Barnes & Noble is looking to make it easier for students to “like” their class reading.
Using a new social-commerce platform, the more than 500 Barnes & Noble college bookstores across the country will be able to sell books and other merchandise through their Facebook pages, and allow students to “like” books and other merchandise available at the bookstore.
“We’re going to the platform that students like the most,” says Karen G. DiScala, a Barnes & Noble College spokeswoman. The company says it hopes that allowing students to “like” products on Facebook will increase “word of mouth” sales of bookstore products.
Shane Hinckley, the assistant vice president of business development at Texas A&M University, says the new Facebook sales platform will give the Texas A&M bookstore an advantage over competitors near campus.
More than 250,000 people “like” Texas A&M’s Facebook page, and Mr. Hinckley says the new social-commerce platform could make it easier to connect those users with the…
Colleges see great potential for using social media like Facebook and Twitter, but many officials are hindered by inadequate staffing, according to a survey of nearly 1,000 colleges released on Tuesday.
Ninety-five percent of respondents agreed that social media have great potential to achieve important goals. But they saw staffing as the biggest barrier: Roughly half reported having the equivalent of one full-time staff member or less working on social media.
The survey was conducted in February and March by mStoner, Slover Linett, and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
A “Race to the Top” for Universities? Pretty interesting idea!
In addition, as part of its 2012 budget, the administration has proposed the $ 123 million “First in the World” initiative for programs that hold down tuition, increase completion rates and move students through college faster. Last, the $ 50 million College Completion Incentive Grants would reward states and schools for reforms that produce more college graduates.
“We all know that the best jobs and fastest-growing firms will gravitate to countries, communities and states with a highly qualified work force,” Mr. Duncan said.
The administration will calculate each state’s expected share of the eight-million-graduate increase, taking into account their current college graduation rates. Currently, only 28 percent of young adults in Arkansas, Nevada and New Mexico have college degrees, compared with more than half in the District of Columbia, Massachusetts and North Dakota.
A Bentley University freshman turned to unlikely tools to help recover his stolen laptop: cloud computing and YouTube.
When Mark Bao signed in Sunday to a Web site where he backs up the hard drives on his computers, he says he was surprised to see recent activity on his MacBook Air, which had been stolen in early February from the lounge in his dorm.
The tech-savvy student had given up hope of recovering the laptop and had already purchased a replacement, but by accessing the Web-browsing history on the stolen laptop via the online backup service, says he was able to identify the person who had the laptop and find recently added files.
Those files included videos the new owner had recorded of himself dancing, one of which Mr. Bao posted on YouTube the same night.
“I thought it was hilarious,” Mr. Bao says of his discovery. “I couldn’t believe he didn’t reformat the hard drive or cover up his tracks. It was in plain sight.”
On Monday, Mr. Bao notified Bentley’s campus police…
The New York Times says its new paywall will affect some of its educational offerings, but not all.
The paper’s new digital-subscription plan, announced today, will require online readers who access more than 20 articles a month to pay at least $ 15 every four weeks to access more material. Print subscribers will get free online access under the plan, which will take effect March 28 in the United States.
Campuses that participate in the college-readership program, through which colleges purchase bulk quantities of the paper to distribute to students free of charge, will get discounted access to the Times Web site, says Eileen M. Murphy, the company’s vice president for corporate communications. There’s no information yet on how big that discount will be, she says.
Teachers and professors who use Epsilen, a learning-management system partially owned by the Times that provides access to the paper’s archives, will still have unlimited access to that content for their classes,…
There’s division in the news media about iPads this week. Optimism about the tablets in the college classroom abounds in a Financial Times article. But The Chronicle‘s coverage, “iPads Could Hinder Teaching, Professors Say,” pointed to serious pedagogical limits to the finger-touch computers.
How could this be? The two articles even reported on some of the same studies. One possible reason for the differing conclusions is that the FT story focused more on students’ reactions—the devices are great for reading, and just plain cool—and less on teaching.
For instance, both articles quoted Corey M. Angst, an assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame who tested the tablets in class. The FT reported, correctly, that students felt the iPad was easy to use and hard to give up. The Chronicle, however, also noted students’ complaints that it was hard to use iPads to take notes—the finger-touch interface isn’t good for writing. And one more telling fact: “For their…
I’d like to see the studies that this article is referencing. I do agree — Window’s style TabletPC’s are much more flexible, and I find Ubiquitous Presenter to be a powerful educational technology. (Great to see Beth Simon and Bill Griswold quoted in this piece.) But I wonder if the iPad allows for a different kind of interactivity, one that can also be used for learning, but we’ll have to learn how to leverage that.
Despite the iPad’s popularity—Apple has sold nearly 15 million of them and just came out with the iPad2; and there are dozens of competitors, like the Samsung Galaxy—early studies indicate that these finger-based tablets are passive devices that have limited use in higher education. They are great for viewing media and allow students to share readings. But professors cannot use them to mark up material on the fly and show changes to students in response to their questions, a type of interactivity that has been a major thrust in pedagogy.
A Reed College professor made an unusual discovery in October when searching for himself on Google. A Web site for an unaccredited college called the University of Redwood appeared to have repurposed much of the material from Reed’s Web site. For example, the list of faculty Web sites on Redwood’s site is identical to the list of faculty Web sites on Reed’s site.
Officials at the Portland, Ore., college say their investigation into the Web site leads them to suspect that its purpose could be to solicit application fees from foreign students seeking to study in the United States. The site’s authors could not be reached for comment.
But the site says, on an “About Redwood” page, that it is a liberal-arts college founded in 1908 (the same year Reed was founded) that offers “a world class intellectually rigorous academic program” and has a “huge team of 135 faculty members.” It says it is named after “the Oregon pioneers Simeon and Amanda Redwood.” (Reed is named for the Oregon…
Barnes & Noble is looking to make it easier for students to “like” their class reading.