SmartClassroom :: Wednesday, September 6, 2006

  • 09/05/06

News & Product Updates

Research Shows Increase in Full-Time Students

The Digest of Education Statistics offers useful context information for projects you might wish to pursue, and some of the data reported may surprise you. For example, between 1994 and 2004, the number of full-time college students increased by 30 percent, compared to an 8 percent increase in part-time students (surprising). During the same time period, the number of men enrolled rose 16 percent, while the number of women enrolled increased by 25 percent (not surprising)...

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Commission Reports on the Future of Higher Ed

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has published a compendium of State Education Reforms. This is particularly germane as we await the Spellings Commission’s Report, A National Dialogue: The Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education sometime this fall. We learn that in 2006, only five states (California, Indiana, Nebraska, New York, and Wyoming) have policies to align high school standards with college and workplace expectations...

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Seeking an Upgrade to GNU

Under the guise of the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source community is in the process of upgrading the GNU General Public License (GPL) for version 2 to version 3. The goal of the rewrite states: “The success of the GPL is due to its fundamental design principle: the protection of users' freedom to work individually or together to make software do what they wish. To carry the GPL into the future, we have undertaken [an initiative] to adapt the license to uphold this principle through the opportunities and menaces of today's technological and legal environment.” This article carries the draft and a variety of perspectives and comments that will influence final form of version 3...

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Featured

  • student reading a book with a brain, a protective hand, a computer monitor showing education icons, gears, and leaves

    4 Steps to Responsible AI Implementation

    Researchers at the University of Kansas Center for Innovation, Design & Digital Learning (CIDDL) have published a new framework for the responsible implementation of artificial intelligence at all levels of education.

  • glowing digital brain interacts with an open book, with stacks of books beside it

    Federal Court Rules AI Training with Copyrighted Books Fair Use

    A federal judge ruled this week that artificial intelligence company Anthropic did not violate copyright law when it used copyrighted books to train its Claude chatbot without author consent, but ordered the company to face trial on allegations it used pirated versions of the books.

  • server racks, a human head with a microchip, data pipes, cloud storage, and analytical symbols

    OpenAI, Oracle Expand AI Infrastructure Partnership

    OpenAI and Oracle have announced they will develop an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity, expanding their artificial intelligence infrastructure partnership as part of the Stargate Project, a joint venture among OpenAI, Oracle, and Japan's SoftBank Group that aims to deploy 10 gigawatts of computing capacity over four years.

  • laptop displaying a phishing email icon inside a browser window on the screen

    Phishing Campaign Targets ED Grant Portal

    Threat researchers at cybersecurity company BforeAI have identified a phishing campaign spoofing the U.S. Department of Education's G5 grant management portal.