The Hank Greenspun School of Journalism now has one of the most noteworthy homes on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus. Brand-new and beautiful on the outside with a full array of industry-standard production technology inside, Greenspun Hall is more than just a stunning building--it represents a new era of journalism education...
The University of Wisconsin-Extension has opened a virtual student union as part of its sustainable management program, where students can chat with each other and connect with employers and faculty online. The site is a pilot program to evaluate how well the platform can eventually serve all students seeking online degrees through the university.
Microsoft has released a free search engine optimization (SEO) tool for Web sites. [Updated Jan. 15, 2010 at 10:38 a.m. PST]
Microsoft denied that its Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server software is subject to new-found security vulnerability.
In most classrooms around the world, using cell phones to send text messages and laptops to access sites like Facebook and Twitter are very much discouraged. Not so at Purdue University, where some professors have come to embrace social networking as an instructional aid.
University of the Arts London recently selected and deployed four load balancer appliances from A10 Networks to create a new Web architecture that optimizes content delivery.
DeVry, parent company of DeVry University and several other for-profit career training institutes, has chosen digital repository Equella for its system-wide curriculum content development.
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has added a branded interactive events calendar to its Web site with the help of Localist.
Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN has signed Oxygen Education to help it develop online components for the university's Technical Assistance Program (TAP) Green Enterprise Development Program. Purdue's program provides energy-related classroom-based and online instruction for workforce training.
To woo students to their distance learning programs, Colorado Technical University (CTU) and American Intercontinental University (AIU) have launched microsites that provide interactive tours of their virtual campuses.
Bexhill College, a British sixth form educational institution (akin to an American community college though with slightly younger students), has implemented Spector 360 from SpectorSoft Monitoring Software to meet "duty of care" requirements for student Web access.
The University of San Diego has launched "MySDMobile," a suite of nine mobile device programs for its campus community.
During his time as governor of Kentucky in the late 1960s, the late Louie B. Nunn decided to fund a project for the University of Kentucky Libraries. The endowment was for the collection of non-partisan oral histories, and the result was the University of Kentucky Libraries Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History.
"You shouldn't have to be a rocket scientist to use BI," according to John Rome of Arizona State University's office of technology. So he works to make data accessible to users of all skill levels, largely through the use of dashboards--succinct graphical summaries of information that are commonly used in business to present data to executives and managers.
Northland College in Ashland, WI is taking steps to integrate its administrative systems and Internet portal to streamline operations and deliver online self-service tools to better engage students, faculty, and staff.
In its efforts to bolster campus safety, a large inner-city university is about to take a step that most institutions haven't: launching an online training program to teach students, faculty, and staff how to stay safe in an active shooter situation. Among the instructions: what to do if the student hears a gunshot in the building; what to do if a shooter comes into the classroom; what to do if somebody is injured....
When Brice Bible was hired as Ohio University's new chief information officer two years ago, the institution's IT operations were "fairly disconnected and not as modern as one would hope," he said, and its student information system had recently suffered a security breach.
Jenzabar is rolling out new software tools designed to help higher education executives make decisions on recruitment and retention, advancement, finance, regulatory compliance, and fundraising.
Log onto the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Web site and you'll see an option that you wouldn't ordinarily expect from an institution of higher education: the ability to access a site specifically designed for lower-bandwidth, mobile device users. Known as "UI Mobile," the option strips out most of the graphics and sticks to the basics so that Internet-enabled mobile phone users can get information (such as staff directories and dining/menus) while away from their computers.
Multitudes of potential students are found online these days--tweeting, blogging, MySpacing, and Facebooking--but marketing to these prospects in their native environments isn't as simple and straightforward as it might seem at first. Diane McDonald, associate director of marketing at Texas A&M University, explained that reaching these prospects via social media takes more than a static institutional Facebook page; it takes an active approach to engage them.
The University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School has subscribed to TopSchool's Student Lifecycle Management (SLM) system to help launch a new online certificate program.
Jenzabar has released Jenzabar Internet Campus Solution (JICS) 7.0, an update to the company's portal solution or higher education. The new release includes performance improvements to the interface and new customization options.
Southwestern Oklahoma State University has launched a new publicly accessible online digital repository, providing access to the university's historical documents.
The University of Georgia has launched its new student portal using the open source uPortal 3 platform in an effort to expand online resources for current students.
The University of Kentucky in Lexington has deployed Coradiant TrueSight Automated Incident Management (AIM) to manage the performance of online applications at the university. The purpose of the program is to provide visibility, manage performance, troubleshoot, and plan capacity into the online experience of users using the university's Web applications, which include Blackboard, an SAP NetWeaver portal, Exchange Webmail, and SharePoint.
What's next for colleges and universities already innovating with mobile devices in the classroom?
Answer: Optimizing administrative applications for anytime, anywhere access.
An inside look at high school student use of Web 2.0 tools
Wellesley College, a liberal arts institution for women, is gearing up to revamp its Web presence using software and services from Bluenog in an effort to boost functionality and provide a richer and more consistent experience for prospective and current students.
Northeastern University is deploying a new content management system to to help simplify management of video used on the university's news portal.
Charged with providing logistical, process, and developmental support for the massive California State University system, the Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) is a big advocate of technology usage, both in and out of the classroom.
American University in Washington, DC has launched a new community-focused Web site built using CommonSpot Web content management software from PaperThin. Huge and North Highland provided site design and development.
Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY has moved from manual Java coding processes to Spring, a development platform built by SpringSource, to develop applications on one of its flagship Web sites, eBird.
There are already more than 20,000 videos on YouTube EDU. Content is varied, ranging from lectures on Quantum Physics to "Snow Day in Chapel Hill."
The University of Southern California (USC) has deployed the new version of Apache Jetspeed, the open source enterprise portal that is maintained and serviced by Hippo, on which it has run its staff intranet since 2006.
The PBwiki Campus Edition launched this month allows schools with up to 1,000 students, faculty, and staff to roll out an unlimited number of PBwikis rather than purchasing them individually.
Once viewed as inferior alternatives to four-year institutions, two-year colleges are now enjoying a spike in popularity--and are investing in technology to meet the growing demand.
Web 2.0 apps, e-mail marketing products, and enterprise-level solutions can help institutions "grab" donors and dollars, despite the economic downturn.
CT asked three education pros familiar with the vagaries of college choice: Can Web 2.0 applications and social software help prospective students get a more accurate picture of colleges and universities before they choose? Where should this information originate?
Jahia has released an update to its open source Web content management system, Jahia Community Edition 6, under GPLv2. The latest version expands the enterprise content management system's portal and document management features and also includes new Web 2.0 enhancements.
Optenet, which sells IT security products, has launched HostSecure, a program that analyzes, detects, and reports inappropriate user-generated material on organizations' Web sites, blogs, and wikis.
Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, PA has adopted college portal CampusCruiser from Timecruiser Computing. The portal will provide a single entry point to Blackboard, the college's learning management system, and will connect users to integrated calendars, e-mail, chat, blogs, and message boards.
Google Apps Education Edition is coming to an open source learning management system near you. Moodlerooms, a Moodle partner, is launching a new enhancement to the open source LMS in collaboration with search giant Google to provide access to the application suite using a single sign-on.
"At some point," said higher education marketing expert Bob Johnson, "[universities] stopped asking me how to do a better view-book. [Now], people are interested in how to make Web sites stronger for recruiting." In this first segment of a two-part interview, he talks about new ways in which technology is being used to connect with students and parents--and how students use technology to find schools.
Few technologies have been subject to more hype and subsequent disappointment than Second Life. Corporations from shoe manufactures to cruise lines to news services set up shop with hopes this new frontier would bring soaring profits. Most evacuated shortly thereafter when the effort resulted in spaces devoid of audiences and buyers. A notable exception, though, is education.
Microsoft's Exchange Labs is changing its name to Outlook Live and adding new e-mail features. Exchange Labs/Outlook Live is a component of Live@edu and functions as an R&D environment for Microsoft's new e-mail developments. The service is free for academic users.
Most Web 2.0 tools are discussed at length in terms of their application to the learning process. While there is much that can be learned from using these tools in instruction, there are also principles upon which that use rests that have long been the goals of instruction at various levels. In other words, while the tools may change, the goals of teaching and learning remain much the same.
Santa Clara University School of Law hosted a workshop in virtual world Second Life to help prospective students learn about applying to the law school. Posing as her own self-created avatar, "Penny Canucci," Law School Dean of Admissions Jeanette Leach welcomed visitors to an open-air seating area on "Santa Clara Island," where they could view a video from Law Dean Donald Polden (appearing in real-life video footage, not as an avatar), pose questions, and chat with each other.
Elsevier has launched SciTopics, a free online expert-generated knowledge sharing service for the research community, which is intended to provide technical, scientific, and medical knowledge on a variety of subjects.
American Sentinel University, an online school, has added a Bachelor of Science degree program in health systems management (HSM).
Duke University has digitally published almost 50 years of its yearbook, The Chanticleer, online in a joint project of the University Archives and the Duke Library's Digital Collections program. Issues between 1912 and 1960 have been scanned and posted in multiple formats, including PDF and text, as well as a flip book format that allows readers to browse through the volumes quickly and do text and photo searching.
In a move that plenty of other institutions are sure to follow, Oregon's Pacific University has integrated its emergency notification system with the popular social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.
As so-called "millennials" reach an age to enter business school in force, graduate schools must move quickly to create digital recruiting efforts that match the students they hope to attract.
Even Web 2.0 is a confusing mass of capabilities, yet already people are talking about Web 3.0. Where are we in all of this? What's important for educators to know?
Wake Forest University now offers the option of admissions interviews via webcam.
The United States Coast Guard Academy, a military college in New London, CT, has adopted University WebChat to aid in communicating with potential students online.
The Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia has standardized on one Web conferencing system to use both for courses and for administration.
Residents at nine universities can now check washer and dryer availability from the Web with installations of eSuds to their dorm laundry facilities. eSuds enables students to check machine availability and the status of their laundry over the Internet. They can also pay for the wash and dry cycles with their student ID cards or debit or credit cards. Users automatically receive an e-mail, page, or wireless message when the wash and dry cycles are complete.
The economy notwithstanding, Ball State University has just announced an Emerging Media Initiative that targets $17.7 million toward the evolving use of technology and digital content.
The Law, Science & Technology Program at Stanford Law School has launched the Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC), an online database that offers comprehensive information about intellectual property (IP) disputes within the United States.
California Institute of Technology's (Caltech) Atwater Research Group has chosen eTouch SamePage enterprise wiki for the group's internal communications. Atwater is engaged in interdisciplinary materials and device research, spanning photonics and electronics and with applications in Si-based photonics, plasmonics, renewable energy, and mechanically active thin film devices.
CCC Confer, a project out of Palomar College in San Marcos, CA, is expanding its Web collaboration capabilities. The organization, which provides Web-based conferencing capabilities for the massive California Community College System (CCCS) enterprise-wide, has upgraded to the Elluminate Learning Suite unlimited license.
Now that we are conducting at least a part of our business of education virtually and often meeting in virtual environments, let's explore the really big question for academics in a Web 2.0 era...
How IBM's new release is following through on old challenges... big ones.
A college or university without a Web site is inconceivable today, but with every site comes the challenge of managing content. Some sort of automated system is a given, but how much should the site's content management system integrate with other aspects of the campus computing infrastructure?
Last month, ActiveState released Komodo IDE 5.0, the company's latest integrated development environment (IDE). Komodo supports multiple programming and markup languages, including HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Java, Python, C++ and more. It does not support some .NET languages at present, such as ASP/ASP.NET, C# and VB.NET.
Cerego has released new content creation tools for its iKnow social learning platform, adding support for creating learning modules in any of 188 languages. The company has also expanded language support for the text-to-speech technology used in the iKnow platform.
Microsoft exec Stephen Elop on Monday announced two hosted solutions from Microsoft--Exchange Online and SharePoint Online--which are now available to organizations of all sizes in the United States. The software, paid for by annual subscriptions, is hosted on Microsoft's servers and supported by Microsoft's channel partners.
New Mexico's Innovative Digital Education and Learning program (IDEAL-NM) has selected the Wimba Collaboration Suite to pilot as its statewide collaborative learning platform. IDEAL-NM will deploy Wimba's in its statewide network of K-12 and higher education institutions, which includes 89 districts and 22 college campuses, to enhance student engagement and collaboration and increase learning outcomes.
How can an institution incorporate Web 2.0 learning opportunities for students, and evidence of learning from those opportunities, into existing campus technologies and processes? PlugJam is providing part of the answer.
Software developer Panopto is reporting that it has partnered with Automatic Sync Technologies to integrate closed captioning into its CourseCast lecture capture system. The solution was developed jointly on behalf of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which is using the system to capture, caption, and publish classroom presentations.
Microsoft's Office Web applications, announced late last month at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, will work on "multiple platforms," including Apple's iPhone, according to a Microsoft Channel 10 blog.
Web sites will be able to get improved bandwidth management for streaming media using a new extension to the Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7) Web server. The extension, earlier this month, is called "IIS Smooth Streaming."
Students now expect to use interactive, Web2.0 applications in their education environments. As part of a strategy to meet such expectations, Delta College in Michigan launched an online Delta iTunes U environment this fall.
Videoconferencing software developer Dimdim recently announced that it's releasing a Web-based conferencing solution specifically for education. The company's new Dimdim Virtual Classroom Pack, which debuted late last month, allows 10 teachers to host up to 40 students at a time in an online environment.
Phoenix-based Cernunnos Team has announced the public launch of Cernunnos 1.0.0, a set of Java component libraries for use with uPortal, an open source enterprise portal designed for universities.
RightAnswers has released new 5.0 versions of its Support Analyst and Self-Service Portal modules for its Unified Knowledge Suite. According to the company, the latest version of the IT help desk software includes more than 100 enhancements, including a number of new Web 2.0 features for customizing the end-user experience.
Omnilert has integrated its e2Campus emergency notification system with Twitter. This enables e2Campus clients to push e2Campus alerts automatically and simultaneously to their schools' Twitter accounts without having to log in to their Twitter account separately.
