Inkling, the company that makes interactive, digital versions of textbooks for the iPad, has thus far focused on makingproducts aimed at college students. But the San Francisco-based startup is set to debut its first title that could appeal to people both in and out of the classroom.
Later this week Inkling will release The Professional Chef, the official textbook of The Culinary Institute of America (CIA), the Hyde Park, New York-based chef’s school founded in 1946. The book, which is also known as “Pro Chef,” is the assigned culinary textbook for all students at CIA and a number of other culinary schools and has been called “the bible for all chefs” by famed French chef Paul Bocuse. Pro Chef has become a best-selling book for home chefs as well.
Professors who use Blackboard’s software have long been forced to lock their course materials in an area effectively marked, “For Registered Students Only,” while using the system. Today the company announced plans to add a “Share” button that will let professors make those learning materials free and open online.
The move may be the biggest sign yet that the idea of “open educational materials” is going mainstream, nearly 10 years after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first began giving away lecture notes online. Blackboard made the change after college officials complained that the company’s software, which more than half the colleges in the country use for their online-course materials, was holding them back from trying open-education projects.
The term digital divide was coined in the mid-1990s as a way to describe the gap in equity between those who have access to computers and the Internet and those who do not. Today, the conversation has shifted to this question: How do we define access when the price of personal computers and related technologies has dropped dramatically over the years and, according to thePew Internet & American Life Project, 95 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 use the Internet? And all of this is happening while we are in the midst of an explosive rise in mobile technology
Foundations, tech experts, and librarians came together to offer support for the proposed library, which would make many collections accessible to the public online.
How does Facebook activity affect a student’s grades? Reynol Junco, a professor at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, recently set out to determine exactly that.
The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
Small private college Abilene Christian University has entered the fourth academic year of its mobile education initiatives, and has issued a 36-page annual report online that documents its research projects, shares response from members of the campus community, and divulges results from multiple student and faculty surveys regarding the mobility work.
OpenClass, a course-management service from Pearson that is available through Google’s education apps, could be a strong player in this hotly contested field.
Posted by Teb Locke 
Charles Wachira
harryhaddon
Oscar Retterer
Teb Locke
