HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — This summer, two Boston College professors are leading a group of students to volunteer at a clinic for HIV patients who are at the end of their lives in a society where the illness carries significant stigma.

A mile from my hotel, the taxi driver looks at the instructions again, does a U-turn and then speeds down the city's main avenue. A good 45 minutes later we are on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, which most people around here still refer to as Saigon. The driver does a zig and a zag past stores selling pots and portable stoves and through an intersection crowded with commuters on motorbikes. Then tucked away on a side street that meanders past several industrial sites we arrive at an HIV clinic run by the Catholic Church, where I’m met by a woman who calls herself Vee, who tells me the name of the facility, Tieng Vong, is pronounced "Tan Vaughn" and means “Hopeful Voice.”

I’m also met at the gate of the “Hopeful Voice” clinic by Boston College professors Thanh Tran and Rosanna DeMarco. They’re leading a group of BC undergraduates on an eye-opening medical mission to help dying HIV patients at the ends of their lives: learning, relating, struggling with it all and then returning to Boston to make a difference back home.

How the Boston team got involved

“I am an expert in the area. I have been working with black women who are living with HIV who are aging with the disease,” says DeMarco.

DeMarco, a professor of nursing, is far from the HIV clinics of Blue Hill Avenue and the African American and Hispanic women she counsels in Boston. But HIV cuts through boundaries and knows no borders. “I partnered with Dr. Tran and we got five other students interested. All of us came together to try to learn. And see how the health care system works for these patients and what it’s like for them.”

Six students, with plenty of choices for a carefree summer, choose Vietnam instead, a place where HIV carries with it a stigma and a personal and cultural challenge. Says DeMarco:

“Vietnam, although stable in a sense, the rising rates among women and men who have sex with men is very significant. Thus the stigma in the Vietnamese culture. When you are perceived as doing something wrong, like IV drugs or sex working or doing something related to the usual connotation of why people get HIV, then you become ostracized and how painful that is in this culture because there’s so much value on family and connection.”

The students' motivation and the scope of the problem

In the doorway of a one-story suntanned brick building, Pauline Tran of Worcester extends her hand. She is one of five Vietnamese-American students at BC who’ve returned — if you will — to a country they have never known.

“I’ve always had an attachment to my background, to my culture. I’ve always been interested in helping the vulnerable, especially for my family who came from something like this,” she says. Her family escaped to the U.S. after the war. She and the other Vietnamese American students were born in the U.S. They say they have also come to this HIV clinic as a way of giving back to the country of their heritage. And everyone on this trip has a role. For instance, Nguyet Chau, a native of Worcester, helped translate the documents the team uses for the HIV prevention program.

They can use all the help they can get. Vietnam has very limited human resources. In a country of nearly 89 million people, about 300,000 have been diagnosed with HIV. But there are only 1,300 health workers assigned to this population, and many of them are volunteers.

Still, stigma is probably the greatest obstacle to controlling the epidemic, says clinic director Co Vinh, speaking in Vietnamese. “About 13 years ago when we founded this clinic there was no treatment for HIV here in Vietnam and most people had no knowledge about the disease. So their own families discriminated against patients and many of them were thrown out in the streets. Some live in the park under the benches and in the bushes.”

The scene at the clinic

We take a tour of the clinic: There are eight beds, a needle cleaning machine, photos of Jesus and Saigon’s archbishop on the wall; clothing, food and medicine are piled in one corner, medical charts in another. Local volunteers bathe patients, hand out supplies, chart their progress or lack thereof and offer moral support. BC nursing student Mary Gerardo is the only non-Vietnamese student among the six from the U.S.

“I’m from Richmond, Virginia. I don’t travel very much," she says. "They contacted me and I said that would be a great opportunity. Professor DeMarco, after meeting her, I said, 'I can do this.'”

Most local volunteers here are congregants at the Catholic Church that sits on these grounds in Ho Chi Minh City. One is a former clinic patient with HIV who seems amazed by his own survival. “They gave me free medicine starting in 2004,” he says, and that has stabilized his medical condition.

IV drug use in Vietnam is on the rise, as is voluntary and forced prostitution, according to the United Nations. Vinh tells me about a patient who was sold by her own mother into sexual slavery across the border in Cambodia and ended up with HIV.