Students at the Arizona State University (ASU) Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering now have access to more online lectures than any other university in the country, according to Sonic Foundry, the company that provides the Webcasting platform the school uses. The school recently recorded its 10,000th lecture.
The "technology revolution" is mis-named. Instead, we are in a human revolution... humans have learned to think with their fingers, to imagine that a flat screen is really as big as the world, to create new personae for themselves, to expand their social interactions in number and kind, to write and design in new ways, to visualize complex concepts, to find information in seconds, and incorporate that information into a constantly evolving awareness.
We all know the routine--all the world has changed but the classroom is the same as it was a millennium ago. Faculty feel guilty but don't know what to do... Ideas are powerful, especially when they have become beliefs and have been unquestioned for generations. Three in particular may be standing in the way of more faculty using our new learning tools in enlightened ways.
In a move that will certainly be echoed by other institutions if it hasn't been already, Texas A&M University just launched a new microsite specifically to let students post YouTube-style videos showing what life as an Aggie is all about. The site, along with a new Facebook profile, is part of a university marketing campaign called "Do You Wonder?"
Zimbra has launched a new edition of its Zimbra Collaboration Suite specifically for education institutions, a completely cloud-based solution called Zimbra Hosted for Education.
Ed tech developer Elluminate announced Tuesday that it's beginning a phased rollout of new versions of its Elluminate Learning Suite components, including Live V9 and Publish V2, as well as Elluminate vSpaces. New features are being rolled into these virtual learning applications now through December.
The OpenAjax Alliance wants to make it easier--and safer--to build applications using the Ajax Web development technique. The group unveiled two standards initiatives at this year's AjaxWorld RIA Conference & Expo last week in San Jose, CA, including a new metadata specification and a new version of its mashup runtime.
Engine Yard has just released the community version of a new Web framework for building Ruby applications. Dubbed Merb, the open source framework written in Ruby is "super-light and super-fast," according to the company, which is positioning it as an alternative to Rails.
LodeStar Learning has announced a new partnership with eFolioWorld to integrate its electronic learning authoring suite, LodeStar, with the eFolioWorld electronic portfolio system. eFolioWorld is a hosted portfolio system developed jointly by ed tech provider Avenet and the Minnesota State College and Universities System.
The Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), a national leader in information security research and education, recently released its Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2009, outlining the top five areas of security concern and risk for consumer and enterprise Internet users for the coming year. In it, the GTISC forecasted five key cyber security areas where threats were expected to increase and evolve.
Education technology developer Saba this week debuted a new solution it describes as an "enterprise social networking platform." The new system, Saba Social, is designed to extend Saba's collaboration platform and provide a vehicle for delivering and capturing informal, peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange.
In the first installment this two-part series, we looked at chat as an instructional tool in general terms. Now we take a look at some of the major concepts in using chat effectively in the process of moving the thinking process forward: building ideas, constructing media, and establishing which elements are critical to making the environment dynamic and relevant to the student.
The IT staff at Johns Hopkins University has completed a collaborative project with Unicon for an upgrade to the uPortal 3 open source enterprise portal. uPortal is a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher education. It's built using Java, XML, JSP, and J2EE.
Michigan State University will be providing its applicants for admission the ability to supplement their required personal statements with video. Powered by CollegeSupplement.com, the feature allows candidates to express how their backgrounds, talents, and experiences will contribute to the university.
The Mississippi State Board for Community and Junior Colleges (MSBCJC) has selected the Wimba Collaboration Suite to deploy throughout Mississippi, allowing students and educators to connect through online video, voice, text, application sharing, polling, and white boarding.
Cerego has taken its first step toward opening its iKnow! social learning platform, a technology from aimed at integrating collaboration and learning into Web-based content, with the launch of the iKnow! Developer Portal. It's designed to allow users to create mashups using iKnow! content and is aimed particularly at "education-focused social communities."
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has implemented DTN/Meteorlogix MxVision WeatherSentry Online Turf Edition for Sports and Recreation.
In its latest bid to keep Web developers in the fold, Microsoft has developed a tool designed to manage the setup, configuration and retrieval of different Web applications.
We are seeing trends in higher education, good and maybe otherwise, that reflect the re-structuring of knowledge systems that seem to come with a point in time we're calling Web 2.0. Educational leadership in this environment means reform at an institutional level, not just technology adoption.
The second annual Blog Action Day takes place today, bringing together 8,000-plus blog, podcast, and videocast sites to post about the same issue on the same day. This year's topic is poverty. The purpose of the effort is, according to organizers, "to create a discussion. We ask bloggers to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue. By doing so on the same day, the blogging community effectively changes the conversation on the web and focuses audiences around the globe on that issue. Out of this discussion naturally flow actions, advice, ideas, plans, and empowerment."
A group of the nation's largest research libraries are collaborating to create a repository of their digital collections, including millions of books. These holdings will be archived and preserved in a single repository called the HathiTrust. Materials in the public domain will be available for reading online.
American University in Washington, DC has signed with media agency Realview TV to design, produce, and stream the school's online "Virtual Campus Experience." The video will showcase its students, faculty, and virtual campus on the Web via an interactive video-based micro site that's designed to match the school's brand.
To combat distance students dropping out before completion of their classes, American Sentinel University has implemented EducationDynamics' Adult, Online and Continuing Education Retention Program. This Web-based communications tool is designed to keep students connected to their instructors, peers, and institutional support services.
Our ontology about teaching and learning is no longer workable. It is time for a change from pedagogy to andragogy and evidence-based learning.
Too often, institutions spend precious resources implementing a learning management system and associated collaboration, teaching and learning tools, only to find that a relatively small percentage of faculty use the tools to any significant degree. At Genesee Community College (GCC), we have achieved high faculty usage of online learning tools by focusing on institutional culture.
Is "cloud computing" the next big thing in IT, or are you just a victim of "cloud wash?" Recent statements by Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison and software-licensing contrarian Richard Stallman zeroed into the phrase.
Web-search advertising giant Yahoo plans to resolve a password security vulnerability identified in late September in its Zimbra open source e-mail and collaboration software. On Wednesday, a Yahoo spokesperson stated by e-mail that the problem will be addressed in a few weeks' time.
Amazon announced Wednesday that it is conducting a private beta test of Microsoft's server products running on Amazon's hosted computing platform, which is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon expects to offer companies the ability to run their applications on EC2 using Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server sometime in the fall, according to an announcement issued by the company.
Here's a bit of trivia for your next high-tech happy hour: A "nog" (in addition to being a Christmas favorite) is a wooden block built into a masonry wall so that joinery structure can be nailed to it. For the founders of Piscataway, N.J.-based startup Bluenog this obscure bit of carpentry nomenclature was the perfect metaphor for an integrated software suite that includes a content management system (CMS), rich portal features and business intelligence (BI) capabilities.
With digital technologies and Web 2.0 surrounding us, information -- and knowledge generation -- is abundant as never before. This creates some big changes for higher education: With no scarcity of information or collaboration opportunities, "seat time" in a classroom is no longer just about delivering content. Trent Batson asks, "How does a teacher reclaim the value of students coming to class in this time?"
Blogging can be an effective tool for learning, but its benefits shouldn't be taken for granted. It takes careful planning and skillful management to make it work in an educational setting. Here are five of the most common mistakes for instructors to avoid when incorporating blogs into instruction.
UCrime.com, which provides crime mapping and alert services for colleges and universities, announced that it has doubled to 200 the number of schools it covers.
Huntington Junior College (HJC) in West Virginia has gone public with its year-long early-adopter use of Campus Management's CampusLearning, a suite of services that provides for real-time, two-way integration between proprietary portals and student information systems and the Moodle open source course management systems.
Serena Software acquired Projity Wednesday and is promoting that company's software as an open source alternative to Microsoft Project.
Lecture capture has been gaining momentum in recent years, but that momentum is being outpaced by student demand. According to new research released this week by the University of Wisconsin-Madison involving about 7,500 undergraduate and graduate students, an overwhelming 82 percent of students said they would prefer courses that offer online lectures over traditional classes that do not include an online lecture component. The researchers also pointed out the implications for these findings extend well beyond the classroom.
Duke University has selected BoardVantage for the electronic distribution of written materials to the University's Board of Trustees.
Adobe debuted Creative Suite 4 Tuesday, with all-new versions of its major development, design, publishing, and video/motion graphics applications, along with new and modified pricing and licensing schemes for both K-12 and post-secondary education. We have a inside look at the new features in each of the core applications, along with preliminary findings based on a pre-release of the Creative Suite 4 Master Collection.
Our annual summer conference seeks presenters
This week, for the fourth year in a row, the once-obscure-now-ubiquitous dynamic scripting language, PHP, took center stage at the annual Zend/PHP conference in Santa Clara, CA. The big news at this year's show (also known as ZendCon) comes from Adobe Systems, which announced plans to collaborate with Zend Technologies, the show's sponsor and the creator and commercial maintainer of PHP.For the fourth year in a row, the once-obscure-now-ubiquitous dynamic scripting language, PHP, took center stage at the annual Zend/PHP conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The big news at this year's show (also known as ZendCon) comes from Adobe Systems, which announced plans to collaborate with Zend Technologies, the show's sponsor and the creator and commercial maintainer of PHP.
Maybe you've heard people ask: "Who needs large lecture halls to learn? Who needs a sound studio or post-production facilities when you can have them on your laptop? If high-end lab equipment or scientific simulation software is also available via the Web, why do you need to visit a campus to run an experiment?" Is "Why attend college at all?" now a serious question?
Kadoo has launched a site where users can manage, store, and selectively share their digital content from one place. The service was created by executives from Blackboard, which produces products and services for the education market.
The Pennsylvania State University and Alcatel-Lucent have announced an agreement to jointly develop a mobile video social networking application. The collaborative research team will be funded by the vendor.
Northern Michigan University has deployed 6,000 Lenovo ThinkPad R61 notebooks to its full-time students to provide access to 724 Web-based classes this fall. This is the 10th year that NMU has issued ThinkPads to its student body.
Galveston College has selected Datatel Colleague and Datatel ActiveCampus Portal solutions to replace legacy systems in use by the school. The College also licensed Colleague Student Retention Alert, a comprehensive offering of software and professional services that identifies and serves students who are academically at-risk.
A humble little old bus left Google's Mountain View, CA campus Monday for a 5,000-mile trek across the US to visit 10 college campuses, beginning with southern California's USC. Of course, the 30-year-old bus was converted to biodiesel, updated with solar panels and other green features, stocked with tons of technology and wireless Internet, and given an adorable "Google" paint job. It departed on schedule, chock full of Google Apps for Education demos and tech experts (riding along or flying to meet the bus) with new ideas to discuss with students and faculty.
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges is rolling out a new system to deliver online classes, presentations, and meetings. The organization recently signed on with Elluminate to use that company's Elluminate Learning Suite across its 34 member colleges.
Microsoft last Wednesday touted the success of its online extension to Microsoft Office, a free browser-based application that's still in beta release. One million people so far have signed up to use the Microsoft Office Live Workspace Beta after six months of the beta's public availability, according to an announcement issued by the company.
Teachers Domain, a free online resource for educators, has announced expanded content in science, math, art, social studies, and language arts. The online library is also launching two new editions: Teachers' Domain College Edition, designed for higher education, and VITAL New York on Teachers' Domain, providing resources for New York teachers that are aligned with the state's core curriculum.
Johnson County Community College (JCCC) in Overland Park, Kansas has adopted the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS) to deliver online and blended courses. The largest of Kansas' 19 community colleges, JCCC chose to transition to the Angel LMS from Blackboard following a review of available products. According to a statement from the vendor, the college chose Angel for its stability, ease of use, and feature set.
Online collaborative technology developer Zoho has launched its new Zoho Docs, a Web-based document management tool that's designed to integrate with Zoho's online spreadsheet, presentation, and document creation software.
Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges has licensed the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS) to deliver online courses available through WashingtonOnline (WAOL). The board consists of 34 schools that serve 450,000 students annually.
Google's Chrome Web browser--complete with quirky marketing comic book--made a splash when announced Tuesday, but what a difference a day makes. On Wednesday, proof-of-concept bugs affecting the Internet app were disclosed. Chrome is still early in its first public beta.
DVcreators.net has released DV Kitchen, a new video encoding and publishing application for Mac OS X designed specifically for creating materials to be posted on the Web.
Trent Batson considers a list of back-to-school resources for Web 2.0.
It's no secret that enterprise use of Microsoft's Internet Explorer is on the decline. The question is, How far is it falling?
Adobe has made its ColdFusion 8 Web development platform free for educators and students. The offer is available for all public and private accredited K-12 schools and colleges and universities.
Kaplan University launched MyPath, a program that uses career planning and student success diagnostics to help students craft a course of study that maximizes their career potential. The assessment tools will be used for all freshmen doing studies in the online program, the school said in a statement, to address study skills and career focus before they begin their academic program.
Adobe Tuesday cracked the lid of its most closely guarded secret: Creative Suite 4 will be unveiled later this month.
Just days after Microsoft released the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, Google unexpectedly made what could be its largest assault on Redmond to date--the release of its own Web browser.
Arizona State University has signed an agreement with Modavox to Webcast the Sustainability Summit the school is hosting in Washington, DC September 17, 2008. Modavox will facilitate the delivery of streaming audio and video.
Georgetown University has partnered with FORA.tv to launch a video channel that will share university content. Georgetown will use FORA.tv's content delivery platform to reach a global audience with its issue-oriented video. The channel will feature programming with individual university faculty who are experts in their field as well as world leaders speaking on Georgetown's campus.
Beginning this fall, students in Tiffin University's newest online program, Ivy Bridge College, will use eCollege, a course management system from Pearson, for all of their online courses. The 2,350-student Tiffin U is located in Tiffin, OH and offers both on-campus and online classes. Since 2005, those online courses have been managed through Jenzabar Internet Campus Solution.
Columbia University has been beta testing its content through iTunes U, the Apple desktop media player for education-related podcasting. The New York-based university expects to go live with its release at the start of the fall semester.
