Free Microsoft Technology Associate Certification for CA Computer Science Instructors!

Teacher/Administrator:

This is to let you know that Certiport is extending an offer to all California computer science instructors to get Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) certified for FREE.

MTA is the newest and fastest growing industry credential offered by Microsoft to validate foundational IT, development and database knowledge.  Additionally, through Certiport, Microsoft offers a rich set of FREE instructor and student resources to augment curriculum and enrich your lesson plans.

Through this offer, you can get certified, align your curriculum to industry standards, and add value to your courses and your institution as a whole.

It's likely you already know what you need to know to certify. So come on! Prove to your students (and yourself) that you have the credentials to help elevate your students’ potential.

Interested instructors (sorry, no students) are eligible to receive a free MTA exam voucher, MeasureUp MTA practice test, and LearnKey MTA eLearning course, which is a $200 value.

Register now for your free prep and certification exam materials at:

http://www.certiport.com/itstartshere/

For more information about this offer or the MTA program, please contact John Reseska, whose contact information is below.

John Reseska
Certiport, Inc.

Toll Free: 888.999.9830 x144
Email: jreseska@certiport.com
www.certiport.com • www.certiport.org

Best,

Gary Page, Information Technology Consultant

Career Tech Ed Leadership & Instructional Support Office
1430 N Street, Suite 4503
Sacramento, CA  95814
916-319-0499 Phone
gpage@cde.ca.gov

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/garypageusa
Find information and resources I have previously provided at: EdSynergy.Org

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CA Career Briefs - Preparing for Change

October 30, 2012

Prepare for Change

Did you know? Change may be the most important life skill and survival tool for the next decade. Whether it is personal or professional change, to thrive in today’s world, students must understand...

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Be a CompTIA CDIA+ Beta-Tester

CompTIA is looking for digital information management professionals to participate in a beta exam of its revised CDIA+ certification. Those who pass the exam will become CDIA+ certified at the time the final exam launches in 2013. Sign up.

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NICE National Cybersecurity Workforce Framework Available

The National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) has published version 1.0 of the National Cybersecurity Workforce Framework (“the Framework”) to provide a common understanding of and lexicon for cybersecurity work. Defining the cybersecurity population consistently, using standardized terms is an essential step in ensuring that our country is able to educate, recruit, train, develop, and retain a highly-qualified workforce.

Check it out at http://csrc.nist.gov/nice/framework/.

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EPIC 2020

Posted on May 1, 2012, EPIC 2020

EPIC 2020, stands for the proposition that the education of the world will change dramatically for the better during this decade. The two movies that follow and this site hope to provide tools that shatter the paradigm that the future will be anything like the past as well as facilitate discussion and accelerate actions to bring about the transformation of the education of the world.

Comments from Martin Van Der Werf, The College of Education Blog: “Will higher education collapse in this manner? No, this is far too simplistic. But are there grains of truth and seeds of nightmares in this? I would argue Yes. This video should inspire a mixture of guffaws, inspiration, and feelings of dread in just about anyone who watches it. So, if nothing else, Sams has succeeded in starting a dialogue that any college thinking seriously about its future needs to have.”

The Breaking Point has been replaced by The Tipping Point video 

2012 The Tipping Point

2012 The Tipping Point is a short presentation in a TED like format that was given by Bill Sams in June 2012 to the Ohio Tech Angel Fund members. Where EPIC 2020 is a futurist dramatization of what might happen in education and is designed to help people break out of their paradigm of traditional education  2012 The Tipping Point is a concise overview of what has already happened. This web site contains links and additional information on every thing discussed in the presentation.

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The tsunami online

Can e-learning revolutionize higher education?

by Chris Kenrick Palo Alto Weekly

As surely as it crashed over the publishing and music industries, the Internet is inexorably remaking the world of education.

Stanford University President John Hennessy has likened the latest wave of online education -- from simple video lectures to entire degrees earned online -- to a tsunami.

"What I told my colleagues is there's a tsunami coming," he said recently. "I can't tell you exactly how it's going to break, but my goal is to try to surf it, not to just stand there."

Though Stanford and others have dabbled in distance learning for decades, recent advances have dramatically improved the student experience, making it more interactive and unleashing a torrent of renewed interest in online courses.

The global press took note when more than 100,000 people around the world signed up last fall in each of three free, online Stanford courses in computer science and artificial intelligence.

Those Stanford classes were the most powerful demonstrations yet of the latest buzzword in higher education: "MOOC" -- massive, open, online courses.

Despite the many unknowns, major universities began flocking to join MOOC startups like Palo Alto-based Coursera and Cambridge, Mass.-launched edX, which allow them to offer courses to tens or hundreds of thousands of students. Another Palo Alto startup, Udacity, aims to enroll mass numbers in courses such as Introduction to Computer Science, Introduction to Physics, Introduction to Statistics and Algorithms.

Stanford, not surprisingly, is in the thick of it, with two of the major, for-profit players -- Coursera and Udacity -- founded by Stanford professors.

And within Stanford itself, more than 40 faculty members recently applied -- and half received funding -- for grants to advance efforts in online teaching.

"The level of interest from the faculty has been building steadily," said Computer Science Professor John Mitchell, recently tapped by Hennessy to become vice-provost for online learning.

"There is nothing top-down about this. ... There is something of a start-up mood all across campus. And many faculty members really want to get the message out to potential students around the world."

Stanford's schools of business, engineering and medicine all have recently appointed associate deans to expand e-learning.

"MOOCs are not necessarily the best or only model for Stanford," Mitchell told the faculty in June. "There are many possible models, so we all need to become tech-literate and figure out what's best for us."

