News 10-30-2001
Featured Sessions at Upcoming Syllabus fall2001
Featured sessions at Syllabus fall2001 are designed to appeal to a broad audience.
We're excited to present two keynoters who are true movers in education technology
with exceptional track records in IT on campus.
Carl Berger, of the University of Michigan, will examine the next "killer
app" in higher education, and Kathy Christoph, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
will talk about the transformation of teaching and learning with technology-on
your campus.
A featured panel, moderated by MIT's Phil Long, will consider what Open Source
means for higher education. And the TLT Group's Steve Gilbert will offer a featured
track covering several facets of the digital realm in higher education. The
conference will be held at the Sheraton Ferncroft in Danvers, Mass. November
29-December 2. Register online at www.syllabus.com.
Northwestern Launches IT Development Laboratory
Northwestern University said it would launch an Information Technology Development
Laboratory (DevLab) to turn promising promising university research prototypes
into complete products. DevLab will be funded in part by Motorola, Inc., which
will help spark innovative start-up companies. The first application coming
out of the DevLab is a software search assistant called "Watson" that
reads along with a user and immediately searches for relevant information while
they are online. Kristian Hammond, DevLab director and professor of computer
science at Northwestern, called the lab a "first step in creating a new
model that builds a relationship between the academic community and today's
global leaders in the technology industry."
For more information, visit: http://www.devlab.northwestern.edu.
NSF Funds USC National Tech Network
The National Science Foundation awarded the University of Southern California
a $600,000 grant to establish a National Technology Transfer and Commercialization
Network. The project, estimated to cost $1.2 million, aims to spur innovation
and commercialization of new technologies in the U.S. The network will partner
MBAs with inventors to develop new products and to potentially become stakeholders
in the resulting new commercial ventures. Network partners would have access
to resources for rapid prototyping and commercial assessment, distance education
in commercialization skills, conferences, and visual collaboration technology.
In addition to several universities, charter members include: PricewaterhouseCoopers,
research lab NASA Ames, and the National Collegiate Innovators and Inventors
Alliance (NCIIA).
For more information, visit: http://www.marshall.usc.edu.
Wisconsin Picks Instant Messaging Platform
The University of Wisconsin has licensed the Jabber Communications Platform
to provide instant messaging (IM) applications for its 80,000-plus students,
faculty and staff. Jabber, an IM applications developer, will provide the real-time
communications platform, which can also be extended to provide messaging between
students and users of other messaging services like Yahoo or MSN.
The IM services
will be delivered via the Jabber Instant Messenger client for Windows, developed
to ensure the performance of widesrpead deployment of IM. Roger Hanson, a technologist
with the University of Wisconsin, said the platform would provide "everything
we think our students and faculty will need for spontaneous IM communications."
For more information, visit: http://www.wisc.edu.
Schools Go 'Cashless' for Off-Campus Purchasing
Mercer University in Macon, Ga., and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond,
Va., have instituted "cashless" buying programs to enable students,
faculty and staff to use their ID cards to purchase goods at select off-campus
businesses. Currently students use the stored value cards to buy some products
on campus, including vending machine snacks, cafeteria lunches, and books. The
new program, being managed Student Advantage Inc., would create off-campus networks
of businesses at which card holders could make cashless card purchases. The
company said the program would "dramatically" decrease the use of
cash on and off campus, thereby contributing to campus safety. It also helps
cement the universities' relationship with their surrounding communities, officials
argued.
For more information, visit: http://www.studentadvantage.com.
Student Consumers Targeted by Digital TV Companies
Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University,
and the University of the Arts are being offered high-end digital cable television
service that offers them up to 118 digital channels, access to premium channels,
pay-per-view events, and the ability to customize channel line-ups over the
Internet. The service, provided by Madison, N.Y.-based Falls Earth Station,
Inc., would be delivered directly to a cable headend on the campus and fed through
the campus's existing cable system, thereby eliminating the need for a satellite
antenna on each dormitory building. Jerry Barnes, president of Falls Earth Station,
said, "we recognize today's college student is a sophisticated and value-conscious
consumer, and (the service) is designed to offer the variety, value and flexibility
demanded by the higher education community."
For more information, visit: http://www.fallsearth.com.
Michigan Provides Dow Jones Service to B-School
Dow Jones Newswires said it would provide its flagship equities information
service, Dow Jones News Service, to the trading room at the University of Michigan
Business School. The school's Trading Room is designed to give students a realistic
view of operations on an actual trading floor. Students are required to manage
a real investment fund, combining skills acquired in traditional courses with
the latest financial technology to develop strategies for portfolio management.
Dow Jones news service offers quick, in-depth reports on everything that affects
the stock markets. Richard Sloan, a Michigan professor of accounting and finance,
said "students now have the opportunity to analyze how security prices
react to the release of new information using the same information source as
the Wall Street professionals responsible for setting prices."
For more information, visit: http://www.bus.umich.edu.
McGill Forms Wireless Tech Research Partnership
McGill University has formed a research partnership with wireless technology
developer InterDigital Communications Corp. to improve the efficiency of advanced
wireless networks carrying large amounts of voice and data traffic, including
multi-media services. The alliance between the company and McGill's Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering is focused on radio resource management
techniques that support smart antenna solutions for 3G wireless networks. Such
techniques will help develop applications that use the scarce 3G specturm more
efficiently, the principals said.
For more information, visit: http://www.mcgill.ca.
Blackboard, PeopleSoft Link Higher Ed Portals
Blackboard Inc. announced an expanded alliance with PeopleSoft, Inc. that would
tie in the online enterprise education and administrative platforms of the two
companies. The deal would activate Blackboard links in the PeopleSoft Campus
Portal and PeopleSoft links in the Blackboard portal to simplify navigation
between the platforms. The move is expected to give universities flexibility
to select an institution-wide portal with single sign-on access to both academic
and administrative information. PeopleSoft said the deal underlines its "commitment
to e-learning." The two companies have already collaborated in integrating
PeopleSoft with Blackboard 5 Level 3, which ensures basic data integrity between
the two systems. Customers of either platform will now have access to both administrative
and academic information at any time through the use of a standard browser.
Campus Pipeline Unveils Content Management for Higher Ed
Campus Pipeline, Inc. introduced what it called the first enterprise content
management solution designed for higher education. The Campus Pipeline Luminis
Content Management Suite 2.0 is the product of a collaboration between the company,
Drexel University, Pepperdine University, and Documentum, a provider of enterprise
content management. The software is intended to automate and administer the
management of tens of thousands of Web pages, documents, and other digital resources,
from multiple contributors, both inside the campus and in the public domain.
Drexel chief information officer John A. Bielec said the collaboration allowed
the school to "customize the first content management suite for higher
education and help many universities address similar needs."
Don't Miss This Event from 101communications
Syllabus fall2001 "Next Steps: Moving Forward with Campus IT"
November 29-December 2
Danvers, MA.
Online registration available: http://www.syllabus.com