McGill University Library in Montreal will be using a Kirtas Technologies APT BookScan 2400RA to digitize its collections. The company says that the 2400RA is capable of acquiring page images at the rate of 2,400 pages per hour. The library will be working with Ristech, a Canadian reseller, to implement the digitization solution.
Ball State University in Muncie, IN has gone public regarding its deployment of a Web site content management system from Sitecore. Ball State chose Sitecore's software to revamp its 220-plus sites, integrating common new media applications and garnering a next-generation user experience that has won several awards from education and new media marketing organizations. Now, Ball State maintains uniformity across all university Web sites and said it has enhanced its recruiting efforts through the site's new look and interface.
Polytechnic Institute of New York University has selected an Array Networks SPX3000, a universal access controller that combines virtual private network (VPN) and network access control (NAC) functionality. The device will provide identity-based customized portals for 5,000 users to access their individual information.
Two universities are moving forward in their work with Sakai. The University of Hawaii System has adopted Sakai as its official learning and collaboration service, effective this fall, and Columbia University has recently upgraded to a new version of the open source learning management system as part of a pilot program in several schools and departments. At the beginning of August, the New York institution upgraded its Sakai pilot from version 2.4 to 2.5.
Sun Microsystems has fulfilled a promise made this summer to release the source code for the Java ME-based light-weight UI toolkit (LWUIT) for mobile UI development to the java.net community.
Microsoft has released an improved security filter for its Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server that is designed to help thwart SQL injection attacks. The free application, called UrlScan 3.0 (Release-to-Web version), is an add-on tool to IIS that provides real-time verification of HTTP server requests, potentially blocking malicious code.
San Francisco-based Coverity recently announced the release of Coverity Software Readiness Manager (SRM) for Java, a tool to help assess code readiness. This tool is mainly geared toward managers, providing dashboard-type reporting for determining software availability and maintainability before release.
As a long-time expert in data warehousing and business intelligence (BI), David Wells has seen the technologies gradually come into their own in higher education. Now a consultant--Wells was formerly director of education for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), a sister institution of Campus Technology--he continues to advise colleges and universities on data warehousing and BI issues.
Vorex has released an update to its Vorex Online Survey, a Web-based data collection tool designed to allow schools to collect information and gather feedback from education stakeholders.
The Sakai Foundation has released the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment 2.5.2, the first maintenance update to the open-source learning management system since the 2.5 release in March. The new version includes performance enhancements, as well as a number of bug fixes and other enhancements.
Over the last six years, Stewart Mader has staked his career on the power of wikis. Mader first worked on wiki adoption initiatives in the IT department at Brown University, becoming fascinated by their power and potential. In this first half of a two-part interview, Mader talks about powerful ways to use wikis in education, content ownership issues, and how wikis tend to be used--and why.
Trent Batson takes a look at the National Science Foundation's Report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning, "Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge."
Georgia Virtual Technical College has selected the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS) as the platform for its portal to deliver Web-based instruction to Georgia's 33 technical colleges and one Board of Regents college.
Colorado State University has selected Campus Management Corp. to provide the infrastructure for its new online campus, known as CSU-Global Campus. The technology the Ft. Collins campus will use includes CampusVue, a student information system, and CampusPortal, an integrated, configurable Web site software.
Virginia Tech has selected HiSoftware's Compliance Sheriff to address management of its Web site accessibility. Compliance Sheriff is a browser-based service that crawls a Web site and compares pages against a user-defined set of criteria. The tool will compare the school's site against world-wide accessibility guidelines such as the federally-defined Section 508, which addresses how technology should be designed to enable its use by people with physical impairments, and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0/2.0, from the World Wide Web Consortium, which address Web content and mobile Web applications.
Collexis' Lawriter division has launched a social network for law students. The site, CasemakerX.com, was demonstrated in beta format at the American Association of Law Librarians Conference in Portland in July. A full launch is expected in early fall 2008 to coincide with the incoming class of new law students. Along with the social networking site, CasemakerX will provide free access to the Casemaker Suite of Applications for the American law student community.
IDG News Service is shedding some light on the current efforts of Microsoft and Google to gain acceptance in the education market. Both offer free services for institutions like mail and storage, along with free collaboration tools for students and faculty. Watch this video to see what representatives from the two companies had to say at the recent Campus Technology 2008 conference in Boston.
Eclipse developers will soon have an easier time integrating with Maven, the popular Java open source build framework.
According to the National Association of College Stores in a 2007 survey, the average cost of a new college textbook was $53. The founders of Flat World Knowledge, which launches with its first run of college textbooks this fall, consider that too high--so high, in fact, that they'll be offering textbooks for free, at least in versions that can be read online.
Walking in the old part of Istanbul, the narrow street awash in shops, each with its appealing bins of gorgeous goods, I kept expecting to find a super market of some sort. But no supermarket ever appeared, just more miles of tiny shops. Welcome to Web 2.0.
Want to build custom Web applications without writing a single line of code? That's the promise of Model-Driven Development (MDD), and the objective of Intelliun's MDD-based Virtual Enterprise (VE) toolset.
Digital media software developer Stream57 has released a new version of StreamLine, the company's Webcasting solution. The new 2.8 release adds a suite of e-learning features, including course management and assessment functionality.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have created a Google Maps mashup, called SafeRoadMaps, which pinpoints the location of every fatal accident that has happened in the United States using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.
Herkimer County Community College (HCCC) has adopted the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS) to deliver its online courses. The college, which has about 3,300 students, is a two-year unit of the State University of New York (SUNY). HCCC offers 40 traditional degree programs and 20 online degree programs.
Purdue University has selected StudentLink from CollegiateLink to manage its 840 student clubs, organizations, and fraternities and sororities. StudentLink will allow individual organizations at the 39,000-student university to conduct online surveys and elections, recruit new members, manage membership lists, and plan events.
Ed Map has announced an agreement with CourseSmart that will allow the company to deliver an expanded list of electronic textbook titles to higher-education students around the country.
UC Irvine Extension, the continuing education arm of the University of California, Irvine, has announced a joint educational venture with Brazil-based Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV). Through the partnership, FGV--a nonprofit higher education institution and the largest provider of online education in Brazil--has created free online courses, presented in Portuguese, as part of the UC Irvine Extension's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative.
Speculation continues as to what the ultimate systemic Domain Name System (DNS) flaw could be. This flaw apparently allows Web surfers to be spoofed, directing them to fake Web sites to gain passwords and load malware on their computers.
Microsoft announced late Wednesday a reorganization of its Platforms & Services Division (PSD), as well as the departure of Kevin Johnson, a 16-year Microsoft veteran and president of the PSD.
Desire2Learn this week announced a new mobile application of its Desire2Learn Learning Environment. Called Desire2Learn 2GO, the application ties in with Learning Environment 8.3 to provide access via Blackberry. The company also announced that it's streamlining integration Respondus 3.5, a quiz- and test-building application.
Yahoo partly acceded to the demands of corporate raider Carl Icahn by agreeing to seat Icahn and two of his proxy-slate candidates to Yahoo's board. The about-face move by Yahoo is a surprising turn in the ongoing harsh wooing of the company, which began in January with an unsolicited acquisition proposal from Microsoft.
Infinity Learning Solutions (ILS) said it has used the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform to develop a cloud computing solution for the open source learning management system Moodle.
Semantics is a sub-field of linguistics that focuses on meaning making in language. Therefore, the Semantic Web we're still reaching for will be based on a set of definitions, languages, and standards that can base a search on the detection of meaning and not just on a simple character string. The Semantic Web will at least be smarter than the current Web.
With 2.5 million students and 75,000 faculty, the California Community College system has considerable shopping clout with vendors. Using those numbers to its advantage, the CCC has created an immense and cost-effective state-wide Web conferencing system for its 109 member colleges.
Michael Keller is well known as the innovative university librarian and director of academic information resources at Stanford University, as well as publisher of the Stanford University Press and HighWire Press. In this interview, he discusses a worldwide effort to digitally preserve vast amounts of material from history, both aging paper documents and very recent digital content.
Microsoft's executives have been talking with investor and corporate raider Carl Icahn about renewed plans for Microsoft to acquire part or all of Yahoo, provided that Yahoo's board is replaced. The details were described in an open letter issued Monday by Icahn, which is addressed to Yahoo's shareholders.
The University of Utah has acquired a site license of CyProof's ErrNET for online document proofreading. ErrNET runs on CyProof's servers and is accessed through the user's Web browser. To check a document, users upload their files to the Web site, the cost is calculated, payment is requested, the document is processed, and the results are presented for download. The service works with PDF files.
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
Sun Microsystems's Project Darkstar and the Wonderland Toolkit for building 3D spaces show why virtual reality is better for education than video conferencing. And Project Wonderland has announced its first education space.
Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, announced the resignation of its president, Brian Mueller, effective immediately. Mueller headed up the Apollo Group since early 2006 and previously served as CEO of the school's online campus.
The Burton Group put the spotlight on Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 product on Thursday at its Catalyst Conference 2008 event. The analyst and consulting group allocated no less than five panels at the San Diego-based event to discuss SharePoint for the enterprise. The panels focused on the solution's strengths and weaknesses, as well as the importance of partner support in implementing SharePoint.
Students taking a course in venture capital at Wake Forest University have, over the last semester, benefited from the use of Recordant audio-capture technology that allows Web-based archiving, searching, and playback of course lectures. The university said one of the goals was to get students to close their notebooks and focus on comprehension, secure that they'd be able to access the captured lectures later on.
The Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame will be implementing Primo from Ex Libris Group as a discovery system. The school, a long-time customer of Ex Libris library automation applications, will be using the search and retrieval software to provide a single interface for discovery and delivery of local and remote resources, including books, journal articles and digital objects within the libraries' collections.
When Richard Nelson's IT team at the University of Southern California's Information Science's Institute (ISI) decided to make an internally developed research administration application available to other groups on campus, it faced a unique security challenge: how to provide access to the program itself without also handing over broader access to other resources on its network.
New "educational" software and applications are usually not as educational as one might think. As a whole, applications developed in the name of learning have ended up favoring the institution and preserving the status quo. Given existing dynamics, it could not be otherwise.
Tomorrow the Eclipse Foundation is sending its third annual "release train" chugging down the track. This year's synchronized launch of several Eclipse projects at once (code named "Ganymede") involved the coordinated release of 23 projects, up from 21 in last year's "Europa" release, and 10 in 2006 with the original "Callisto" release.
This fall Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, PA and Discovery Education, which produces digital media-based learning, are launching a new online master's degree program in instructional media. The 30-credit instructional media program will prepare teachers to engage today's students in learning through digital media. Courses will focus on topics such as digital storytelling, using digital media in the classroom, using technology to support creativity and applying brain-based theories of how students process information to technology integration.
Virginia Tech University's Outreach Information Services (OIS) has deployed the Kaseya User State Management (KUSM) module, extending its use of Kaseya IT automation software to include the setting up and deployment of user profiles. Administrators are now able to create, update, migrate and back up user settings and apply the images to workstations remotely through the Kaseya application.
A huge increase in freshman enrollment numbers for the fall semester has Loyola University in New Orleans pleased with its efforts to rebuild its student body after Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS) is also looking at strong enrollment numbers, three years after the hurricane and its aftermath of flooding devastated New Orleans.
Del Mar College has selected Datatel Colleague to create a Web-based self-service capability for constituents and enhanced campus management tools for employees. The Datatel technology solution replaces a legacy administration system.
Yahoo today said its talks with Microsoft focusing on acquiring all or part of the company are officially over -- a position that Microsoft appears to be at least partially disputing.
An interdisciplinary team from the University of Oregon's School of Architecture and Allied Arts and the College of Arts and Sciences collaborated with scholars in Rome to produce a new Web site dedicated to the work of one of Rome's great vedutisti--or cityscape artists. The intention is to provide a rich historical resource for educators, scholars, students and others.
Georgia Tech College of Management has selected Talisma CRM to manage its constituent communications. The college will use Talisma for communications across multiple channels, including e-mail, phone, personalized portal, and mail. The initial implementation will be deployed by three administrative departments: graduate programs, executive education programs and faculty recruiting.
Ed tech developer Elluminate Monday announced new collaborative learning bundles--the Elluminate Learning Suite and the Elluminate Next bundle--and launched a new tool for planning online learning sessions called Elluminate Plan! The company also told us it's revamping its education licensing structure, moving away from a concurrent user model to a structure based on the full-time enrollment of educational institutions.
iLinc released a new version of its Web conferencing tool, iLinc 10, which bolsters session management and adds a "green meter." The green meter shows cost savings, carbon emissions, and total distance not traveled by using Web conferencing versus in-person meetings. Administrators can also customize several variables in the meter to match their organization's specific policies.
The Web 2.0 wave on campus may have left academic computing units in its wake. Is anyone in charge of technology innovation?
Apple Tuesday expanded the international reach of iTunes U, bringing in 10 universities from the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, all of which are providing content via the iTunes education portal free of charge.
A core debate about learning design arises from the fear that, if we allow learners too much freedom, they will not learn the right things. Web 2.0 exacerbates that fear because it is beyond the control of educators.
Paying for word processing software may soon be a thing of past if Microsoft competitors Adobe, Google and IBM have any say.
The University of Arizona has brought video and animation relating to the Phoenix Mars Mission onto iTunes U, the education-focused portal hosted on Apple's iTunes. U Arizona is the lead on the mission, the first in a NASA program aimed at launching smaller missions to Mars designed to complement larger ones.
IBM's Rational Software division yesterday unveiled 20 new commercial products based on its Jazz collaboration platform and opened up the Jazz community to all interested parties.
Adobe Monday announced details of its forthcoming major revision to the entire Acrobat family: Acrobat 9. The company also debuted a new Acrobat.com collaboration beta site and announced an updated Creative Suite (version 3.3), which will incorporate the upcoming Acrobat 9 Pro software.
This week Microsoft released the latest preview version of its model view controller (MCV) architecture for Web applications frameworks.
Hewlett-Packard may not be the first name that comes to mind when the conversation turns to application security, but since its acquisition of SPI Dynamics last year, HP has increased its investment in research, product enhancements, and new services in the application security area.
Google's long-percolating application development environment, the Google App Engine, is now generally available to the public at large, the company announced Wednesday.
