News 11-12-2002
Sponsor: Syllabus Now Has a Voice: Syllabus Radio
Now broadcasting to a computer near you! Click on www.syllabus.com
and hear audio interviews with established leaders and creative thinkers in higher
education as they discuss the good, the better and the best uses of IT on campus.
Join host Judith B'ettcher of CREN each week as she explores issues in education technology.
This week, five-time Emmy Award winning composer and Syllabus fall2002 keynoter
James Oliverio discusses opportunities for interdisciplinary and multicultural
understanding that accompany the cross-pollination of technology and culture.
Two Teraflop Supercomputer Aids Science Research
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the Universityof
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said it will deploy an IBM Power4 p690 supercomputer
capable of two trillion operations per second to study science and engineering
problems, including structural mechanics, computational chemistry, and fluid
dynamics. The supercomputer, a cluster of 12 IBM eServer p690 Unix systems,
will be available to the scientific research community through the National
Computational Science Alliance early next year. "This installation, combined
with the Linux clusters that will form the bulk of the TeraGrid computing system,
will give NCSA the world's largest computing system available for peer-reviewed
open scientific research," said NCSA Director Dan Reed.
Tech Museum Awards $250K to Humanitarians
Bunker Roy, representing The Barefoot College in Rajasthan, India, received
a $50,000 Tech Museum Award in the education category for teaching practical
technology skills, from solar power to rainwater harvesting systems, to India's
rural poor. Roy was among five winners of the 2002 award, given to those who
are applying technology to improve the quality of life around the world. "The
Tech Awards bring to life one of the ideals of the UN—the employment of technology
to address the needs of all the world's peoples," said Michael Doyle, assistant
Secretary General to the United Nations, which actively promotes the awards
program. In making the awards, more than 460 nominations were reviewed by judging
panels assembled by Santa Clara University's Center for Science, Technology,
and Society. The 25 2002 finalists came from Argentina, Australia, Canada, India,
Malaysia, Nigeria, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States.
For more information, visit www.techawards.thetech.org/
Wisconsin dot.edu ASP Partners with Training Firm
dot.edu, the University of Wisconsin's educational application service provider,
said it will partner with NIIT, a training company, to offer programs to external
customers in higher-education institutions, public and private schools, and
agencies. dot.edu was formed to respond to requests for Web-based learning from
the university's 28 locations. Rather than replicating services to accommodate
each location's requests, the school set up a centralized distributed learning
system based on an ASP model. Key services at dot.edu—hosting, training,
instructional design, consultation, and help desk for Web-based learning systems—are now being used by 83 customers nationwide, including 55 locations outside
the University of Wisconsin system.
Penn State Bolsters Internet Campus Connectivity
Pennsylvania State University has installed a high-speed point-to-pointnetwork
connection between its University Park campus and the Pittsburgh GigaPop, an
Internet aggregation point to access the Internet and Internet 2. Network infrastructure
provider Adelphia Business Solutions Inc. initially provided two OC-3 fiberoptic
transport channels between the campus and the GigaPop, enough bandwidth to support
the interconnectivity of over 450 local area networks and 100,000 computer hosts.
The school has recently committed to upgrading the OC-3s to an OC-12 capacity.
Corinthian Colleges to Offer Technology Diploma
Corinthian Colleges Inc., which offers diploma programs in the allied health
field, said it plans to expand its curriculum to include diploma programs in
technology. In doing so, it will open a National Institute of Technology campus
in Austin, Texas, one of five branch campus openings it plans in fiscal 2003.
For-profit Corinthian, which specializes in post-secondary school programs,
operates 65 colleges in 21 states. The Austin campus is a leased facility, where,
in addition to its diploma programs in Medical Assisting and Medical Administrative
Assistant, it plans to offer diploma programs in Electronics and Information
Technology within the next 12 months.