By Prof. Hacker. Are you a reader? A student of America’s founding? Interested in book history? We have an app for that. And we would love to show it to you. But a funny thing happened on the way to the App Store: Apple has rejected it, multiple times. Our attempt to produce an app designed to let readers interact with facsimiles of rare documents — in this case, the first printed editions of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, his only full-length book — is a story of great frustration for us, but, we hope, can be a cautionary tale for others who are thinking about the possibilities of developing educational and scholarly material for the iOS and the iPad. More...

By Dayna Catropa. According to Google, “Every day Google answers more than one billion questions from people around the globe in 181 countries and 146 languages. 15% of the searches we see everyday we’ve never seen before.” By analyzing these search queries, Google is in a unique position to spot trends. Google’s Education Team recently released data related to education search. The report analyzes search volume over time using data unique to Google. They separate search queries into five categories: brand terms (includes an institution name); program terms (business, psychology); general terms (online education); degree terms (includes the level of the degree) and MOOC terms. Here are three trends they discussed. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. Sometimes we are reminded about how small our edtech community really is. Ray Henderson's announcement that he is stepping way from is executive operational role as Blackboard's President of Learning Platforms and into a strategic role on the company's Board of Directors was much noticed in our little edtech universe.
To his credit, Ray wrote a really thoughtful post about this move in his blog, which was followed-up by some excellent analysisby the indomitable Michael Feldstein. Read more...

By Harry Slater. The best productivity apps for students. Struggling to get stuff done? Get off Facebook and use the internet to improve your work rate instead. More people are spending more time online, and it's damaging our productivity. As a student the internet, especially social media, can be incredibly distracting and addictive – dangerous, even. Hardcore bloggers are suffering too and the latest trend is to disconnect for a year. Grist writer David Roberts recently announced he's taking a break because 10 years of constant web surfing has started to do strange things to his brain. Read more...