Student Loan Blog : Internet

Free Online Global University to Debut This April

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:51:00 GMT

This fall, Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef will open the world’s first tuition-free internet university called the University of the People, reports The New York Times (“Israeli Entrepreneur Plans a Free Global University That Will Be Online Only,” Jan. 25, 2009).

University of the People — which will operate solely based on open-source courseware, a type of learning tool that has allowed universities all over the globe to post education materials online at no cost to the public — will allow its students throughout the world to access written materials and lectures for thousands of courses via its website.

In lieu of tuition, students will pay enrollment fees of $15 to $50 and exam fees of $10 to $100, both of which will vary depending on the student’s country of origin. And instead of physically attending lectures, students will participate in online study communities and weekly discussion topics and will be asked to submit homework and exams online.

“The idea is to take social networking and apply it to academia,” Reshef told the Times. “The open-source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free.”

With about $5 million in start-up funds, including $1 million of his own capital, Rashef will open the school, initially, to approximately 300 students who will be able to pursue bachelor’s degrees in business administration and computer science. The school will support the students with both paid and volunteer professors, along with librarians and other professional educators that will monitor curriculum and evaluate exams.

In five years, at which time Reshef expects the university to be self-sustaining, Reshef hopes to have increased enrollment to 10,000 students.

Critics Question Plan

Although close to 4 million U.S. students took at least one online course in 2007, according to a survey by the Sloan Consortium, an advocacy group for online learning, online education experts still wonder how Reshef’s new venture will come together.

John Bourne, Sloan Consortium executive director, says, “It’s true that the open courseware movement is pretty robust, so there are a lot of high-quality course materials out there, but there’s no human backup behind them. I’d be interested to know how you’d find and train faculty and ensure quality without tuition money.”

Despite these uncertainties, Reshef, who is currently the chairman of Cramster, an online study community for students, and who offers an extensive entrepreneurial background in the business side of higher education, is convinced that his new venture will be a success.

“We know that online peer-to-peer teaching works,” Rashef said. “Putting it all together, we can make a free university for students all over the world, [to] anyone who speaks English and has an Internet connection.”

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Down Economy May Be Driving Students to Online Education

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:05:00 GMT

As jobs continue to disappear and unemployment soars, large numbers of adult learners may soon be enrolling in online programs, particularly at two-year colleges and for-profit institutions, according to a new online education survey (“Recession May Drive More Adult Students to Take Online Courses,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 9, 2009).

These two-year colleges and for-profit institutions, which offer programs tailored to working adults, will likely see the biggest boost in enrollment, but all types of colleges could experience an enrollment surge as more people turn to higher education to gain marketable skills in the recession, revealed the 2008 online education survey by the Sloan Consortium, a non-profit organization working to improve online education.

“A lot of people want to increase their skill levels or get that degree they didn’t have,” said I. Elaine Allen, one of the report’s authors. The threat of losing their job can be as big a motivator for people to get a degree as actually losing their job, Allen told The Chronicle.

She said that the primary motivator for adults turning to online education over a traditional classroom-based education may be one of convenience. “Time-wise, you have the flexibility of logging online and taking the course whenever you want,” Allen said. With Internet -based courses, “you don’t have to leave your house. If you have a family, that’s going to make things much easier for you.”

Over 20 percent of all U.S. students enrolled in higher education were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2007, according to data from the Sloan Consortium. And, The Chronicle suggests, if the recession were to drive more students to take courses online as expected, the percentage of online education students is likely to rise sharply.

Most of that growth will likely come from the two-year and for- profit colleges that have not yet maximized their potential for online enrollment, Allen predicts, while public institutions likely won’t see “huge growth” in Web-based learning. Of all the colleges surveyed, 58 percent said that online courses were critical to their enrollment strategies, and a full 70 percent reported that competition for the growing number of students pursuing an education online is increasing.

Allen said, “For the first time, [schools] are seeing students choose another college for its online program.”

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Yahoo! Website Finds of the Year 2007: Weird & Wonderful

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 06:11:00 GMT

Annually since 2003, Yahoo! UK & Ireland has been handing out their “Finds of the Year” awards to the most interesting and innovative websites of the year. Yahoo! UK’s panel of judges chooses a winner and several runners-up in nine categories:

In addition, users are invited to review the nominees in each group and vote for their favorite to win the People’s Choice category.

Here are some of our favorites from the Weird & Wonderful winners.