Canada's McMaster University Library and United States-based companies Kirtas Technologies and Lulu.com will be partnering this fall to make rare books available to the public.
There has been a lot of recent debate on the benefits of social networking tools and software in education. While there are good points on either side of the debate, there remains the essential difference in theoretical positioning. Can social networking both as an instructional concept and user skill be integrated into the conventional approaches to teaching and learning? Do the skills developed within a social networking environment have value in the more conventional environments of learning?
Following on the heels of Microsoft's announcement that it would pay customers who search for and buy products through Microsoft Live Search cashback, the company's Microsoft's Live Search team announced on its blog that it would be taking down its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects Web sites in coming days.
Microsoft's Live@edu, a suite of online tools focused specifically toward education, has now been expanded to include Exchange Labs, which is similar to a hosted Exchange service but with prototype features that are not yet available to the general public. The move brings expanded e-mail options to campus IT departments, including 10 GB of space per account, as free added features.
Harris Connect has launched a new alumni and student relations tool built on the Facebook Platform. Dubbed "Community Connections," the application is designed to provide secure connections between schools and their Facebook-using constituents and keep them engaged with news and other information.
Google is set to unveil the latest version of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) at the company's first big developer conference, Google I/O, scheduled to run this week (May 28 and 29) in San Francisco.
Columbia University has selected Format-Studio to develop a new website strategy and design for the Mailman School of Public Health. Format has designed websites for major magazines, including New York Magazine, Prevention Magazine, Glamour and Field & Stream.
Four universities--two in the United States and two in Brazil--are testing inter-continental distance learning in a program facilitated by technology from Wimba. The U.S.-Brazil Consortium enables global collaboration among teachers and learners at The University of Georgia in Athens, Utah State University in Logan, Universidade Federal do Ceará and Universidade Estadual Paulista, Bauru.
In this fictional scenario, Trent Batson examines a typical department's struggle to redesign its Web presence, posing questions like: "We can't help but notice that social sites like YouTube and Facebook are awfully easy to use -- why can't our academic site be more like them?"
Adobe this week launched a new slate of bundles and resources for educators looking to use Acrobat Connect Pro in their online teaching efforts. Adobe just introduced the new version of Acrobat Connect Pro about two weeks ago.
SightSpeed has launched SightSpeed Light on MySpace, a free widget that adds integrated video mail, public video posting, and video chat for members of MySpace. The widget was built using MySpace's Developer Platform, introduced in February.
The New Media Consortium, a not-for-profit group of organizations focused on bringing technology into the learning process, has kicked off a competitive award program for educational communities in Second Life and Project Wonderland. Twenty grants totaling $100,000 in cash and development assistance will be awarded this year to fund these educational efforts.
Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML and Sun Microsystems' director of Web technologies, hosted a lively post-Script Bowl panel discussion on the future of dynamic scripting languages at this year's JavaOne Conference.
Purdue University has selected Winnov's Cbox 3 to record classroom lectures and enhance its distance learning programs. The Cbox 3 lecture capture appliance is used at Purdue's School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Blackboard Inc. today announced Blackboard Sync, an application that allows students to receive course updates and communicate with classmates while logged on to Facebook.
Education consultancy Eduventures has teamed up with The Campus Computing Project to kick off a new study focusing on online operations in higher education.
In many ways, college campuses are an obvious implementation for a wiki tool. The decentralized nature of the technology and its ability to allow a wide range of individuals or groups to contribute ideas into a single area through Web browsers make wikis simple and compelling for higher education uses.
Organizations still aren't doing enough to protect their data from Web application vulnerabilities, according to a study released Tuesday by security firm Cenzic. The study, Application Security Trends Report, Q1 2008, identified "1,409 unique published vulnerabilities for the first quarter of 2008, with Web technology vulnerabilities comprising 70 percent of the vulnerability volume...."
Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 beta bits for public download this week. In addition to the usual performance enhancements, bug fixes and stability improvements, the SP1 betas offer widely anticipated data access technologies.
The Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) said it will deploy the Wimba Collaboration Suite across 16 colleges to connect students and educators through online video, voice, text, application sharing, polling and whiteboarding.
Ed tech developer Tegrity reported this week that usage of its Campus 2.0 classroom capture system hit record levels last year, including, among other things, capturing 325,000 hours of faculty lectures on Tegrity servers in a 12-month period.
Texas A&M University has signed a license agreement with BreakAway Ltd., a developer of game-based technology, for the worldwide rights to Pulse!! The Virtual Clinical Learning Lab. Pulse is a federally funded project in development at the Corpus Christi campus that allows medical professionals to practice decision-making protocol and experiential skills on PCs in a virtual hospital setting. The agreement grants BreakAway the rights to develop, market and distribute Pulse.
Rock legend Neil Young joined Sun Microsystems' Executive Vice President of Software Rich Green on stage during the opening keynote of the 13th annual JavaOne conference, underway this week in San Francisco.
E-mail is the ordinal form of this age. But in the collective conscience of higher education, the reference form when talking about writing is still the essay. Should e-mail writing instruction replace the teaching of essay writing?
IBM has introduced a new tool for migrating content from Microsoft SharePoint and other data repositories into Lotus Quickr. The new Lotus Quickr Content Integrator, which recently began shipping, is designed to bring content from existing repositories into Quickr's "team places" for collaboration and sharing.
Georgia Tech announced recently that it's contracted with open source service provider Unicon to integrate CalDAV within its Sakai implementation. CalDAV is a calendaring protocol that allows for event and meeting sharing across various platforms via WebDAV.
Strangeloop Networks has introduced a product the company is billing as the first appliance designed specifically to accelerate enterprise applications in service-oriented architectures. The new WS1000 Web Services Accelerator is aimed at the growing number of organizations employing Web services to integrate disparate applications and databases, to extend their mainframe applications and to deal with performance challenges associated with dynamic Web apps.
Adobe has introduced a new version of Acrobat Connect Pro, the company's virtual meeting and eLearning tool. The new version includes enhanced integration with Blackboard, as well as several editing and management improvements.
Citing a hefty price tag and other concerns, Microsoft this weekend officially scrapped its plans to acquire Yahoo! In a letter to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed the possibilities of both a friendly buyout and a hostile takeover, stating he believed that in a hostile takeover situation Yahoo! would take steps to make itself an unattractive acquisition target.
Imagine entering the virtual world Second Life to discover that a flu pandemic requires you, a health care professional, to attend to stricken patients lying on the streets around an over-capacity virtual hospital. When you report in to collect your virtual uniform, you're told what your responsibilities will be during the disaster and to whom you'll report.
Tim O'Reilly woke up his end-of-the-day audience when he took the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo, held April 22-25 in San Francisco. The publisher of the popular "In a Nutshell" computer books series declared that the Internet is fast becoming "a global platform for everything," and an "amazing tool for harnessing collective intelligence."
Creighton University in Omaha, NE has implemented a suite of services from Web and audio conferencing company iLinc to update the distance-learning platform for its online doctor of pharmacy program. The school evaluated the software from several Web conferencing vendors and chose the solution from iLinc, in part because it integrated with Active Directory to enable single sign-on and authentication.
Last week, Microsoft's .NET Framework program manager Krzysztof Cwalina announced that his team is working on a new framework for .NET--Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)--designed to improve compatibility with third-party extensions.
Analyst reaction last week to Redmond's "Live Mesh" initiative can be deciphered in one of two ways. On the one hand, it's an old idea, namely "convergence," with new buzzwords. On the other, it means that industry leader Microsoft has become serious about playing hard ball with its more nimble competitors, working to simplify the end user experience in a Web 2.0 era.
The Wyoming Community College Commission, which has seven colleges, and the University of Wyoming have subscribed to the ebrary Academic Complete e-book database, according to the company.
A federal judge is ordering a "clean-up" of language presented on a company's Web sites that help students apply to colleges after a competitor filed suit charging that the Web sites deceived users. CollegeNET filed the suit against XAP, citing patent infringement and unfair competition. Both companies offer Web sites through which students can apply to multiple colleges and universities for admission and financial aid.
The term "Nomadic" has been used to describe current college students' culture of wireless and mobile connectedness in the sense that they are not "rooted" but incredibility flexible and fluid when it comes to their social connections and their virtual life culture. This refers not only to their uses of social networking tools but also to the reality that they are connected wirelessly in any situation and for any reason. They are essentially nomads when it comes to their life "space."
Johns Hopkins University has chosen Unicon to develop and deploy the school's new mobility theme based on uPortal, the open source enterprise portal for higher education. The mobility theme is designed to enhance the functionality and content of Johns Hopkins' campus portal to make it accessible by mobile devices such as cell phones, smartphones, and PDAs.
Microsoft revealed Friday that its code-named "Albany" project is a consumer-oriented hosted service that provides Excel, PowerPoint, and Word applications, as well as security and collaboration tools.
A group of publishers has filed suit in federal court to stop what it calls "widespread copyright infringement" at Georgia State University (GSU). The complaint, filed by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications and supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), charges that GSU administrators are violating the law by systematically enabling professors to provide students with digital copies of copyrighted course readings without publisher authorization.
Brigham Young University - Idaho (BYU - Idaho) has selected Jenzabar's Total Campus Management enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The suite the school will use includes Jenzabar CX, Jenzabar's Internet Campus Solution (JICS) and the Jenzabar Non-Traditional System (Jenzabar NTS).
Trent Batson urges social Web site developers to offer options for managing use for academic purposes.
The question about ePortfolios is no longer "What is it?" Now, it's "How can we do it?" A Web-based ePortfolio provides the answer.
Yale University is piloting a new program that brings integration between its open-source learning management system, Sakai, and its digital asset and digital rights management system, C-Labs from Cdigix. Yale has used the Web-based DAM/DRM tool since 2004 to deliver online digital media to students in about 400 courses.
Microsoft's acquisition bid for Yahoo, initiated at the end of January, today unleashed media reports suggesting that shifting coalitions are forming that could decide Yahoo's fate. However, it all could just be rumor associated with an increasingly harsh exchange stemming from Microsoft's unsolicited takeover proposal.
IBM revealed Wednesday that it will ship WebSphere Portal 6.1 this quarter (i.e. by the end of June) with new collaboration, administrative, deployment, and Web 2.0 features based on input gathered from some 4,000 beta testers. The company also announced that it's shipping three of its accelerators for WebSphere Portal this quarter.
As free-Tibet protesters continue their efforts to block passage of the Olympic torch on its way to Beijing for the opening of the Summer Games, one US campus has decided that the best approach to changing the course of history is by educating China's populace.
Milpitas, CA-based Mainsoft, known for its development-related interop software, released a new 2.2 version of Mainsoft for Java EETuesday that offers "full support" for ASP.NET 2.0 components for AJAX-type Web applications. The solution provides a "cross-platform development framework for the Java Virtual Machine [VM]," according to the company's announcement.
Students at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside can now enjoy file collaboration capabilities via a free software-and-service product from Microsoft called Office Live Workspace. The university, which last year outsourced its student e-mail accounts to Microsoft Live@edu, now offers students, faculty, and staff the ability to store, share, edit, and collaborate on documents in common Microsoft file formats.
Yahoo issued an announcement today that it plans to conduct a limited test of Google's ad search solution. Even though no commercial deal with Google has actually been made, Yahoo's announcement has already drawn the ire of Microsoft.
The Web Marketing Association this week released its 2008 Internet Standards Assessment Report (ISAR), an evaluation of some 15,000 sites, including universities and other educational institutions. The bad news? According to the WMA, "University sites have underperformed the five-year criteria benchmark averages in all areas." The good news?
Yahoo's board of directors got a letter from Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer over the weekend about Yahoo's slow response to Microsoft's proposed takeover bid. No yellow smiley face punctuated the end of it, judging from its tone.
Rush University has chosen Datatel Colleague and ActiveApply software to build an administrative system and enhance student recruitment efforts. The applications will replace a legacy administration system.
Indiana University's Center on Congress has selected ProtonMedia to be its development partner in the creation of a Virtual Congress, an online learning environment announced in 2007 that aims to give high school students an insider's view of representative democracy and help them understand their role as citizens.
Just months after forming a new center to manage digital scholarship, Johns Hopkins University has chosen a system from Kirtas Technologies for digitization work in the school's Sheridan Libraries. The collections form the major research library resources for the university and include rare and unique volumes, many that are deteriorating.
Web 2.0 apps, because they are popular and perceived as entertainment or fun, may on the surface seem inappropriate for education -- but in fact, they are learning spaces.
A quick update on two companies that are working toward the Semantic Web.
Campuses are starting to outsource e-mail services to popular Web 2.0 mail services such as Hotmail, gMail, Yahoo Mail, or others. Will various office functions also be outsourced? How far will outsourcing to the Web go?
IBM has released Lotus Quickr 8.1, an update to the company's collaborative learning tool. The new version adds Microsoft Outlook support and integration with Lotus Connections, among other enhancements.
Fuser.com, a free online tool that enables Internet users to consolidate their e-mail and social networking accounts into a single online inbox, announced the launch of Fuser MySpace. The application allows MySpace users to view Facebook messages and wall posts from their MySpace page. This application was developed under MySpace's new application development platform.
Ball State University's Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts and Animation is leveraging years of innovation in 3D animation and virtual applications to support the university's entry into Second Life. CT interviewed IDIAA director John Fillwalk.
Yahoo! announced Tuesday that it's joined forces with Google and MySpace to back OpenSocial, which aims to define a common API to allow social applications across multiple sites. Google, Yahoo!, and MySpace are also creating a non-profit foundation to "foster the continued open development of OpenSocial."
Laguardia Community College will host a conference in April on ePortfolios in higher education.
The Eclipse Foundation offered attendees at last week's EclipseCon 2008 conference an early look at plans for the next generation of its Eclipse distribution and platform: Eclipse 4.0, better known as "e4."
BEA Systems, a provider of enterprise infrastructure technology, announced the availability of WebLogic Portal 10.2 earlier this month. The solution is a Java-based portal for service-oriented infrastructure. It supports the creation of Web pages with dynamic content, as well as composite applications and Web 2.0 apps.
