9/12/2007
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.
9/6/2007
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.
9/4/2007
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.
8/30/2007
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.
8/29/2007
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.
8/28/2007
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.
8/23/2007
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.
8/22/2007
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.
8/22/2007
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.
8/21/2007
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.
8/21/2007
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.
8/17/2007
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.
8/15/2007
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.
8/15/2007
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."
8/15/2007
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.
8/14/2007
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!
8/14/2007
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.
8/9/2007
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.
8/8/2007
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.
8/7/2007
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.
8/7/2007
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.
8/6/2007
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.
8/3/2007
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.
8/3/2007
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.
8/2/2007
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.