Dubbed The Experiment Fund, the firm describes itself as “a bridge between America’s oldest universities and storied venture capital firms.” Backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the firm is made up of Hugo Van Vurren, NEA co-head Patrick Chung, and NEA General Partner Harry Weller — all of whom have a degree of some form from the school.

When I say it’s “right on the Harvard campus”, I’m not kidding — it’s going to be based out of 33 Oxford Street, which is Harvard’s School Of Engineering And Applied Sciences. It’s a bit more than a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard. With that said, the fund operates with complete independence from the university.

And if you’re not a Harvard student? Don’t sweat it too much. The fund says they’re open to anyone, “regardless of university affilation, nationality, age, or prior experience.” Being a Harvard student — or at least a Cambridge local — probably wouldn’t hurt, though.

Anyone who has read this blog knows that there are many reasons that investors want to be on campus. The questions is, do they know what they are looking for? Do they have a framework for assessing student initiated ventures and campus infrastructure?

via Harvard Gets Its First VC Firm: The Experiment Fund | TechCrunch.

Summer@HIGHLAND is a 5-year old entrepreneurship program designed to provide university-affiliated startups with the environment and resources for taking their initiative/company to the next level. The program is “founder friendly”: Highland receives no equity stake in exchange for a team’s participation, and teams are under no obligation to Highland after the summer. Our only priority is helping entrepreneurs and their teams significantly advance their startup over the summer.

Selected teams will receive $15K, free office space in Highland’s Cambridge or Menlo Park office, and the opportunity to work closely with the Highland team and an incredible network of founders. Teams will also have access to the Summer@HIGHLAND Speaker Series, which has included founders, CEOs and experts from technology leaders.

You have about 68 days to get your applications in. (Early deadline is March 1, 2012, and regular deadline is April 5, 2012).

It is interesting to note that they are not looking for business plans, but for applicants that have taken some action, on a scalable path, and are entering large markets. This is about high impact student firms, not basic t-shirt shops (so yes, they would have rejected Marc Ecko!).

via Summer@Highland 2011 Entrepreneurship Program.

Depending on whom you ask, Rosetta Stone is either modernizing higher education or jeopardizing the quality of foreign language instruction by offering classes for transferrable college credit.

Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association and a Spanish professor, calls the idea “scandalous.”

David McAlpine, president of the board of directors for the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), said teaching a Spanish class completely online threatens educational standards and leaves students floundering behind their peers in traditional courses.

But James Madison University officials say the academic demands in an online class they offer through Rosetta Stone are the same ones that students face in their Harrisonburg, Va., lecture halls. Of course, the people making these statements aren’t Spanish professors – many language professors at the university don’t like the idea, but weren’t in a position to stop it. The university’s foreign language department chair is skeptical, arguing the software is best used as extra practice for students and not a course in itself.

In April, James Madison became the first college to partner with Rosetta Stone, an international company that creates instructional language software, to offer a for-credit course to the general public in which instruction is provided by the company’s software.

For $679 and a $20 James Madison application fee – of which the college keeps $380 – anyone who has finished their sophomore year of high school gains access to a 16-week class designed to line up with the regular JMU curriculum.

Groups such as the MLA find this appalling.

Feal, the MLA president, said James Madison’s program “sounds like buying college credit.”

“If a college is charging tuition and essentially turning their students over to Rosetta Stone with very little value added, that is scandalous,” said Feal. “Why would a student need to go through a college for that experience?”

Feal doubts students are getting an authentic cultural experience through Rosetta Stone, and said the program raises bigger questions about the role of professors. “It sounds like what our worst critics of higher education say. If we don’t value the role a highly educated faculty member brings to the student learning process,” she said, “then why should the public?”

While I am not going to outline the shallowness, arrogance, and ignorance of the above statement, I will say I am glad to see universities experimenting with models that are efficient and extend opportunity.

