Gene circuits in live cells can perform complex computations.

Technique combines analogue and digital processes in engineered cells.

Stock image of mitotic cells

Living cells are capable of performing complex computations on the environmental signals they encounter.

These computations can be continuous, or analogue, in nature — the way eyes adjust to gradual changes in the light levels. They can also be digital, involving simple on or off processes, such as a cell’s initiation of its own death.

Synthetic biological systems, in contrast, have tended to focus on either analogue or digital processing, limiting the range of applications for which they can be used.

But now a team of researchers at MIT has developed a technique to integrate both analogue and digital computation in living cells, allowing them to form gene circuits capable of carrying out complex processing operations.

The synthetic circuits, presented in a paper published today in the journal Nature Communications, are capable of measuring the level of an analogue input, such as a particular chemical relevant to a disease, and deciding whether the level is in the right range to turn on an output, such as a drug that treats the disease.

In this way they act like electronic devices known as comparators, which take analogue input signals and convert them into a digital output, according to Timothy Lu, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of biological engineering, and head of the Synthetic Biology Group at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, who led the research alongside former microbiology PhD student Jacob Rubens.

“Most of the work in synthetic biology has focused on the digital approach, because [digital systems] are much easier to program,” Lu says.

However, since digital systems are based on a simple binary output such as 0 or 1, performing complex computational operations requires the use of a large number of parts, which is difficult to achieve in synthetic biological systems.

“Digital is basically a way of computing in which you get intelligence out of very simple parts, because each part only does a very simple thing, but when you put them all together you get something that is very smart,” Lu says. “But that requires you to be able to put many of these parts together, and the challenge in biology, at least currently, is that you can’t assemble billions of transistors like you can on a piece of silicon,” he says.

The mixed signal device the researchers have developed is based on multiple elements. A threshold module consists of a sensor that detects analogue levels of a particular chemical.

This threshold module controls the expression of the second component, a recombinase gene, which can in turn switch on or off a segment of DNA by inverting it, thereby converting it into a digital output.

If the concentration of the chemical reaches a certain level, the threshold module expresses the recombinase gene, causing it to flip the DNA segment. This DNA segment itself contains a gene or gene-regulatory element that then alters the expression of a desired output.

“So this is how we take an analogue input, such as a concentration of a chemical, and convert it into a 0 or 1 signal,” Lu says. “And once that is done, and you have a piece of DNA that can be flipped upside down, then you can put together any of those pieces of DNA to perform digital computing,” he says.

The team has already built an analogue-to-digital converter circuit that implements ternary logic, a device that will only switch on in response to either a high or low concentration range of an input, and which is capable of producing two different outputs.

In the future, the circuit could be used to detect glucose levels in the blood and respond in one of three ways depending on the concentration, he says.

“If the glucose level was too high you might want your cells to produce insulin, if the glucose was too low you might want them to make glucagon, and if it was in the middle you wouldn’t want them to do anything,” he says.

Similar analogue-to-digital converter circuits could also be used to detect a variety of chemicals, simply by changing the sensor, Lu says.

The researchers are investigating the idea of using analogue-to-digital converters to detect levels of inflammation in the gut caused by inflammatory bowel disease, for example, and releasing different amounts of a drug in response.

Immune cells used in cancer treatment could also be engineered to detect different environmental inputs, such as oxygen or tumor lysis levels, and vary their therapeutic activity in response.

Other research groups are also interested in using the devices for environmental applications, such as engineering cells that detect concentrations of water pollutants, Lu says.

Ahmad Khalil, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, who was not involved in the work, says the researchers have expanded the repertoire of computation in cells.

“Developing these foundational tools and computational primitives is important as researchers try to build additional layers of sophistication for precisely controlling how cells interact with their environment,” Khalil says.

The research team recently created a spinout company, called Synlogic, which is now attempting to use simple versions of the circuits to engineer probiotic bacteria that can treat diseases in the gut.

The company hopes to begin clinical trials of these bacteria-based treatments within the next 12 months.