CodeGear has teamed up with Instantiations, a provider of software products, services and technologies for Eclipse, Java and Smalltalk. The companies plan to add Instantiations' Swing Designer visual layout tools to CodeGear's JBuilder integrated development environment (IDE). Swing Designer will be part of the JBuilder 2008 release, due in April from CodeGear, the development-tools arm of Borland Software Corp. JBuilder will be the first commercial Java IDE to integrate this technology, company representatives said.
Microsoft has added another nickel to its open source credibility bank this week with the announcement of its first collaboration with the Eclipse Foundation. The world's largest proprietary software maker and the non-profit host of the open source Eclipse project will work together to allow the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) to use Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), according to Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab.
Boston-based Nexaweb Technologies released the latest version of its integrated development environment (IDE) for the enterprise. Nexaweb Studio 4.0 provides a drag-and-drop development environment for the creation of dynamic Web applications. It can be used to create composite applications, mashups, and rich Internet applications (RIAs).
Adobe today began shipping Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server, a $40,000 (per CPU) system designed to integrate with Adobe Media Player and Adobe AIR software to "safeguard video content created for Adobe Flash technology against misuse." It's targeted mainly toward broadcasters and other media-focused organizations.
An examination of a thesis for a masters of science in art education, done in Second Life.
Yahoo is about to add semantic elements to search. For educators, evolution toward search based on meaning and not just a character-string is highly significant.
What technologies do researchers need at different phases of their projects? With new possibilities constantly emerging, it seems we must keep reconsidering all our options. Part of research now is not just doing our research, but keeping abreast of new collaboration technologies.
A chemical engineering student in Toronto faces expulsion from his school for running an online study group through Facebook. Chris Avenir, a first-year student at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, said he joined the social networking group in fall 2007 to get help with the homework in one of his chemistry classes. Eventually, he became the administrator for the network, which grew to include 146 students.
IBM announced new technology to secure "mashups," Web applications that pull information from multiple sources, such as Web sites, enterprise databases, or e-mails, to create one unified view. Mashups allow users to gain insight on complex situations but, as with all Web-based initiatives, security has been a concern.
IBM this month will release two new software updates focused on collaboration--Lotus Quickr 8.1 and Workplace Collaborative Learning 2.7. The company has also expanded its Information Server software platform with the introduction of IBM Information Server FastTrack, a new module for information integration projects.
Vanderbilt University has released a version of its homepage designed for the Apple iPhone. The site was created by the Vanderbilt News Service's Office of Web Communications, which is working to optimize the university Web site for other mobile devices.
CodeGear announced last week that it has released a new 1.1 version of 3rdRail, a Ruby on Rails integrated development environment that plugs into Eclipse.
The University of Texas has taken its Longhorns athletic events online to broaden the reach of its collegiate sporting programs to a much larger audience.
Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) is making its digital collection of 3,000 Oxford titles available through ebrary, a California-based company that offers an online content management platform for libraries and publishers. OSO is a subscription service providing digital versions of books published through Oxford University Press, the publishing arm of the University of Oxford.
Microsoft has just put the finishing touches on its Students to Business (S2B) portal, an initiative aimed at pairing American college students working toward IT careers with companies who are looking to fill entry-level IT positions.
Social networking sites aren't just for fun. In what may be the future for college recruiting efforts, some 300,000 students now use a social networking site called Zinch specifically to network with colleges. On Zinch, prospective students can enter a personal profile that gives colleges in-depth information well beyond grades and test scores. From the other side, Zinch says that more than 450 colleges and universities are using Zinch as a high-powered recruiting tool.
Microsoft Wednesday ushered in two highly anticipated betas for developers at its MIX08 conference in Las Vegas: the first public downloads of Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight 2. The company also released a slew of technology previews, including the Visual Studio 2008 tooling for Silverlight 2, Expression Studio 2 beta (which supports Silverlight 2) and an ASP.NET MVC Preview 2.
During the Gutenberg period, just ending, humanity valued printed works as the foundation of knowledge, and tended to believe knowledge is "owned" by an individual. We are just beginning to understand once again, with the Internet, that knowledge is communal.
Stoneware announced the integration of Apple's iTunes U with its virtualized Web desktop solution, WebOS. iTunes U allows colleges and universities a way to let students search, download and play education content just like they do music, movies, and TV shows. With the integration of iTunes U into the user's virtualized WebOS desktop, students can access applications, files, documents, educational podcasts and other content from a Web desktop that is accessible from anywhere.
Depending on your point of view, Twitter--an online social networking/micro-blogging service--is either a cool new way to connect with people or yet more online noise. But Twitter as an academic tool? In this interview, we talk with David Parry, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas at Dallas, who recently blogged about using Twitter in class.
In Web 2.0, the proliferation of Web services that create spaces and sites for learning continues to grow and add value.
After nearly three months of private beta testing involving about 100,000 users, Microsoft Office Live Workspace (OLW) is being rolled out worldwide as a full public beta. Previously, participants had to be qualified by Microsoft for the beta; now, as of today, it's open to all comers who wish to create workspaces. Coinciding with the public beta, Microsoft has also revved OLW with new features and enhancements and has kicked off a sweepstakes to build awareness for the service.
Microsoft has announced a new step forward for one of its Software as a Service (SaaS) initiatives, Microsoft Online Services, with online betas of Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Web 2.0 is changing the landscape of higher education IT and the application of learning technologies. Washington State University's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology Director Gary Brown explains why he thinks we're moving from collaborative learning environments (CLEs) and ePortfolios, to personal learning environments (PLEs) and worldware.
Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA has expanded its educational outreach with the creation of an ODU YouTube channel. The channel hosts videos featuring various aspects of the university, including academics and faculty, campus life, distance learning, and athletics. Among the current videos featured are faculty spotlights, an ONFilm Festival promo, virtual tours of forthcoming athletic facilities, and a helicopter tour of the campus.
Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada has deployed an online video portal that lets students view, index, annotate, remix, search, and share class lectures. Although the school has been offering streaming video for three years, the new portal, run on the Gotuit platform, implements more interactive features.
This week in San Francisco, Sun Microsystems is bringing together thought leaders in education from more than 30 countries for its annual Worldwide Education and Research Conference, this year themed, "The Power of Communities." Conference organizers are maximizing the reach of the conference through live broadcasts and blogs...
In a move that will let Web developers use their existing skills to build rich Internet applications for the desktop, smart clients and browsers, Adobe Systems Monday released the first version of its widely anticipated AIR cross-operating system runtime, along with updates to its Flex framework for Windows and Mac OS X platforms.
McLean, VA-based Advanced Modeling Concepts recently released a Java security tool designed to help developers add security to existing Java applications. The product adds role-based access control (RBAC) security via a tool called AfterthoughtSoft-Secure.
The first public beta of Silverlight 2.0 is expected from Microsoft in the next few weeks. By all accounts, those that have seen the private beta report that the features outlined by the General Manager of Microsoft's Developer Division, Scott Guthrie, in a November blog posting are pretty much on track.
Free DNS service provider OpenDNS has launched its new, free Web filtering solution targeted toward education. The service taps into the expertise of IT professionals to create categories of Web sites that can be blocked by administrators with the click of a button (or two).
Web 1.0 allowed us to replace mental hyperlinks with digital hyperlinks. Now, Web 2.0 helps us tag knowledge objects on the fly as a kind of personalized -- and variable -- cataloging. As we look ahead, the semantic Web, or "Web 3.0," is emerging and semantic Web sites help us do the tagging.
Is there hope for surviving the fire hose of Web 2.0? Will we reach a tipping point in 2008 or 2009 where the creative burst will be balanced by organizing and managing technologies? It's the tech award and prediction season, so let's check out what's going on.
IBM announced Thursday that its commercial mashup software Lotus Mashups will be made free for academic users when it's released later this year. The move is part of the company's plan to expand its Academic Initiative in 2008.
In an effort to promote expertise in Web 2.0 application development among the next generation of IT professionals, IBM has teamed up with two universities--University of California, Los Angeles and North Carolina State University--to provide support for academic programs teaching programming using open technologies like Groovy and Java in conjunction with Eclipse and Ruby on Rails. IBM also said it will be providing its previously announced Lotus Mashups software free to the academic community later this year.
Denodo Technologies this week released the latest version of its flagship platform to create enterprise "data mashups." The Palo Alto, CA-based enterprise software maker is billing the release as "the industry's only unified data integration platform."
In a move that could help deliver single sign-on to the masses, Google, Microsoft, IBM, VeriSign and Yahoo have joined a consortium that backs a common federated identity specification. The vendors jointly announced their membership to the OpenID Foundation's board Feb. 7. The OpenID spec allows individuals to create one user name, password, and other credentials for logging onto multiple Web sites that support the spec.
Iowa's Mount Mercy College has selected an integrated suite from SunGard as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. In a recent statement, the campus said it will deploy SunGard's PowerCAMPUS Unified Digital Campus (UDC) to help it achieve its vision of becoming a university by 2015.
The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) will be extending its distance learning and online collaborative efforts across all 14 universities in its system. The initiative includes a contract with Wimba to deploy its Wimba Collaboration Suite system-wide for collaboration between students and faculty outside of traditional settings.
Just what is "people-powered security?" It's how OpenDNS describes its forthcoming Web filtering solution targeted toward education. The service, set to launch later this month, taps into the expertise of IT professionals in schools (and in the private sector) to create a sort of reverse social tagging, blocking potentially dangerous sites based on users' experiences. Like all of OpenDNS' services, this new one is free, including support for deployment and integration in existing campus infrastructures.
JumpBox this week released JumpBox for PmWiki, a bundled software tool that combines support for virtual computing environments with open-source wiki functionality.
Malicious Flash banner ads have been surfacing on major web sites including Expedia.com, Rhapsody.com and MayoClinic.com in the last month, according to media reports. Users who click on the banners, which advertise a digital music service, a student dating service, and disk cleaning software, are redirected to Web sites that proceed to install malware on their PCs.
Red Sweater Software has released an update to MarsEdit, a blog editing tool for Mac OS X. The new 2.1.1 release, posted Monday, includes several enhancements to tagging posts, previewing content, and managing blog entry drafts.
The Apache Software Foundation Tuesday ratcheted up the project status of its open source Apache Synapse enterprise service bus (ESB) technology. The Foundation established Apache Synapse as a Top-Level Project, boosting it from subproject status under Apache Web Services.
Mobile broadband, collaborative Web technologies, and mashups will all significantly impact education over the next five years, along with "grassroots" video, collective intelligence, and "social operating systems." This according to a new report released this week by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, the 2008 Horizon Report.
Hyperic is offering a new version of its open source management solution for large-scale hosted Web applications. Hyperic HQ 3.2 incorporates improved monitoring and reporting features. It also supports migration options for those using popular open source management solutions such as Nagios.
Microsoft today has made a surprise bid to acquire Yahoo Inc. for a $44.6 billion, a 62 percent premium over the company's closing share price Thursday.
After a more than week-long crash of a server hosting two of its inexpensive Web-based services, Strongspace and BingoDisk, Joyent is taking steps to address customer complaints following the outages--and taking both applications open source.
Education technology provider Panopto has released an update to its lecture capture and streaming tool, CourseCast. The latest version, CourseCast 1.5, adds several enhancements in the areas of lecture distribution, editing, and workflow. It remains free for educators through the Socrates Project, which provides access in exchange for participation in the software's ongoing development efforts.
WSO2 is offering a new open source mashup server and has rolled out a beta of a new hosted mashup service. Both fall under Apache open source licensing and the WSO2 Mashup Server 1.0 represents "the first open source [server] solution for mashups," according to Jonathan Marsh, WSO2's director of mashups.
IBM has unveiled several new collaboration tools and Web 2.0 technologies, including IBM Lotus Mashups, a forthcoming commercial mashup maker designed to allow "non-technical users to easily create enterprise mashups." At the Lotusphere conference in Florida last Wednesday, the company also introduced new versions of Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr, a rich collaboration tool.
Content management system developer Systems Alliance Tuesday launched a new version of its flagship Web CMS SiteExecutive. The latest release, version 4, includes expanded support for mobile devices for content delivery and multiple platforms for content authoring and also adds new optimization features.
Adobe has released two new full version upgrades in its Flash Media Server line: Flash Media Streaming Server 3 and Flash Media Interactive Server 3. The latest versions, released Jan. 25, both include "major" performance gains and additional security enhancements for content delivery. They also add MPEG-4 support in the form of H.264 video and High-Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio.
With the seemingly exponential growth of Web 2.0 technologies, IT professionals in education--and all other sectors, for that matter--face new challenges as control over technology slips away and moves into the hands of users.
IT security firm Sophos this week let the cat out of the bag, spilled the beans, and otherwise debunked the widely treasured myth that Macs are invulnerable to malware in its "Security Threat Report 2008," released Tuesday. The report said that, among other things, "in 2007 [organized] criminal gangs for the first time arrived at Apple's doorstep with the intention of stealing money." Proof, the firm said, that "hackers are extending their efforts beyond Windows."
Speaking to a standing-room only crowd at FETC 2008 in Orlando, FL Thursday, presenters Ann Barron, James Welsh, James Takacs and Luis Perez--all from the University of South Florida (USF)--shared their insights on planning, producing, and administering the university's educational podcasts, hosted through Apple's service, iTunes U.
Zend Technologies Wednesday launched its PHP-based Web application server, Zend Platform 3.6, as a general-availability product, while simultaneously announcing the immediate availability of Zend Studio for Eclipse, its IDE plug-in for PHP development.
Time to unplug the mainframe? Just what do you do with that big black box with all of its gear and software--especially if it's only three years old and still running in the data center? That was the dilemma faced by Palm Beach Community College in Lake Worth, FL when it outgrew its IBM z890 mainframe. Why, if you have nerves of steel, you auction it off on eBay, of course.
Web developers who use the increasingly popular combo of the Ruby programming language with the Rails framework, better known as Ruby on Rails, now have an open source framework for providing and/or consuming Web services. WSO2's newly released Web Services Framework for Ruby (WSF/Ruby) is the first Ruby extension to support the WS-* specifications, which include the SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM), WS-Addressing, WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, and WS-Reliable Messaging.
