yarrrr

Now that Netflix is in the original content business, the company has to deal with piracy. It took some time, but House of Cards is now all over the torrent sites. [Variety]

Is Apple working on a competitor to Street View? [Apple Insider]

New software would leave student essays to be graded by A.I., leaving professors more time for other tasks. What professors are doing that's more important than evaluating the progress of their students is anyone's guess. [New York Times]

"If you install this, then it is very likely that Facebook is going to be able to track your every move, and every little action." [GigaOm]

A secrets-sharing app named "Whisper" just raised $3 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners. [PandoDaily]

Absolutely related. (Image: Memory-Alpha.org)

The pissing match between Mathalicious founder Karim Kai Ani and Khan Academy founder Salman "Sal" Khan is heating up! Today Mr. Khan responded to Mr. Ani's recent Washington Post editorial which questioned the hype surrounding Khan Academy's mission to tutor math students with free online videos and also criticized Mr. Khan's teaching ability. Mr. Khan offered a new correction to Mr. Ani's correction of the definition of slope (so meta!) and may have outed his critic as low-down dirty profiteer in his email response to Valerie Strauss, the anchor for the Post's Answer Sheet education blog:

I also think you might misunderstand our "business model." Unlike Mathalicious which is for-profit (and if it does well, Karim will become very wealthy), Khan Academy is a 501c3 not-for-profit. I take a salary from it that is approved by the board, but I do not own it (no one does). It can never IPO or be sold. It is a public charity.

BOOM! We can only hope they will eventually take this offline and go old school with hand-to-hand slide rules and compasses.

Below, Mr. Khan's video illustrating the correct definition of slope. Intense stuff.

Don't get struck by lightning when hanging with Bill Gates. (Photo: jurvetson)

We're calling it: This Mystery Science Theater 3000 trolling  of Sal Khan’s Khan Academy videos, posted in June, was the beginning of an inevitable backlash against the breathless hype about Khan’s abilities as an instructor.

Today, in  "Khan Academy: The hype and the reality" in the Washington Post, math coach and Mathalicious founder Karim Kai Ani put some sting in the criticism with a much more direct, serious approach to criticizing the Bill Gates-backed "Messiah of Math":

... [The] truth is that there’s nothing revolutionary about Khan Academy at all. In fact, Khan’s style of instruction is identical to what students have seen for generations: a do this then do this approach to teaching that presents mathematics as a meaningless series of steps. Khan himself says that “math is not just random things to memorize and regurgitate,” yet that’s exactly how his videos present it.

Sal Khan has done something remarkable in creating such a vast and varied library, and he deserves to be recognized. His commitment to making the site free is a rare and selfless act, and he deserves to be praised. Sal Khan is a good guy with a good mission. What he’s not, though, is a good teacher.

Karim Ani's harshest criticism isn't directed at Khan as much as at journalists covering Khan Academy's popularity, who have "confused journalism with sycophantism," leading to a "suspension of common sense."

That Sal Khan chose to make his videos freely available and has done so much work to at least help students the world over isn't lost on his other critics. It seems clear that some--in spite of Khan's own contention educators are jealous--agree with Mr. Ani. Khan Academy isn't the problem, the hype surrounding it is. Robert Talbert, who teaches with the math instructors who made the MST3K-style video, wrote this about Khan in early July: "I’m not jealous of, or threatened by, Khan Academy in the slightest. But I’m not an uncritical fan, either, and we need to look at carefully at Khan Academy before we adopt it, whole-cloth, as the future of education."

"My mom told me to." (Photo: Filmofilia

A Pennsylvania mom is on the hook for criminal computer trespassing after using her job at the Northwestern Lehigh School District to--in a move straight out of War Games--alter her children's grades. Millions of teens nationwide are kicking themselves for not paying better attention in their computer science classes.

Reports ABC News (via The Mary Sue):

"She has been accused of changing her daughter's failing grade from an F to an M for "medical" in June 2010, and then changing her son's 98 to a 99 in February 2012, nearly a year after she quit her job as an administrative office secretary to work at another school district."

