed college guides, says it employs 19 full-time editors. This team uses information from a nationwide network of 300 representatives on campuses to create each college’s profile. Each representative rounds up contributions from others on campus, so that the site claims that over 15,000 students contributed to the profiles of the first 250 colleges.

Reviews, photos and videos can also be submitted out of the blue, and these are also eventually reviewed by the editors.

Each profile starts with a fairly long editor-written overview, liberally sprinkled with comments from students and accompanied by basic information, statistics and rankings.

But the heart of Unigo’s look at each college is student-created, in multiple forms. For instance, the site’s section on the University of Michigan includes 92 written student reviews, some running to thousands of words; 35 photos; 36 videos; and 10 student-written “documents.” The latter are often by campus journalists and cover things like athletics or critiques of nearby restaurants.

The videos are the most interesting part of Unigo, because they provide a look at current students and at the campus that isn’t often captured in standard guides. Most of the videos are fairly short, some only containing the answer to a single question like “What’s the best or worst thing about this school?” But others include opinions on issues like what kinds of students fit in best or worst on campus, or minitours of the campus or of typical dorms.

One student video I watched was a walk down the main street of the college town. Others are reflections on the school’s reputation, or on why the student chose one school over another. Another was about a student’s biggest freshman-year mistake (he took Classical Mythology, found it boring, didn’t do the work and flunked the course.)

I stumbled on a rap video submitted by a student from Clarkson University, which doesn’t yet have a review on Unigo, in which the rapper comments on the alumni, the architecture and the weather at the Potsdam, New York, school.

Unigo also contains articles on general topics, such as how to decide what size of college is best for you, and how to get the most out of a college tour.

While the editors ban personal attacks and nudity, they don’t bar negative comments. Unigo deliberately seeks out pro and con opinions. Many of the student submissions are enthusiastically positive, but plenty are negative comments on campus social life, the costs, the food, the faculty, the dorms and other topics.

The site feels surprisingly full for such a young venture, but it has some quirks and issues. Coverage is uneven. For instance, Vassar College in New York boasts 117 reviews and 42 videos, while the much larger University of Kansas has only 45 reviews and three videos. Finding the detailed search feature can be clumsy, because it’s not obvious on the home page. You can’t generate a quick comparison among colleges, and the site lacks any parent-oriented sections, although parents are free to use it.

Finally, there are just loads of colleges that aren’t yet included. The first 250 schools were “seeded,” with months of research and solicitation of student content. Unigo is confident it can get more schools, but only time will tell.

Still, Unigo is a good example of how user-generated content can do a lot to enhance an important topic, and still keep editorial standards.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090218/unigocom-gives-everyone-a-say-about-college-picks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080220/grading-neighborhood-schools/ http://allthingsd.com/20080220/grading-neighborhood-schools/#comments Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:01:00 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20080220/grading-neighborhood-schools/ Education — an issue that affects everyone in some way or another — is an ideal candidate for discussions on the Web. There, parents, students and teachers can ask questions under the cloak of Internet anonymity, which enables conversations about personal topics such as learning disabilities and teacher conflicts.

But the vastness of the Internet can leave many people wondering where to begin, especially when asking sensitive questions about education. And, even in a sea of discussions and forums on education, parents are often hungry for one piece of information above all else: data that helps them select a school for their children.

Education.com’s SchoolFinder (top right) enhances an already rich Web site (top left), while GreatSchools.net (above) works education-related content into school search results.

So this week I tried three education-related Web sites that dedicate some or all of their resources toward providing free school comparisons, including demographics, test results, teacher-to-student ratios and percentages of students eating free and reduced-price lunches.

I performed various school queries using Education.com Inc., GreatSchools Inc.’s GreatSchools.net and SchoolMatters.com by typing in a ZIP Code, city, district or school name. Overall, GreatSchools and Education.com offered the most content-packed environments, loading their sites with related articles and offering community feedback on education-related issues by way of blog posts or surveys. And though GreatSchools is 10 years older than Education.com, which made its debut in June, the latter has a broader variety of content and considers its SchoolFinder feature — newly available as of today — just a small part of the site.

Both Education.com and GreatSchools.net base a good portion of their data on information gathered by the Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, the government entity that collects and analyzes data related to education.

SchoolMatters.com, a service of Standard & Poor’s, is more bare-bones, containing quick statistical comparisons of schools. (S&P is a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos. [MHP]) This site gets its content from various sources, including state departments of education, private research firms, the Census and National Public Education Finance Survey. This is evidenced by lists, charts and pie graphs that would make Ross Perot proud. I learned about where my alma mater high school got its district revenue in 2005: 83% was local, 15% was state and 2% was federal. But I couldn’t find district financial information for more recent years on the site.

All three sites base at least some school-evaluation results on test scores, a point that some of their users critique. Parents and teachers, alike, point out that testing doesn’t always paint an accurate picture of a school and can be skewed by various unacknowledged factors, such as the number of students with disabilities.

Education.com’s SchoolFinder feature is starting with roughly 47,000 schools in 10 states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey and Georgia. In about two months, the site hopes to have data for all states, totaling about 60,000 public and charter schools. I was granted early access to SchoolFinder, but only Michigan was totally finished during my testing.

SchoolFinder lets you narrow your results by type (public or charter), student-to-teacher ratio, school size or Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), a measurement used to determine each school’s annual progress. Search results showed specific details on teachers that I didn’t see on the other sites, such as how many teachers were fully credentialed in a particular school and the average years of experience held by a school’s teachers.

The rest of the Education.com site contains over 4,000 articles written by well-known education sources like the New York University Child Study Center, Reading is Fundamental and the Autism Society of America. It also contains a Web magazine and a rather involved discussion-board community where members can ask questions of like-minded parents and the site’s experts, who respond with advice and suggestions of articles that might be helpful.

Private schools aren’t required to release test scores, student or teacher statistics, so none of the sites had as much data on private schools. However, GreatSchools.net at least offered basic results for most private-school queries that I performed, such as a search for Salesianum School in Delaware (where a friend of mine attended) that returned the school’s address, a list of the Advanced Placement exams it offered from 2006 to 2007 and six rave reviews from parents and former students.

GreatSchools.net makes it easy to compare schools, even without knowing specific names. After finding a school, I was able to easily compare that school with others in the geographic area or school district — using a chart with numerous results on one screen. After entering my email address, I saved schools to My School List for later reference.

I couldn’t find each school’s AYP listed on GreatSchools.net, though these data were on Education.com and SchoolMatters.com.

SchoolMatters.com doesn’t provide articles, online magazines or community forums. Instead, it spits out data — and lots of it. A search for “Philadelphia” returned 324 schools in a neat comparison chart that could, with one click, be sorted by grade level, reading test scores, math test scores or students per teacher. (The Julia R. Masterman Secondary School had the best reading and math test scores in Philadelphia, according to the site.)

SchoolMatters.com didn’t have nearly as much user feedback as Education.com or GreatSchools.net. But stats like a school’s student demographics, household income distribution and the district’s population age distribution were accessible thanks to colorful pie charts.

These three sites provide a good overall idea of what certain schools can offer, though GreatSchools.net seems to have the richest content in its school comparison section. Education.com excels as a general education site and will be a comfort to parents in search of reliable advice. Its newly added SchoolFinder, while it’s in early stages now, will only improve this resource for parents and students.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

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