April 2010

Oregon schools adopt Google Apps to save cash, expand ed-tech offerings

Oregon's 540,000 public school students will be able to get teacher feedback on classroom projects in real time and create web sites and online videos, after the state school system announced April 28 that it will be the first to use Google Apps for Education in K-12 schools statewide.

Moving to the free Google Apps for Education - a host of school-friendly features the Internet giant has pushed in recent months - will save the state $1.5 million in IT costs because the service is hosted entirely on the web, with no hardware, software, or technology upkeep involved, Oregon Schools Superintendent Susan Castillo said.

Foundations offer $506M for education innovation

A coalition of wealthy foundations is offering up to half a billion dollars to match federal grants meant to encourage education reform, taking the pressure off schools scrambling to find the matching dollars they need to get the money.

A dozen foundations plan to announce this week that they are investing $506 million, a portion of which is intended to match grants from the $650 million Investing in Innovation (I3) program from the U.S. Department of Education (ED). The foundations also set up an Internet portal for applying for matching funds from all the foundations in one step, streamlining the task of seeking money from multiple sources. School districts, schools, and other nonprofits have until May 12 to apply for the money, which will be paid out by the end of September. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he was ecstatic about the foundations' interest in the innovation program and called the partnership unprecedented.

Lots of technology, but we're missing the point

[Commentary] Though I'm a technology junkie, I continue to revel in the fact that so much of the world's information is never more than a few keystrokes away. I remember the days of those terrible old search engines that returned 10 million results, most of them irrelevant. I marvel now at the ability of Google or Bing or Wolfram Alpha to deliver pretty much what I ask for. Educators, from K to Ph.D., have assumed that our most foundational task is to put the best technology into the hands of as many people as possible. Once they have the tools, the assumption goes, our students can flourish. Whether delivering unbelievably cheap laptops or sophisticated scientific databases, education is in a providing mood despite the economic downturn. Many are predicting that the result will be a utopia in which education and technology create the super-student of the future.

My institution -- Trinity Western University, in Langley, British Columbia -- has technology: lots of it, from campus-wide Wi-Fi, to extensive library databases, to laptops in the hands of most students. One would think that utopia was just on the horizon, and the coming techno-student was emerging before our eyes.

But, as necessary as technology is to education, something crucial has been left out. The give-them-technology movement is missing the point. We are not teaching our students how to handle information.

ONC turns its attention to health reform IT

Dr. David Blumenthal, the national health IT coordinator, asked his advisors to turn to one of the most vexing problems on the health reform horizon: streamlining federal and state systems for enrolling people applying for health insurance benefits under the law.

Dr Blumenthal asked members of the Standards Committee to start to develop standards for exchanging eligibility and enrollment data electronically between what is now a hodgepodge of federal and state health and social health programs and services organizations. In doing so, he acknowledged both a major new direction - and workload - for ONC.

Study: VA gets high yield from HIT investment

The Department of Veterans Affairs has spent proportionally more than the private sector on health IT and has achieved higher levels of IT adoption and quality of care as a result.

Those were the key conclusions reached in a comparative study undertaken by researchers from the Center for Information Technology Leadership and published in the April issue of Health Affairs, a healthcare policy journal. CITL is part of the Boston-based, nonprofit Partners HealthCare System. The CITL researchers concluded that taxpayers have ponied up over $4 billion on the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), and its predecessor, the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program, since 1977. CITL compared VA IT spending levels from 2001 to 2007 with that in the private sector and came up with a ratio of IT spending to total healthcare spending of 4.76 percent at the VA and 3.97 percent in the private sector figure.

The Pixelization of Journalism

[Commentary] The journalism industry is in turmoil. The digital revolution has hit content providers of all kinds, changing their business models and in some cases altering the nature of the underlying content itself. Music has seen this most starkly. But print content, most particularly newspapers, have also faced significant disruption.

Digitization and the communications revolution have placed in the consumer/user the tools to access the content they want, when they want it, at little or no cost. But there needs to be something to access: content needs to be created and paid for at some level. The good news is that there are many revenue streams for news and information visible today. Journalists serve as watchdogs to the effective operation of government, and provide much of the information a citizen needs to exercise his or her functions of citizenship. They also supply much of the day-to-day information necessary for an individual to get along in civil society. As the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy so aptly describe, these functions are all essential to a thriving democracy. So too is the quest for finding sustainable models for the functions of journalism, however they are realized.

New Tool Allows Consumers To Manage Behavioral Targeting Preferences

Spam compliance company UnsubCentral will unveil a new service Thursday that enables marketers to allow Web users to manage the types of behaviorally targeted ads they receive.

The new program, dubbed PreferenceCentral, will allow brands to collect information directly from consumers about whether they want targeted ads, and if so, for which types of products. The program is designed to work in conjunction with the soon-to-debut behavioral targeting icons, which will carry metadata that includes information about the advertiser and links to the company. The PreferenceCentral platform can be included in the icons' landing page for marketers; consumers who click on that link would be able to visit a marketer's page where they can let the company know their preferences regarding behaviorally targeted ads. The tool is slated to launch in the third quarter.

Nielsen Turns The 'Channel' Off, Permanently

In a move that is a bit ironic and very symbolic for the television industry, Nielsen Wednesday said it has effectively turned off the TV channel. As part of the release of an annual report on America's television audiences, Nielsen said it had dropped one of its most popular features - data showing how many channels the average TV household receives - because in a digital, time-shifted multichannel universe, there no longer is a "consistent" meaning for the term "channel."

"In an analog world, one channel generally represented a single viewing source," Nielsen explained in the release of its annual Television Audience Report. "With the growth and evolution of digital television technology this is no longer the case." The move is ironic, because Nielsen originally got into the TV business in the 1950s by measuring which channels TV households were tuning to. It is symbolic, because Nielsen, and others in the media industry, are pushing to redefine television as something else: one of many platforms in a rapidly expanding "video" marketplace chockfull of potential new clients and reports to sell.

House transparency caucus vows to regain public's trust in government

Twenty-seven Members of Congress kicked off a congressional transparency caucus on Thursday with a panel discussion on how the government can earn back Americans' trust.

One of the group's first actions will be to ensure that information posted on the Web from every branch of government is consistent, searchable and downloadable. The uniform level of reporting would allow citizens to have a better context for comparing spending figures such as federal officials' compensation and earmarks, or appropriations for lawmakers' pet projects. The goal of the caucus, which was announced in March, is to advance transparency and accountability across government. Measuring these goals will require online access to government information in formats that can be searched and downloaded for free, according to the caucus' principles. The group plans to make such information available by educating lawmakers, taking legislative action and overseeing existing polices.

Volcano Still leads Online News

For the second week in a row, the travel delays caused by the Icelandic volcano that spewed ash in the skies over Europe were the lead subject on blogs. And in an illustration of how news can be personalized in social media, a good deal of the commentary included individual experiences from people directly affected by the grounded fights.

For the week of April 19-23, more than a quarter (28%) of the week's links on blogs were about the Icelandic volcano and the related travel problems according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. That more than doubled the attention to the story the previous week (13% of the links), when the volcano finished in a three-way tie for the lead topic.