The JMU / Rosetta pilot has only attracted a handful of students, but interestingly none of them were full time JMU students. Is not the goal of higher education to educate students, regardless of their status, age, race, creed, etc….? I am sure Charles Van Hise would be very proud of JMU and Rosetta Stone.

via Educators question taking Rosetta Stone for credit | Inside Higher Ed.

From Thiel and DIY Edu to online badges, things are changing. Incredible news out of Palo Alto that a leading artificial intelligence academic is leaving campus. From Nick DeSantis at Wired Campus:

The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his position to aim for an even bigger audience.

Sebastian Thrun, a research professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital – Life – Design conference in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters.

During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than “a camera, a pen and a napkin.” Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course’s popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said.

The article is worth reading and my favorite part is at the end,

“I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill,” he said. “And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”

I wish more in academics wanted to see Wonderland (or were even aware that it existed). I am continuing to experiment with various new methods of delivery and reaching out to those beyond the confines of my courses (StartUp Mason is one such initiative).

All that said, Thrun is not the first to leave a university for an online startup (some of my University of Chicago Professors did it during the first internet bubble — though I can’t remember the name of their firm — it failed).

via Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Faculty and administrators  always ask why I blog, tweet, participate in online chats, and video record my interviews and ethnographic observations. Its all because I believe other media output and methods of distribution (beyond academic publications and books) are the present and future of knowledge and content. Higher ed is woefully behind in the production and distribution of content (knowledge) when compared to other sectors of society.

Looks like the uber powerful Modern Language Association is coming around to my point of view. From Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Education:

So much has changed, he said, but dissertation norms haven’t, to the detriment of English and other language programs. “Are we writing books for the 19th century or preparing people to work in the 21st?” he asked.

Leaders of the MLA — in several sessions and discussions here — indicated that they are afraid that too many dissertations are indeed governed by out-of-date conventions, leading to the production of “proto-books” that may do little to promote scholarship and may not even be advancing the careers of graduate students. During the process, the graduate students accumulate debt and frustrations. Russell A. Berman, a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, used his presidential address at the MLA to call for departments to find ways to cut “time to degree” for doctorates in half.

And at a standing-room-only session, leaders of a task force studying possible changes in dissertation requirements discussed some of the ideas under consideration. There was a strong sense that the traditional model of producing a several-hundred-page literary analysis dominates English and other language doctoral programs — even though many people feel that the genre is overused and frequently ineffective. People also talked about the value of digital projects, of a series of essays, or public scholarship. Others talked about ways to change the student-committee dynamic in ways that might expedite dissertation completion.

“We are at a defining moment in higher education,” said Kathleen Woodward, director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. “We absolutely have to think outside the box that the dissertation is a book or a book-in-progress.”

I will continue to hop through the hoops of the PhD (its too late for me), but will come out armed with multiple output, assets, and skill sets beyond the minimum outdated methods and content required of a 19th century business model. (#bmgen)

via MLA considers radical changes in the dissertation | Inside Higher Ed.

Miller, a veteran biotechnology researcher and entrepreneur in California, went to work for UT in September 2010 to help turn more of the school’s research discoveries into new jobs, companies and licensing income. As part of his job, he oversaw the work of the Office of Technology Commercialization, which assists companies that are interested in using patented UT technology and negotiates licensing deals with them.

Miller resigned effective Dec. 31 after he was told by UT officials that he could not have a personal and financial involvement in companies that might want to license technology developed at UT.

UT generated $25.6 million in licensing revenue in the most recent fiscal year and completed 29 new licensing and options agreements, according to the commercialization office’s website. The school also received 58 U.S. and foreign patents last year.

Juan Sanchez, UT’s vice president of research, said there was no active conflict of interest with Miller’s involvement with the companies because they had not yet licensed technology from UT. However, Miller “was setting up a scenario in which he would be negotiating with himself, and that would have been a conflict of interest, which we would not allow,” Sanchez said.