Another major player in global online education is also local -- the Mountain View-based nonprofit Khan Academy, which offers education at the K-12 as well as the university level.

Khan already has reached more than 6 million individual students around the world and has ridden a wave of acclaim -- including strong backing from Bill Gates and Google -- in the past two years.

MIT and Harvard also have weighed in to cosponsor another startup, the nonprofit edX, which the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas recently joined.

The allure of online higher education comes down in no small part to economics -- the dream of delivering quality education at a much lower price per head.

That lower cost comes in the form of reaching large numbers of people, said Daniel Schwartz, a professor at Stanford's School of Education.

Coursera reports that it has more than 1 million enrolled students, while around 100,000 people logged into their Udacity accounts each week this summer, according to Udacity co-founder David Stavens.

"I think one of the great appeals is that (online education) can bring a lot to scale," Schwartz said.

Stavens points to the rising cost of education and levels of student debt in creating the need for a lower-cost alternative.

From 2002 to 2012, in-state tuition for the University of California rose from $3,800 to $12,200, while non-resident tuition increased from $14,900 to $36,000. California State University tuition rose from $2,070 to $6,518 over the same period of time.

And according to the federal government's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, outstanding student-loan debt surpassed $1 trillion in 2011.

"I think (online education) makes sense given where technology is, and I think it has to happen due to where (student) debt is in the United States today," Stavens said.

Besides lowering costs, online education could also change the quality and nature of higher education itself. A student who's now little more than a passive number in a 300-plus lecture course in a state university could -- in theory, at least -- get a much more personalized experience taking the same class online, given the rise of interactive tools.

"Flipping the classroom" -- having students absorb information online at home and then using classroom time, if there is any, for more creative and engaging pursuits that build on the material -- also could fundamentally alter the experience of higher education.

Online learning also holds the appeal of democratizing education by providing poor people in any village the opportunity to "rub minds" with the most brilliant professors on the planet.

"There's unique talent in places like Mongolia and Ghana," said Daphne Koller, a professor of engineering at Stanford and cofounder of Coursera.

Noting that students in some of those places are getting top scores in online classes, she added: "This is helping us identify some of the world's best talent to come here (to Stanford)."

In spite of the promises of online education, many urge caution about premature adoption. Former Princeton University President William Bowen -- once a skeptic who gradually has become a convert to the quality of online educational outcomes -- delivered two lectures at a recent series at Stanford aimed at taking a critical look at the newest move toward online courses.

He stressed that more evidence is needed on academic outcomes and cost effectiveness despite thousands of studies of online learning -- most of which he said had flaws.

However, Bowen recently completed a small study at Carnegie Mellon University that persuaded him online classes can produce learning outcomes equivalent to those in traditional classrooms.

Overall, universities shouldn't be defensive and should be open to experimentation with the new, he said, though there's a danger people will rush to embrace online learning before it's fully tested.

Andrew Delbanco, director of American Studies at Columbia University and author, most recently, of "College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be," likewise urged caution.

He spoke in response to Bowen and said that the key questions to ask about the rush to online courses are "What will be destroyed, and what will be innovated?"

Tsunamis, he noted, are not known for their selectivity.

A large percentage of America's college students attend overcrowded, underfunded community colleges or state institutions, he said.

If the online tsunami can wash away obstacles to educational attainment -- and barriers to learning once students get to college -- it could be a great plus, he acknowledged.

But other possible consequences to learning are more ominous, Delbanco said.

Massive online courses could accelerate a rush to a star system, in which the top professors attract a global following of hundreds of thousands of students.

For other faculty members -- those teaching languages in particular -- "the prospect is for near or total obsolescence.

"Your French teacher may be a version of Siri on your smartphone," he said.

Delbanco also worries that the pressure for revenue in the plethora of online education startups could result in shortcuts that reduce quality, making it "hard to retain the high-mindedness" that characterizes the elite pioneers of online education at places like Stanford.

"So far, universities have done little to define conflicts of interest in this brave new world that's already upon us," he said.

Delbanco also is skeptical about the quality of humanities education that a student can experience while sitting alone with a laptop -- the same venue in which he simultaneously could be shopping, chatting with friends and even surfing for porn.

He worries about the future of teacher-student interaction -- the kind that happens when a professor gets to know a student face to face in a class over time.

"Maybe it will be possible to preserve that experience ... but I'm not convinced," he said.

"I'm not convinced there's anything sequential about humanistic knowledge or learning."

In an 1838 address to graduates of the Harvard Divinity School, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul."

"I don't think we can emphasize too much this distinction between instruction and provocation, facts versus knowledge, discipline versus inspiration, information versus insight," Delbanco said.

"A true education values and entails both."

Related stories:

• The disrupters -- or the amplifiers?

• The enthusiasts

• Online education's local incubator

Freelance writer Bryce Druzin contributed to this article. Staff Writer Chris Kenrick can be emailed at ckenrick@paweekly.com.

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Moving toward MOOCs

By Tabitha Whissemore, Published October 19, 2012, CommunityCollegeTimes

​Image: iStockphoto

​Online classes have allowed colleges to reach more students, but most classes aren’t set up for an enrollment of thousands and they typically aren’t free. Not so with “massive open online courses” (MOOCs), which give anyone with an Internet connection free access to learning.

Several sites have sprung up offering MOOCs taught by professors from Stanford and Harvard Universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other big-name institutions. The MOOC platform Coursera has 33 university partners and has attracted more than 1.6 million “Courserians.”

