Source:Google Reader
Source:Google Reader
Silicon Valley-backed software company ServiceNow Inc. priced its initial public offering above its expected range on Thursday in a closely watched post-Facebook IPO.
Thanks to Valerie Summet for pointing me to this article! I found the argument insightful. Blogs didn’t reduce the value of journalism — they eliminated the revenue streams (which is part of what John Mitchell and Dave Patterson were saying). People still value professional journalism more than citizen journalists, but it’s not still not clear how to pay for it. In higher education, we have a revenue stream problem. Online education doesn’t fix that.
Let’s take the newspapers as an example. Blogs haven’t undermined the newspapers. NYTimes.com and CNN.com get more traffic than any single blog. More people are reading the Times than ever before, in fact. Direct competition from citizen journalists hasn’t been a problem for the news industry. It turns out that most of us prefer our news from journalists. Newspapers don’t have a readership problem, they have a revenue problem. The plague on the newspaper business has come from Craigslist and Google AdWords. Craigslist fundamentally changed the classified advertising business, while Google revolutionized the rest of the advertising market. And once revenues collapsed, news conglomerates could no longer pay off the debts they accrued through a decade of leveraged buyouts and consolidations. Hence, we’re left with newspaper disruption. The same is true with books and even (as my own research shows) with political advocacy organizations. It isn’t direct competition that undermines market leaders. It’s the decline of revenue streams, making it impossible to pay for your old infrastructure.
Revenue problems for public universities are not originating in competition from online learning programs. They’re coming through systematic defunding by state legislatures. Higher education in America faces its share of problems, to be sure. Tuition soars and students are racking up mountains of debt. But the underlying revenue model faces no direct threat. A modern-day Good Will Hunting might gain his education through MIT’s online lectures rather than a Boston public library card, but the great mass of privileged 18-year-olds will keep heading off to college. Neither the University of Phoenix nor MIT’s online courses offer a replacement for the college experience that students are currently paying for. And competition does not equal disruption.
via David Karpf: UVA Board’s Lazy Business Sense.
Another conference on secondary school education in computing, also in Germany: 6th Conference on Informatics in Schools: Situation, Evolution and Perspectives. This one has been running since 2005, which is as long as ICER. This one is for researchers and practitioners.
Information technology surrounds us and from very early ages onwards, children are using it regularly. But in many countries Informatics Education featuring educational aspects provided by informatics is not part of compulsory curricula at schools, yet.
The International Conference on Informatics in Schools: Situation, Evolution and Perspectives – ISSEP – is a forum for researchers and practitioners in the area of Informatics education, both in primary and secondary schools. It provides an opportunity for educators to reflect upon the goals and objectives of this subject, its curricula and various teaching/learning paradigms and topics, possible connections to everyday life and various ways of establishing Informatics Education in schools. This conference also cares about teaching/learning materials, various forms of assessment, traditional and innovative educational research designs, Informatics’ contribution to the preparation of children for the 21st century, motivating competitions, projects and activities supporting informatics education in school.
via ISSEP 2013 in Oldenburg, Germany.
People have plenty of complaints about Apple's iTunes. It's makes organising your music a pain, crashes often, and is a slow resource hog. Plus, don't even get people started on how you can't manage content on a device that's not synced to your computer.
BT has hailed the 10th anniversary of Wi-Fi's arrival in the United Kingdom with two major announcements this week.