Weird & Wonderful Finds of the Year 2007

Faces in Places, Winner: Faces in Places collects photos of the various faces people have found in everyday locations.

Even if you’ve never been able to make out the old man in the moon or Jesus in a tortilla, we guarantee that after one tour through this site, you’ll be seeing faces where you never expected: in mops and typewriters, on noodles and pizza slices.

One of our favorites is Potty, which captured smiling faces, made with a stovetop, bottle tops, and pencils, on two ordinary cooking pots.

Got a great face photo of your own? Add it to the Faces in Places Flickr group.

Toy Voyagers, Runner-Up: This site follows the adventures of toys traveling around the globe with the help of humans. If you’ve ever seen the 2001 French movie Amélie, where a lawn gnome travels the world with his journey recorded in photographs and letters home, it’s the same general idea.

Users register their toys and set up a character profile and life mission. Each toy can then keep a travelogue or diary, documenting its globe-trekking adventures by posting written entires and photos of its journey.

Fishycam, Runner-Up: Just two goldfish in a fishbowl tracked by a webcam. It may sound boring, but there’s something weirdly hypnotic about the ever-circling fish. Tune in for a few minutes, and you may just find yourself hooked.

The cam quality’s a little sketchy, but site-owner Stephan is taking donations to collect the £300 he needs for a new webcam, if you feel like contributing to the Fishcam cause.

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Online Ordering Causing Mailroom Mayhem on College Campuses

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:46:00 GMT

The internet has completely changed the way college campuses operate, from class offerings and registration to college admissions and financial aid services. Now the technology is changing the way campuses deliver and receive mail. As more college students gravitate to online shopping, college and university mailrooms are overhauling their mail processing operations to accommodate the influx of packages.

Some pretty bizarre ones at that.

Car tires, barbecues, dishwashers, ant farms and air conditioners are just some of the orders college students are having mailed to their dorm rooms, according to a New York Times article by Jonathan D. Glater (“Majoring in Mailroom Management,” Nov. 21, 2007).

When students make their online purchases they often give little thought to the cost let alone the effect their shipping volume or types of packages they’re ordering will have on the mail processing centers at their schools. But for some schools, the adjustment has not been simple or cheap.

Revolutionizing the Mailroom At a Cost

The University of Southern California, for example, has experienced double the amount of their typical package volume in the last four years, expecting to process more than 67,000 packages by the end of this year. It has spent thousands of dollars adjusting their mail processing systems by building a new highly-complex mailroom almost as large as half a volleyball court for just one of their residence halls, Glater reports.

“Some folks don’t realize the logistical implications,” said Jeff Urdahl, the recently retired director of housing at USC, told the Times. “It’s a different world.”

Although online shopping statistics don’t exist for the college age demographic, according to shop.org, a division of the National Retail Foundation, internet buying increased nearly $220 billion last year and this year it is expected to top $259 billion.

And how are students paying for these purchases? Most interviewed for the Times article said their online shopping splurges are financed by college jobs, savings and parental allowances, but many students are also resorting to their good friends Visa, Master Card and American Express.

But students’ online ordering habits are not only affecting theirs and their parents’ bank accounts, they are also proving costly for the schools themselves. SUNY Binghamton spent $25,000 to implement a new bar code scanning system to track the increase of incoming packages, which rose from 33,000 in 2002 to 57,000 this year. Purchase College, also in New York, spent $37,000 on a similar system.

For Arizona State University, the second largest university in the country, the process became so cumbersome, the school chose to wash its hands clean of the mail distribution process and turned over all mail responsibilities to UPS.

Mindless Internet Shopping Hurts Students and Schools

The effect of students’ online spending is not isolated to schools; students’ bank accounts are taking huge hits as well. Credit and debit card use, necessary for online shopping, makes it much more difficult for students to keep track of their spending and their account balances.

Some students told the Times that they may buy something off the internet three times a week. This has led college students, according to Young Money, a student financial magazine, to have credit balances averaging $2,700, and as the popularity of internet shopping continues to rise, these numbers may only go up.

Students like Sarah Staton, a first year student at USC, don’t mask their online shopping activities; however they don’t quite seem to understand the effects it has on their finances.

“I do buy a lot of things, but it’s O.K. because I buy things that are cheap,” she told the Times. She admits to shopping on the internet more than two hours a day, especially for shoes. “How can I make a fashion statement if I don’t have the right shoes that match what I’m wearing?”

With this type of attitude, it looks like college mail centers and students will have to keep expanding their wallets.