“It’s the wild, wild West out there,” said Kae Novak, instructional designer for Front Range Community College (FRCC) in Colorado. “Nobody wants to be left behind.”

That includes community colleges. Most have offered online classes for years, but many are now exploring how to use MOOCs to bring professional development to faculty and staff and to help students, particularly in developmental education.

Learning opportunities for staff

FRCC held its first MOOC this summer as a professional development tool. “Introduction to Game Based Learning” attracted 301 faculty and staff members who wanted to learn more about using games, simulations and game-like environments to facilitate learning. Participants were encouraged to be part of the learning community by asking and answering questions and engaging in online discussions.

Funding to develop the MOOCs came from the Colorado Community College System as part of the Faculty Challenge Grant Program.

For many participants, it was their first time taking a MOOC.

“MOOCs really allow people to see what’s possible online,” Novak said.

EDUCAUSE brief: "What Campus Leaders Need to Know About MOOCs"

On Oct. 8, FRCC began its second iteration of the MOOC and will be running versions of it next spring and summer.

Because MOOCs are non-credit courses, most are designed for professionals who are “targeting a course because they need it for their professional development goals,” said Joanne Dehoney, chief of staff for EDUCAUSE, which recently released a brief on MOOCs.

“It’s not about credentialing. It’s about meeting a specific job requirement,” Dehoney said.

Adapting MOOCs for students

The challenge, then, is adapting MOOCs to serve students who need to earn credits and who may need more one-on-one attention.

Enrollment in traditional online courses at community colleges is usually capped at 25-30 students to ensure students receive a high-quality experience, said Christine Mullins, executive director of the Instructional Technology Council.

With MOOCs, there’s no limit to the number of participants. Last year, a MOOC hosted by Stanford University enrolled about 180,000 students. With that high number, there was no possibility of one-on-one interaction between the instructor and students. There also was no policing for cheating or consequences for not completing work. Only about 10 percent of participants completed the course.

Though accessibility is a hallmark of community colleges, it shouldn’t come at the expense of quality, Mullins said.

“It’s been extremely important for colleges to ensure online courses are comparable to or better than face-to-face classes,” she said.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation developed a grant program with the idea that the kind of open learning provided by MOOCs isn’t necessarily exclusive of high-quality instruction. The foundation is looking for colleges and universities that are creating programs that blend the two qualities to “engage a broad range of students in successfully advancing their general and developmental education,” according to its request for proposals. The courses do not necessarily have to be offered for credit, but they should “align learning outcomes, content, and structure” with typical course offerings at most institutions.

The foundation will announce the grant winners next month.

Experimenting with development math

In North Carolina, Wake Technical Community College plans to experiment with a MOOC in developmental math in spring 2013. For no cost, students will be able to navigate at their own pace through pre-algebra and beginning algebra, and monitor their own progress through directed self-assessments.

“We believe this large-scale online format will be a game changer in community colleges and in higher education in general and we think mathematics is the perfect place to start,” Wake Tech President Stephen Scott said in a press release.

The MOOC will prepare students for better placement test outcomes, but Wake Tech has a bigger goal in mind: to eventually eliminate the need for developmental math altogether.

Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland also has experience using a form of open learning. The college, along with a number of partners, received funds from the Gates Foundation for work on the online project Open Learning: Bridge to Success, which offers free and open resources to help adults transition to a college environment. There is an emphasis on assisting learners reduce the need for remediation in developmental math.

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) creates awareness of open educational resources (OER) that colleges can use to make education more accessible for all learners and improve teaching and learning. Foothill-De Anza Community College District established CCCOER in 2007.

On Nov. 13, the consortium will host a webinar on MOOCs.

Though MOOCs are popular, they may not be right for every institution. Colleges need to assess institutional capacity and ensure that technical and instructional requirements can be met, according to the EDUCAUSE brief. Engaging instructors is also key to ensuring that a MOOC is a success for the student and the college, said FRCC’s Novak.

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NOVA Workforce Board launches campaign to expand worker access to digital literacy training

Posted by Melanie Glover on October 25, 2012 in News | Techwire.net

The NOVA Workforce Board—a nonprofit, federally funded employment and training agency in Silicon Valley—has kicked off a digital literacy campaign with a board-approved resolution they are encouraging other California agencies to adopt.

The action was prompted by a national initiative of workforce training and job development agencies addressing the skills gap employers are facing in both private and public sector industries.

“Foundational to our initiative is the conviction that ICT skills are increasingly required in virtually all jobs and careers, regardless of employer or industry,” said Kris Stadelman, NOVA director. “We believe that new technology requirements associated with the Affordable Care Act and other new federal programs will highlight the need for a greater digital literacy focus in government and public sector careers.”

Approved at its bi-monthly meeting on Sept. 26, the resolution promotes access by workers to jobs requiring ICT skills; opportunities for students and workers to acquire ICT skills; and development of programs that incorporate ICT training.

“Given the projection that 80 percent of U. S. jobs in the next ten years will require workers to be digitally literate, this resolution is the first step in a grass roots campaign to highlight the need for workforce boards, educational institutions and others to focus on providing workers with the skills they will need to be self-sufficient in the new economy,” Stadelman said.

The state currently has about 1.2 million ICT workers — five percent of the state total — employed in all industries. Between 2011 and 2013, state employers are projected to add 110,000 new and replacement jobs, according to a NOVA press release.

NOVA is sharing its resolution with other workforce investment boards and related agencies to focus attention on this training need and to encourage those organizations to take action.  They are also identifying and educating workforce agencies in preparation for outreach to state officials, including the California Workforce Investment Board (CAWIB) and California Workforce Association (CWA).