“We couldn’t move forward with his expectation of having a dual role” with the companies, Sanchez said. “It was clear that he would have to divest his interest. The resignation was his call. I would have liked him to remain as chief commercialization officer, but he chose not to.”

Sanchez said he instructed Miller in December to divest his interests in three startup companies that he had co-founded with UT faculty members and graduate students. Miller did divest his holdings in the three companies — Wibole, Graphea Inc. and Ultimor — but resigned sometime after that discussion, Sanchez said.

Get the most out of university technology transfer is a common cry, its no wonder we are running into scenarios such as this.

Over the past decade, UT has stepped up its efforts to generate more revenue from technology licensing. Part of the reason is faculty pressure and recruitment of top-level researchers. Both new recruits and existing research faculty have pressed the school’s administration to take a more proactive role in tech commercialization.

Pike Powers, an Austin lawyer and veteran economic development activist, said Miller brought new ideas to UT but might not have understood the constraints of working for a public university.

“He was offering some new ideas and thoughts about ways that the University of Texas could be more competitive,” Powers said. “I don’t think he received as strong a reception as he wanted to receive, so it was frustrating for him. He met with numerous members of the business community, and we advised him to be very careful about what steps he took next and to make sure he had the full support of the business community and the UT administration. But I don’t think he ever heard that message to the extent that he should have.”

What I find interesting is that people are looking for entrepreneurial leaders, but they also demand consensus. That is a little backwards no?

via UT official resigns after questions raised about ties to startups.

The company is “reinventing the textbook,” said Philip Schiller, a senior vice president, and “as students are introduced to iPad, remarkable things are happening.” Apple’s leaders identified high schools as the biggest initial market for its new books, though they mentioned potential in higher education as well.

The most unusual offering was iBooks Author, a free book-making program that lets anyone build a rich-media textbook that can be displayed easily on an iPad. Professors can drag in images from their iPhoto libraries, video clips from iTunes, and lecture slides from Apple’s Keynote program (a competitor to Microsoft’s PowerPoint).

A key drawback, however, is how much the new program relies on professors and students adopting Apple products. The book-building program runs only on Macs, not on PC’s, and the resulting textbooks work only on iPads, not on competing Android tablets.

When Apple first released its iTunes software and music store in 2001, it set new standards for digital music that led to the demise of CD’s in favor of 99-cent-per-song downloads. There was nothing else like the iTunes music store at the time, and the company was able to cajole music publishers into accepting lower prices than they wanted to ride the digital-music wave.

When it comes to e-textbooks, though, Apple is hardly the first mover, and it does not seem to have the muscle with book publishers that it flexed with music executives.

I don’t think it matters that they are not the first mover (I owned a Diamond Rio — the first MP3 player; my wife and I now own 9 apple hardware products, not to mention the content we buy via iTunes etc.)

My favorite part about this is that teachers can build their own content. I believe this is where we are heading — like old school coursepacks. The key difference is that much of the content (articles, videos, audio, etc.) will be freely available and this drive down the cost. Additionally, buying snippets of content (sections of chapters vs entire textbooks) should also lower the costs (think of Kindle Singles and .99 cent music downloads and $1.99 tv shows). This does mean more work for teachers, administrators etc., but may also lead to the rise of specialty curators and also print on demand and download on demand types of services.

Young seems concerned that Apple is entering with its own, closed standards and is adding to an already fragmented market, thus delaying our realization of moving to digital textbooks.

As a lifelong student and faculty member member for the past 3 years,  I don’t think e textbooks offer the functionality that traditional textbooks offer (portability, note taking, page marking and searching, etc.) Yes textbooks are expensive, but they serve many needs and offer attributes that e textbooks do not yet offer.