She says, “The young woman ended up in critical condition with tuberculosis and I met her in a local hospital. I got her address from the hospital and later I was looking for her but the address wasn’t clear. So one rainy afternoon I was looking for her and found her sitting on the streets; coughing on the streets by herself. And when I saw her like that I just could not stand it and I used my own money to rent her a small room.”

To listen and to learn

While most of the Boston College team are visitors to this faraway land, Professor Thanh Tran knows Vietnam well and struggles — perhaps more than we can ever know.

“I was born and raised up here until I finished high school and came to the U.S. at the end of the war," he says. "I’m always very hesitant to return to Vietnam because I belong to a different generation and a member of the Vietnamese community in the United States that’s extremely anti- this government. But I came here with Dr. DeMarco and a group of students to learn about the health care system; how these people find resources [to take care of patients] under very limited conditions.”

And the commitment to reducing HIV infections and the stigma of AIDS outweighs any ideological tug of war between Vietnamese Americans and Vietnam, between heritage and politics, says Professor Tran.

DeMarco agrees and says being here offers an invaluable lesson: “No matter what the care is, whatever level it is, whatever is here or isn’t here, when people come here — they come with their family members and they don’t feel any stigma, they feel respect. When they come here they don’t have people not listening to them. They have people listening to them.”

And that’s perhaps the most important lesson here. These professors and their students are not missionaries. They’re not here to tell Vietnamese clinicians, caregivers and patients what to do and how to do it, but instead they listen and learn, says DeMarco. “As professors we’re interested in helping students not understand research like they are reading it out of a book but understanding that it’s a relationship with people who have real experiences and in order to ask good questions and to figure out the answers to those questions you really have to get to know the problem, up close and personal.” 

And “up close and personal,” says DeMarco, is a step nearer to addressing the stigma of AIDS that keeps many from admitting a problem that is worldwide in scope — from Ho Chi Minh City to Boston.
 

 
BOSTON — Massachusetts high school students will soon be required to take at least 3 years of lab-based science classes to get into the state's public universities. The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education announced the new entry requirements on June 19.
 
Currently, students looking to get into a four-year university in Massachusetts have to take 3 years of high school science but only 2 of them need to be lab-based. And those classes have to be in biology, physics or chemistry.
 
Starting in 2017, high school seniors will need to have 3 years of lab-based science courses instead of 2. And classes in computers, engineering and technology will count.
 
Massachusetts Education Secretary Paul Reville said the new entry requirements would better prepare Massachusetts college grads to compete in key industries.
 
“Engineering and technology should be a prominent part of our curriculum and part of our admissions requirements," he said. "Because that’s where the future is in terms of jobs that are coming to Massachusetts."
 
He added that the emphasis on experimentation and problem-solving would persuade more kids with scientific inclinations to stay in the sciences:
 
"We have what I call an 'inspiration gap' in Massachusetts. We do better than any other state on average in terms of student test scores in math and science. And yet when our students expressed what they’re interested in majoring in college, we are well below the national average in terms of interest expressed in STEM majors. Kids aren’t excited."
 
Reville said he worries traditional science education shuts out too many kids at a time when the state needs more scientists and lab technicians.
 

Twenty-three years ago, MIT wanted to find the very best start-up ideas out there. What new companies were waiting to be born? What inventions could change our lives?

Today, the winners of MIT’s 100K Entrepreneurship Competition have, together, created businesses worth $16 billion and generated nearly 5,000 new jobs.

A screen shot from filepickr.io, the first product from the team that created CloudTop, this year's MIT 100K winner.

But the competition is stiff. 

This weekend, we meet the winners of this year's challenge, who may have started the next big thing — while trying to finish their homework. And we'll hear about some fascinating entrants in the competition, like Liquiglide -- which promises to help you get that last bit of ketchup or mayonnaise out of the bottle -- and IoVista, a small device which helps residents of poor countries get a prescription for glasses.

Guests:  

• Alice Francis, co-managing director, MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition

• Brett van Zuiden, co-founder, CloudTop

• Liyan David Chang, co-founder, CloudTop

WALTHAM, Mass. — Cairo has its pyramids. Rome has its ruins. But it’s not necessary to go so far away to see history unearthed. In fact, one archeological dig is only a bus ride away from Boston.
 
On a warm and breezy June day, archeology students crowd around their outdoor classroom: two rectangular trenches on the historic Gore Estate in Waltham. Sweaty and covered in dirt, they methodically dig into the ground, paying attention to every bit of debris.
 