NOVA’s digital literacy campaign is part of a broader effort, called TechLadder, to help ICT workers of all skill levels continually advance their careers. TechLadder partners include BW Research Partnership, a workforce and economic development consulting firm from Carlsbad, and The Stride Center, an Oakland-based agency that trains low-income workers for ICT careers.

Stride Center Executive Director Barrie Hathaway said that the group has a timeline for a State-level approach with this initiative, noting that the CAWIB and CWA efforts will occur early next year.

Other California organizations that have adopted a resolution such as NOVA’s include Workforce Development Board of Contra Costa County and Sacramento Employment and Training Agency (SETA). Contra Costa County was the first, adopting early this year, and SETA followed suit in the spring.

The group is also in conversations with RichmondWorks as well as several other Bay Area WIBs and intends to focus on Southern California this month, according to Hathaway.

To view the NOVA board’s resolution, visit http://novaworks.org/SpecialProjects/TechLadder.aspx.

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CCC ePortfolios In The Online Teaching Program

WRITTEN BY PATRICIA DONOHUE, TechEDge

WEDNESDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2012

Graduates of the Online Teaching Certification Program, offered by @ONE, walk away with much more than just a certificate of completion of required coursework. By the end of the program, candidates will own tangible evidence of their accomplishments by way of an academic ePortfolio. The academic ePortfolio is a digital collection of multimedia artifacts and evidence demonstrating the candidate's proficiency and competency in online teaching.

The Online Teaching Certification Program uses an integrative approach to ePortfolio design and development by encouraging students to document and reflect upon their learning as a practice to expand their perspective of alternative ways to teach and assess in an online environment.

To better understand this process and the tools used for development, ePortfolio California sat down with @ONE’s Micah Orloff, Interim Co-Director, to learn more about ePortfolios in the Online Teaching Certification Program.

ePortfolio California: Micah, before we dive right into talking about ePortfolios, can you tell us a little bit more about the Online Teaching Certification Program?

Micah: Development began in 2008, but we implemented the revised and aligned curriculum in 2010. The program allows faculty to develop and demonstrate the knowledge, skills and abilities of a quality online instructor as defined by research driven and nationally recognized standards for online teaching effectiveness. The curriculum has been designed to align with an adaptation of the iNACOL Standards for Quality Online Teaching. After the successful completion of the program coursework that focuses on effective online practices, course management, accessibility, online community development and designing effective online assessment, candidates advance to the final phase of the program and prepare an ePortfolio complete with reflective artifacts from the program and their specific practice. The ePortfolio is then presented to peers and program staff in a final showcase.

ePortfolio California: What types of candidates are taking this course? Are they mostly California Community Colleges faculty and staff?

Micah: The program is primarily focused on preparing California Community Colleges faculty to be effective online instructors with nearly 86% of enrollees coming from a CCC institution. However, we also have faculty from the University level, both in and outside of California (6%), and we also have K-12 educators (6%) from across the nation participating. Lastly we have some graduate students and even a couple commercial sector participants.

ePortfolio California: Why is ePortfolio development a required component of this program? What are you hoping the student takes away from this experience?

Micah: When @ONE began development of the program we felt that, to have our participants be able to fully demonstrate the knowledge, skills and abilities of an effective online instructor during but, more importantly, after the program with prospective and current employers and students, our candidates would need to carry a credential that speaks for itself.

We wanted a deliverable that provided much more in terms of verification of qualification than through a bullet point on a resume or another professional development completion certificate.

ePortfolio California: Wow, that’s a win-win for the student candidate; being able to visually represent successful completion of required coursework, and demonstrating their qualifications and new found skills can be powerful asset when meeting with a potential employer.

So that gives us insight about the product they are taking away. What about the process of building an ePortfolio? How is that important to the learner?

Micah: It is an important part of the curriculum because the integration and development of an ePortfolio throughout the program allows participants to document and reflect upon their learning experience and inventory their current teaching practices and program deliverables while aligning their work to research driven and nationally recognized standards for quality online teaching.

This is an excerpt from the ePortfolio California interview.

The full transcript is available from the ePortfolio California website.

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Patricia Donohue is a Project Manager for ePortfolio California.

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Free CCC Automated Website Assessment Tool

WRITTEN BY JAYME JOHNSON, TechEDge

THURSDAY, 25 OCTOBER 2012

The High Tech Center Training Unit of the California Community Colleges system has licensed the Hi-Software Compliance Sheriff tool for use by each of the California community college districts.

This tool allows each district to conduct customized evaluations of their Web content to ensure that legal standards for accessibility and privacy are being maintained, as well as a host of other assessments useful for ensuring quality and fully functioning Web content.

The Compliance Sheriff tool allows for immediate testing as well as automated testing to be conducted at pre-determined dates and times. Customized reports can be sent to specific content creators and managers to help facilitate the management of quality control and content creation. In the reports, specific issues can be highlighted on a case-by-case basis, with general assistance in remedying each issues being provided to the end-user.

Screenshot of Compliance Sheriff Summary Report

Each automated scan can be configured to cover different levels of web content, the ability to assess MS Office documents, Flash, and PDF content, multi-domain support, the ability to scan learning management systems that are protected by username and password security, and the ability to create automated scripts for sophisticated interactivity assessment. Compliance Sheriff features an extensive library of assessment criteria to address concerns, ranging from technical standards like Section 508 and HIPPA to more general support such as Link Validation and Offensive Content standards.

Partial listing of available assessment criteria/checkpoints.