ORIGINAL: MIT News

Helen Knight | MIT News correspondent
June 3, 2016

WORLD’S LARGEST NATURAL SOUND LIBRARY NOW ONLINE

Add caption

The Macaulay Library, with over 150,000 recordings of 9,000 species is now digitised and has been uploaded to an online searchable database.

The library, housed at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, has made available over ten terabytes of recordings, with a runtime of 7513 hours of natural sounds.

The collection, which began in 1929 has taken researchers dozens of years to accumulate. It currently holds recordings to a massive three-quarters of the world’s entire bird species, but it’s not all chirps and squawks, there’s also a decent helping of whale songs, insects, bears, elephants, primates and just about every other critter or creepy crawley that roams the earth.

The collection’s curator Greg Budney describes the archives as revolutionary, in terms of the speed and the breadth of material that is now accessible online.

“This is one of the greatest research and conservation resources at the Cornell Lab,” said Budney. “And through its digitization we’ve swung the doors open on it in a way that wasn’t possible 10 or 20 years ago.”

“Our audio collection is the largest and the oldest in the world,” explained Macaulay Library director Mike Webster. “Now, it’s also the most accessible. We’re working to improve search functions and create tools people can use to collect recordings and upload them directly to the archive. Our goal is to make the Macaulay Library as useful as possible for the broadest audience possible.”

Now the team has digitised its massive archive, it’s focusing on collecting new material from amateur and professional recordists from around the world.

The sounds are not only used by sound designers and filmmakers, but also by researchers, museums, or anyone interested in the sounds of nature.

“Plus, it’s just plain fun to listen to these sounds,” explained Bundy. “Have you heard the sound of a walrus underwater? It’s an amazing sound.” 

*UPDATE*

We had previously stated the library was free to use, but that seems not to be the case – rather, it’s ‘free to listen’. Licensing for commercial and non-commercial use is available, however it requires submitting an online purchase order, which may have fees associated with it (in other words, not free).

You can access the library now at macaulaylibrary.org.

Sound Recordists Chris Watson (image: lists/uk)

Check out some of the fun sounds found at the library:

• Earliest recording: Cornell Lab founder Arthur Allen was a pioneer in sound recording. On a spring day in 1929 he recorded this Song Sparrow sounding much as they do today.
• Best candidate to appear on a John Coltrane record: The indri, a lemur with a voice that is part moan, part jazz clarinet
• Most spines tingled: The incomparable voice of a Common Loon on an Adirondacks lake in 1992
• Most erratic construction project: the staccato hammering sounds of a walrus under water
• Most likely to be mistaken for aliens arriving: Birds-of-paradise make some amazing sounds – here’s the UFO-sound of a Curl-crested Manucode in New Guinea

ORIGINAL: Video and Film Maker

Free text experiment a success, say UGA students, faculty

Faculty and students in a University of Georgia experiment with free digital textbooks say the experiment worked. 

Students in two UGA introductory biology courses got the free textbooks last semester and this semester. Surveyed afterward, most said the free digital text from OpenStax was as good as or better than a traditional biology textbook.

“For us it was like a proof of concept,” said Eddie Watson, director of UGA’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

The concept, he explained, was simply that students in large classes might cumulatively save a lot of money with a free digital textbook.

The experiment was part of a "Complete College Georgia” incubator grant program of the University System of Georgia, designed to make attending college more affordable, and therefore improve graduation rates.

The state gave UGA a $25,000 grant to try out the free text, used by biology professors Peggy Brickman, Erin Dolan and Tessa Andrews in a two-course biology sequence, with the help of So Mi Kim, a graduate student and instructional designer. Kim worked with the biology professors to reorganize the courses and tailor the OpenStax textbook to the UGA course requirements.

When nearly 700 students completed surveys following the courses this fall, a big majority said the free digital textbook they used was as good as or better than a regular print textbook.