The failing grade we get, but we can't imagine the difference between a 98 and a 99 is worth going to jail for. Now, for a higher SAT score, on the other hand...

Meet the new Lore. (Photo: Screencap)

The latest from edtech startup Lore: Today the company debuts a rebuilt platform, designed to function more like a social network and less like those dreadful discussion forums you might remember from your educational days.

The rebrand fits with the vision CEO Joe Cohen was excitedly evangelizing when last we spoke. Back in April, the company shucked its original name (Coursekit) and christened itself Lore, a move meant to provide the team with more wiggle room. “Our vision is to be a platform for learning in whatever form,” he told Betabeat, but refused to divulge any details on what that might mean, product-wise.

In a phone conversation yesterday explaining the changes to Betabeat, Mr. Cohen was every bit as irrepressibly pie in the sky:

“Our ambitions are bigger than kits or courses,” he told us. “We want to be this underlying software platform for the whole of education.”

That's a big ambition, all right.

Lore's approach: social networking, but specifically for education. The revamp introduces profiles, so that rather than the platform privileging a particular class, students and instructors will be individual users who happen to be participating in a class. The company has also merged the newsfeed-style stream and the class calendar, as well as adding a library to serve as a repository for course content.

"If you think about companies like Yammer, LinkedIn, they've validated this idea that you don't just have Facebook. You have situation-oriented social networks. And we're trying to do that for education," Mr. Cohen told Betabeat.

He described the results as analogous to LinkedIn: “We think we’ve got the largest connected community of instructors and students ever put together so far,” he said (even as he confessed there’s no real data to support that feeling), and the revamp is "the next step in making that fabric stronger but also more pervasive,” he added.

After a semester up and running at 600 schools across the country, Mr. Cohen confessed that he just “didn’t see the platform scaling” into the future to meet that broader goal. Hence the redesigned user interface.

Besides the more social changes, Instructors landing on the homepage are now prompted with the question “What do you teach?” They can choose from one of twelve areas where the platform has worked best, ranging from social studies to engineering. Once they select an area, they’ll get an explanation of how Lore works best for that particular discipline.

To date, Lore has raised $6 million in venture funding, including support from the king of higher-ed skeptics, Peter Thiel.

Watch out, you've made the math teachers mad. (Photo: jurvetson)

Video-learning nonprofit Khan Academy is basically the hottest thing in edtech, complete with TED talk and Gates Foundation grant. But you know who thinks it's a load of crap? These two Grand Valley State University math teachers. In fact, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education, they're so annoyed that they've taken to the YouTubes with a Mystery Science Theater 3000-style parody.

The description: "Two teachers sit down to learn about math teaching from a man who is Bill Gates' favorite teacher." It comes complete with a goofy little musical intro. Sample dialogue: "Bill Gates calls him the best teacher he's ever seen," greeted by a sarcastically dramatic gasp.

Somehow we'd forgotten just how cutting math teachers can be.

The Chronicle reached out to Mr. Khan himself, who responded: “There’s always the critique that Khan Academy is not pedagogically sound, that we’re procedural-based, focusing on mechanics without base understanding,” adding, “But I actually think we’re the exact opposite of that.”

It's okay, Mr. Khan, they can't put you in detention any more.

(flickr.com/Caitlinator)

Looks like there’s one place the Bloomberg administration’s techno-enthusiasm can’t touch, and that’s the New York City Department of Education. After a nationwide rash of inappropriate teacher-student Facebook interactions, the Wall Street Journal reports that the city has released new social media guidelines that promise "no expectation of privacy." Teachers, you might want to keep any ragers mum, and it's probably best not to perv on students.

Despite the strict language, the guidelines primarily ask that teachers maintain a strict separation between personal and professional accounts. That means no friending or otherwise communicating with students on personal accounts, and supervisors will monitor professional accounts for anything inappropriate. The rule of thumb offered isn’t a bad one, either:

If a particular type of behavior is inappropriate in the classroom or a professional workplace, then that behavior is also inappropriate on the professional social media site.

These are also “strong recommendations,” as opposed to strict penalty-carrying requirements.

As we recall, the educational system takes a less positive view of "disruption" than does the tech community.