To learn more about the HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff and how your district can get access to the tool, please contact Jayme Johnson at the High Tech Center Training Unit via emailjjohnson@htctu.net.

The High Tech Center Training Unit promotes the success of students with disabilities through the use of technology. More information about the unit is available from www.htctu.net.<>

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Jayme Johnson is a Web Accessibility Instructor for the High Tech Center Training Unit
of the California Community Colleges.

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npower: Nonprofit Technology Network Webinar

October 25, 2012

This Week: The Community Corps Teams Up With NTEN For Member Appreciation Month



Next month The Community Corps will host a webinar with NTEN entitled

“Successfully Engaging Volunteers on Tech Projects” on November 8, 2012 at 11 EST.

Having the right technology in place enables nonprofits to do more with less, yet 88% of nonprofits say they have inadequate IT. Technology budgets tend to be small and having tech support on staff is a luxury for many organizations.

There are thousands of technology professionals that have the skills nonprofits need to bridge this gap, but many organizations struggle to engage tech volunteers successfully.

This session will highlight a success story from The Community Corps on how the Brain Injury Association of Maryland engaged a pro bono web developer to enhance its website.

In this webinar, participants will get practical tips on:
How to define your technology needs upfront
The key points to cover in your project kickoff call
Best practices for giving feedback and direction
The importance of saying thanks

Register Today!

Cost - $70 or Free for Community Corps nonprofits. Email Miriam.Young@npower.org for the code! Offer ends Friday, November 2, 2012.

Presenters

Miriam Young
Nonprofit Outreach and Engagement Manager at The Community Corps, a program of NPower.
Bryan Pugh
Executive Director of the Brain Injury Association of Maryland
Steve Murphy
Volunteer, The Community Corps

NTEN’s Member Appreciation Month

This webinar is part of NTEN’s Member Appreciation Month. During November NTEN will be celebrating and providing webinars, prized and sharing.

About NTEN:

NTEN aspires to a world where all nonprofit organizations use technology skillfully and confidently to meet community needs and fulfill their missions. Connect with NTEN and join today!

Did you know that NTEN offers tons of other great technology webinars for nonprofits? If your organization is not yet a member of NTEN, consider joining now for 2013.You’ll receive benefits immediately so the rest of 2012 is free and you’ll also receive a webinar coupon to use in the future

Become a Member Today!

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San Francisco to train 2,500 for tech jobs

San Francisco Business Times by Patrick Hoge, Reporter
Date: Tuesday, October 23, 2012, 3:45pm PDT

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee launched a federally funded program to train and place 2,500 residents of diverse ages and backgrounds in jobs in the city's burgeoning tech sector over the next five years.

The TechSF, which will use $8 million in workforce training grants from the U.S. Department of Labor, is a partnership with San Francisco Citizens for Innovation & Technology (SF.CITI), a new coalition of more than 330 of the city's high tech companies, as well as with local community colleges and educational institutions, workforce training nonprofit organizations.

SF.CITI Chairman Ron Conway said that Jawbone, a maker of wireless consumer devices like headphones and speakers, will be taking a leadership role in the effort.

The first class of the TechSF Academy has 80 students taking courses in mobile app development, networking, multimedia design and tech support. Training partners include the Bay Area Video Coalition, Bayview Hunter’s Point Center for Arts & Technology, City College of San Francisco, San Francisco State University and Year Up Bay Area.

SF.CITI members, which collectively employ 20,000 people, has been gathering data to understand the hiring needs of its member companies to help local educational institutions train local residents to fill those jobs.

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FREE CA Perkins Nontraditional & Special Populations Regional Workshops

Schedule yours now or attend one in your area!

Why: Perkins legislation requires you and your staff to participate in professional development! The JSPAC makes that easy!

What: Outcomes, participants will be able to do the following by the end of this workshop:

• Understand the basics of Perkins IV legislation and the Core Indicators
• Analyze data for accuracy, program planning, evaluation and improvement using Perkins IV
• Discuss the Root Causes of & Strategies for addressing internal, situational, and school based barriers that prevent students from being successful in CTE programs & occupations
• Identify the steps students should take as they select a program or career
• Begin to Develop a unified regional team & plan to close Core Indicator gaps and increase student success

Invite All: Educators from K-12, Adult Education and Community Colleges, WIA and SB70 grant recipients,Nontraditional & Special Populations educators & program coordinators; academic and CTE educators and teachers, Perkins IV coordinators; Counselors, CTE Deans and administrators; Title IX/504/equity coordinators; CalWORKs One-Stop directors & staff; student support staff; grant writers; institutional researchers; etc.

*To schedule a workshop contact Elizabeth Wallner at eawallner@gmail.com

More information & FREE registration available at www.jspac.org

Regional Workshop Dates:

• October 19, 2012 — CCCAOE Conference, Long Beach
• October 25, 2012 — San Diego City College
• October 26, 2012 — Palomar College
• December 4, 2012 — JSPAC Conference, Sacramento (with paid conference registration)
• February 8, 2013 — San Bernardino ROP
• March 10-12, 2013 — Educating For Careers, Sacramento*
• April 12-13, 2012 — CITEA Conference, Oakland
• LA/Orange City — Dates TBD
• Your School or College?

*Applied, submission not yet accepted as of 10/15/2012

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Webinar - What's Completion Got to Do With It? The Value of Student Short-Term Course-Taking

Webinar –  October 31, 2012 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST

California’s community college system encompasses a broad-ranging vision for higher education. Yet, as resources dwindle, the conversation about what constitutes success has focused on those outcomes that can be counted easily. Completion defined as the attainment of degrees and certificates or transfer to a four-year institution is increasingly becoming the yardstick for effectiveness. But does completion capture the full impact of community colleges? How does a focus on completion affect our ability to capture the vital role that community colleges play in job retraining or workforce development?