Only 14 percent of 673 students who responded said the OpenStax textbook was of lower quality than other textbooks they have had; 65 percent said it was about the same, and 21 percent said it was of higher quality.

The students did have some complaints. The book could be slow to load, and searching through it was sometimes unwieldy. Reading on a computer gave some students eyestrain, and some said they just like having a paper copy in front of them.

But those shortcomings seemed to be outweighed by the positives. The digital textbook was easily accessible, they said, and students liked the fact that they could print out individual sections or chapters if they wished.

They also liked that it was free, saving each student $97, not counting the possible money they might have recouped by reselling the textbook at a lower price.

Estimating that a little more than 2,000 students a year take these courses, that adds up to a cumulative savings of nearly $200,000, Watson figures.

The cost of textbooks is an important part of what students pay to go to college, he said.

Forty percent of the students who took the biology courses said they have trouble paying for textbooks. More than half said they pay more than $300 per semester for books, and 21 percent said they paid more than $400.

Many students say they sometimes don’t even buy required textbooks; they’re too expensive, and they’re often unnecessary to pass the class, more than half the students in the survey said.

Nearly 60 percent said they rarely use them.

Watson expects to see more courses with free textbooks, and instructors using other kinds of free resources in UGA classrooms as well as different and more active learning models.

“It’s promising. There’s lots of opportunity,” he said. “We know that there’s reasonable quality content out there.”

There’s more involved in switching to a free digital textbook than just switching from one to the other, Watson said.

The change required some redesign of the course.

“The big challenge is for faculty to have the time and support to engage in this,” he said.

The biology text experiment worked because of faculty members, he said, beginning with Brickman, who last year won UGA’s top teaching award. And the teachers had help from a top graduate student, Kim, he said.

“We have a fantastic, well-motivated graduate student coupled with a fantastic, well-motivated faculty member,” he said.


• Follow education reporter Lee Shearer at www.facebook.com/LeeShearerABH or https://twitter.com/LeeShearer.

ORIGINAL: On Line Athens

By Lee Shearer
updated Saturday, January 25, 2014

Andy Lomas Lets Digital Systems Bloom In "Morphogenetic Creations" Exhibit

Andy Lomas, a digital artist and mathematician, likes to let the virtual world spin out of control. Using software code to creates very basic rules, Lomas then sits back and watches his digital “growth systems” bloom, fractalize, shape-shift, and otherwise behave in organic and emergent ways.

Yesterday, at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts (LACDA), Lomas’s Morphogenetic Creations opened, giving digital art enthusiasts the opportunity to see his dynamic virtual systems up close. The exhibit includes work from the Aggregation, Flow, and Cellular Forms series. To coincide with the exhibit, Lomas uploaded a view of these digital growth videos to Vimeo. Startlingly beautiful to behold, they’re a bit like Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms of Nature animated with a cyberpunk edge.

I recently rang up Lomas, who lives in the United Kingdom, to talk about Morphogenetic Creations. We talked about his background in mathematics, his early fascination with D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form, and how his work as a computer-generated effects artist for film (The Matrix sequels and Avatar), where highly-predictable outcomes and stability predominate, served as a springboard for the more random digital forms he now creates.

The Creators Project: What can people expect to see at the Morphogenetic Creations exhibit at LACDA?

Andy Lomas: There will be four animation pieces from the Cellular Forms series in the windows, but also then some 44x44-inch big prints of new and old work. They’re ridiculously high-resolution at 12,000x12,000 pixels.

Another thing I have at LACDA for the Aggregation series are picture frames with these old, Victorian-style stereo viewers to create a 3D effect. The frame only contains two pictures, but through the stereo viewer it really looks like this three-dimensional thing. I believe they’re going to pull those out for this exhibit as well.

Is Cellular Forms the most recent series?

The two Cellular Forms videos are the most recent. They’re almost exactly the same date because they’re basically differently rendered versions of the same thing. That would be Cellular Forms and Cellular Forms (X-Ray version).