Archeologist Dave Landon teaches a summer course that gives UMass students hands-on experience unearthing historical remains.
 
“We love projects like this because it really does kind of go straight at this misconception that archeology is always far away,” Landon says.
 
This summer’s underground target: a greenhouse built by the seventh governor of Massachusetts, Christopher Gore. It’s part of an innovative agricultural movement that took place in New England in the early 1800s. Co-teacher Christa Beranek says the students are likely to find a variety of artifacts under layers of soil.
 
“Probably down there there’s greenhouse structure, there’s destruction debris from taking apart the building, lots of brick and stone and mortar and remnants of things from the greenhouse, lots and lots of glass, planting pots, nails,” she says.
 
Technology provides clues
 
In the month before the class started, Landon and his team spent days mapping out the area using electromagnetic radiation. It’s an off-the-shelf technology used in an innovative way. And it spared Landon’s students from the arduous hit-or-miss process of figuring out where to dig.
           
Just as planes navigate by radar, sending waves out into the atmosphere, the electromagnetic detection machine sends microwaves into the earth. When they hit a rock or a patch of clay, they bounce back.
 
Using historical maps as a general guide, the precision of this data helps target the exact location of hidden structures. But the archeologist’s goal is to form a cohesive narrative about the past, and that can’t occur until what’s underground is unearthed.
 
Today’s big find
 
While some students dig, others sift through dirt as if looking for gold. They mostly find pieces of ceramic and glass, but every so often, something unexpected turns up. The big find so far today? The base of a flat-bottomed drinking glass, which, it seems, was used as a tool. The broken edges have been chipped in the same way a flint stone is chipped into an arrowhead.
 
Volunteer Phil Cook says the process of digging and sifting can be a little mind-numbing, but it is totally worth it when you find something unexpected.
 
“You're out here for 8 hours a day, especially in the heat,” Cook says. “Your eyes kind of widen when you see it sticking out of the ground and you really don’t know what it is at first.”
 
An understanding of history gives context to the dig, but some artifacts — like the broken base of the tumbler — yield more questions than answers.
 
“Someone was here making a tool out of broken glass,” Landon explains. “Why would there be this handmade tool here when they really had the ability to buy any tools they wanted for this greenhouse?”
 
Landon says a lot of times artifacts like these found in New England are associated with Native and African Americans. “So who exactly is working here and what kind of skill set are they bringing?”
 
The dig's next phase
 
The answers to the past will not come quickly. This portion of the excavation will round up at the end of June. Then the UMass team will spend a few months analyzing the artifacts before beginning the next phase of excavation at the same site in October.
 
“We’re going to use every bit of evidence we can get — any kind of historical evidence, or artifactual evidence, or archeological evidence — to try and understand, try and imagine the greenhouse when it was in use and people were moving in and out of it,” says Landon.
 
The story promises to slowly unfold. And right here in New England an archeological adventure is underway.
 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — MIT's president is addressing the high cost of a college education. On the WGBH coproduction The Takeaway, Susan Hockfield said that despite shaky employment figures, the chances of finding employment with a college degree are significantly greater than with only a high school diploma.

If cost is an issue, she said there were avenues students and families should consider.

"For a family that is deeply concerned about the cost of college education, I would offer two important directions to pursue. The first is that public universities in almost every state are outstanding and can offer an outstanding education. Education is largely the responsibility of the student, so a well-motivated student can get an education at any one of the public universities in America," she said.
 
Hockfield added that most people don’t know about the financial support private universities provide.
 
"Here at MIT, Harvard, at Yale, Stanford, Princeton, we admit students in a need-blind application process. We don’t consider a family’s ability to pay for an education when we review who comes to MIT," she said. "We decide on which students are prepared to make the best use of MIT’s resources. We make it financially possible for every one of those students to come to MIT. If you’re a family with an annual income of $75,000 a year, we cover all of your tuition costs, and in some cases, more."

> > EXTRA: John Hockenberry of The Takeaway reflects on the value of college in his family.
 

BOSTON — The University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees approved a 5 percent hike in student fees on June 6 over the objections of Gov. Deval Patrick.
 
In-state student fees will go up by about $580 next year, making annual tuition and fees $12,481. That doesn't include room and board, which is about $10,000 at UMass Amherst. The hike comes on top of increases in student fees over the past 10 years.
 
It left UMass Amherst student Steve Donahue wondering how he'd afford it all.
 