Co-sponsored by LearningWorks and The RP Group, this hour-long webinar examines the number of students pursuing short-term skills-building, the impact of this course-taking on student earning potential, implications for colleges, and how you can examine course-taking patterns at your own institution.

Presenters:

Kathy Booth & Terrence Willett, RP Group

Rock Pfotenhauer, Cabrillo College

The webinar is free, but you must register to receive the log-in information.

To enroll, visit:

What’s Completion Got to Do With It? Unpacking the Value of Student Short-Term Course-Taking

For any question you might have, please contact: info@learningworksca.org

To download a copy of a report examining student course-taking patterns and a methodology for replicating this study at your own institution, click here.

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Moore's Law: The rule that really matters in tech

CNET

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore foresaw an inexorable rise in chip power that eventually delivered the computer to your pocket. While long in the tooth, Moore's prediction still has plenty of life in it. Here's why.

by Stephen Shankland

 October 15, 2012 12:00 AM PDT

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore speaking in 2007 at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET )

Year in, year out, Intel executive Mike Mayberry hears the same doomsday prediction: Moore's Law is going to run out of steam. Sometimes he even hears it from his own co-workers.

But Moore's Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who 47 years ago predicted a steady, two-year cadence of chip improvements, keeps defying the pessimists because a brigade of materials scientists like Mayberry continue to find ways of stretching today's silicon transistor technology even as they dig into alternatives. (Such as, for instance, super-thin sheets of carbon graphene.)

Oh, and don't forget the money that's driving that hunt for improvement. IDC predicts chip sales will rise from $315 billion this year to $380 billion in 2016. For decades, that revenue has successfully drawn semiconductor research out of academia, through factories, and into chips that have powered everything from a 1960s mainframe to a 2012 iPhone 5.

The result: Moore's Law has long passed being mere prognostication. It's the marching order for a vast, well-funded industry with a record of overcoming naysayers' doubts. Researchers keep finding ways to maintain a tradition that two generations ago would have been science fiction: That computers will continue to get smaller even as they get more powerful.

"If you're only using the same technology, then in principle you run into limits. The truth is we've been modifying the technology every five or seven years for 40 years, and there's no end in sight for being able to do that," said Mayberry, vice president of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group.

Keeping Moore's Law ticking (pictures)

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Plenty of other industries aren't as fortunate. You don't see commercial supersonic airplane travel, home fusion reactors, or 1,000-mile-per-gallon cars. But the computing industry has a fundamental flexibility that others lack: it's about bits, not atoms.

"Automobiles and planes are dealing with the physical world," such as the speed of sound and the size and mass of the humans they carry, said Sam Fuller, chief technology officer of Analog Devices, a chipmaker that's been in the electronics business even longer than Intel. "Computing and information processing doesn't have that limitation. There's no fundamental size or weight to bits. You don't necessarily have the same constraints you have in these other industries. There potentially is a way forward."

To shrink its microprocessor circuitry elements to today's 22-nanometer size -- just 22 billionths of a meter -- Intel had to develop a technology called tri-gate transistors in which silicon semiconductor material protrudes in fin-shaped ridges.

(Credit: Intel )

That means that even if Moore's Law hits a wall and chip components stop shrinking, there are other ways to boost computer performance.

This chart from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's seminal 1965 paper showed the cost of transistors decreased with new manufacturing processes even as the number of transistors on a chip increased.

(Credit: Intel )

Before we get too carried away with lauding Moore's Law, be forewarned: Even industry optimists, Moore included, think that about a decade from now there could be trouble. Yes, all good things come to an end, and at some point those physical limits people have been predicting will turn out to be real.

To understand those limits and how they may be overcome, I talked to researchers at the big chip companies, academics, and industry gurus. I wanted to go beyond what what most of us think we know about semiconductors and hear it from the experts. Do they have doubts? What are they doing about those doubts? The overwhelming consensus among the chip cognescenti, I found, was, yes, there's a stumbling block a decade or so from now. But don't be surprised if we look back at that prediction 20 years from now and laugh.

For related coverage, see what would happen if Moore's Law fizzled and a Q&A with Intel's Mike Mayberry.

Strictly speaking
Moore's Law is named after Gordon Moore, who in a 1965 paper in Electronics Magazineobserved an annual doubling in the number of chip elements called transistors. He refined his view in 1975 with a two-year cycle in an updated paper. "I didn't think it would be especially accurate," Moore said in 2005, but it has in fact proved to be. And now, Intel times its tick-tock clock to Moore's Law, updating its chip architecture and its manufacturing technology on alternating years.

Here's a very specific illustration of what Moore's Law has meant. The first transistor, made in 1947 at Bell Labs, was assembled by hand. In 1964, there were about 30 transistors on a chip measuring about 4 square millimeters. Intel's "Ivy Bridge" quad-core chips, the third-generation Core i7 found found in the newest Mac and Windows PCs, has 1.4 billion transistors on a surface area of 160 square millimeters -- and there are chips with even more.

A transistor is the electrical switch at the heart of a microprocessor, similar to a wall switch that governs whether electric current will flow to light a lamp. A transistor element called a gate controls whether electrons can flow across the transistor from its "source" side to its "drain" side. Flowing electrons can be taken logically as a "1," but if they don't flow the transistor reads "0." Millions of transistors connected together on a modern chip process information by influencing each other's electrical state.

