Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Windows Julie Larson-Green was at WIRED’s Business Conference today, and she was put on the spot when asked by interviewer and WIRED Senior Editor Michael V. Copeland about the apparently sluggish start for Windows RT. RT’s failure is a consumer education problem, according to Larson-Green, since it’s very different from what’s come before.
Windows RT, for those unfamiliar or confused by the new familial breakdown of Windows following the introduction of version 8, is a lightweight version designed for ARM-powered devices (vs. x86, the architecture which full Windows OS runs on), which doesn’t offer access to the full suite of Windows software. According to our own Matt Burns, that has resulted in a big app gap, and made the Surface RT essentially a glorified web browsing tablet, which sounds like something different from a simple matter of properly framing the product.
“I think we have some work to do on explaining it to people because it’s different,” Larson-Green said. “They’re just so used to Windows meaning backward compatibility in all the programs that you use today. I use Surface RT as my main computing device, I connect to a corporate network using my virtual smart card and VPN when I need to, Office is already on there [...] it’s just a simpler experience and then the Surface Pro has the flexibility if you want to work on the details.”
“I love my Surface RT,” was a common refrain from Larson-Green even into the Q&A, who later characterized it as a device for casual consumption mostly, especially filling a niche for “weekend” use. Even the dual nature of her defense of the Microsoft tablet shows that it still needs work at Microsoft itself in terms of fleshing out its role in the consumer ecosystem, which probably isn’t helping the company properly explain its purpose to the buying public.
The Surface RT is estimated to have sold only around 1 million units total since its launch late in 2012, far under its reported initial estimates of 3 million or so. Other OEMs have balked at the RT line in the meantime, with Acer waiting on launching its RT slate until at least Q2 of this year.
Ramiro Juárez was born and raised in Arlington Heights and moved to Streamwood in 2009. He graduated from Rolling Meadows High School in 1999 and immediately began his undergraduate studies. Ramiro worked at his parents’ small business while in college, and gained a valuable insight into small businesses and the positive impact they have on the community. In 2007 he received a Bachelors degree from DePaul University with a concentration in history. In 2009 he received his Master of Arts Degree in Teaching from Rockford College. For the past five years, Ramiro has been a public school teacher at the primary level, serving the last three years at the Community Consolidated School District 62. He has provided a safe and positive learning experience for his students and has helped them meet or exceed on both the math and reading state standardization tests. Ramiro has also demonstrated his commitment to the education of children through the guidance of after-school programs, such as reading interventions, Saturday math groups and an advanced robotics science program for 4th thru 6th graders. www.championnews.net www.juarezforillinois.com Video Rating: 0 / 5
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Budget cuts and bureaucracy have kept engineering equipment from our nation’s schools, so a scrappy Stanford team is taking a truck chock-full of fun tools to the students themselves. SparkTruck literally parks a engineering bench outside of schools, let’s students play with the latest in maker technology, and has managed to have a measurable impact on students’ path towards a career in science.
“The maker movement has the potential to deeply engage kids in creatively using the math, the science, the other skills that they’ve learned, to build real things and see the connection between what they’re doing in schools and the real world applications,” says Joanna Weiss, the Secretary of Education’s Chief of Staff, who watched SparkTruck launch their nation-wide road trip at the annual Aspen Ideas Festival*.
“We believe that if we can get kids to make things and take them home, they’ll start thinking of themselves as makers that can create real impact in the world,” writes co-founder Jason Chua. For many students, science is a textbook, a brick of words and brightly colored images, which only has use in preparing them for a multiple choice test. One survey of student attitudes towards STEM found that “it is almost universal that mathematics and science is seen as boring and not related to real life” [PDF].
The maker movement, a trend towards mass, amateur engineering, is like Legos on steroids, complete with 3d printers, circuit boards, and anything else a child would need to create their toys from scratch.
SparkTruck sounds nice, but does it work? Stanford Education PhD student and resident researcher Kathayoon Khalil finds that students exposed to the SparkTruck glory see a sizable increase in how they identify themselves as builders (39% vs. 56%), which some psychological evidence suggests is a reliable predictor of actual behavior change. Khalil estimates that around 1-2 out of 100 students will pursue a STEM major in college as a result of SparkTruck. It may not sound like much, but educational interventions are usually (disappointingly) tiny.
One longitudinal study found that experience with high school scientific research bumped the actual decision to choose a career in science about 13%. SparkTruck is only an afternoon with some fun tools. So, as far as workable solutions go, it’s a relatively solid (and inexpensive) solution.
Check out SparkTruck’s road trip guide here.
*Disclosure: I consult for the Aspen Institute on a separate government innovation-related conference.