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Could Google Go Obsolete?

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 05:29:00 GMT

The programmers and executives at San Francisco–based startup Powerset are hoping that the answer to this question will be “yes” once they debut their search engine that operates on natural-language technology.

Powerset finally offered its first public preview on September 17, reports Associated Press writer Michael Liedtke, at a conference hosted by TechCrunch, “a blog widely read by venture capitalists and other high-tech luminaries” (“Search Startup Ready to Challenge Google,” Sep. 17, 2007).

Powerset’s natural-language search engine would give Internet users a platform to conduct their searches in plain English—in other words, in the kinds of sentences people speak in real life—as opposed to by typing in an assortment of keywords.

Right now, all the major search engines—Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—use the traditional keyword-based model, with Google cornering more than half of all search engine traffic.

The difference between the two types of searching technologies has to do with how the search engine processes the search terms you type in when you want to find something on the Internet.

A keyword-based engine, like Google, basically disregards “minor” words like articles (a, an, the) and prepositions (in, by, about, etc.), and hones in on what it considers to be the most important terms. Natural-language engines take into account a string of words as a whole rather than looking at them as individual pieces.

For example, if you wanted to find information on student loans, in a natural-language search, you would type your request in the same way you would ask a person: “How much money can I get as an undergrad?” In a Google search, on the other hand, you would search by keywords like “undergrad money college” and hope to get results with information on maximum loan amounts. Change the order of your keywords—“money college undergrad”—and get different search results.

This distinction, writes Liedtke, means “Web surfers will theoretically be able to get more meaningful results by typing more precise search requests in the form of straightforward questions.”

Searches Going Au Naturel

Perhaps more buzzworthy than the natural-language engine itself is the fact that Powerset is licensing its technology from veteran powerhouse Palo Alto Research Center, the subsidiary of Xerox famed for introducing one revolutionary technology after another—laser printing, the graphical user interface (GUI), Ethernet networking, and the first commercial use of the computer mouse, just to name a few.

Ronald Kaplan, PARC’s top natural-language specialist, is now Powerset’s chief technology and science officer, Liedtke reports.

“We have the best natural-language search technology that has ever been developed,” says Barney Pell, Powerset’s co-founder and chief executive.

And he plans to take that technology, along with Powerset’s $12.5 million in venture capital, and give Mother Google a run for her money.

Although Powerset is not the first to push natural-language searching, with Ask Jeeves failing miserably in the 1990s and Hakia currently struggling to make inroads in the Internet search market, Pell believes his company’s technology will be able to fill in the holes that keyword searches leave behind.

He compares the problem of searching with keywords to trying to talk to a toddler with limited language skills.

“In one sense, you are happy you can talk to it at all, but you still really want it to grow up so you can hold a real conversation,” he says.

Not everyone expresses the same optimism. Industry analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research says the problem with natural-language searches lies not with faults in the technology’s algorithms, but with a computer’s inability to differentiate between variable meanings of the same word and discern the subtle nuances of language.

In a search, Li says, asking “What caused the collapse of Enron?” and “What caused the downfall of Enron?” will generally yield completely different search results even though the questions are essentially the same.

For other skeptics, whether Powerset can achieve its goal of revolutionizing the search engine sector will depend on the company’s ability to transform the mindset and ritual practices of Internet searchers. These critics argue that the majority of current searches are short, only a few words long, and that Internet users, increasingly demanding that all their online interactions happen in high-speed, may not easily make, or even want to make, the shift to more typing and longer search strings.

Danny Sullivan, a blogger for SearchEngineWatch.com, says Pell fails to provide a convincing argument for why today’s keyword search users would miraculously transition to the other side.

Internet users “aren’t using keywordese now because they somehow have been trained to do it,” Sullivan writes in a blog post. “No one from Google sat the searchers down and said ‘only two words, and don’t use conjunctions.’ People search however they want—and right now, they use only a few words” (“Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend,” Oct. 5, 2006).

Testing to Determine Powerset’s Potential

The natural-language debate aside, how successful the technology and the company will be remains to be seen. Powerset is rolling out its search engine gradually and will begin by analyzing feedback from the 16,000 people who have registered as users of its test site, Powerlabs. The temporary site is currently operating in a limited capacity, explains Liedtke, only indexing content from Wikipedia, the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia.

Powerset has set up Powerlabs to display, alongside its own results, the results returned by competitor sites like Google and Yahoo when given the same search questions. Powerlabs then requires users to choose which search engine’s results worked better for them before they can proceed with their next search.