What I quite like is the idea that there are two things: the creation of these three-dimensional data structures, where the goal is to create the most organic things possible with very simple rules; and that there is no one correct way of doing that. One shows you everything solid, while the other gives you an x-ray that reveals what’s actually going on inside. Neither is the original, if you like. They’re just different views into the data.

And you wrote the software code for this series?
Yeah, I wrote the software for Cellular Forms. I’m a code junky. I write it for my own pleasure. There are two main parts to the code. 

• One is what I call the simulation engine, which is the thing that is actually almost like running a growth process. It starts with a sphere or ball of cells, with rules for how they divide and have forces between them, how it moves, changes shape, and grows over time.  
• Then there is the rendering stage, which takes the data produced by that simulation and turns it into something you can see. It produces pixel data out of cell data, if you like.

Did you use this code in your film work, or did you build it on the side for this specific purpose?
It’s completely built on the side. It’s very much a labor of love. When I worked on The Matrix sequels for this company I was working with then, another person there used a much simpler version of what’s called Diffusion Limited Aggregation for some of the effects work. It was used for when Agent Smith was turning other people into other Smith’s with these tendril things. DLA inspired the code I wrote.

When you’re doing things for films, you have to construct things in a very different way—you have to make things very controllable and directable. Whatever you do, when the director or visual effects supervisor looks at it and says, “That’s great, but can you change this and modify that,” that is what you spend most of your time doing. One of the things I like about my own work is that it is trying to be almost exactly the opposite. You’re hoping for the things which are unexpected.

It’s almost like growing plants; you don’t know exactly how a plant is going to grow. But, you start to learn that if you cross-breed that with that, then it might do something interesting. Maybe nine of the plants end up really uninteresting, but one does something really interesting and maybe different than what you thought it would. People talk about emergence, where things emerge that you didn’t expect, which you almost can’t use in professional production.

Do you prefer the lack of control that your solo work affords you?
I’ve got to say that I prefer the lack of control. As soon as things become digital, people think that they can control everything. When you get to a certain level of complexity, you can explore it more than control it. I prefer the things where 99% of the time it doesn’t produce anything interesting, but that 1% of the time is like, “Wow, that’s really cool.” I’m not a control freak director. I actually want the work to surprise me instead of do exactly what I thought it was going to do.

What specifically might have influenced Cellular Forms and your other series?
I’ve always been fascinated by sculpture and form. I also used to scuba dive and look at coral. To my mind, organic things go from really hideous to incredibly beautiful, whereas most engineered things go from ugly to something quite interesting. In organic forms, there is a very visceral reaction. Trees look beautiful and mold looks ugly, and things like that.

My original background is in mathematics, which I studied as an undergraduate. One of the main areas I got interested in is what’s called Dynamical Systems, which is sort of the math behind Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory—the math of how things change over time when you almost reapply the same rule again and again and again. So, the combination of those two, it’s almost like how simple could the rules be to make something that is as beautiful as a tree or coral or something like that. So, those two have always been like two germs working together. And, to my mind, computers are the things that allow you to actually try that out.

Any other critical influences in your work?
There was a Scottish mathematician named D’Arcy Wenthworth Thompson, who wrote a book about a hundred years ago now called On Growth and Form, which is basically him talking about the constraints of the real world. When you think about how things grow, are the sorts of forms that you see in the real world just the results of almost the only things that can grow? With a computer we can actually test that. Often, it doesn’t work quite how you expected.

For more of Lomas' work, head over to his website here.

@djpangburn

ORIGINAL: The Creators Project

By DJ Pangburn
Jan 10 2014

3D Brain Maps Guide Doctors — via iPhone

Here, the brain has been neatly sliced in half.

Credit: Albert L. Rhoton Jr., MD, 2007.

Far from the state-of-the-art medical facilities available in the United States, many brain surgeons in developing countries look to their smartphones for guidance. The phones have started to fulfill this role, in part, thanks to the thousands of 3D brain images, produced by Dr. Albert Rhoton at the University of Florida, that are freely available online.