A years-long project at Ball State University to digitize a huge range of content is using advanced encoding technology and digital rights management (DRM) to help manage and make available thousands of hours of content stored in its libraries. The university has also recently expanded its digital offerings to include high-definition TV.
In December, I wrote about Internet Explorer 8's ability to properly render the Acid2 test. Many current or upcoming browser releases are able to successfully process Acid2. However, the bar is about to be raised again. Since April 2007, the Web Standards Project has been designing Acid3 to be the next rendering milestone for modern browsers.
For the last 10 days, Sausalito, CA-based online document and storage hosting company Joyent struggled to get its online secure document collaboration service, Strongspace, back online.
Research and education organization the SANS Institute this week revealed its list of the top menaces facing IT in the coming year. Echoing earlier reports from security watchdog organizations, the group's "Top-10 Cyber Security Menaces for 2008" cited Web 2.0 technologies, converged devices, botnets, and browser addons among the worst, with a heavy emphasis on consumerized technologies and the vulnerabilities they present.
Xignite is offering subscribers an on-demand service that lets users create custom business applications via a Web services mashup platform. The platform, called Xignite Splice, enables composite Web services applications to be built using a visual development environment.
Newsgator, one of the earliest entrants into the RSS and aggregated content reader business, has decided to offer its latest generation of client tools for free. That includes NetNewsWire 3.1, a Mac reader; FeedDemon 2.6, a PC reader; and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0, a mobile reader. The company is also offering a free version of NewsGator Inbox, which delivers RSS feeds to Microsoft Outlook folders.
Is podcasting spreading like wildfire across campuses, or does it just seem like it? Can good podcasts on your school's site boost enrollment? How can educators get started in podcasting on a budget? What's the first rule to follow in considering whether or not to create a podcast?
A Syracuse University associate professor introduced a new program that gives people a simple way to do file sharing among digital devices. Syracuse University School of Information Studies Associate Professor Lee McKnight debuted Innovaticus during the International Consumer Electronics Show last week. The software lets users set up a grid of devices--computers, cell phones, printers, and even MP3 players--to collaborate and share files and hardware using devices across multiple networks, wired and wireless. Users with access to that grid could drag and drop files from one device to another, whether it was local or around the world.
A new Web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online got a nod of fame last week when it was referenced in The Washington Times profile of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, which the paper called "at the forefront of the new wave of collecting history." The free, open-source platform is named Omeka, a Swahili word meaning "to display or lay out goods or wares; to speak out; to spread out; to unpack."
SpringSource is offering the final release of Spring.NET 1.1. The framework, which apparently was released early last month, lets .NET developers use some of the features that are currently available in the open source Java-based Spring Framework.
The debate continues over just how useful virtual worlds like Second Life are for educational purposes. We spoke with Drexel University's Jean-Claude Bradley, who is e-learning coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences, and an associate professor of chemistry. Despite his initial skepticism, in 2007 Bradley helped establish Drexel's presence in Second Life, Drexel Island, and used Second Life last semester to augment portions of his Introduction to Organic Chemistry course. He has blogged extensively about his use of the medium. Here, he discusses the benefits--and drawbacks--of the much-discussed virtual world.
Project Zero (an IBM incubator project) is an extension of the Eclipse open source Java programming IDE. It allows Java programmers to use a familiar development environment to create dynamic Web applications. While the project is supported by a "community," much like open source efforts, the aim of Project Zero is commercial, with IBM counting on getting feedback from developers in the mean time.
Eclipse and Java coders are being offered a helping hand with their component assembly challenges from a new company with a fledgling free service. The Web-based Cloudsmith service, from the company of the same name, is designed to streamline component assembly across multiple sources. It helps developers cobble components directly from the Internet, or "the cloud"--that global pool of connected computers drawn as lump on countless whiteboards.
Billy Hoffman gave a talk on advanced AJAX security at the recent Google Web Toolkit (GWT) conference in San Francisco. Hoffman manages HP Security Labs, which was SPIDynamics until HP acquired it this year, along with Hoffman. He focuses on automated discovery of Web application vulnerabilities and Web crawling technologies.
WaveMaker Software unveiled two new developer solutions this week: WaveMaker Visual Assembly Studio and WaveMaker Rapid Deployment Framework for Enterprise Web 2.0. The former is designed to provide enterprise departmental developers with a visual dev tool for building data-driven Web apps. The latter enables those apps to be deployed to industry-standard Java app servers.
IBM has added two new Web services to its alphaWorks Web site, which provides "sneak previews" of the kind of technologies that are being contemplated at IBM research and development labs. The new Web services include IBM Sharable Code, a platform for managing Web 2.0-type mashup applications, and IBM Web Highlights.
Roxbury Community College is beefing up its enrollment and constituent relationship management efforts. The college, located in Roxbury Crossing, near Boston, has signed on to use portal and CRM solutions from Jenzabar, as well as the Informz Text Messaging solution.
Red Hat today began shipping a new application integrated development environment (IDE) that combines both tooling and runtime. JBoss Developer Studio Eclipse is an Eclipse-based IDE bundled with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Network. It also includes tooling for Java EE, the JBoss Seam app framework, AJAX, Hibernate, Persistence, JBoss jPBM, Struts and the Spring IDE.
To better understand the views, attitudes, and usage of various technologies and brands among college students, Eduventures conducted research of 18- to 24-year-old students enrolled full-time at a four-year college or university via a Web survey.
A federal judge has denied a petition by Facebook Inc. to force a Harvard alumni magazine to take down documents pertaining to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, the Associated Press reported. The documents, including Zuckerberg's Harvard College application, a personal diary, and an e-mail he wrote to the college admissions office, are part of a court battle between Facebook and ConnectU, a social networking site founded by Harvard students where Zuckerberg worked before he went on to found Facebook.
Microsoft has begun a full rollout of the private beta of its Live Office Workspace. OLW, unveiled earlier this year, is a Web-based feature of Microsoft Office that allows for collaboration and sharing of documents. The technologies included in OLW have already been rolled into Microsoft's Live@edu, a portal, communications, and collaboration suite for education.
ChitChat has launched a new online tool for educators. Dubbed the "Educational Network," the service provides free online hosting for class Web pages and multimedia content and allows educators to share materials with one another.
The NetBeans community has released the latest build of its open source, Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) with, among other new features, a dual-licensing scheme. NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is licensed under both the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 with ClassPath exception and Sun Microsystems' Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). NetBeans creator and primary corporate sponsor Sun Microsystems proposed adding the GPL license option.
For nearly a decade, Macromedia's Flash (now an Adobe product) has been the de facto standard for Web animation. It's in widespread use across the Web. Recently, Microsoft introduced its Silverlight platform, a competitor to Adobe's Flash and a few similar technologies.
Enterprise open source software provider SpringSource (formerly known as Interface21) has released Spring Framework 2.5, the latest upgrade to its Java/J2EE application framework.
It just got a little easier for developers using Microsoft's .NET Framework technology and SharePoint to integrate their .NET applications with IBM's Java-based portal technology. In a global reseller deal, IBM agreed to sell Mainsoft Corp.'s .NET Extensions solution with the IBM WebSphere Portal solution.
Continuing and professional education (CPE) sites are somewhat effective at helping students with their enrollment decisions, but they're lacking in some key functionality areas: content, search capabilities, and multimedia. In the second of its three-part series of research reports, "Optimizing School Web Sites as a Marketing and Recruitment Tool," education consultancy Eduventures found that prospective continuing education students in large part think these sites come up short in areas they consider crucial and made specific recommendations for the types of content that should be added to these sites to boost their effectiveness.
The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) is expanding its e-learning activities by developing online and hybrid programs in health care. The move will help alleviate what the college described as a "backlog of potential students who previously were prevented from enrolling due to limited classroom space." The initiative includes new online nursing, paramedic, and medical lab technician programs.
Researchers in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new Web-based technology that's designed to take recorded classroom lectures to the next level. The technology, developed by a team led by MIT's Regina Barzilay and James Glass, provides search functionality for classroom video recordings. At present, the prototype only works with MIT's online lectures made available to the public through the university's OpenCourseWare initiative, but it may be made available to other institutions in the future.
Software AG recently unveiled Natural for AJAX, a variant of Software AG's Natural 2006 programming language. Natural 2006 is typically used at the enterprise level for transactional systems running on mainframes.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (also known as Virginia Tech) is enhancing its Web presence in an effort to improve communications, offer new services, and provide autonomy to schools and departments at the university to create and reuse content. For the Web upgrade, Virginia Tech is deploying Percussion Software's Rhythmyx Web Content Management system.
Palo Alto-based Symphoniq Corp. has teamed with Seattle-based F5 to address application delivery problems on the client side--something that may not be well tracked by network administrators. Under a partnership deal, Symphoniq's TrueView Express client monitoring solution has been incorporated into F5's BIG-IP application delivery controller solution.
Students at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, the only liberal arts university in the world for the deaf and hard of hearing, are benefiting from lecture capture software that includes closed captioning. That lets students view videos of lectures on demand, complete with text captions along the bottom of the screen.
Professional Web designers are skillful in creating integrated sites that make use of a range of technical functions, such as virtual tours, online chats and podcast downloads, as well as informational formats, including text, graphics, pictures, and so on. Eduventures explores what preferences prospective students have around these functions and formats.
Google's attempt to grab moral high ground in the social networking development is a step in the right direction, according to industry analysts.
Just how much priority should admissions sites be given? For prospective students, they're crucial, trusted, and highly utilized sources of information. But according to new research from education consultancy Eduventures, higher ed admissions departments give them a much lower priority--at least in terms of budgeting.
As increasing numbers of enterprises climb aboard the Web 2.0 bandwagon, it's more important than ever for software developers to keep security in mind during the development process. So says Danny Allan, director of security research at Watchfire, the Waltham, MA-based Web-app security company acquired by IBM in July. Allan was in Santa Clara, CA to speak at this year's AjaxWorld show, and he took a few minutes to talk with me before his presentation.
SAP AG signaled its commitment to open solutions in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) space last week with a couple of announcements.
The National Transcript Center (NTC) reported late last week that five states have adopted its preK-20 electronic transcript exchange system over the last year. These include Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming. NTC handled the development and deployment of the records systems.
Mineral Area College in Missouri is deploying Jenzabar EX Total Campus Management. INTEC, signing on for licenses for Jenzabar's ERP, portal, and learning management solutions to improve administrative efficiencies and supplement learning the school's traditional learning techniques with online technologies.
Audio and even video capture of lectures is becoming more common on college campuses, which post the material to their Web sites so that students can revisit a lecture after the fact. But Drexel University....
The University of Northern Iowa, like a large number of universities in recent months, is deploying a classroom capture system to record lectures and make them available via the Internet. This one, though, is being used not only to provide access for UNI's students but also for an audience of K-12 teachers who will use the content to further their professional development.
Online plagiarism detection service DOC Cop has expanded its offerings again, adding support for PDF files to its free document checking tools. This includes the ability to check PDF files against other PDFs or against Word documents.
iTunes U, the education portal within Apple's iTunes, has expanded its content to include educational materials from sources beyond colleges and universities, including Smithsonian Global Sound, KQED, Little Kids Rock, and the Museum of Modern Art. The most recent addition to the expanded content area, known as Beyond Campus, is American Public Media, which is making its radio programming available free for educational purposes.
The University of California, Los Angeles is continuing its phased deployment of IP audio encoders for its classrooms. According to information released this week by Barix, the vendor supplying the Interstreamer encoding systems, UCLA's Office of Instructional Development has so far installed the devices in 43 classrooms, with plans for 200 classroom installations eventually.
University of California, Berkeley this began making its course lectures and special events freely available on YouTube. At present, this amounts to more than 300 hours of captured courses and events. The university said it will continue to expand the volume and range of videos it makes available to the public.
The Eclipse Foundation released version 1.0 of the Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform (RAP). The organization is billing this toolset as the first AJAX platform that allows developers to create rich Internet applications (RIAs) using the Eclipse component model.
It was about 14 months ago that Apple first previewed Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") at its 2006 Worldwide Developers Conference. Now, following delays reportedly resulting from resources shifting to iPhone development, the company has announced a release date for the new OS: Oct. 26 at 6 p.m. Coinciding with the release is Mac OS X Leopard Server, which includes the first commercial CalDAV calendar server, along with Wiki Server and Podcast Producer.
In an effort to shift virtual worlds to the broader realm of the World Wide Web, Linden Lab and IBM are partnering to bring open standards and interoperability to Second Life, the online 3D realm created by Linden Lab. The two will also be working with a broad range of industry partners and have discussed the formation of an open consortium for all comers to engage in the effort.
Halyard Education Partners has launched a new forum for marketing and student affairs professionals in education: EDUInsight. The site is designed as an interactive venue where these professionals can share best practices best practices in recruiting, retention, communications, and electronic learning.
Robotics has become the standard bearer in STEM education as high schools, colleges, and universities around the world focus their software and hardware engineering efforts on inventing better and better machines and ultimately plunge their creations into the underworld of robotics competitions. Now a new site has been launched to promote the educational value of robotics and robotics competitions and provide resources for students and educators.
The ever-nebulous "Web 2.0" is emerging as one of the five top security risks to watch for both consumers and the enterprise--this according to the inaugural edition of the "GTISC Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2008" out of Georgia Tech's Information Security Center. The report, released at the GTISC Security Summit on Emerging Cyber Security Threats and Countermeasures, identifies the key data security threats that are likely to expand and evolve in the coming year.
Instituto Tecnologico de Santo Domingo (INTEC) in the Dominican Republic is deploying an ERP solution from Jenzabar called Jenzabar EX Total Campus Management. INTEC, a non-profit university, had previously been using systems developed in house. The university will implement the Jenzabar EX student suite, as well as the Jenzabar Internet Campus Solution, over the next two years.
Giving people the ability to update their slice of the campus website doesn't sound like a revolutionary idea--at least not in an era ruled by mass participation in social networks, the sharing of mashups, and the craze to add widgets to personal websites.
