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A new network under development by Internet2 will give researchers at member colleges and other participating institutions up to 10 times more bandwidth—making it easier and faster to share large data sets.

The Internet2 network now allows users to transfer up to 10 gigabytes per second. The new network will bring that up to 100 gigabytes per second. The key to the speed increase will be capacity, organizers say. That means it will carry more data at any given time than the group’s present backbone network, and that will reduce congestion.

“The really heavy users in the network, the researchers, are going to be the first people that recognize the benefit,” says Chris Robb, network operations manager at Internet2.

Roughly two thirds of the funding for the $ 97-million project comes from federal stimulus funds announced last summer to expand broadband access nationally.

A coast-to-coast network that will connect New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Sunnyvale, Calif., is expected…

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Researchers at the University of Missouri at Columbia found no consensus among academics about the definitions of “e-learning,” “online learning,” and “distance learning,” which they say makes it difficult to assess the strengths of each approach.

“As education researchers, we don’t get the true context of the instructional environment, and without that, it is impossible to compare learning results,” says Joi L. Moore, an associate professor in the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at Missouri, who led the research, which was published recently in the journal The Internet and Higher Education.

Wired Campus would like to know, what do you think is the difference between the three? How important is it that researchers settle on a common definition of each?

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I strongly agree with this.  Certainly, we can show learning in short-term studies.  But the most important issues in education (e.g., motivation, attitudes, broadening participation, success in later academic career, success after graduation) can’t be studied in the standard three years of an NSF grant.

A group of education researchers and representatives of private philanthropies argued on Monday for more money for long-term studies of education. Such studies, they said, are often harder to find money to support but tend to be more effective than shorter-term projects at decisively answering key research and policy questions.

The researchers and philanthropists made their case at a gathering on Capitol Hill, titled “Payoffs of Long-Term Investment in Education Research,” that was organized by the American Educational Research Association, the Education Deans Alliance, and the National Academy of Education.

via Researchers and Grant Makers Call for More Long-Term Education…

Computing Education Blog

Photo courtesy of Jeopardy Productions Inc.

Raymond J. Mooney will be rooting for IBM’s Watson computer as it takes on two former Jeopardy! champions next week.

“As a tech person, you’re always rooting for the machine,” says Mr. Mooney, a computer-science professor at the University of Texas at Austin. But this time his allegiance is more pointed: His research is behind Watson’s ability to understand Alex Trebek’s questions (or answers, in the classic Jeopardy! format). In fact, Austin and seven other universities contributed many of the concepts that IBM developers drew on to make Watson work.

Mr. Mooney will tune in Monday at a viewing party the computer-science department is hosting and then watch the final night of the competition Wednesday at IBM’s offices in Austin, where he and his colleagues will participate in a question-and-answer session.

His specialty, natural-language learning, will be important for Watson’s performance on the game show.

“Natural language is ambiguous…

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An iPhone application has been used by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles to keep tabs on the progress of patients afflicted with Parkinson’s disease.

Researchers attached an iPhone 3G to two people, one with Parkinson’s and one without the movement disorder. The scientists used the phone’s accelerometer (a device that tracks phone motion) to detect tremors that are characteristic of the disease. The results, which showed a statistically significant difference between the two people, were then sent wirelessly to the researchers directly from the phone, according to iMedicalApps.

The study notes that previous research used wireless accelerometers to measure the severity of Parkinson’s disease, but this is the first attempt to use one device to both collect and transmit the data, which could make it easier for distant doctors to track the condition of their patients.

It’s the latest example of scientists using cellphones to help diagnose diseases remotely….

Wired Campus

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found that “crowd-sourced” articles written piecemeal by dispersed writers stack up well against those drafted by one author.

“I am pleasantly surprised,” said Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor at the university’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and one of the lead researchers on the project. The research team developed a framework it calls CrowdForge to split up and recombine complex, creative human tasks such as writing.

Articles created with CrowdForge rated well not only against those created by individual authors, Mr. Kittur said, but against those available on the same topics on a portion of Wikipedia devoted to short, clear entries.

CrowdForge starts with “small slices at a time and turns them into a complex artifact,” said Mr. Kittur. The framework provides guidelines for how to break down a project, assign portions to writers, and reassemble the pieces. The system also includes a method to evaluate the…

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