News 12-04-2001
Call for Papers Deadline Extended for Syllabus2002
The Call for Papers has been extended to December 15, 2001, for the Syllabus2002
annual summer conference. The conference will be held July 27-31 at the Santa
Clara Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley, Calif. The conference
covers a wide variety of timely topics in the field of education technology.
Tracks include: New Technologies Update; Administrative Systems for the Academic
Enterprise; Technology Infrastructure and IT Planning Issues; Standards, Interoperability,
and Open Source; New Publishing Models and Intellectual Property; Web-Based
Environments for Teaching and Administration; Evaluation and Assessment Strategies;
and Faculty Innovation-Case Studies.
Interested parties are encouraged to submit proposals online at <http://www.syllabus.com/cfp2002/index.asp>
UCLA Report Pegs Internet Usage Up, E-Commerce Down
A UCLA study on the impact of the Internet shows that despite continued growth
in usage, enthusiasm for electronic commerce is down, and concerns about online
privacy and security remain steady. The study found that 72.3 percent of Americans
have Internet access, up from 66.9 percent in 2000. Users go online an average
of 9.8 hours per week, up from 9.4 hours in 2000. While Internet commerce remains
strong -- 48.9 percent of Internet users purchased online in 2001 -- it is down
from 50.7 percent in 2000. Jeffrey Cole, director of the university's Center
for Communication Policy, said that "despite the dot-com meltdown, we found
that the Internet is more vigorous than ever."
For more information, visit: <http://www.ccp.ucla.edu>.
Princeton Launches Cashless Card Application
Princeton University has launched a cashless card program that will let students,
faculty and staff make off-campus purchases via their university identification
cards. The "stored value" program is being set up by Student Advantage
Inc., an e-commerce marketing comany. Its SA Cash program enables Princeton
users to buy food, necessities and entertainment at a network of off-campus
businesses. The company helps build the network by screening, recruiting and
offering marketing support to local merchants. It then provides the merchants
proprietary transaction processing equipment that is compatible with the university's
host system and permits transaction settlement through the university.
For more information, visit: <http://www.princeton.edu>.
Neural Net Theorists Win Louisville Psychology Prize
Neuroscience pioneers James McClelland and David Rumelhart won the $200,000
University of Louisville Grawemeyer award for psychology. McClelland is co-director
of Carnegie Mellon University's Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Rumelhart
was a psychology and computer science professor at Stanford University until
1998. The psychologists began collaborating two decades ago on a cognitive theory
called parallel distributed processing. Their research explored the idea of
connectionism -- that no single neuron in the human brain d'es its job alone
in processing information, but that neural networks decide things collectively
and simultaneously rather than in sequence. The award honors their achievement
of bringing the idea to a wider audience in psychology, neuroscience and computer
science.
For more information, visit: <http://www.grawemeyer.org>.
UMass Lowell Trains Faculty Online in Distance Learning
The University of Massachusetts at Lowell has put on the Web the course it
offers faculty to train them in developing online course materials. "What
better way to have faculty understand the technology and the students' experience
than to take an online course themselves?'' said Dean Jacqueline Moloney. The
six-week online training pilot program will help 20 faculty adapt courses in
a distance learning format and complete a course outline. The program will provide
both technical and pedagogical skills development needed by faculty to migrate
10 courses online.
For more information, visit <http://continuinged.uml.edu>.
Cal-Poly Nets Grant for High-Tech Labs, Student Outreach
California Polytechnic State University won a $294,000 grant from the Society
of Manufacturing Engineers to help the university strengthen its manufacturing
curriculum. The grant will help the university create labs and update coursework
to prepare students to meet the needs of California manufacturers. The school
will also offer a work experience program with participating ME members in 2003.
Students will become paid employees at partner companies, allowing them to "earn
as they learn" and gain work experience while earning wages to offset their
educational costs. SME has awarded more than $1 million such grants to California
schools since 1998.
For more information, visit <http://www.sme.org>.
SAP Funds Universities in E-Business Research
Eenterprise software developer SAP, Inc. has started a program to fund university
e-business research projects. The company is currently committing more than
$500,000 to fund three projects at colleges and universities, with additional
research projects to be considered as the program progresses. The initial projects
include "Realizing the Process Enterprise," at Carleton University,
to study of the role of institutionalizing processes during enterprise system
implementations; "E-Business Solutions to Border Control Challenges,"
at Rutgers University, a study of the information technology requirements for
international trade; and "Adoption of Web-Based New Product Development
Systems," at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a study of business-to-business
product development.
Universities to Use Sallie Mae E-Payment Gateway
Sallie Mae, the student loan financing company, said five more universities
had signed to use its Net.Pay electronic payment gateway, pushing the total
number of schools using the gateway to more than 80. The electronic payment
system, which provides a real-time interface between an school's web site and
the gateway, lets students, alumni and others make secure Internet payments
using a credit card, debit card or Automated Clearing House (ACH) debit. The
University at Buffalo; ITT Educational Services, Inc.; the University of Colorado,
Boulder; Mary Baldwin College; and Southeast Missouri University are the latest
signees for Net.Pay services. "The Net.Pay electronic payment gateway allows
us to bring to our users secure online transactions with minimal effort on the
part of our staff and systems people," said William Betlej, director of
CIS, Mary Baldwin College.
U. Washington Signs Broadband Services Contract
The University of Washington signed a one-year agreement with Level 3 Communications
Inc. to provide broadband connectivity to the public Internet. The company,
which offers IP, broadband transport, colocation, and switching services, will
provide the university its CrossRoads brand Internet access service via its
multiple protocol label switching (MPLS) backbone. The network currently operates
at 10 gigabits per second. Scott Mah, director of the school's communication
technologies division, in commenting on the deal, said the university puts "exceptionally
high demands on our Internet and networking infrastructure."
For more information visit <http://www.washington.edu>.
U. Dayton Picks Groupware Antivirus Solution
The University of Dayton has purchased Sybari Software Inc.'s Antigen groupware
antivirus software to protect its Lotus Notes/Domino servers. Susan McCabe,
director of Lotus Integration for the university, said it picked Antigen, "for
many reasons including trusted scanning, which means less processor time, the
ability to quickly block any files or file type, multiple scan engines, and
the 24 x 7 uptime." Dayton's Notes servers support more than 10,000 students
and 2,000 faculty and staff. Antigen enables users to run multiple-scan engines.
It also provides a file filter that lets administrators filter e-mail attachments
by file name, type, or wild card. Last year, Dayton was ranked 16th out of 200
colleges and universities accredited by Yahoo as being "Most Wired."
For more information, visit: <http://www.udayton.edu>.
Fiber Optic Pioneers Win 2001 Columbia Marconi Award
Herwig Kogelnik of Bell Laboratories and Allan Snyder of the Australian National
University, pioneers in the development of fiber optic technology, will share
the $100,000 Marconi Award for work that has revolutionized modern telecommunications.
Kogelnik and Snyder have been at the forefront of discoveries in optical technology.
John Jay Iselin, president of the Marconi foundation, credited the work of the
two scientists with helping move the Internet into the fiberoptic age. "Much
of this transformation is attributable to the creativity demonstrated by the
two honorees," he said.
For more information, visit: <http://www.columbia.edu>.
