The top technology-related priority for community colleges in the coming year is mobile device and app support, according to a survey from the Center for Digital Education. About a third of those institutions have a strategy in place for use of mobile devices, and more than half are piloting the use of devices in the classroom but lack a formal strategy for doing so.
A new mobile browser developed at Carnegie Mellon University offers a better search experience for people doing complex searches across multiple websites. The app offers the promise of replacing the overwhelming tab management required by iPhone's default Safari browser. The Bento browser, as it's called, compartmentalizes search sessions into a project workspace structure.
A small private institution in New York is using mobile to better communicate with students and keep them engaged with campus events. St. Francis College partnered with Modo Labs to create a mobile app that personalizes the user experience for different student populations. For instance, the college is catering to prospective students with modules for Open House and Accepted Students Day, and already seeing an increase in online applications, according to a news release.
A professor of electrical engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University uses Sony's Digital Paper device for e-textbooks, lecture notes, grading and more.
A new mobile app at Arkansas State University will help the institution communicate with students on their on terms — via mobile device. The university partnered with OOHLALA Mobile to build the app, which will include message boards, event tracking tools, calendars and other resources, according to a news announcement.
A joint research project at several universities found that the "persistent presence" of smartphones comes at a "cognitive cost." Researchers in the schools of management at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, San Diego as well as the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon ran two experiments to attempt to measure how well people finish tasks when their smartphones are nearby — even if the phones aren't in use.
A homegrown student scholarship management application has spread its wings beyond the institution that originally developed it. Scholarship Universe, launched at the University of Arizona, has been rewritten from scratch and updated by Campus Logic for use in other schools. The product helps match students with potential scholarship opportunities and manage their applications; the new version is mobile-friendly and offers text notifications.
Wearable devices will see 15.9 percent growth this year on their way to selling 132.9 million units, according to a new forecast from International Data Corp. Throughout the forecast, the market will see a compound annual growth rate of 13.4 percent, reaching 219.4 million shipments in 2022.
A new whitepaper from personalized learning nonprofit KnowledgeWorks explores how wearables, augmented reality and virtual reality could play out in education. Vignettes drill into how educators could use these technologies in and out of the classroom to add "digital depth" to physical reality to increase student engagement, enhance the personalization of learning, help people understand others' experiences and perspectives, generate greater levels of self-awareness and foster critical thinking.
Neural networks have been behind many advancements in AI in recent years, underpinning systems designed to recognize speech or individual faces, among others. But neural nets are also large and power hungry, making them poor candidates to run on personal devices such as smartphones, and forcing apps that rely on neural nets to upload data to a server for processing. But researchers at M.I.T. are working on a new kind of computer chip that might change that. The new chip improves the speed of neural-network computation by three to seven times and reduces energy consumption by 94 to 95 percent, according to the research team.
