Ipad-Will the gadget cut costs or open an even bigger money pit for cash-strapped students?

It seems like Ipad is causing a lot of controversy. I have heard so many people talking about this (well, facebooking about it) and know it’s all over the tech news. I’m not sure how beneficial it would be to replace books with the Ipad. It looks pretty neat and organized but, geez poor eyes of ours! All day long staring at a screen. Let me know what you guys think of it. The video is just a demo of the educational advantages of the iPad: Keep all your textbooks in one slender, elegant package; highlight and make notes; watch embedded video and multimedia; browse the web for supplementary material; chat and collaborate with classmates and teachers as you read.

 Enjoy!

Already textbooks cost the average college student more than $1,000 a year; electronic content can be much less, especially when it’s open-source. The open-license textbook company Flat World Knowledge estimated it saved students a collective $3 million just this past fall. The iPad uses the open ePub format for electronic books, which should be a boon to the burgeoning open education movement.

However, Joshua Kim, a technology blogger at Inside Higher Ed, asks whether the iPad is a “sustaining” rather than a “disruptive” innovation. The danger, in other words, is that colleges will spend even more money and faculty time on purchasing and developing content for these new gadgets, as they have on the generations of tech that came before (laptops, Ethernet, fancy AV in classrooms) without making cuts elsewhere. This is one reason tuition keeps growing faster than inflation. “The possibilities for learning, student interaction and enhanced campus services that the iPad unleashes will all come at a price,” Kim says. “Nothing about a tool as wonderful as the iPad will lower the cost of constructing or delivering education.”

That is, costs won’t come down unless universities act boldly to replace the expensive texts and butts-in-seats classroom models with mobile, wireless, open-source education. 

CUAid: Credit Unions helping Credit Unions During Disaster

CU aid (www.cuaid.coop) is the national online giving center for credit unions. All contributions are directed to the National Credit Union Foundation (NCUF) Disaster Relief Fund. The donations made to the Foundation’s Disaster Relief Fund will be disbursed through the credit union leagues or state foundations for use at the local level.

Your generosity will enable the credit unions to re-open their doors and provide critical financial services and resources to their members and communities they serve to help them rebuild their lives and provide for their families.

The donations will be used to ensure that the credit unions are able to function and will also provide humanitarian aid to the credit union and league staff in the affected communities, in short, where it will be needed most.

Updates on the Foundation’s Disaster Relief Fund can be found at www.cuaid.coop.

Holiday in Space – the 5 most expensive minutes!

SpaceShipTwo (world's first commercial space-plane)

Space tourism is the recent phenomenon of tourists paying for flights into space. I found this article interesting, I have heard of it but I thought it was something far and unreal (it’s pricey so it’s still unreal for me) but apparently they are going to start flying tourist to space this year. Enjoy! 

Recently, Virgin mogul Richard Branson unveiled the SpaceShipTwo, the world’s first commercial space-plane. With three bodies, five hybrid rocket engines, and (apparently) zero room for spaces in its title, the SpaceShipTwo will carry passengers 70 miles above the earth and give them five minutes of weightlessness before returning them to earth $200,000 lighter. Flights start in 2010.

Virgin is getting into space tourism just as their only competitor, the Russian space agency RosCosmos, is getting out.

In fact, even NASA is done with sending humans to space; they’ve grounded all their space shuttles and are asking astronauts to hitch their way to the International Space Station with the Russians until 2015, when their new space jitney is ready. (With American astronauts on board their Soyuz rockets, there’s no room for civilian customers, the Russians say.)

That leaves the Virgin plane way out in front of an industry that a lot of people are pretty excited about. Many of us may even be wondering if “space tourism” is going to become just another type of vacation, like a cruise or an Atlantis resort or a Vegas hotel.

Virgin is doing its part to bolster the industry by keeping its price relatively low: its flights cost only $200,000 with a $20,000 deposit, which is a lot less than the Russians’ multi-million dollar fee. Got the scratch for a Virgin Galactic ticket?

Source: http://www.fastcompany.com