Mears Technologies hopes its transistor technology will extend the lifespan of traditional silicon transistors, the tiny semiconductor switches at the heart of microprocessors. This cross section of a transistor shows the gate across the top that controls whether current flows in a silicon channel, the darker source and drain areas on either end of the current pathway, and an area marked in green area where Mears' MST technology is added. The MST technology gives more precise control over elements added to the silicon channel, a process Mears says reduces variability so smaller transistors that consume less power are practical.

(Credit: Mears Technologies )

In today's chips, a stretch of silicon connects the source to the drain. Silicon is a type of material known as a "semiconductor" because, depending on conditions, it'll either act as a conductor that transmits electrons or as an insulator that blocks them. Applying a little electrical voltage to the transistor's gate controls whether that electron current flows.

To keep up with Moore's Law, engineers must keep shrinking the size of transistors. Intel, the leader in the race, currently uses a manufacturing process with 22-nanometer features. That's 22 billionths of a meter, or roughly a 4,000th the width of a human hair. For contrast, Intel's first chip, the 4004 from 1971, was built with a 10-micron (10,000-nanometer) process. That's about a tenth the width of a human hair.

Intel's Ivy Bridge generation of processors is an example of how hard it can be to sustain that process.

To make the leap from the earlier 32nm process to today's 22nm process, Intel had to rework the basic "planar" transistor structure. Previously, the electrons traveled in a flat silicon channel laid flat into the plane of the silicon wafer and with the gate perched on top. To work around the limits of that approach, Intel flipped the planar transistor's silicon on its side into a fin that juts up out of the plane of the chip. The gate straddles this fin the way a person might straddle a low fence with both legs. To improve performance, Intel can put as many as three of these fins in a single transistor.

The result is a "tri-gate" chip design that shrinks without suffering debilitating new levels of "leakage," which takes place when current flows even when a transistor is switched off. And it means Intel has one more "shrink" of the chip manufacturing process under its belt.

Developing the tri-gate transistors wasn't easy: Intel researchers built the company's first finned transistor in 2002, nine years before it was ready for mass-market production. And it wasn't the only challenge; other fixes include making gates out of metal, connecting transistors with copper rather than aluminum wires, and using "strained" rather than ordinary silicon for the channel between source and drain.

In 2013, Intel plans another shrink to a 14nm process. Then comes 10nm, 7nm, and, in 2019, 5nm.

And it's not just Intel making up these numbers. In the chip business, a fleet of companies depend on coordinated effort to make sure Moore's Law stays intact. Combining academic research results with internal development and cross-industry cooperation, they grapple with quantum-mechanics problems such as electron tunneling and current leakage -- a bugaboo of incredibly tiny components in which a transistor sucks power even when it's switched off.

Doom and gloom
Given the engineering challenges, a little pessimism hardly seems out of place.

Intel's current chip manufacturing road map extends to the 5nm process "node," scheduled to arrive in chips in 2019.

(Credit: Intel )

A 2005 Slate article bore the title, "The End of Moore's Law." In 1997, the New York Times declared, "Incredible Shrinking Transistor Nears Its Ultimate Limit: The Laws of Physics," and in another piece quoted SanDisk's CEO forecasting a "brick wall" in 2014. In 2009, IBM Fellow Carl Anderson predicted continuing exponential growth only for a generation or two of new manufacturing techniques, and then only for high-end chips.

Even Intel has fretted about the end by predicting trouble ahead getting past 16nm processes.

In decades past, Moore himself was worried about how to manufacture chips with features measuring 1 micron, then later chips with features measuring 0.25 microns, or 250 nanometers. A human hair is about 100 microns wide.

Yes, there are fundamental limits -- for example, quantum mechanics describes a phenomenon called tunneling where the position of an electron can't be pinned down too precisely. From a chip design point of view, that turns out to mean that an electron can essentially hop from source to drain, degrading a chip with leakage current.

So is there an end to Moore's Law? In a 2007 interview, Moore himself said, "There is." He continued:

 Any physical quantity that's growing exponentially predicts a disaster. It comes to some kind of an end. You can't go beyond certain major limits... But it's been amazing to me how technologists have been able to keep pushing those out ahead of us. For about as long as I remember, the fundamental limits were about two or three generations out. So far we've been able to get around them. But I think another decade, a decade and a half, or something, we'll hit something that is fairly fundamental.

That was five years ago, and few seem to want to venture too much farther beyond Moore's prediction.

"I think we have at least a decade before we start getting into issues," said Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. "I still give it another decade," added Robert Mears, founder and president of Mears Technologies, which has developed a technology called MST CMOSdesigned to improve the performance of the conventional silicon channel.

Beyond silicon
Although Moore's Law might not continue if transistors can't be shrunk, the post-silicon future shouldn't be overlooked. When traditional silicon transistors eventually run out of gas, there are plenty of alternatives waiting in the wings.

"The most probable outcome is that silicon technology will find a way to keep scaling, some way continue to deliver more value with succeeding generations," said Nvidia Chief Scientist Bill Dally.

One likely candidate keeps the same basic structure as today's transistors but speeds them up by breaking out of today's constraints in the periodic table of the elements. In transistors now, the source, drain, and channel are made from silicon, which inhabits a column of the periodic table called group IV.

But it's possible to use indium arsenide, gallium arsenide, gallium nitride or other so-called III-V materials from group III and group V. Being from different groups on the periodic table means transistor materials would have different properties, and the big one here is better electron mobility. That means electrons move faster and transistors therefore can work faster.