“How am I going to do this? I’m really anxious," he said. "I’m in college now. My sister's starting college next year. My family has to cover the fees for both of us.”
 
At the State House, Patrick voiced his opposition. “It’s a crummy time to ask students to pay more. The economy is tough; their prospects after graduation are uncertain.”
 
He said the university system had to do a better job managing its money so students don’t have to pay the price.
 
In a press release, university officials blamed the hikes on a steady decline in the proportion of education costs the state has shouldered over the past decade — from 61 percent in 2003 to an estimated 43 percent next year. They've agreed to freeze student fees for the next 2 years at the new rate if the legislature agrees to bring the state's commitment up to 50 percent of the burden.
 
The board of trustees took swift action on the fee hike — proposing it at a Dartmouth campus meeting Tuesday night and ratifying it first thing the next morning. University officials did not return calls for comment.

 
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Can Massachusetts own the emerging field of “big data”? That’s a buzz phrase for systems that make sense of huge amounts of information generated in markets like telecom, retail and social media. This week, Gov. Deval Patrick announced a new initiative that includes forming a big-data industry consortium, creating a matching-grant program for universities and supporting a tech-community space called HackReduce in Cambridge. Intel is also committing $12.5 million to support big-data research at MIT. This could all help revitalize the state’s tech economy — as long as big data doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own hype.

In other innovation news …

Vertex Pharmaceuticals revealed it had mistakenly overstated the benefit of an experimental treatment for cystic fibrosis when reporting on a clinical trial in early May. Vertex stock took a 21 percent tumble on the news but has since made up some of that ground.

Our deal of the week goes to GreenBytes, a data storage company in R.I. that raised $12 million in a round led by Al Gore’s venture firm, Generation Investment Management.

And finally, the startup accelerator MassChallenge has named 125 finalists for its third annual program in Boston, choosing from more than 1,200 applicants. It remains to be seen how many of the eventual winners will end up working on … big data.

The weekly roundup of business, technology and life science news from our partners at Xconomy.com airs every Friday on 89.7 Boston Public Radio.

Teacher Kathleen Turner at the WGBH studios. (Annie Shreffler/WGBH)

BOSTON — The newly appointed Massachusetts Teacher of the Year is about to spend 12 months traveling the state, making speeches and conducting workshops, in addition to teaching. And she's already voiced concern for the wide variations in funding for public schools from town to town.
 
Kathleen Turner teaches French at Sharon High School. She said the demographic makeup of her town is always changing.

BOSTON — Legendary guitar musician Doc Watson passed away Tuesday at the age of 89. Watson, who lost his sight when he was a baby, was an inspiration to many musicians, but particularly those in the blind community. And his music resonates with one local institution — the Perkins School for the Blind.

"There’s that list of famous blind musicians that we all know and love and Doc Watson is definitely one of them,” said Robert Hair, education director of the Perkins Lower School. Wednesday morning, the school paid tribute to Watson by playing his music and talking about his accomplishments.

“Blind kids in particular, I think, really do enjoy music and gravitate towards it," Hair said. "And of course having role models like Doc Watson and Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles is really meaningful to these kids. So when they hear something like Doc Watson with this sort of soulful folk picking on the guitar and singing, it really says something to the kids and they really can get into that.”

Hair added that although they are fortunate to be able to listen to a recording of Doc Watson any time, the musician will be missed.

Several months ago, when this show had only just begun, we did a segment on the next big thing. The next iPad , the next Facebook, the next Twitter.

But we got a big surprise.

America, our guests said, may not be up to the challenge. It may not be producing the young minds needed to create and staff the companies that will change our world.

Here’s what Joe Kessler, who is president of The Intelligence Group in Los Angeles, said when I asked him how we were doing producing workers for high-tech companies:

Since then, I’ve asked almost everyone who’s walked into this studio whether they’re hiring new employees and what they think of the talent pool.

Almost to a person, they shake their heads. We need more technical people, they say. We have to turn to workers from overseas, but it can be hard to get them visas.

So, today we ask what’s going on. Is our education system failing to train young Americans for the future — a reality that will impact all of us — whether we majored in computer science or English literature? 

The Talent Pool: What's the problem?

First, we hear from employers. Are they having trouble filling jobs? And why isn’t this issue a greater part of our national discussion?