Test preparation company PowerScores' new Virtual LSAT Course will begin instruction in October for the Dec. 1 LSAT test. While PowerScore holds onsite test instruction, the online course offers students across the globe the chance to prepare remotely for the test from their homes or offices.
At Western Oklahoma State College, students in a single classroom, with one instructor present, can be taking either of two introductory algebra classes. That's just one of the advantages the college has discovered in offering computerized online instruction to augment several of its developmental mathematics courses.
Social Web hotspot Facebook is the focus of a new course at Stanford this semester designed to teach both techies and non-science majors how to build "engaging Web applications." In fact, the name of the course is called--in Learning Annex-style--"Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook."
Georgia Tech librarian Brian Matthews has teamed up with GT computer science professor Blaire MacIntyre to develop a space in the Second Life virtual world from which students could "check out" land parcels in order "to hang out, explore, and learn the basics of the software."
In a study of more than 1 million spam e-mails, computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego have concluded that most scams are hosted by individual Web servers even though thousands of compromised computers might be used to relay spam to end users.
AccessMyLibrary is now providing students and educators returning to school with free Web access to almost 30 million online articles from a collection of more than 4,000 publications.
A shortage of physicians in rural areas isn't a problem unique to Canada, but the highly sophisticated technology solution that the University of British Columbia has set up to solve it may well be.
Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC) will use a variety of solutions from Datatel to provide a centralized student finance and HR database and to create an online application and registration system. The community college will use Datatel's Colleague Student, Financing, and Human Resources to centralize its data to improve efficiency in enrollment, student services, financial management, financial aid, and human resources.
Duke University will use Tizra's Agile PDF hosted white label service to repackage, deliver, and sell textbook content in electronic formats.
Lehigh University has added a virtual class to its curriculum this fall called Bioscience in the 21st century. The multidisciplinary class is designed to allow anyone interested to watch lectures and study course material or PowerPoint presentations posted on the university's website for free. Lectures are also available from iTunes U, according to Lehigh University.
In the past five years, social networking has rocketed from a leisure activity to a "phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users," according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit that follows the impact of the internet in differing social environments. In a recent national survey on teenagers and social networking conducted by Pew, more than half of all online American youth ages 12 to 17— 55 percent to be precise—are heading to online social networking sites. What does this mean for higher ed? Simply this: Your incoming students are now expecting a presence of your college or university on social networking sites.
Drexel University will collaborate with the University of Michigan and Florida State University to help transform its 10-year-old Internet Public Library (IPL) into a "virtual teaching and learning laboratory for digital reference," the university announced.
Software on demand provider Velaro is ramping up its Academic Live Help Initiative by making its services available to the higher ed community as a whole. The company currently provides live help services to a number of universities.
LectureShare has debuted its free online course management system (CMS) at lectureshare.com, which lets instructors upload class announcements, documents, and audio and video files.
University of California, Berkeley has mounted a publicity campaign to warn its incoming freshman class of the consequences of downloading copyrighted music. The message of the campaign is "Learn Before You Burn" and is directed at the 95 percent of incoming freshman who own computers and may have not been aware that most music is not, in fact, free.
A new service has been launched to help instructors in both higher education and K-12 institutions detect plagiarized work submitted by students. The service, DOC Cop, is an entirely Web-based tool that provides free and automated assistance in locating "source material" (ahem) used in assignments submitted to teachers.
With an $8,000 investment, Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy has set up the capability to provide video podcasts for courses that enable students to watch lectures they may have missed or that warrant review.
The State University of New York-Maritime College this fall will debut two new online courses developed in collaboration with The History Channel. Both courses are to be based around History Channel television series and will be offered for credit, marking the first time The History Channel has developed a course for college credit.
Researchers at the U.K.'s Bath University have developed a tool that uses the unique electronic IDs of Bluetooth devices, such as a mobile phone, to map the physical paths of friendship networks, the BBC reported.
The Library of Congress announced $2.5 million in grants for projects to establish digital format standards for preserving photos, films, music, and video games. The funding covers eight organizations involved in significant digital content projects, including UCLA's Film and Television Archive and the "Preserving Virtual Worlds" project at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Penn Libraries, the University of Pennsylvania Library system, is embarking on a project to digitize its special collections, including rare books and historical documents. The project will kick off this summer and culminate in a fully searchable collection of rare books online.
The University of Oklahoma will deploy Day Software's Communiqué, an enterprise Web content management suite, to help revamp the school's various portals for students, staff, and alumni.
Whatever else your students are doing on the Internet, they are using it for educational purposes as well. According to a study released last week by Houghton Mifflin, more than half of college students use the Internet "to keep up with course work and prepare for exams."
Columbia Southern University has launched a new online service for its alumni. Dubbed "CSU Click," the service provides social networking functionality for the school's graduates at no charge.
Yahoo! will open an office in University of Illinois's home town of Urbana-Champaign. The office, which will pursue a cross-section of the Web giant's operations and business interests, will employ about 100 engineers, according to Ken Timmons, vice president of operations for Yahoo!
Three teams of University of Illinois computer science students are spending the summer trying to launch their own companies with the help of an internship that requires them to pitch their own software or web based services to potential investors.
Online higher education information provider College Toolkit (Brooklyn, NY) has partnered with SimpleTuition (Newton, MA) to provide online research tools to help students and parents visiting collegetookit.com analyze and compare student loan options using Simple Tuition's service.
Indiana University's alliance with search firm ChaCha, announced last week, may portend how universities, librarians, and Internet search engines will work together in the future.
Google Inc. announced it would make two new services available to the higher education research community--access to Web search and machine translations--as part of a new University Research Programs effort. The search firm made the announcement at its higher ed Faculty Summit held July 26 to 27 in Mountain View, CA.
Computer programming is not just for grownups anymore, thanks to developers at the MIT Media Lab. Researchers in the Lab's "Lifelong Kindergarten Group" have created a program called Scratch, a graphical programming language that is designed to be used by programming novices, including children and teens.
Earlier we reported that Indiana University has partnered with Internet search service ChaCha, also based in Indiana, to create an alliance for developing research tools and services via the Web. Since then, we've had a chance to speak with Brad Wheeler, vice president for information technology at IU, to provide some clarification on the move, including information that contradicts other reports out there.
More than a dozen colleges and universities have joined the ranks of campuses using technology from Xythos Software to collaborate with, store, share and manage their documents.
The University of Southern California has launched TrojanTV All-Access, a multimedia website featuring a variety of Trojan Athletics content ranging from live broadcasts of games, video archives or previous games, a talk show, and other original programs for Trojan fans across the 'Net.
Virginia's Hampton University (HU) will deploy technology from higher education customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Intelliworks to streamline communications with prospective and current students.
As Director of the Student Records Office for the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse, I oversee the processing of a vast mass of student data--who's who, who's where, and who's taking what course from whom.
Half of a group of prospective college students who said they would be interested in taking an online course in the next 12 months also said they would like to enroll in a completely online degree program, according to a recent survey conducted by the American InterContinental University Online.
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (Daytona Beach, FL) has debuted EagleVision, a Web-enabled, collaborative virtual classroom designed for aviation and aeronautical education.
Learning management provider Blackboard is expanding its "Greenhouse" initiative into the area of immersive virtual learning. Through a new program, called the Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds, a single recipient will receive a $25,000 for the integration of virtual worlds into teaching and learning.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) plans to introduce a new amendment to the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act requiring a number of universities to police and report uses of illegal file sharing on its campuses.
The University of New Orleans will begin offering classes this fall on a virtual campus in Second Life. There are currently about 6.5 million people who circulate in the electronic community.
The uPortal project to develop a free, sharable Web portal for higher education won the 2007 Catalyst award, given by the Educause association for innovation and excellence in campus IT.
The United States Senate today voted in favor of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (SB 1642) 95 to 0 without the previously reported amendment that would have held universities accountable for illegal file sharing on their networks.
A years-long project at Ball State University to digitize a huge range of content is being expanded to include high-definition TV in its offerings.
Oxford University has begun fining students whose Facebook profiles contain pictures of "trashings," a flavor of rowdiness that Oxford undergraduates indulge in after final exams. Trashings involve getting covered in eggs and flour by fellow revelers. The fines range from $80 to $200, according to an Associated Press report.
One of the discussions I have been in for the last week or two has been about the growing use within academia of MySpace information for what verges on "official" purposes.
The Texas Tech University System (TTUS) is in the middle of a four-year implementation of a project called ConnecTech, which is designed to integrate information systems within the TTUS enterprise. As part of the program, the university system has adopted various technologies from SunGard Higher Education, a provider of enterprise solutions for higher education.
The California Community College System (CCCS) is deploying an enterprise-wide Web conferencing solution from Elluminate called Elluminate Live! CCCS is the largest higher education system in the world.
Eight colleges and universities have recently adopted Live Classroom, a collaboration tool designed for higher education that allows institutions to build virtual classrooms and conduct courses online.
Lindenwood University in Missouri has partnered with ed tech provider ConnectEdu to deploy Connect!, an online portal system designed for education. The university will use Connect! to help Missouri students and parents prepare for college and to begin accepting electronic applications.
Answering the prayers of those who like to look at mouse brains, Duke University's Center for In Vivo Microscopy last week posted the results of new advances in magnetic resonance imaging, showing off high-resolution 3D images of mouse brains, including a genetically modified mouse brain.
You're sitting on a pile of about a million telescopic photos of the universe, and each one needs to be classified. Bit of a job. So what do you do? Astronomers at the University of Portsmouth, Oxford University, and Johns Hopkins University came up with a solution last week that not only alleviated the burden but also generated an enthusiastic response from the public: They opened up the project to volunteers via the Internet.
Does the Internet predict the future? Are bloggers and wiki posters psychic, delivering news before it happens? Or are traditional media outlets like newspapers and television just getting scooped and refusing to accept that news can occur before they report it?
In the same vein as YouTube, SciTalks.com (Boston, MA) has launched a searchable online collection of science lecture video files from across the world. Currently 1,000 lectures are online, with new videos being added daily.
With roughly half a million pages of content on more than 500 well used Web sites, Temple University faced a huge challenge in getting content management under control.
Maryland's Towson University has formed a partnership with the United States Department of Commerce's National Technical Information Service to offer U.S. government employees discounts on Towson's professional online education programs.
Information technology researchers and executives from around the Middle East convened in Qatar recently to participate in an "Arabic Search Engine Workshop" hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMUQ).
The University of Notre Dame is revamping its alumni relations with social networking and online engagement capabilities, which it will provide to roughly 120,000 graduates in more than 300 alumni clubs, classes and affinity groups.
Colleges and universities around the country are continuing to rapidly adopt or upgrade their electronic and wireless messaging systems for campus emergency alerts in the wake of the Virginia Tech mass murder.
The University of Washington last week said it would charge students it detects are illegally downloading music with copyright violations on behalf of the recording industry.
Loyola University Chicago recently revamped its website’s organization and features in an attempt to target and attract prospective students. According to Loyola, 77.8 percent of freshman its applications were received online, and the majority of the current freshman class was chosen from online applicants.
A recent question posed to the college and university webmasters list, UWEBD, asked the list subscribers to share their latest expertise and stories about the production and publication of campus maps. Not surprisingly, the ensuing discussion was enlightening. I'll share some of it here.
As the Internet rapidly reshapes how scholarly information is disseminated at colleges and universities, an open-source, open-community initiative at Rice University in Houston may portend the future.
Universities can now provide social networks to create closer, more intimate relationships with prospective students via eXpressNet from TargetX, a Bristol, PA-based provider of higher education marketing tools and services.
Today's students have little patience for trudging to the library and researching a question on paper. For better or worse, they're far more likely to jump online and use tools like Google and Wikipedia to try to find answers quickly.
Santa Clara University is debuting its new library--even though it won't be finished until next fall--in Second Life, the online virtual community.
Google Inc. announced a deal last week to digitize portions of the libraries of 12 major universities--nearly 10 million books and periodicals--as part of its book scanning project.
Internet2, the higher education research consortium, is working with a student-managed television network to produce a film festival that will showcase films solely on the Internet.
Christopher Soghoian, a grad student at Indiana University's School of Informatics, has discovered a security flaw associated a number of big-name commercial extensions to the Firefox Web browser.
A free product that helps make writing assignments less subjective and more understandable to students is saving Santa Ana College Professor John Howe huge amounts of time and helping him grade writing assignments much more consistently.
A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University has found a way to turn the process by which people register at commercial websites into a method for digitizing books, the Associated Press reported.
Administrators from the University of California at Los Angeles are disputing the validity of data used by two congressional committees to identify universities that allowed the most illegal downloading of movie and music content on their campuses.
Apple has launched a new iTunes feature called iTunes U, a new department in the iTunes Store that provides free education resources from American colleges and universities. The idea is to share resources from these campuses, such as lectures and research, free of charge.
The Supreme Court of British Columbia has ordered Vancouver University Worldwide (VUW) to stop granting degrees in the province. The court had upheld a suit by the B.C. provincial government that argued that for profit distance education provider VUW was breaking the province's Degree Authorization Act by offering degrees without authorization.
Drexel University and Internet service provider EarthLink Inc. struck a deal to extend the boundaries of its wireless network so that students, faculty, and staff can access university resources or browse the Internet via EarthLink's Wi-Fi networks.
Google said it would ban advertisements for essay-writing services in an effort to help cut down on campus plagiarism. As part of the ban, Google will not accept ads from companies that sell essays, theses, and dissertations.
Google has licensed remote sensing technology developed by a team of Stanford University students to help it compete with Microsoft in the race to build the best photographic Web map of the planet Earth, according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News.
Peirce College is accelerating its Web applications with Crescendo Networks. The Philadelphia, PA college is using Crescendo's Maestro Application Front End to accelerate Java and ASP services on a student portal that's expected to launch by the end of this quarter.
The University of Washington, in an effort to improve access to classroom materials for students, has deployed IP-based audio encoding devices throughout 24 classrooms, standardizing on Barix Instreamers.
Educational software developer Plato Learning recently announced the release of Academic Systems Algebra, a three-course math program designed for entry-level college students. Courses include pre-algebra, elementary algebra, and intermediate algebra, al designed to prepare students for college level courses, according to Plato.