"I've had young surgeons from Africa, Brazil and other countries tell me they're pulling the images into the operating room" and using them during surgery, said Rhoton, head of the Neuro-Microanatomy Lab at the University of Florida's McKnight Brain Institute.

From its beginnings as a training tool for surgical residents, the doctor's image library has grown into the world's largest collection of 3D brain images. Physicians across the globe now use the detailed anatomical images to train residents, prepare for surgeries and even guide them when performing surgery. [Gallery: See the Amazing 3D Images of the Human Brain]

 

Human Brain

 

Neural Connections

 

Brain Atlas

 

Brain Blueprint

 

Brain Blocks

 

Neurocortex

The images are "our small contribution to making what is a delicate, awesome experience for neurosurgery patients more accurate, gentler and safer," Rhoton told LiveScience.

Rhoton has collected images of brain anatomy for as long as he's been teaching surgery — 50 years — and began moving to 3D technology 25 years ago. Only recently, however, did he realize how smartphones and online download venues could expand the reach of his educational tools. Two and a half years ago, Rhoton and his colleagues began working with the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) to make the brain images and videos available on iTunes University — all at no cost.

Even before the iTunes U venture, Rhoton had shared his brain images with hospitals and universities as a visiting instructor. "I've always given these images to those who wanted to use them," he said, "in the hopes that they would help some patient I'll never know and never meet."

  The big blue structure here (dyed by Rhoton for easy viewing) shows where the great cerebral vein drains blood from the cerebrum. Credit: Albert L. Rhoton Jr., MD, 2007.

The guides show the detailed structures of various sections of the brain, with blood vessels and nerves color-coded in bright red and blue. The colors make the details of neural anatomy much clearer than in the normal, grayish brain matter.

Rhoton and the residents he instructs have built up the library over decades, performing careful dissections and transferring the images they obtain to 3D photography and video. The iTunes U content is engineered to be usable across device platforms, from iPhones to laptops to 3D television.

Having images in 3D provides advantages over 2D images for brain surgeons, Rhoton said. For instance, two-dimensional content tends to flatten brain anatomy, obscuring the way nerves, veins and other structures traverse the brain matter, he said. Surgeons viewing the 3D images, in contrast, can plan a precise surgical path, avoiding delicate structures whose damage would have dire consequences.

With 3D images, "the anatomy is displayed in such a way that you can orient the images to the direction of approach the surgeon is using in the OR [operating room]," Rhoton said. "You can see where the nerves and structures are that need to be protected in that particular area, using that specific approach, in that specific direction."

Rhoton and AANS have formatted the images with a menu, so that users can control the angle and area of the brain they want to view; users can even click links to call up medical literature related to the portion of the brain they're viewing.

Rhoton's work earned him the 2011 Surgeon of the Year award from the journal World Neurosurgery. His images and educational efforts have helped "several thousands of neurosurgeons scattered across the planet to save millions of lives," Dr. Hildo Azevedo-Filho, chairman of neurological surgery at the University of Pernambuco in Brazil, wrote in recognizing the award.

After seeing how surgeons have used his images during actual surgeries, Rhoton and the AANS next hope to feed the brain maps directly into endoscope screens used in surgery. They're developing technology that would split that screen to show Rhoton's images side by side with the live feed from cameras inserted into the patient's brain.

Moreover, Rhoton said the library of images and videos will only continue to grow. "We've just scratched the surface on the number of images," he said.

Follow Michael Dhar @michaeldhar. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+.

ORIGINAL: Live Science
By Michael Dhar, LiveScience Contributor
December 30, 2013

Troy Hicks: A Conversation About Digital Writing

ORIGINAL: Edutopia
July 26, 2013

Troy Hicks Hickstro.org

"There is not a writer in our classrooms today who will not be producing something with a digital writing tool in her or his lifetime." -- Troy Hicks

Troy Hicks frequently uses the words "intentional" and "deliberate" to highlight the need for writers to conscientiously think through composing digital texts. Those two words could just as easily describe the author's thoughtful affect on Paul Allison's Teachers Teaching Teachers or the degree to which his new book, Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres, methodically articulates how 4th-12th grade instructors can introduce technology tools, mentor texts, composing practices, and heuristics for helping students write.