Guests:

• Michael Greeley, general partner, Flybridge Capital

• Paul Clegg, vice president of human resources, talent aquisition, labor relations, Raytheon

• Ben Russell, vice president of human resources, Bullhorn

Toward a Solution

Part 1: 

Part 2:

We're joined by a panel of educators hoping to empower the next generation of mathmeticians and scientists.

Guests:  

• Christopher Doss, teacher, physics, Boston Latin School

• Aaron Osowiecki, teacher, physics, Boston Latin School

• Arthur C. Heinricher, dean of undergraduate studies, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

• Mark Somerville, associate dean; professor of electrical engineering and physics; Olin College

May 17, 2012
 
BOSTON — The Massachusetts unemployment rate dipped to 6.3 percent in April from 6.5 percent in March. It's the lowest level since October 2008.
 
While the state added 2,500 jobs last month, there's a renewed call for a major investment in higher education to create more jobs. A new study has found that an $800 million investment in higher education in the state would essentially pay for itself.
 
Co-author Michael Ash, head of economics at UMass Amherst, said that investment would produce an extra 11,200 graduates, 7,000-8,000 new jobs and $740 million in new income tax revenue. It's a better payoff, Ash said, than cutting taxes or putting the same dollars into casinos. In fact, he claimed that cutting taxes produces the worst results.
 

> > READ: "Economic Impact of Investment in Public Higher Education in Massachusetts: Short-Run Employment Stimulus, Long-Run Public Returns"
 

May 16, 2012
 
BOSTON — The new president of MIT has been out in front on the university's online education initiatives.
 
On May 16, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named provost L. Rafael Reif as its new leader. Reif, a native of Venezuela, joined the MIT faculty in 1980. He has served as provost since August 2005.

In April, Reif won a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award for his work on MITx, the university's online learning intitiative. (A fellow honoree: Justin Bieber.)
 
From there, the university partnered with Harvard to launch edX, a free platform available to all. Reif discussed the project on Greater Boston on May 2, calling it a "new, phenomenal technological tool."
 
Each institution committed $30 million to edX, and Reif certainly saw a potential return on investment. "There are so many revenue stream possibilities. Just the amount of information that one can learn," he said. "I can see a significant interest from employers worldwide. … The opportunity to monetize this is huge."

That said, "the goal is not to make money with this venture. The goal is to do a better job at education. The goal is to learn about online learning," he said.
 
The initiative also aimed to transform the on-campus experience. "Right now we offer the content in the classroom. For many subjects in the near future, the content will be delivered partly in the classroom ... and partly online," he said. "The online version, what we call the X version, is the one we will offer to the world."
 
Departing MIT president Susan Hockfield praised Reif's role in online learning and beyond. "I and the global MIT community have benefited immensely not only from his brilliant leadership of major initiatives, such as our international engagements and the MITx and edX launches, but also from the vital role he has played in stewarding the Institute’s finances and capital planning during a time of global financial uncertainty," she said in a statement.
 
Reif starts the new job on July 2.
 

BOSTON — Massachusetts House leaders unveiled plans on Monday to boost funds for universities and local infrastructure programs as part of an omnibus economic development bill. One part of the bill would direct $50 million in matching grants to research and development projects sponsored by universities in the state, with half of the money reserved for the University of Massachusetts.
 
House speaker Robert DeLeo said investing in research and universities will grow jobs and improve the economy.
 
“I am proud this bill targets many of the areas where state government can make a difference. We take steps, important steps that Massachusetts is still the home of invention and innovation,” he said.
 
The bill would also increase state funding for a program called I-Cubed to $400 million, an increase of $150 million. The program gives developers state bonds funds to build public infrastructure like roads and sewers. In return, they agree to create a certain number of jobs and generate new tax revenues. But there's a catch that might not sit well with municipal officials: If the new project fails to generate enough taxes to cover the state's costs, the host town could be on the hook for the money. 

In this 1996 photo, Bill Gates visits a Dorchester after-school program after making a $100,000 donation to start an after-school computer club in Boston. (AP)

Innovation is a lofty word. It often gets associated with Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs.

But today we look at the innovative, on-the-ground programs that are helping inner-city students get the connections, resources and knowledge that it takes to be the next great entrepreneur, scientist or thinker.

The four programs we look at today all aim to change kids’ trajectories.

