China now leads in foreign student enrolment in the US

WASHINGTON (AFP)—Soaring interest by Chinese students has led to record foreign enrollment at US universities, offering a potential boon to the United States both economically and politically, a study said.

Indians remained the biggest group of foreign students in the United States in the last academic year but their numbers appeared to be leveling off, while strong growth came from China, Vietnam and several other emerging economies.

The United States hosts far more foreign students than any other country, owing to their universities' reputation, flexibility and concerted recruitment drives, said the Institute of International Education, an educators’ group.

The number of foreign students increased eight percent to a record 671,616 in 2008-2009 from the previous academic year, the sharpest growth since 1980-81, the group’s annual report said Monday.

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India falling behind in growth of English-language skills

India is falling behind countries such as China in its attempts to increase the use of English among its population, a new report says.

The study by the British Council says a "huge shortage" of teachers and quality institutions is hampering India despite a growing demand for English skills.

The study says China may now have more people who speak English than India.
India's emergence as a major software and IT hub has in part been possible due to its English-educated workers.

The study, English Next India, by British author David Graddol says English is a “casualty of wider problems in Indian education.”

It says: “The rate of improvement in the English language skills of the Indian population is at present too slow to prevent India from falling behind other countries which have implemented the teaching of English in primary schools sooner, and more successfully.”

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Wikipedia loses nearly 50,000 volunteer editors, study shows

LONDON—The free Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia is losing volunteer editors at warp speed, casting a cloud over the future of one of the world's most popular Web sites, with more than 3 million articles in English alone, The Times of London reported.

The English-language version of the site suffered a net loss of 49,000 volunteer editors in the first three months of this year, compared with 4,900 for the same period a year earlier, according to a university study, the newspaper said.

A researcher who studied the exodus of editors blamed increasing bureaucracy at what Wiki calls a “collaborative” and “free-content” store of knowledge. Felipe Ortega, at Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, used edit-tracking software to reveal that tens of thousands of Wikipedia editors had stopped contributing and were not being replaced, the newspaper said.

Ortega told The Times: "If you don't have enough people to take care of the project, it could vanish quickly. We're not in that situation yet. But eventually, if the negative trends follow, we could be in that situation."

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Number of institutions accepting TOEFL surpasses 7,300 worldwide

PRINCETON, NJ—Educational Testing Service (ETS) announced today that more than 7,300 institutions worldwide are now accepting the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) test to assess English-language proficiency for both undergraduate and graduate applicants.

Of this number of educational institutions accepting the TOEFL test, about 5,175 are located in the United States and Canada, 1,000 in continental Europe, 200 in the United Kingdom, 600 in Asia, 100 in Australia and New Zealand, with the majority of the remaining institutions located in Africa and the Middle East.

Within the last year alone, an additional 383 institutions have become TOEFL score users and the number of institutions signing on to use TOEFL scores continues to increase at a fast pace, the ETS said.
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In response to the growing demand for the TOEFL test by colleges and universities, ETS has increased the number of test administration sites to allow greater access and flexibility for test takers. Currently, there are more than 4,500 test administration sites globally.

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Children’s schooling should start at six, a British study recommends

Schoolchildren should not start formal lessons until they turn six, and Sats should be scrapped to relieve the damaging pressure England's young pupils face, the biggest inquiry into primary education for 40 years concludes today.

In a damning indictment of Labour’s education record since 1997, the Cambridge University-led review accuses the government of introducing an educational diet "even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools".

It claims that successive Labour ministers have intervened in England’s classrooms on an unprecedented scale, controlling every detail of how teachers teach in a system that has “Stalinist overtones.” It says they have exaggerated progress, narrowed the curriculum by squeezing out space for history, music and arts, and left children stressed-out by the testing and league table system.

The review is the biggest independent inquiry into primary education in four decades, based on 28 research surveys, 1,052 written submissions and 250 focus groups. It was undertaken by 14 authors, 66 research consultants and a 20-strong advisory committee at Cambridge University, led by Professor Robin Alexander, one of the most experienced educational academics in the country.

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Wikipedia edit system should be in place by year's end

The English-language Wikipedia should have a system in place by December to vet anonymous edits for certain high-profile entries, according to the online encyclopedia's founder.

The system, called "flagged revisions," would allow anonymous users to make changes to certain pages. However, the edits must be approved before going live, said Jimmy Wales on Tuesday. The system is already in place for the German version of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, which is run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, said in January that it would test the flagged revisions system on the English pages. That followed a couple of notable incidents where the biographies of U.S. senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd had been wrongly changed to say both men had died.

Other Wikipedia entries have also been subject to frequent vandalism. In response, Wikipedia locked the entries and required those who wanted to edit to be logged in. New registrants had to wait four days before they could submit changes, which then had to be approved.

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