12/3/2007
Wacom today launched two additions to its flagship high-end tablet lineup, the Cintiq 12WX and the Cintiq 20 WSX. The new models expand the range of sizes available for the tablets, which integrate a display and pressure-sensitive interactive input for visual arts applications, delivering for the first time a Cintiq priced (barely) below $1,000.
11/29/2007
Customer service in higher education comes in a multitude of offerings, from grand and glorious, such as student lifecycle initiatives involving complex six-figure CRM software, to small, narrow and--well--round, such as providing disc duplication services where a dime will buy a student all the data that can fit on a blank CD. Pennsylvania State University's Entrepreneurial Services addresses the latter category.
11/21/2007
The 2007 college football season is winding down, and while the last of the autumn leaves falls lazily from the trees in Charlottesville, VA, there's no slowdown for Erik Elvgren, senior producer and animator at the University of Virginia's Athletics Video Services Department (AVS).
11/14/2007
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.
11/13/2007
Varnished wood. Rosin and bow strings. Well cared for reeds. These are the images that spring to mind when one thinks of classical music--a realm seemingly rooted in tradition and antiquity--but that's not the case at the Berklee College of Music.
11/7/2007
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.
11/7/2007
AV technology developer Advanced Media Design has started shipping a new model in its MediaPointe family of digital media recorders, the DMR210e, designed for capturing presentations and classroom lectures. The new model sports a DVD drive and updated design and supports up to 1,500 hours of recording time.
10/31/2007
Chat software (text or media-based) provides an excellent tool in supporting academic dialog (exchange), critical thinking, and knowledge building. The immediacy of the technology provides students with a direct connection with the instructor as well as other students. While chat software is usually used for "chatting," and, therefore, it has a relaxed and colloquial protocol, with a little thought and planning, it can also be used well to support instruction.
10/29/2007
Adobe last week announced its intention to release Flex Builder 2 free for students and faculty at education institutions. Flex Builder, which retails for $499, is an integrated development environment for the Flex framework, which powers cross-platform rich Internet applications on the Web.
10/25/2007
Apple has created a new suite of development resources tailored specifically for the iPhone. Dubbed the "iPhone Dev Center," the service provides a range of resources, including guidelines for optimizing Web apps for the iPhone, sample code, video tutorials, and other reference material.
10/24/2007
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....
10/23/2007
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.
10/19/2007
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.
10/17/2007
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.
10/16/2007
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.
10/10/2007
Stanford University librarian Michael Keller will join other leading digital archiving experts November 14-16 in Paris for the inaugural meeting of the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group, a group dedicated to working on the unique problems of storage and data management, workflow, and architecture for very large digital repositories. The Sun PASIG brings together a large group of organizations for an ongoing global discussion of their research and sharing of best practices for preservation and archiving. Here, CT asks Keller for his perspectives on the effort and the goals of the Sun PASIG.
10/8/2007
Sun Microsystems has formed a new collaborative group focused on developing and sharing best practices for digital archiving: Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (Sun PASIG). The group brings together representatives from industry, education, government, and library services in an effort to preserve and archive research and cultural materials.
10/4/2007
Education technology developer Tegrity has launched a new program for its flagship classroom recording system, Campus 2.0: free, semester-long trials for higher education institutions.
10/2/2007
Frostburg State University in Maryland is bolstering its mass communications program with the addition of a Thomson Grass Valley Indigo AV Mixer to its campus television studio. It will be used to support a wide range of programming that's available via local cable.
9/26/2007
The new DSpace Foundation is fostering open access to scholarly works with the open source DSpace platform for storing, managing, and distributing digital collections. Here, Campus Technology interviews Michele Kimpton, executive director of the nascent nonprofit created this past July by MIT and HP as a successor to their joint DSpace project begun in 2002.
9/18/2007
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."
9/13/2007
Wacom has debuted two new tablets in a new line of entry-level models called "Bamboo." The Bamboo tablets replace Wacom's previous Graphire line of entry-level tablets and lower the cost of entry to a street price of around $60.
9/12/2007
Apple has released new versions of its professional audio applications: Logic Pro and Logic Express. The high-end Logic Pro, now in version 8, has been released in a studio suite, with pricing cut in half for education institutions.
9/12/2007
Duke University will use Tizra's Agile PDF hosted white label service to repackage, deliver, and sell textbook content in electronic formats.
9/11/2007
Drexel University hosted a conference last week on new media applications, a "PodCamp" to "promote the use of new media to television, newspapers, radio, businesses, educators, and individuals." The conference was free to "podcasters and listeners, bloggers and readers, and anyone interested in new media."