"You can imagine staying with fairly traditional transistors, moving to silicon-germanium, then III-V structures," Fuller said. But that's mostly a stopgap. "There is some potential future in that, but it pretty quickly runs into similar limits that hit silicon. There may be [performance improvement] factors of two, four, maybe eight to be gained."

IBM is working on replacing silicon channels in transistors with carbon nanotubes. These images show a schematic and real-world images of such a device. Image b shows a top view, image c shows a cross section, and image d shows an end-on view.

(Credit: IBM )

Another tweak could replace the silicon channel with "nanowires," super-thin wires made of various semiconductor materials (including, it so happens, lowly silicon itself). More exotic and more challenging is the possibility of using carbon nanotubes instead. These are made of a cylindrical mesh of interlinked carbon atoms that can carry current, but there are lots of difficulties: connecting them to the rest of the transistor, improving their not-so-hot semiconductor properties, and ensuring the nanotubes are sized and aligned correctly.

Glorious graphene
Which brings us to one of the most promising post-silicon candidates: graphene, a flat honeycomb lattice of carbon that resembles atomic chicken wire. If you roll up a sheet of graphene, you get a nanotube, but it turns out the flat form also can be used as a semiconductor.

One advantage graphene holds over carbon nanotubes is the possibility that it can be manufactured directly as a step in the wafer processing that goes on in chip factories, instead of being fabricated separately and added later. (This is a very big deal in the intricate and minutely choreographed business of chip manufacture.) Another is that it's got fantastically high electron mobility, which could make for very fast switching speeds if graphene is used to connect source and drain in a transistor.

"I think graphene is very promising," Fuller said.

But graphene has plenty of challenges. First on the list: it lacks the good "band gap," a separation in energy levels that determines whether a semiconductor conducts electrons or insulates. Graphene by itself has a band gap of zero, meaning that it just conducts electricity and fails as a semiconductor.

"Graphene has some very nice properties, but as it stands at the moment, it doesn't have a proper band gap," Robert Mears, president of Mears Technologies. "It's not really a replacement for silicon or other semiconductor materials. It's a good connect medium, conductor, but not necessarily a good switch at the moment."

IBM has figured out how to build a graphene-based transistor on an integrated circuit geared for wireless communication purposes, not for computing.

(Credit: IBM )

Here's how Fuller describes an ideal transistor: "When you turn on, it comes on strong, and when you turn it off, it consumes almost no power. That's what you want for a great logic gate." The problem so far, though. is that "the graphene transistors today have been hard to turn off."

But there are ways to give the material a band gap, including using two separated strips of graphene fabricated as "nanoribbons." Varying the placement of the transistor gate or gates also can help. If scientists work out the challenges, the result could be a transistor that's not necessarily smaller, but that is a lot faster.

"We're in the early days of exploring the use of graphene, like we were with silicon a long time ago -- in the 1950s, maybe," Fuller said.

But wait, there's more
Another radical approach is called spintronics, which relies on information being transmitted within a chip using a property of electrons called spin.

"If you could use spin to store a 1 or a 0, rather than charge or absence of charge, it doesn't have the same thermodynamic limits that moving charge around does," Fuller said. "You probably wouldn't run into the same power limits."

Silicon photonics, in which light rather than electrons carry information, could be involved in future chips.

"That can be a great partial solution between chips, or even on chips," Fuller said. Today, a large fraction of a chip's power is used to keep the chip components marching lockstep by broadcasting ticks of the chip's clock, but there are promising research projects to do that with optical links.

There are limits to how short optical links get, said Mears, who by the way invented the erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) technology that vastly improved fiber-optic network capacity. The problem: the wavelength of light is inconveniently large compared to chip components, he said.

"In spite of it having been one of my main research subjects, I'm not a great fan of optics on a chip," Mears said. "Any kind of optical waveguide on a chip will look huge compared to the kinds of devices you can put on a chip."

The chip industry treadmill involves tackling a constant series of challenges. Intel has maintained an ability to predict what'll happen for about the next decade.

(Credit: Intel )

Fuller concurred. "What makes it great for communicating over long distances makes it difficult to make a logic gate out of them: photons don't interact with each other. If you want to build a NOR gate or NAND gate [two forms of basic logic gates out of which chips are assembled], you need to switch from photons to electrons for the gate, then back to photons to transmit the data," he said.

Mayberry is keeping an eye on so-called spintronics, but as with many technologies he's cautious. "A spin wave travels at a slower rate than an electron wave," he notes. There are also numerous manufacturing challenges.

Beyond that, there's a wide range of even more exotic research under way -- quantum computing, DNA computing, spin wave devices, exitonic field-effect transistors, spin torque majority gates, bilayer pseudospin field-effect transistors, and more. An industry consortium called the "Nanoelectronics Research Initiative" is monitoring the ideas.

"There are something like 18 different candidates they're keeping track of. There's no clear winner, but there are emerging distinctive trends that will help guide future research," Mayberry said.

It's certainly possible that computing progress could slow or fizzle. But before getting panicky about it, look at the size of the chip business, its importance to the global economy, the depth of the research pipeline, and the industry's continued ability to deliver the goods.

"There's an enormous amount of capital that's highly motivated to make sure this continues," said Nvidia's Dally. "The good news is we're pretty clever, so we'll come through for them."

Topics:

Computing

Tags:

carbon nanotubes,

microprocessors,

chips,

graphene,

Moore's Law,

semiconductors,

processors

Stephen Shankland

Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and has also covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux, other open-source software, and science.

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