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A Truly Inspirational Tech Story from MIT

The story of 15-year-old Kelvin Doe, a mobile infrastructure overhaul and the best stories of the week.

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Jimmy is a writer and editor who publishes a weekly newsletter. You can find him on Twitter.

Welcome to our weekly roundup of tech and education news. Have a story you’d like to see here? Tweet us.

A Truly Inspirational Tech Story

Kelvin Doe, a 15-year-old from Sierra Leone, has built FM transmitters, generators and batteries, all with spare parts he found in the trash. This incredibly talented young man recently spent time at MIT’s Media Lab working with engineers on some of his designs. It’s one of the most inspirational technology-related stories we have ever heard. Watch below.

The Groundwork for a Mobile Future

At the College of Lake County, in Grayslake, Ill., between 8,000 and 10,000 devices connect to the college's network each day. A network upgrade has allowed students and faculty to be as mobile as they want to be. Read more about the project here.

The Internet of Things: Just an IT Headache?

Campus Technology reported on a new Gartner report that estimates there will be 26 billion connected devices by 2020:

"IoT threatens to generate massive amounts of input data from sources that are globally distributed," said Joe Skorupa, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, in a statement released to coincide with the report. "Transferring the entirety of that data to a single location for processing will not be technically and economically viable. The recent trend to centralize applications to reduce costs and increase security is incompatible with the IoT. Organizations will be forced to aggregate data in multiple distributed mini data centers where initial processing can occur. Relevant data will then be forwarded to a central site for additional processing."

He added that the effects will impact more than just centralized applications. "The enormous number of devices, coupled with the sheer volume, velocity and structure of IoT data, creates challenges, particularly in the areas of security, data, storage management, servers and the data center network, as real-time business processes are at stake," he said. "Data center managers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management in these areas to be able to proactively meet the business priorities associated with IoT."

The Internet of Things could prove to be the biggest IT challenge since cloud computing. Will its growth be slowed by infrastructure limitations? Let us know your thoughts on Twitter.

Tweets of the Week

Is it possible to be mindful in a mobile world? I don't know. Ask me in 7 minutes: http://t.co/DseEbGfxEt #edtech @DrLarryRosen

— Cheryl Clemons (@cherylclemons) March 20, 2014

Hangout Archive-->Supporting Online Community College Faculty in High Growth Low Budget Times: http://t.co/b780Gv3YUU #edtech #facdev

— M Pacansky-Brock (@brocansky) March 20, 2014