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Forbes has just released its list of the wealthiest people in the world and you may be surprised to discover that among the top ten, none have MBA degrees. Rather, this vaunted list is populated by…dropouts!

Microsoft Founder Bill Gates (2) dropped out of Harvard; Oracle Founder Larry Ellison (5) dropped out of both the University of Chicago and University of Illinois. Spanish fashion entrepreneur Amancio Ortega (7) never attended college, so he cannot be considered a dropout. Eike Batista (8), a Brazilian/German mining magnate, dropped out of Aachen University in Germany, while Mukesh Ambani (9), the Chairman of India’s largest conglomerate, completed a degree at Mumbai University, before dropping out of Stanford Business School – at least someone has some MBA experience, short of that coveted degree! Finally, Christie Walton, an heiress to the Walmart Fortune and the wealthiest woman in the world, did not attend college (and her deceased husband, John Walton, dropped out of…

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The lecture-capture system Tegrity Campus has long been integrated into the Blackboard course-management system. But it used to take hands-on work from the college IT staff to get the two programs talking, and sometimes students who wanted to watch professors’ talks would be delayed for a day.

Now Blackboard and Tegrity have figured out a better way to shake hands, with a module that makes lecture-viewing a one-stop shop for students, and saves time and hassle for college technology staff. “I used to have to tweak things from time to time,” says Steve Clark, coordinator of learning systems at Athens State University. “Now it’s completely hands-off.”

For the technologists, the fix is an interface called a Blackboard Building Block designed to let Tegrity Campus users plug right in.

From the students’ perspective, they log into their Blackboard account, click on the Tegrity button, and get instant lecture access. That wasn’t always the case, says Mr. Clark. He used to run an…

Wired Campus

A new collaboration between Columbia University researchers and The Echo Nest, a company that tracks online music and delivers listening suggestions to users, hopes to take the human element out of Internet radio. One goal is to deliver better recommendations and more songs through improved artificial intelligence.

A giant set of Echo Nest data, which includes identifying features for one million popular songs, will make it easier for researchers to develop algorithms that can tag and recommend music to people, says Daniel P.W. Ellis, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia.

At popular music-recommendation services like Pandora, that work is still done by individual people, says Ellis, who heads up the Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio at Columbia.

He says the large data set also solves a problem that has plagued music researchers for years.

Previously researchers looking to study the underlying data patterns in music had to…

Wired Campus

This is an interesting argument that I hadn’t met previously: Pagination is better for long digital texts because it’s easier for sustained reading.  What are the implications for reading source code?  Is pagination (and perhaps formatting via something like Knuth’s WEB) better than a scroll bar?

Let’s put it under the umbrella term ‘scrollable’. Scrollable content works very well for two or three screenfuls of content, because it lets you adjust, pixel by pixel or line by line, to your changing context. You can say “I want this thing on the screen, and this nearby thing on the screen at the same time”, which is often useful — particularly if the content has varied elements like buttons and links and images as well as text. That is to say, scrollable content generally works very well for web pages.

But for anything of real length, it is seriously hard work. It’s important to realise what you’re doing when you’re scrolling. You’re gazing at the line you were reading as you draw it…

Computing Education Blog

Here’s a compelling example related to our earlier discussion about if and when order in a curriculum matters.  This report suggests that having the appropriate background knowledge helps in understanding content fully, so that what’s learned is not just memorized terms.  I like the argument, that we delay teaching a subject until students know enough to understand the fundamentals of a subject.  However, there’s still a question of what we call “fundamentals,” of how deep.  I’ll bet that the eighth graders who learn about the eye learn about nerves and light and rods/cones, but probably not about rhodopsin, and quantum mechanics.  At some point, there is a “just trust us on the rest of it” to the explanation.  The question is where to draw that line — in what primitives does one ground the explanations? What’s “fundamental” enough?

Students in the United States generally start to learn about the human eye in elementary school. Students in many other countries, though, don’t…

Computing Education Blog