With all the press over the past two years surrounding Powerset’s natural-language model, Google execs may be starting to feel the pressure of a competitor threatening to break Google’s steel grip on Internet searchdom. According to Liedtke, Google has been working on its own version of natural-language search technology since the end of 2005, pumping nearly $2.2 billion into research and development and beefing up its staff by thousands.

But executives at Powerset aren’t deterred by the competition or the criticism.

“Google is the king. … Their system does an amazing job, given what they have to go on” says Pell. “But we think they have plateaued.”

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Happy Birthday to :-)

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:13:00 GMT

To send e-mails or chat online without emoticons would be like listening to your computer’s artificial voice read an excerpt from the Harry Potter books—you may get the plot, but Harry’s spells are no longer frantic and Voldemort’s hissed threats no longer ooze evil.

This month, we celebrate September 19,1982, the birth date of the “smiley” emoticon, and all you chatting kings and queens out there may want to pay your respects to a man who revolutionized the way we communicate online with three simple keystrokes.

Scott E. Fahlman, a computer science research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, first introduced :-), or “the smiley,” on a departmental electronic bulletin 25 years ago. Fahlman considers his post to be the foundation of emoticons, otherwise known as emotional icons.

Scott Fahlman.

“I’ve never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence was in use before my original post, and I’ve never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did,” Fahlman writes on Smiley Lore :-), the university Web page he’s dedicated to the origins of the electronic smiley face. “But it’s always possible that someone else had the same idea—it’s a simple and obvious idea, after all.”

Following the Smiley Craze

Fahlman could never have imagined what would follow after his quick, impulsive post. As use of the smiley spread throughout his department, then from college to college, and finally across the country to the global e-space, writing in online formats changed forever.

“It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” Fahlman says in an Associated Press article (“:-) Turns 25,” Sep. 18, 2007). “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this started.”

The online bulletin with Fahlman’s post wasn’t saved and remained lost for years following the smiley explosion, Fahlman says on Smiley Lore. Neither Fahlman nor anyone else had any idea how popular that little sideways face made up entirely of punctuation would become, or that a two-sentence message would eventually be archived as a piece of communications history.

With the help of Mike Jones from Microsoft, an exhaustive search of Carnegie Mellon’s backup tapes uncovered Fahlman’s original post, which reads, “I propose the following character sequence for joke matters: :-). Read it sideways.”

Today, 25 years later, Internet users have thousands of emoticon options to choose from. Emoticons help to convey tone of voice or shades of meaning in online conversations that could otherwise be easily misconstrued without hearing a speaker’s intonation or seeing a facial expression to differentiate the excited from the angry, the serious from the sarcastic.

For example,

See you later ; )

means something completely different than

See you later

Smiling Strong for 25 Years

For some language purists, the use of emoticons cheapens the written word. They point to masters like Shakespeare and Faulkner, who crafted exquisitely descriptive phrases to paint vivid images and convey undertows of emotion, all without the use of emoticons.

But it’s hard to compare chat-speak to literature when online chatting and e-mail act more as stand-ins for speech than as writing.

“What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don’t have the voice,” says Clifford Nass, a Stanford University communications professor, in a quote in the AP article.

Whichever way you view it, the online world, from teen chatterboxes to forty-something CEOs, has embraced the smiley and other emoticons to such an extent that our words would now be lost in translation without them.

So the next time you stick out your virtual tongue or send a cyber wink, give a small thanks to the emoticon father himself, Steve E. Fahlman, for giving you the tools to do so.

Still a little lost when it comes to figuring out what that B-) and :--} in your e-mail mean? Check out this emoticon dictionary from Nerd Times.

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TV Battles Internet for Leading Entertainment Title Role

Student Loan Girl — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 18:45:00 GMT

Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, “has predicted the end of traditional television,” writes Nicole Martin for the British Telegraph (“TV is Dying, Says Google Expert,” Aug. 28, 2007). According to Cerf, TV is approaching its “iPod moment,” meaning we’re about to see a drastic long-term change in how we watch TV, the same way we’ve witnessed the iPod revolutionize the way people listen to music.

In the near future, Cerf suggests, we’ll no longer view our programs the way we have for years, making sure to tune in to our favorite shows when they hit the air, but instead downloading and watching them on our own time.