I became involved with hybrid teaching simply as a common-sense approach to the challenge of transitioning traditional faculty from classroom to online learning environments while I was director of a center for instructional technology at a university in the South.
The City University of New York (CUNY) has purchased a software suite to help automate its help desk services. The school, the country's largest urban public university, with 23 institutions, picked the RightAnswers site to drive self-service initiatives across all its service desks.
Ohio University boasted that, following crackdown, illegal file sharing via its campus networks has been eradicated. University CIO Brice Bible said that illegal file-sharing on the university's network had "virtually stopped," according to a report in the Athens (OH) Times.
A statewide initiative launched in Mississippi will bring Blackboard's CMS and LOM systems to 15 community and junior colleges. The program was initiated by the Mississippi State Board for Community and Junior Colleges.
Howard Community College in Maryland was looking for a way to transform its website into a more user-centric information vehicle that was also designed with security in mind. The college announced this week that it has done that with SiteExecutive from Systems Alliance.
Pearson said this week that it plans to acquire eCollege, an online distance education provider. The deal will cost Pearson $477 million net, including the agreed $41 million sale of eCollege's Datamark division to a group of investors. The acquisition is expected to take place next quarter and has not yet been approved by shareholders.
Like most medical residents, Paul Sucgang regularly puts in 80-hour weeks as a third-year resident at USC's Keck School of Medicine's family practice residency program in Los Angeles.
The College of Technology and Aviation at Kansas State University's Salina campus has adopted Trumba Connect for its online event management.
Congressional leaders have sent letters to 19 major university presidents warning them to step up efforts to curb illegal Internet file sharing or Congress "will be forced to act." "The fact that copyright piracy is not unique to college and university campuses is not an excuse for higher education officials to fail to take reasonable steps neither to eliminate such activity nor to appropriately sanction such conduct when discovered," said a letter addressed to Purdue University president Martin Jischke May 1, 2007.
University of Essex, located in England, has teamed up with Kaplan, a provider of education and training solutions, to launch an online higher education program called Kaplan Open Learning. Students in the program can take courses and receive their degree using the online venue.
Less than 36 hours after the Virginia Tech shootings, Internet scammers were creating fraudulent charity websites, according to the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team.
I look forward each year to the EDUCAUSE annual Current Issues Survey Report. There is always something new and interesting, be it the ways in which the survey instrument itself has been shaped to reflect the association’s view of the field or in the results of the survey.
While the notion of "finding individual voice" is not new to the learning process, technology such as blogging has presented a unique opportunity for teachers and students to work intentionally at this process. The notion of individual voice, however, is difficult to manage and evaluate.
The Iowa College Student Aid Commission (ICSAC) is expanding its relationship with developer Bridges Transitions to implement an online, statewide "career exploration" resource for middle schools, high schools, and post-secondary institutions.
realhealth.TV, an Internet TV channel dedicated to consumer health education, is signing up university hospitals as sources of health care expertise.
Google is now the most popular place to work for MBA students, according to a survey by Universum, a branding consultancy.
Penn State announced it would not renew its contract with the Napster music service and instead would offer students access to Ruckus, a multimedia service it said offered students greater media flexibility. Under the new contract, Ruckus will provide students downloadable access to 2.75 million songs, full-length feature films, short-form video, sports clips, and music videos, as well as access to a social network site focused on the network.
Angel Learning this week rolled out enhancements to its Angel LMS (learning management system), bringing integration with Tegrity Campus 2.0, a widely used student achievement system.
By giving current students and all alumni a lifetime e-mail account accessed through a portal, Plymouth State University has enhanced its ability to stay in touch with graduates long after they leave the university.
The University of Pennsylvania is launching a service for its students called "Penn Live." The aim of the program is to provide communications tools for students, such as e-mail, blogging, and photo sharing.
Autodesk Inc. was presented April 17th with the Software & Information Industry Association’s CODiE award for best postsecondary instruction solution, for the company’s Student Engineering and Design Community.
Campus Technology is seeking nominations through May 15 for its 2007 Innovators Awards for exemplary use of technology by colleges and universities and their vendor partners.
Silverchair Science plus Communication, a developer of medical technology, and McGraw Hill, recently launched AccessPharmacy, part of a series of medical Web applications. The site is designed to complement the curricula for medical students pursing pharmacy doctoral degrees and hosts interactive resources and a reference library.
The Iowa Community College Online Consortium (ICCOC), made up of seven community colleges, is using an outsourced LMS to offer its online courses to students across Iowa....
Today Angel Learning, in conjunction with the Second Life Educators community (SLED), will unveil a brand new island in Second Life dedicated toward educational experimentation....
California State University Chancellor Charles Reed last month issued an executive order that the use of Cal State resources, including computers and Internet connections, must not be used to download, copy, or use copyrighted music, motion pictures, and other content. The order extends to students, staff, faculty, and the general public.
Media X, a Stanford-based community of researchers studying interactive communications and technology, is sponsoring a contest to invent new words and expressions to describe the convolution of information, technology, and ideas that falls under the banner of "Web 2.0."
The National University of Singapore has deployed Secure Access SSL VPN, a security technology from Juniper Networks. The University will use the security platform to establish an electronic examination portal for online testing.
While the notion of "finding individual voice" is not new to the learning process, new technology such as blogging has presented a unique opportunity for teachers and students to work intentionally at this process. The notion of individual voice, however, is difficult to manage and evaluate. How individual is a comment? How personalized is the voice of the student? Are students aware of a developing voice? Does this voice raise the confidence of the student in the learning process? Do students perceive the blogging process as helpful or just another task/assignment?
The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) and the Center for Digital Education honored the top 30 most technology-aware community colleges in the country, according to a survey of administrators at 200 community colleges. They were asked a set of 24 multiple-choice questions and five written questions regarding technology services for students, faculty, and their host communities.
Google yesterday announced that it's looking for input from university students on how they use e-mail on campus. The company has set up a survey to collect information on user preferences.
What are the most popular online programs in higher education? According to a report from education consulting firm Eduventures, most students enrolled in programs online are participating in bachelor's degree programs, followed by associate degrees.
Google brought its Google Desktop to the Mac Wednesday, marking the first time the application has been available on that platform. The new release is still in beta form, though it is fully functional.
Products that can record a classroom lecture and make it available after the fact sometimes raise concerns that class attendance will drop off as a result.
The University of Michigan's School of Information (SI) announced a graduate-degree specialization in "social computing" through a Master of Science in Information. The university said the program is the first in the country to focus on social computing, the term describing the wave of open technologies that enable masses of people to interact and exchange and sort information.
In an effort to reach out to newly admitted high school seniors, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, has expanded its online community presence with the launch of its new Tulane Community Center. The new service is built on the Community Center platform from LiveWorld.
UMassOnline yesterday announced record enrollment and revenues for fiscal 2007. UMassOnline is the online learning division of the University of Massachusetts. The organization said it credits the record enrollment with "the depth and breadth of our program offerings," according to David Gray, CEO.
Indiana's Taylor University has selected Seattle-based Trumba Corp.'s Trumba Connect to enhance its event calendar to help students, alumni, faculty, and staff communicate.
"As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway."
Management consultancy Bain & Co. has opened a recruiting center in the Second Life virtual environment. Earlier this month the firm held an open house in Second Life, at which students attended from Harvard Business School, MIT's Sloan School of Business, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and the Kellog School of Management at Northwestern University.
IBM is working with several universities to expand a repository of reusable learning materials that will make it easier for student developers to make software more accessible to people with disabilities. The repository will help change a culture in which the majority of faculty respondents do not teach accessibility in the classroom, IBM said.
Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft today announced the establishment of the Microsoft Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking. Started with a three-year, $1.5 million grant from Microsoft, the center will support research into emerging areas of computer science, with a particular focus on those that influence thinking in other disciplines.
As part of its Accessible Technology Initiative, the California State University (CSU) system will implement software from Nashua, NH-based HiSoftware to monitor the accessibility of its websites, Web content and Web applications for people with disabilities.
The Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba has created a wiki of "Net Technologies for Teaching and Learning."
At a meeting to discuss the findings of a university task force on teaching and career development, Harvard professors called student apathy for learning--expressed by classroom Web surfing and lack of energy--an "elephant in the room" contributing to a decline in the quality of classroom and general education at the university.
Salt Lake City-based CafeScribe, an e-textbook marketplace and social network for students, has announced MyScribe, a new way for students share information, collaborate and communicate.
CSU Fresno has implemented Turnitin for combating plagiarism on campus. But one professor is using its modular features to save time with grading and record keeping as well.
With more than 130 million members (and growing at a rate of 150,000 new members each day), MySpace.com is undeniably a cultural phenomenon. Not only is a whole new generation of teenagers coming of age on MySpace, but adolescents are also interacting with individuals of all ages via the internet--for better or worse.
Researchers at the Yale School of Management say a business can potentially increase its market share by referring customers to competitors via blogs and other social media tools.
A report released this week by Eduventures, Sloan Consortium, and Babson College, shows a slow but steady decline in the percentage of blended courses offered by colleges and universities, while purely online courses continue to grow. At the same time, the report found that colleges and universities have not been meeting consumer demand for online course offerings.
Digication has released an update to its e-Portfolio tool, bringing integration with the company's eponymous online classroom suite. The newly revamped suite continues to be free for up to 1,000 users at accredited institutions in the United States.
University of Maryland Law School, Taylor University, and William Patterson University have all recently adopted Trumba Corp.'s Trumba Connect technologies to enhance event-based communications on their websites.
The University of Virginia's Darden School of Business has adopted Ektron CMS400.NET for Web content management.
East Carolina University in Greenville, NC is implementing Saba-Centra Live from software provider Saba to support distance learning through the university's academic outreach program.
World-wide Web "inventor" Tim Berners-Lee made a rare public appearance last week to talk to federal legislators about the "digital future of the United States."
Last week we reported that the University of Washington was offering an introductory course on Google programming developed by a Google employee who was dissatisfied with the quality of computer science learning arriving with the company's latest college recruits.
A social website that helps students evaluate prospective professors will now let professors express their opinions about the reviews.
The Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) has launched two websites using SystemExecutive from Systems Alliance, an IT and business consulting firm.
Second Life, the virtual world that's becoming increasingly popular in education, will soon add proximity-based 3D voice capabilities, according to developer Linden Lab.
Imagine that everyone who enters your college or university is guided through a single main gate onto campus....
Last year, Ohio University purchased two islands and built several buildings on it, including a student center, learning center, and arts and music center.
Last year, Ohio University purchased two islands and built several buildings on it, including a student center, learning center, and arts and music center.
Broadcasting a breakup: Was it portable cruelty or powerful social networking?
The University of Washington is hosting a course about Google.
The course was designed by Google programmer Christophe Bisciglia, 26, a U. Wash alumn, during his "10 percent" time, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. Google employees are encouraged to use 10 percent of their time on the job brainstorming creative ideas.
mtvU, MTV's college network, unveiled its campus programming lineup for Spring 2007, including a search for the first four mtvU Fulbright scholars and a series called "Best Film on Campus," to encourage collaboration among young filmmakers. mtvU said its programming is focused on offering "students new tools to effect real world change."
Last year, Ohio University purchased two islands and built several buildings on it....
An associate professor of science and technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has created a suite of culturally-attuned Web-based applets to help students from different cultures more easily absorb computing and math teaching.
There was a time, less than a year ago, when a lot of us thought that the telecommunications dinosaurs were plotting against us. Net neutrality is essentially the status quo, and they wanted to change that. I don't know about you, but I pretty much wake up every morning ecstatic about the development of the Internet and the Web so far.
Welcome to the Year of the Google. In 2007, Google will become the most frequently visited Web site on the Internet. In November of 2006, it passed Yahoo, briefly. Microsoft, of course, with required downloads of software upgrades, is the other major player. But Google, with the help of its new purchase, YouTube, will end Yahoo’s 10-year ride on the top of the worldwide visits charts sometime in 2007.
MOVE OVER, MYSPACE. STEP ASIDE, FACEBOOK. These two technologies may have been pioneers in the world of social software, but nowadays, colleges and universities across the country are embracing better and more targeted forms of technology, to enable their campus users to interact. Today, the world of social software includes traditional venues and formats: blogs, wikis, and podcasts.
WHETHER THE MANDATE is to offer a single class that trains students in studio production, to produce 25 videoconferenced classes a day for thousands of students across different continents, or to offer the very latest high-definition (HD) technology to a regional consortium of users, schools across the US are using the latest videoconference and audio/video streaming technologies creatively, to move to the next level of their very specific needs.
What does wildlife viewing have in common with online learning? Nothing at first thought; they seem to be unrelated, almost contradictory. That was my concern when Dr. Kelly Cain, a University of Wisconsin – River Falls (UWRF) professor known for innovation, approached me in 2004.
At a meeting at Arizona State University in Tempe, I nearly made a suggestion that seemed at first to be a really good one, but then like a really bad one. It’s rare that I actually manage to keep my mouth shut under such circumstances, and I am proud that I did. On the other hand, I’m going to share the idea with you here, so that you can see just how bad it was, or not, so the effort did not last.
It’s tough to master a new language without speaking it, of course. So it follows that language courses that incorporate speaking as much as possible can help students learn faster and better, and help professors better assess their progress.
Are you hooked into all the new Google beta stuff? Starting next week, organizations can offer staff, students, customers, employees, or whomever access to chat, calendar, Web page publishing, and Web-based e-mail.
Very recently, I was able to find a "political" use for Wikipedia that feels empowering.
Whether this will affect the search behavior of many other people is unknown. It doesn’t seem to me, from casual conversations, that many of my acquaintances would have even heard of this security beach if they hadn’t learned of it from me.
What if we could know what you are planning to do? What if we thought we knew what you are planning to do? What if law enforcement thought it knew what you were planning to do? These became questions for the real world earlier this week.
Thomas L. Friedman addressed the assembled 4,000+ attendees at the Campus of the Future Conference on the morning of Monday, July 10. Friedman, author of the influential book, The World Is Flat, provided a condensed and vigorous summary of the key points of his thinking in the book and shared some additional thoughts of interest to educators.