Bellevue College looks to online software to help autistic students collaborate
Bellevue College in Washington has deployed online learning software to help students with autism improve their small-group collaboration skills.
Fifty Bellevue students in an Autism Spectrum Navigators program have been taking advantage of a discussion board feature inside Canvas, a learning management system from start-up Instructure.
The Navigators program, now nearing the end of its second full year, has deployed the Canvas software for the past year, giving Bellevue students and teachers access to assignments, grades and other materials as well as collaboration through text, audio and video from desktops, tablets and even smartphones and tablets.
"We've had Canvas this entire year and we've seen a lot more confidence and interaction with students," Sara Gardner, manager of the Navigator program, said in an interview. "We use a social justice model instead of a medical one [for dealing with autism], so we aren't aren't trying to fix our students and rather are trying to use the technology to put students together to communicate better and...support them with skills." Read more...
Computer science enrollments rise again by 10%
Interest in computer science continues to grow among undergrad students, who pushed enrollments up nearly 10% in the 2011-12 academic year. This marks the fourth straight year of increases.
The numbers might have been even higher if not for enrollment caps that some schools have put in place because they don't have enough faculty members, equipment or classrooms to meet demand, according to the Computing Research Association (CRA), which conducts the annual Taulbee survey.
"We don't have a way to gauge -- at least in the current survey -- how many students wanted to be admitted," said Peter Harsha, the CRA's director of government affairs. The association reported a 10% enrollment gain last year as well.
The steady gain in enrollments is a turnabout from what happened after the tech bubble burst in 2001. Read more...
Students gain credit for stealing 30 laptops from university staff
Stealing someone’s laptop could land you in jail. Stealing 30 of them would certainly earn you a longer sentence. But if you attend the University of Twente in the Netherlands, it may instead count as credit towards your degree.
Students did manage to steal 30 laptops from the Twente university campus, but no arrests were made because the whole thing was an experiment. It was setup by Trajce Dimkov, a PhD student and researcher in the Distributed and Embedded Security Group at the university. He wanted to find out how much human behavior factored into the security of an organization, specifically when viewed in isolation from the security practices in place there. Read more...
Rogue character space tripped Scottish exam results
A rogue space in the date field caused almost 30,000 Scottish students to get their exam results a day early, as Excel versions clashed and human checking fell down.
The texts telling students their Higher results (the Scottish equivalent of A-Levels) were supposed to go out Thursday morning, having been preloaded onto the automated systems at text-specialist AQL, as a CSV export of an Excel spreadsheet. The problem was a space which somehow got appended to the dates, causing Excel to export it as a text field, in quotes, which got rejected by the automated system which then substituted the default setting: the current date. Read more...
IBM rolls out free cloud software development tool
IBM announced this week a cloud-based collaborative software development tool that's being offered free to students now for academic use only but is expected to become a commercial service at some point in the future.
Called the Jazz Hub and available directly at Jazz.net, the cloud-based software development service is based on IBM's software development tool Rational Team Concert. Particularly aimed at use by college students, Jazz Hub is an idea from IBM to encourage a new generation of software developers to work more collaboratively and in the cloud. Read more...
Microsoft gives students free Xbox with PC purchase
We normally like to round up the latest and greatest tech deals in one daily post, but we couldn't resist sharing this particular one right away: Microsoft is offering a free Xbox 360 to any student who purchases a Windows PC priced at over $699. Read more...
Students aim to combat malaria with smartphone software
A team of graduate students has created a new smartphone application they say will allow healthcare workers in remote locations to diagnose malaria cases on the spot.
But first, the students hope their application wins this weekend's Imagine Cup 2011 national finals in Seattle.
The 9th-annual Imagine Cup, sponsored by Microsoft, asks student entrants to "imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems."
Tristan Gibeau, 25, a graduate computer engineering student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, said his team's application fits the bill.
"It's going to make a difference in trying to contain the outbreak of malaria," said Gibeau, the project's software designer.
"In the big picture, it'll hopefully help in the fight against most diseases out there and make everybody's life a little easier."
His team's prototype is a Windows 7-equipped Samsung Focus smart phone modified with a microscopic camera lens.
Gibeau said the software application can take a picture of a blood sample, process the data to detect malaria parasites, quantify how much malaria is in the sample and point the parasites out to the phone user. Read more...