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.
We stare at our phones all the time not because the devices themselves are addictive, but because we're driven to socialize, according to a recent literature review by researchers at McGill University.
Smartphones dipped in the final quarter of 2017, a period in which Apple re-took the lead over Samsung in worldwide market share.
Mobile phones, particularly high-end smartphones, will lead the segment, which comprises PCs and tablets in addition to mobile phones, and premium ultramobile devices, which include "thin and light Apple and Microsoft Windows 10 devices," will also help to push growth.
In a randomized trial this past summer, community college students in STEM fields who received personalized text message "nudges" to keep them on track stayed in school at a rate 10 percentage points higher than those who did not receive nudges. The study, a joint effort by Jobs for the Future and Persistence Plus, followed about 2,000 students at four U.S. community colleges to gauge the impact of text message communications on college completion and student success.