"We have all these devices and technologies available to us. How are we being intentional? How are we being thoughtful -- taking time to craft writing with these digital tools?"

A professor of English Education at Central Michigan University and Director of the Chippewa Writing Project, Dr. Hicks published The Digital Writing Workshop in 2009. His YouTube summary of this book describes five writers' workshop principles that remain, regardless of available technology. To help stakeholders understand and support schools' digital writing initiatives, he coauthored Because Digital Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia Environments in 2010 with Danielle Nicole DeVoss and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl.

 

 Why Teach Students to Craft Digital Writing?

Throughout Crafting Digital Writing are counter-arguments to those who might resist teaching students to compose digital texts on the grounds that:
Standardized tests reward mastery of traditional writing genres.

Hicks: "[We] can no longer cling to the idea that producing good test-takers will yield the types of writers who will succeed in college, career, and life." Besides, crafting digital writing corresponds with the Common Core's CCR Anchor Standards and Habits of Mind set forth by the Council of Writing Program Administrators among other authorities.

Students need intensive help with writing, not technology.

Hicks (extending on a quote by Lucy Calkins): "Teach the writer, then the writing, then the technology."

Students inserting txting language into formal essays confirms that technology is harming students' ability to write.

Hicks: "No formal study has shown that 'txting' ruins student writing." When txting pops up in essays, "Teach students to code switch back and forth between formal and informal discourses."

Crafting Digital Writing

Crafting Digital Writing capitalizes on Troy Hicks' MAPS heuristic --

• mode (genre), 
• media, 
• audience, 
• purpose, 
• situation -- 

that helps writers understand the contexts in which they compose and reach their writing goals. Each chapter describes how to craft different digital texts: 

• web, 
• presentations, 
• audio, 
• video and 
• social media. 

For each genre, Hicks 

• analyzes a representative mentor text using MAPS, 
• discusses genre conventions and composing obstacles, 
• makes curriculum connections, 
• introduces a range of tools, 
• summarizes the composing process specific to each genre, 
• presents rubrics, and 
• provides multiple student examples or links to projects on the web. 

In short, Hicks economically lays out the fundamental resources teachers need in order to help students successfully negotiate multiple forms of digital writing.
To compliment Crafting Digital Writing, the book's companion wiki contains abundant links and resources associated with each of the chapters. A Websites and Apps page offers even more tools; members are invited to contribute resources to help keep the space up to date. QR codes appear throughout the book to relieve readers of typing out long hyperlinks. When asked during a recent presentation why his latest text was not published as an e-book, Hicks sighs, "The ironies abound."

Exchanging knowledge through conversation with students or colleagues is a theme that runs through Troy Hicks' writing. This ethos is also modeled in the author's conference workshops and webinars, articles, blog posts, Twitter exchanges, and through interactions with Crafting Digital Writing's Google+ community. It was in this latter space that Dr. Hicks answered a couple questions about his book.

Intention and Innovation

Edutopia: Crafting Digital Writing offers multiple examples of successful digital texts, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek by John Branch, for example. RSA Animate and The Story of Stuff Project host several of my favorites. What is the one piece of digital writing that resonates with you most? Why?

Troy Hicks: The one piece of digital writing that continues to resonate for me, even though I don't mention it in the book, is Michael Wesch's The Machine Is Us/Using Us. I think that he released that in 2008 or so, and at that time I thought his innovative manner of screen casting combined with zooming and refocusing was amazing. Plus, he uses the computer as a key actor in the text, but it is all controlled by him. The last part, where he types that we will need to "rethink a few things" still resonates for me. I sometimes still show that video in professional development sessions, and I admire the time he took to plan, record and edit that piece.

