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Texas A&M System Signs Distribution Deal for Virtual Clinical Learning Lab

5/8/2008

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.

Tegrity Records 325,000 Hours of Lectures

5/8/2008

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.

JavaOne Keynote: Neil Young Likes Java

5/7/2008

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.

Writing: It Ain’t the Same Anymore

5/7/2008

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 Expands Team Collaboration, Social Networking Software

5/6/2008

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 To Implement CalDAV in Sakai

5/6/2008

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 Device Addresses Web App Performance Pains

5/6/2008

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.

Microsoft Scraps Yahoo! Acquisition Plans

5/5/2008

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.

Adobe Connect Pro and Presenter Beef Up eLearning Features

5/5/2008

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.

Idaho State Simulates Emergency Response in Second Life

5/1/2008

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.

Creighton U Updates Distance Learning Program with iLinc

4/30/2008

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.

Web 2.0 Event Draws the Bleeding-Edge Cloud Crowd

4/30/2008

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."

Convergence Idea Gets Serious with Live Mesh, Analysts Say

4/29/2008

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.

Wyoming Colleges Bolster Digital Libraries with 'Academic Complete' Database

4/29/2008

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.

Microsoft Announces Extensibility Framework for .NET

4/29/2008

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.

Company Ordered To Stop 'Misleading' Students on College Admission Sites

4/25/2008

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.

Johns Hopkins Goes Mobile on uPortal

4/23/2008

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.

Mobile Learning in Higher Education

4/23/2008

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."

Publishers Sue Georgia State over Digital Distribution

4/22/2008

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.

Project Albany Moves into Google Turf

4/22/2008

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.

Brigham Young University in Idaho Moves to Jenzabar for ERP

4/17/2008

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).

ePortfolios: Hot Once Again

4/16/2008

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.

The Social Web: Academic Zoning Rules

4/16/2008

Trent Batson urges social Web site developers to offer options for managing use for academic purposes.

Yale Pilots Digital Media Integration with Sakai

4/15/2008

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.

WebSphere Portal 6.1 To Couple Web 2.0, Enterprise Technologies

4/11/2008

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.