By Prof. Hacker. Recent announcements are showing a trend in cheaper storage solutions and cloud backups. Google recently updated its pricing for Drive storage and now offers 15 GB for free and incredibly cheap prices for 100 GB, 1 TB, and 10TB+. At WWDC, Apple announced changes to its iCloud service towards a more Dropbox-like experience and revealed a new pricing model that includes a baseline 20 GB for $0.99 per month. And just this week, Amazon revealed its plans for unlimited storage for photographs for those purchasing the new Fire Phone. Cloud storage, it seems, is everywhere and dirt cheap. More...

By Natalie Houston. Some hard (and sometimes hard-won) truths about deadlines, academic and otherwise:
Some deadlines are really, truly, firm. And some are not.
Some deadlines come with negative consequences for not meeting them in a timely fashion. Some do not.
Some negative consequences take physical or visible forms, such as late fees, delayed diplomas, or cancelled accounts. Some negative consequences are psychological and emotional, such as feelings of embarrassment, guilt, or shame.
Deadlines and their flexibility are, like other resources, typically unevenly distributed (within an organization, within a profession, within the world more broadly). This means that some people have more ability to renegotiate a deadline than others do. More...

By Anastasia Salter. A survey of grade school educators on using games in the classroom was recently released by the Games and Learning Publishing Council (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). While this survey isn’t directly applicable to those of us working in higher education, the adoption and success of games methods in K-12 will impact responses to those approaches when we try them in our classes with those students years later. More...