A few years ago at MIT we took a look at how we had organized academic computing and administrative computing; in most universities these are the two organizations that handle the technology infrastructure on campus. At the time, the decision was made to reorganize pieces of academic computing. Stuff like the learning management system went to central IT, and other parts to the library. Our group, the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology was created to bridge between faculty innovation and the service organizations. We do the fun stuff from working with faculty, looking at scaling up innovation, and experimenting with things. We’re part of the Dean for Undergraduate Education’s office, and so our mission is to work with MIT faculty to do teaching and learning innovations for MIT students.

I do a number of things with OEIT, ranging from working with individual faculty members to looking at strategic initiatives for the university to how we might move forward with some of the teaching and learning innovations that we see in the world at large. So it’s both the local focus with individual faculty and students, as well as an Institute-wide focus. I’m also fortunate to be able to continue to participate in the open education community and the broader technology and learning community outside of MIT.

E-P: Can you tell our readers a little bit about some of the very cool things that OEIT does and helps with?

BM: We have a couple big project areas. One group is called STAR; it takes research software, software that faculty and graduate students are using to perform research, and looks at how it might be used in undergraduate classes. More generally they look at the educational problems faculty want to address or they have in their teaching that technology might be able to help address. And so what we’ve done is we’ve taken this research software, we’ve rebuilt pieces of it and we’ve also put in interfaces that are much more approachable, with a few minutes of introduction for undergrads, versus say months of learning if you’re a graduate student trying to understand all the nuances of the software. Our students can get started very quickly doing some really cool learning activities.

Then the other group is the one that I work in, it’s called Content and Curriculum. As the name says, we have a number of projects looking at how content is related to MIT’s curriculum, and how it’s related to pedagogy.

One of the projects that we launched about a year and a half ago is something we’re calling Project Greenfield. I know about the notion of greenfield from manufacturing, it’s an industrial age term where factories and production used to be in towns and cities (brownfields), and if you wanted to try doing something new, you would go out into a green field and start over. And so we sort of took that name and started to think about – and we’ve actually been thinking about this for years – how MIT has this great resource, OpenCourseWare, but that we thought it could be much more. We wanted to try this little tweak to OCW or this other little experiment. Instead of experimenting on OCW live, we came to the realization that wait, we could just try doing all of these ourselves under the same license that everybody else can. What we’ve done is we’ve made a copy and are starting to experiment with it.

E-P: OEIT is awesome, especially for MIT students, but what opportunities do other students who don’t attend MIT have? Can they use OEIT’s resources? Is there anything they can take advantage of, other than obviously OpenCourseWare?

BM: So OpenCourseWare exists. The thread of openness pervades much of what we do at OEIT. And even though we’re doing things in some cases very specifically for MIT students, much of what we do is openly available on the Web. The STAR tools are all on the Web; you can download them, you can use them, there are exercises that you can use as part of them. All of the things that we’re doing to play around with OpenCourseWare are also on the Web. The other software tools we’re developing is often open source, so individual tools and things you can use.

I think it’ll be interesting as we continue to move forward whether there’s additional opportunities for the world at large to really start to use this same set of tools that we’re providing for MIT students. source: education-portal.com

Draggable routes is arguably the most significant change to Bing Maps. “This is a great (and much requested) feature added to Bing Maps allowing you to generate a route, then in the case that you need to change the route, you can simply grab any part of it and drag it to where you want the route to actually go,” says Microsoft’s Chris Pendleton. “To use draggable routes, click the directions link in the welcome pane or the car icon near the bottom of the welcome pane. Enter a start and end, generate a route, then grab anywhere on the route to move the route line. The route will regenerate for you.”

With the zoom bar, you can now jump to specific zoom levels rather than just zooming in and out, and if you want driving directions or traffic info, you can enter specific commands in the search box like “Bellevue, WA to Space Needle” or “Seattle Traffic.”

You can now embed maps onto blogs or sites by clicking the share button when the map is where you want it to be. You can then copy the code or click the “customize view” link to bring up the embeddable map customizer.

As far as navigation, there is a new selection of features on the button bar with the following:

- “Welcome” loads the welcome pane

- “Car” loads driving directions

- “Star” loads My Places, formerly called Collections

- “Envelop” loads the ability to share the map with someone via email, copy a URL or embed the map into a web page

- “Printer” is for printing

- “Traffic light” will load the traffic overlay

“We’ve moved the processing power closer to the user,” says Pendleton. “Using Microsoft’s ECN, we now have Bing Maps running in data centers in 7 locations around the world. This means wherever you are around the world, you will access Bing Maps from the closest geographic node to where you are physically located.”

In addition to that, the default Bing Maps home page dropped from 678kb to 484kb and Pendleton says it “zips through the pipes” much faster now.

Art Swift, the vice president of marketing at MIPS, explained in a statement, “Android presents a compelling value proposition in bringing internet connectivity and a broad range of applications to MIPS-based digital home devices.  We are working closely with customers and partners to ensure that critical technologies are available for developers to take advantage of Android for consumer electronics.”

And since MIPS has previously worked with Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Linksys, Pioneer, Microchip Technology, Motorola, and Sony, that could mean that some very exciting and polished stuff is being lined up.

Indeed, digital TVs, home media players, mobile Internet devices, set-top boxes, and VoIP systems were all mentioned in the MIPS press release (although nothing resembling a concrete release date was shared).

So Android fans may not need to keep their fingers crossed much longer.  It looks like it’s becoming just a matter of time until the operating system is found in a lot more products than mobile phones.
source:http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/05/processor-specialist-promotes-android

Nationally, online job demand has been relatively flat over the last several months after sharp declines in December 2008 and January 2009.Nationally, there were over four unemployed looking for work for every advertised online opening, as the number of unemployed increased even as the number of advertised openings remained steady.

“Online job demand has held relatively steady at around 3.3 million advertised vacancies per month for the last six months,” said Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board.

The monthly number of advertised vacancies in 2009 continues to average about 1.2 million below the monthly average of 4.5 million in 2008.

“While we are not seeing declines, the sluggish nature of labor demand is another indication that the path to recovery is likely to remain a long haul,” said Levanon.

Looking at the overall trend in online job demand, the South showed the most positive improvement. In July, large states that continued to show modest increase include Virginia (4,700), Maryland (3,300), and North Carolina (1,400). Among the smaller states in the South, Oklahoma (500) and Alabama (400) increased modestly in July. Florida and Georgia, which have been relatively flat over the last few months, declined 4,400 and 3,700, respectively.

source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/03/online-job-openings-see-modest-gain

The online database will allows users to access information on 22,000 works of art from the Louvre, and provide high-resolution images along with their locations in the museum.

Before today, the Atlas database was only available in French and could be accessed via the Louvre’s website, which receives more than 10 million visits a year.

The launch of the English version of Atlas was started by and funded with a $380,000 grant from the American Friends of the Louvre, a group that was founded in 2002 to strengthen ties between the museum and the American public. The new version of the database will offer English-speaking visitors in depth information on the Louvre’s large collection.

Atlas was launched in 2003 and offer access to a database of 26,000 of the 35,0000 works on permanent display at the Louvre. Currently 5,500 artists in a variety of media are on the site. Atlas also offers online visitors a virtual album, which allows them to customize their own personal tour of the Louvre.
source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/07/30/the-louvre-opens-online-english-database