Microsoft has launched a new version of its Office 365 online productivity suite and it’s aimed specifically at educational institutes. Office 365 for Education replaces Microsoft’s previous Live@Edu service, with all previous customers getting an automatic upgrade to the new version. Like other versions of the online suite — such as the recently launched Office 365 for Government — users have access to apps like Microsoft Exchange Online and Office Web Apps, and the service maintains the same level of security, with support for standards like EU Safe Harbor and the US Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. The likes of Dartmouth College, Cornell University, and Gonzaga University have already signed up, and Microsoft told I…
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Today’s education event was a reasonably small one, so far as Apple pressers go, held at the Guggenheim museum in New York City, with a smattering of media representatives in attendance. It arrives on the tails of some already hearty numbers for the company, including the existence of 20,000 learning-themed apps and 1.5 million iPads currently in use for education. But Cupertino’s plans for the future of learning are grand indeed, including the desire to “reinvent the textbook” via iBooks 2. And while our expectations weren’t particularly grandiose going into this morning, we were, indeed, pretty impressed with what we saw. So, what did you miss if you happened to sleep in late today? Find out, after the break.
Continue reading Apple’s education announcement: what you need to know
Apple’s education announcement: what you need to know originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Apple and education have always gone hand in hand, from the first Apple IIs gracing libraries across the nation to the countless aging machines now in place at schools everywhere. Now, however, a new version of the iMac (not shown here) may allow schools to upgrade on the cheap.
9to5 is reporting that a sub-$ 1,000 iMac will be released on or around August 16 with a slower processor and less RAM. The machine will not compete with the “real” entry-level iMac, priced at $ 1,200, and instead will be available primarily to educational clients.
9to5 writes that the machine will have a:
3.1 GHz dual-core processor (3.06 GHz rounded up), 2 GB of DDR3 RAM, 250 GB of hard drive storage space, and the AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor with 256 MB of dedicated memory.
Presumably you don’t have to be a volume client to get this machine, but it isn’t aimed at the general market.
Where would we be without the world’s graduate art projects? In the case of Markus Kayser’s Solar Sinter, we might never have seen the day when a solar-powered 3D printer would turn Saharan sand into a perfectly suitable glass bowl. Well, lucky for us (we suppose) we live in a world overflowing with MA students, and awash in their often confusing, sometimes inspiring projects. Solar Sinter, now on display at the Royal College of Art, falls into the latter category, taking the Earth’s natural elements, and turning them into functioning pieces of a burgeoning technology. Solar Sinter uses the sun’s rays in place of a laser and sand in place of resin, in a process that is perhaps more visually stunning than the results. See for yourself in the video after the break.
Continue reading Solar Sinter solar-powered 3D printer turns sand into glass, renews our faith in higher education (video)
Solar Sinter solar-powered 3D printer turns sand into glass, renews our faith in higher education (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Inkling Chooses Aptara to Help Transform Higher Education Learning Aptara’s University Publishing and Content Technology Expertise Uniquely Support Inkling’s Revolutionary Digital Textbook Platform Read more on PRWeb via Yahoo! News
Pizza Beret Is Fierce, Delicious Pizza Hats: They’re not just for amusing Google Image searches or autocorrected texts about Pizza Hut anymore: Wow, that kid is intense. As intense as his beret that is a pizza. Hopefully those researchers compiling statistics about how kids keep losing their virginity younger and younger these days don’t count pizza beret kid in their study, or he’s gonna drag the age down to like negative … Read more on Best Week Ever
The “Post-PC” Era: It’s Real, But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does By Sarah Rotman Epps Computing is changing. The news last week showed that loud and clear, as Micros Read more on Forbes
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If you haven’t heard of Dr. Amar Bose directly, you’ve surely heard of his eponymous audio equipment company. Late last week, the 81-year old founder and chairman of Bose Corporation announced that he’s donating the majority of shares in the privately held company to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A member of that college’s graduating class of 1951 and its electrical engineering faculty all the way until 2001, Bose felt compelled to give something back and he’s opted for the most grandiose of gestures. MIT won’t be able to sell its shares in Bose Corp. nor have any say in the way it is run, but it’ll receive dividends as and when they’re paid out, which will then be reinvested in its research and education programs. In making this perpetual endowment public, Amar Bose took the time to credit Professors Y. W. Lee, Norbert Wiener and Jerome Wiesner as his mentors — in the image above, you can see him pictured with Lee (left) and Wiener (right) back in 1955. Chalkboards, that’s where it all began.
Amar Bose donates majority of Bose Corporation shares to MIT, says thanks for the education originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 May 2011 05:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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