Edutopia: You write, "It is time to give up on the idea that we are doing students a service by limiting the range of writing experiences we offer." Would you agree that teaching has become more complex with the advent of digital tools? What advice do you give to new teachers who are apprehensive about the complexity of teaching composition in the digital age?

Troy Hicks: I don't know that teaching has become more complex, per se. The best writing teachers have always invited their students to compose in a range of genres for a variety of audiences and purposes. I would say that digital writing "generatively complicates" the art of teaching writing, but that we shouldn't let the variety of new technologies overwhelm us. Instead, we need to refocus on what we know to be true about teaching individual writers -- with choice, time and response -- as well as how to teach specific kinds of writing -- with models, scaffolding and practice. The digital tools offer students new opportunities, no doubt, but they still need to be intentional in the way that they craft their pieces of digital writing. To that end, even a young teacher still has more experience as a reader and writer (both traditionally and digitally) than his or her students, and if a technology is confusing then it provides him or her the opportunity to model the thinking and writing process. So, my advice, in short -- keep the bigger picture in mind, give yourself and your students permission to play (and fail) with the tools, and then work intentionally as you model the digital writing process.

There’s that word again.

Education Technology: Hamilton Project Report Calls For EDU STAR To Evaluate Tech In Schools

ORIGINAL: Huffington Post

09/27/2012

Foto: Getty Images

In a new paper for The Hamilton Project, Duke University’s Aaron Chatterji and Northwestern’s Benjamin Jones propose establishing a third-party ratings organization dubbed “EDU STAR” that would evaluate education technologies.

The proposal aims to encourage innovation in the education sector — which has seen relatively little new technologies compared to other industries — and provide new methods to help students learn.

While instructional software can offer personalized learning for students and potentially complement a teacher’s skillset, little is known about the effectiveness of learning technologies. According to the report, schools often have no way of knowing if a product works, and collecting such information or running their own tests requires investing both time and money.

In their paper, Chatterji and Jones write that their proposed nonprofit organization would 

• bridge the information gap between market suppliers and schools, 
• test software-based learning tools, and 
• disseminate ratings and other measures of effectiveness online — similar to the publication Consumer Reports.

EDU STAR would begin by focusing on instructional content, which it would evaluate based on one or more of the Common Core State Standards. The organization would also collaborate with entrepreneurs, screening their products before they go into schools.

According to the report, EDU STAR plans to partner with a group of schools or school districts to test new technologies. The idea is that every school would set aside time for students to engage in digital learning, during which they would log into the EDU STAR system and work with the products that are being evaluated.

Chatterji and Jones estimate that one large school district would be enough to provide comprehensive results. In the event that there is not sufficient interest from schools, EDU STAR may offer incentives like discounts on software or compensation.

When it comes to disseminating results, the organization would be responsible for creating easily accessible reports detailing the effectiveness of various products and publishing these reports online. EDU STAR would rate each technology on a scale of one to five stars, and would also include supplemental information like how many students have used the software, how it was tested, user ratings from both students and teachers, and how effective the product is for different types of students.

The paper states that the organization would seek $5 million in start-up funding from a combination of U.S. Department of Education grants, such as the Investing in Innovation fund and foundation grants. EDU STAR would gradually transition to being financed by user fees paid by the technology companies, and would hypothetically be launched by a consortium including the Department of Education, private foundations and private sector partners.

“Technological innovation could be a potent weapon in the fight against stagnating achievement in the U.S. education system,” the report’s conclusion states. “However, before it can be used, both school systems and entrepreneurs must overcome a proof of effectiveness challenge.”

A poll by the Leading Education by Advancing Digital Commission released earlier this month found that over 90 percent of K-12 teachers and parents support greater use of technology in education, and believe that school systems should do more to improve access. More than half of both audiences also believe that technology will play a much bigger role in educating students during the next decade.

When it comes to investing in resources for students, 89 percent of teachers and 76 percent of parents would rather spend $200 per pupil on an Internet-connected device, than $200 for new science textbooks for each student.

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