Guests:

• Cathy DelVento, Policy Director for the Massachusetts Afterschool Partnership; spokesperson, Expanded Learning and Afterschool Project; coordinator, 21st Century Community Learning Center Program
   

• Keith Crawford, M.D., Ph. D., Brigham and Women’s Hospital; instructor, Harvard Medical School; works with Life Science Institute at Roxbury Community College
   

• Lauren Gilbert, vice president, Bell

 
BOSTON — A Harvard Law School professor and former Reagan administration official is calling "false" and "complete nonsense" any suggestion that Elizabeth Warren enjoyed an affirmative action advantage in her hiring as a full professor.
 
Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried told WGBH that the Democratic Senate candidate was recruited to be a tenured professor because she was preeminent in the fields of bankruptcy and commercial law, saying, "The suggestion that Elizabeth Warren was an affirmative action hire or that somehow minority status played any role in her hiring, displays a profound ignorance both of the hiring process at a major law school and also of her particular qualifications.”
 
Fried was a member of the appointments committee that reviewed Warren. He said the subject of her Native American ancestry never came up.
 
“She was hired because she is a superstar in her field. She’s at the very top of her profession as a scholar. She was one of the two or three best in the country," he said. Glowing student evaluations have continued to show her abilities in the classroom, he added.
 
He said that calls for Harvard to conduct a review of Warren’s hiring, as suggested by State Republican Party chairman Bob Maginn, were wrong-headed. Maginn did not return our emails.
 

 
BOSTON — Massachusetts is home to some of the best four-year colleges in America. Yet higher education advocates said on Monday that the state’s community colleges have been neglected even as they try to manage booming enrollment in the face of shrinking resources and an aging infrastructure.
 
Gov. Deval Patrick has proposed sweeping changes to the state’s community colleges, including merging the authority of the 15 community college campuses into a centralized board and streamlining coordination among the campuses. 

Community colleges in the state are not in favor of the proposal and are resistant to the proposed uniform model of education, as the colleges serve a wide variety of educational needs that vary by location. Community college students are generally older than their four-year college counterparts; most have families to care for and many are lower-income. Students' goals vary as well: Some attend community colleges for job training, while some plan to transfer to four-year universities and some are looking for a career change.
 
However, community colleges need reform in order to function effectively in the 21st century, said Julian Alssid, executive director of Workforce Strategy Center and a co-author of the Boston Foundation report on community colleges upon which Patrick based his proposal.
 
Alssid said he conducted interviews and focus groups with 55 business and education leaders in Massachusetts. He learned that employers don’t look to the state's community colleges as a trainer of choice because many feel the curricula is out of sync with the workplace, the process for developing and updating curricula is too slow and inflexible, and there is a lack of alignment from one college to the next.
 
“One of the big points they described was the uncomfortably large gap between the skills students learn at college and those needed in the local workforce,” he said.
 
Massachusetts Community College Council president Joseph LeBlanc said a better way to improve community colleges would be to hire more frontline employees — those who work directly with students. He said community colleges do not get consistent state funding, and he pointed out that as enrollment in community colleges has increased over the past 10 years, hiring of full-time faculty has not increased.
 
“We’ve seen our aid from the state drop by 25 percent in the last 20 years, and we feel like we’re in a rollercoaster of aid — it goes up and down, and it’s in no way predictable,” LeBlanc said.

> > READ: The Boston Foundation report (pdf)

> > EXTENDED AUDIO

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — If you think there’s a bubble in higher education, well, it just might burst in Boston. Harvard and MIT have started a $60 million project, called edX, to offer free courses online and to study how students learn on the Web. It’s one of several big efforts around the country aimed at lowering barriers to top-tier education. And it fits with Boston’s growing ed-tech cluster, which includes companies like Alleyoop, Boundless Learning and TenMarks. Time will tell whether the Web causes radical changes in universities; but tuition costs aren’t going down anytime soon.

In other innovation news...

Jennifer Chayes, the managing director of Microsoft Research New England, will also lead the company’s newest lab in New York. Three former Yahoo scientists are founding researchers at the new lab, and will study the intersection of computer science and social science.

Our deal of the week goes to Hologic, a Bedford-based women’s health company that’s acquiring San Diego’s Gen-Probe for $3.7 billion.

And finally, all eyes are on Silicon Valley as the tech world prepares for Facebook’s IPO. But Boston-area investor Bill Warner, talking about the significance of the local innovation community, says our nation’s first social network was launched on the East Coast and now has 300 million users. That network was created by the U.S. Constitution.

The weekly roundup of business, technology and life science news from our partners at Xconomy.com airs every Friday on 89.7 Boston Public Radio.