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The Digest for today will highlight the role that big data is likely to play in heldping disadvantaged students learn better, Havard's push to expand its use of MOOCs and online courses, Staples pilot project to bring 3D printing services to its stores, a look at the connection between student debt and administrative pay, and a professional skills MOOC app. 

Each library conference has a different feel, which is usually determined by the number of attendees. The bigger the conference, the broader the discussions and less detailed the presentations. Recently, two OhioLINK co-workers and I attended the Innovative Users Group (IUG) conference in Detroit, MI. Even with the size of 1000+ attendees, topics focused on workflows, processes, and system implications of proposed changes, and many presentations took a walkthrough approach.

In 2011, at the Techonomy conference in California, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt made a bold statement. “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says. Let me repeat that,” he said. “We create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.”

Today we will take a look of the state of school diversity 60 years after Brown v Board of Education, a new study that is raising concerns about how fair classroom observations are, a look at the job market for this years graduating college students, a school libraries unique move to provide 3D printers, and a discussion of how to resolve the issue of high cost college textbooks. 

The Digest for today will take a look at some of the applications being developed at college campuses that rely on the Internet of Things, a new set of performance ratings for the Ohio schools involved in the data scrubbing scandal, a new open data law that will improve government accountability, a major investment into creating a public cloud in Massachusetts, and robots at the Chicago Public Library.  

Astronomical objects in the space beyond the earth are fascinating and enigmatic. We belong to the planetary system of our home star, the Sun, which is our source of energy on Earth. The Sun is a gigantic ball of hot plasma, the fourth and most prevalent state of matter (over 99% of matter in the universe is plasma, not solid, liquid or gas). It is very important to know how the Sun generates its energy, how that propagates as radiation, what are the solar constituents and elemental abundances, and what are the plasma conditions throughout the Sun.

The Digest for today looks at the increasing amount of time students spend taking and preparing for standardized tests, a series of new online courses to be taught by the Smithsonian Institute, a new supercomputer that will be owned and operated by a collaboration of colleges and private companies, Google's pledge to stop scanning student emails for advertising purposes, and an open letter from renewable energy companies discussing their impact on the state's economy. 

In today's Digest we look at some of the key findings from the White House's Big Data and Privacy report and what these findings might mean for big data. We also look at a new Ohio bill that will provide clearer standards for how to award college credit to returning veterans, the impact that the improving economy is having on student loans, an international robotics competition for students of all ages, and some best practices for keeping online students engaged in thier coursework. 

The digest for today we examine a new way at looking at MOOCs low completion rates and how these low figures may not represent how effective MOOCs actualy are, a new grant program for minority students pursueing STEM degrees that is funded by the Air Force, the addition of an HPC cluster to help researchers at Rutgers University, the role that major industrial firms are playing in the growth of additive manufacturing, and a new breakthrough in the quest to develop the first fully functional quantum computer. 

The digest for today examines the potential impacts that big data could have on the poor, a look at what colleges can do to improve the way STEM subjects are taught, a study that shows why students have not adopted tablets as the industry had predicted, the addition of a job application kiosk to the Queen's library, and a $30 million investment from Chevron to improve project based STEM education.

The digest for today look at efforts by the U.S. Dept. of Education to improve teacher training, the rising cost of tuition at Ohio's Public Universities, efforts to improve the efficiency of computers, the increased oversight of charter schools in Ohio, and the issue of attrition in STEM degree programs

Today we look at Ohio school districts collaborating with the Ohio Straight-A-Fund, job markets improving for college graduates, MIT offering additive manufacturing and Columbus schools cutting funding.