Raspberry Pi has announced that its first batch of $35 computers will be finished manufacturing as of February 20th, and they will be airfreighted to the UK immediately after that; they should be available for purchase by the end of the month. It has also gotten Broadcom to make available a datasheet about the ARM peripherals in the Pi’s CPU chip—useful for those who want to port other operating systems to the device, or are just interested in the tech specs. As I’ve said before, this device could be quite useful in education and for Internet access in places...

CNet has an article about Google’s stripped-down Chromebook laptops, and their placement in schools. In a speech at the Florida Educational Technology Converence yesterday, Rajen Sheth, Google’s leader of Chromebook work for business and education, announced that hundreds of schools across 41 states have outfitted at least one classroom with Chromebooks. Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical...

E-textbook company Kno has popped out a press release saying that it found 95% of college students who used its e-textbook application “found it very useful and plan to use it again”. The company conducted a study with four California community colleges, on 400 students and faculty in 27 classes using an open-source statistics textbook. "It is exciting to see the book brought to life through digital enhancements by Kno," said Barbara Illowsky, a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, De Anza College [and co-author of the statistics textbook]. "The student feedback reinforces the need for...

On Hack Education, Audrey Watters has a fairly long look at why Apple’s new textbook announcement may not be as revolutionary as expected. She was not impressed by Apple’s presentation, stating it lacked Steve Jobs’s magic touch, “the kind of thing that made both fans and skeptics say, ‘Yes, (perhaps) this changes everything.’” She points out that Apple is partnering with the three companies that already make up 90% of the textbook industry, and they have already gotten into digital textbooks (to the tune of $3 billion last year by just one of them). One of...

Here’s a clever use of technology to promote reading among kids—taking a cue from speed dating to create “Extreme Speed Booking”. The idea is that kids are given two minutes with each book—they can do whatever they like: examine the cover, read the first chapter, skip to the last page—and then rate how interested they would be in reading more (as well as copy down the author and title of those that do interest them). And the great thing about the e-book age is that this sort of thing is easier than ever without needing to have physical copies...

On TechCrunch, MG Siegler looks at the new education programs launched by Apple and what they really mean for high schoolers. In Siegler’s opinion, not much. While they might give college students incentive to get iPads, he finds it doubtful that most high school students will be able to get their own, in keeping with Apple’s stated goal that students should be able to buy e-textbooks and keep them forever. The program will be great for college students, Siegler points out. The idea of textbook prices capped at $15 makes the sting of not being able to “sell them...

Do iPads belong in the classroom? A pair of articles on TechCrunch raise and address the question. Matt Burns argues that tablets should mostly be kept out of the classroom, fearing that they could turn into yet another crutch for our youth, just as pocket calculators mean kids no longer need to know how to actually do math. Kids are now taught to pass tests. Knowledge is externalized, stored on some Wikipedia server or graphing calculator until needed. Learning is still prevalent in schools, but the storage of facts and thoughts is not. Digital...

On ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick has a piece on the rise of robotic manufacturing and what it might mean for online educational tools. It cites iPhone/iPad manufacturer FoxConn’s plan to improve working conditions by building 1 million new robot workers over the next 3 to 5 years, increasing the number it currently has by 100 times (that’s 10,000 percent). Human workers, FoxConn says, “will move up the value chain.” (Apparently hiring more “mature” workers didn’t work out.) The article discusses what this means in terms of the one million unskilled laborers FoxConn currently employs, and unskilled labor versus automation. A...

Author Richard F. Miniter has an article about the revolution in home-schooling that e-readers make possible. His idea is that children can be kept home, away from the faux-egalitarian, inaccurate-propaganda-laden classroom and taught to educate themselves on their own by reading a book a day and writing an essay on it. He brings up the example of a special-education foster child he’d cared for who was essentially unable to read, but who ended up testing at or above his grade level a year later after a course of home-schooling that consisted of daily reading with help on words he...

Our founder David Rothman wrote an interesting column on how to use e-books as part of an educational strategy for encouraging children to read. He suggests that parents should aim for a mix of electronic and paper books, using paper books as “gateway drugs” to get kids interested and e-books for times when paper books are not available or appropriate. He also suggests that developers should look into different ways of using e-book content to make it more effective for learning. The effectiveness of the actual books for children is just one issue. As part of...

I’m sure everyone who went to college has had the experience of having to buy a whole book when their professor only turned out to need a few chapters from it. One of the obvious benefits of digital media is that it is more easily segmented than a printed and bound book; in theory, students ought to be able to buy just the parts they need. That’s the idea behind e-textbook site Bookstep.com. This startup allows students to buy just the portions of books and materials their professors need for their classes. Founder Mike Basaraba tells Publishing Perspectives: ...

And speaking of low-cost computers like the OLPC, Slashdot has a post about a company developing a micro-sized computer on a circuit board that will be three times faster than the Raspberry Pi (pictured at left),, and cost 40% less at $15 each (once it gets into mass production). As submitted by a representative of that company, the post reads: "An initiative by a Community Interest Company Rhombus Tech aims to provide Software (Libre) Developers with a PCMCIA-sized modular computer that could end up in mass-volume products. The reference design mass-volume pricing guide from the SoC...