VCRs and TiVo have already made TV scheduling a quaint idea, allowing us to record and watch back at our leisure instead of when network lineups want us to. And now the Internet is making the TV itself irrelevant, as more and more people shift to watching their shows for free online or downloading them to their video iPods

Television Becomes Entertainment on Demand

Choose what you want, when you want to watch it, and forget about commercials.

Actually, you can forget the TiVo too, since chances are the commercial-free shows you want to see are available to you online.

Apple’s iTunes store, which already dominates digital music downloads, has also become the go-to source for TV downloads. Whether you’re a reality show addict, a soap junkie, or you live for primetime, iTunes has what you’re looking for.

From the designer divas of Project Runway to the hapless mismanagement of The Office, iTunes lets you catch the episodes you missed or the favorite eps you want to watch again and again. More of a sports fan? Go to the ESPN section of the iTunes store and choose from classic football and basketball games that made NCAA history before you were even born.

For a flat $1.99 an episode or $34.99–$44.99 for an entire season, you can download years’ worth of TV to watch on your computer. (Although NBC, in a dispute with Apple over wanting to charge more than $1.99 an episode for its popular shows—and less, for special promotions—won’t be offering any new episodes of NBC programming on iTunes, effective immediately.)

When you’re commuting or traveling and want your own lineup of in-flight entertainment, or if your dorm room or apartment scene is just getting old, just throw whatever you’re watching onto your laptop or video iPod, and take your TV with you.

If you don’t feel like paying for downloadable television, the networks are making plenty of hits available to you for free on their own sites. You can spend hours watching Grey’s Anatomy, Lost or Ugly Betty at ABC.com; any one of the CSI series on CBS.com; Late Night with Conan O’Brien on NBC.com; and Hell’s Kitchen at Fox.com.

The cable channel sites may not offer as many free full-length shows, but they’ll usually at least have teasers and trailers, along with cool Web-only extras.

If you missed last week’s The Closer or Saving Grace on TNT, you can download full episodes, check out behind-the-scenes takes, and get sneak peeks of what’s hitting next week. If you can’t get enough Law & Order, catch the TNT L&O-inspired “Web Originals,” like “True Tales from the Interrogation Room” and “Ripped from the Headlines.”

At MTV.com, you can get all the latest entertainment news, watch the highlights of the latest crash and burn on an upcoming Scarred, and travel through 30 years of pop music-on-TV history with both the latest and the vintage in music videos.

USA doesn’t have any full episodes online yet, but their site is the only place you can get online-only “webisodes” of fan favorites Psych and Monk. You can also get up-close with cast interviews and read character diaries and computer files to try to solve ongoing show mysteries along with the show’s characters.

Survey Says: TV Fighting Losing Battle

While it might be surprising that major networks are offering their just-aired shows for free viewing online instead of hoarding them for syndication or summer rerun season, TV execs have realized that online programming is a necessary survival tactic.

As more and more people go online each day, TV-based entertainment finds itself having to compete for audience share in a progressively crowded digital marketplace. Instead of spending hours in front of the TV, consumers are now spending hours in front of their computers, as they devote their free time to online gaming like World of Warcraft, online socializing on MySpace and Facebook, and online viewing on YouTube.

A recent consumer survey by IBM found that the Internet “is becoming consumers’ primary entertainment source. The TV is increasingly taking a back seat to the cell phone and the personal computer among consumers age 18 to 34,” (“IBM Consumer Survey Shows Decline of TV as Primary Media Device,” Aug. 22, 2007).

As the Internet transforms entertainment, shopping, communication and work into an on-demand and instant-gratification business, fewer people are willing to schedule their lives around airtimes when it’s so much easier, convenient and satisfying to watch what they want whenever they feel like it, sitting at home or on the go.

With nearly a quarter of the marketplace already watching at least half of their television content on replay, as IBM found, the notion of “live” TV is waning. And with viewers “increasingly turning to online destinations … , games, or mobile entertainment vs. traditional television,” TV must find a solid cyber footing or risk being replaced by the Internet.

It’s hard to say how those monolithic TV networks will continue to respond to the online threat to their entertainment empires, but it’s very likely that the TV we’ll be referring to in ten years will be altogether different from the one we started out watching.

However television evolves, the direction it’s going to take is going to need to be towards us. The days of viewers flocking to the sofa on cue are over. Whether from your computer desk at home, your laptop at the coffee shop, or your iPod in the middle of a desert, you’re in control and you, not the networks, are going to be calling the shots.

For all the information you need about student loans, go to www.nextstudent.com.

Student Loan Girl

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