Well, the results for 2007 are in. And no surprises here, IT directors cite lack of staff resources, lack of funding, higher education’s culture, and lack of defined security policy as the biggest barriers to improving information security.
How do you get students (and others) to opt in to text-messaging campus alert systems, such as the one used to good effect earlier this semester at the University of Colorado? Once they've opted in, how do you capture their attention and get them to keep your system loaded with their current information?
Chat software (text or media-based) provides an excellent tool in supporting academic dialog (exchange), critical thinking, and knowledge building. The immediacy of the technology provides students with a direct connection with the instructor as well as other students. While chat software is usually used for "chatting," and, therefore, it has a relaxed and colloquial protocol, with a little thought and planning, it can also be used well to support instruction.
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte is deploying thin clients--devices with no hard drives--as kiosks, Web/e-mail stations, and in areas where sensitive data is paramount. Mike Carr and Bob Bair explore the strategy.
We all know, or should know, about phishing, a fraudulent attempt, frequently through legitimate looking email requests, to obtain personal information such as a credit card number, a social security number, or a bank account number and PIN. But to take full advantage of stolen information, the crook needs "mules."
Universities are turning to technology to tackle (seemingly) growing problems with academic integrity (formerly known as "cheating"). Anti-plagiarism solutions routinely check student work; centers are devoted to studying and documenting cheating; and one university has gone so far as to build a high-tech, secure site for testing.
For years universities have been reducing their print output in an effort to reach the elusive paperless ideal. But they aren't there yet.
After what seems like quite some time without having much to address in way of "incompatibilities," I recently found myself coping with a couple of real problems that were affecting my productivity in an important volunteer role that I play. At the same time, I made a decision to go along with the recommendation of my employer's IT staff that guarantees me some learning curve issues, along with likely incompatibilities.
A growing trend in the corporate sector is to more closely integrate or even merge the oversight of information security, physical security, and fiscal security. Is this trend relevant to higher education? What can we learn from corporate experiences?
What if you could access a really detailed study of students that focused directly on their use of and attitudes toward information technology? What if part of the study was a survey of nearly 28,000 students from more than 100 institutions, and the results were sliced and diced not only by gender but by institutional Carnegie class? Sounds pretty useful and interesting, eh?