I have spent a lot of time with ebooks (see my amazon and iBook bills) and they still leave much to be desired for educational users. That is why the market has not been realized yet, not because there are too many players with products in a just emerging marketplace.

via Apple’s New E-Textbook Platform Enters an Already Crowded Field – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

On stage at last month’s Le Web conference Shervin Pishevar, a Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, stated “The World is a Startup.” It’s an interesting perspective, and I think what’s true for the world is also true for countries, states and municipalities. With developments like last month’s announcement that Cornell was selected to build a new tech campus in New York City, it seems to follow that if “a city is a startup,” then the best mayors are the ones who are looking at their cities in much the same way as entrepreneurs look at the companies they have founded.

The ingredients for a successful startup and a successful city are remarkably similar. You need to build stuff that people want. You need to attract quality talent. You have to have enough capital to get your fledgling ideas to a point of sustainability. And you need to create a world-class culture that not only attracts the best possible people, but encourages them to stick around even when things aren’t going so great.

Paul Graham has written extensively on this topic in essays like How to Be Silicon Valley and Why Startups Condense in America. Much of his thinking no doubt played into the decision to base Y Combinator entirely in Silicon Valley. Boston’s loss was the Bay Area’s gain and a striking example of why it’s important for mayors to view their cities through an entrepreneurial lens.

via A City Is A Startup: The Rise Of The Mayor-Entrepreneur | TechCrunch.

The idea for the program grew out of an assignment from a leadership action course at the W. P Carey School of Business, in which Lewis and Nathan were asked to present their ideas on how to take action in the community. After solidifying their ideas and coming up with a business plan, Nathan and Lewis went on to enter and win the spring 2011 Innovation Challenge.

For Lewis, the cause holds special meaning, as she became an orphan after losing both her parents by age 15. Although fortunate enough to live with family members, Lewis says was still forced to grow up quickly at a young age.

“I didn’t know how to navigate the legal system to receive social security benefits and how that fits into paying for college,” Lewis said. “There are a lot of other kids who are in that same situation where their needs get ignored because they don’t have the state looking out for them to help with the things that parents would normally do.”

After visiting ASU while in high school, Lewis said she immediately gravitated to the business management degree from the W. P. Carey School of Business. After four years of hard work, she received her bachelor’s degree in December.

For now, Lewis is enjoying dedicating all of her energy to Partnered for Success and the youth in her program. In the future, however, she dreams of traveling to India to study religion and spirituality, while simultaneously donating her time working in a boarding school in the Himalaya Mountains.

And although she misses her family, Lewis says their words of wisdom will always stay with her.

“My parents instilled a lot of great values in me while I had them. I know they wouldn’t want me to mope and let the negative aspects of everything overcome my life,” said Lewis. “I may as well turn this tragedy into something that I can use to benefit other kids facing similar situations.”

Pretty amazing and another really interesting entrepreneurial story coming out of ASU — the New American University.

via ASU alum wins Forbes College Social Innovator Award | ASU News.

Willetts’ musings on role of government in directing science were more interesting, and included some practical ideas for how ministers might effectively access scientific expertise in order to guide research investment. He was careful to emphasise the sanctity of the Haldane Principle and peer review, which enshrine the rights of the scientific community to judge grant applications on scientific merit. Nevertheless, the minister did not shy away from the conundrum that he has a democratic responsibility to shape policy that is beneficial to the UK economy. Such strategic choices will necessarily colour views on research priorities.

The scientific community should be heartened to hear a government minister speak so confidently of the potential of science to feed into economic growth. It was an argument that the community relied on in the run-up to the Comprehensive Spending Review in October 2010. But scientists remain wary of government interference in what some see as their exclusive domain. Coincidentally, evidence of that wariness was provided in letters from leading scientists to Times Higher Education and the Daily Telegraph in the days following the speech, which criticised what they perceived as excessive interference by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), in the process of awarding public money for science. The signatories to the letters were particularly critical of strategic decisions by EPSRC to focus on particular research areas, to judge the potential long-term impact of the proposed research in assessing applications and demanded rebalancing of decision-making power away from EPSRC officials and back to scientists.

via What should drive science funding: curiosity or commerce? | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional.