Terry Calhoun, IT Trends Commentator
Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
University of Michigan

Part II: Are Portals Dead? And More

As J'e continues his report from last week, he moves from the more purely technological realm into one of definitions and functionality, based on a site-by-site evaluation of 172 college and university Web sites. Along with other observations, he draws the conclusion that “portalization” may already have reached its zenith and predicts that many Web sites already are or will be calling themselves by “portalized” names of some sort, but really aren’t and won’t be true portals. Enjoy!

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J'e St. Sauver
University of Oregon Computing Center

University “Portal” Web Sites

A few years ago, universities were under tremendous commercial pressure (as well as substantial peer pressure from those who’d already jumped on the portal bandwagon) to move to a portal model for their institutional home pages. So far, the hype hasn’t resulted in much real “portal product,” and likely won’t.

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MyDoom Targets Linux Antagonist

The latest virus is more proof that worms and viruses are more and more aimed not purely at laliciousness, but at political and business targets. MyDoom was present in one out of every 12 emails yesterday morning, and MyDoom creates denial of service attacks against SCO, the company that claims Linux uses its intellectual property. ...
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Ball State Teams Up to Research College-Level Video-On-Demand

The research will focus on students' attitudes towards video downloading of feature films and piracy and also their legitimate needs for video services....
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NYU Web site Leaked Vital Student Information

Intramural athletes' social security numbers and telephone numbers have made it out to and all over the Web.....
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Campus Emergency Website Hacked at Indiana University

Between 1:30 and 8 am last Monday morning, if you had believed the IU website, the university was shut down due to the recent snow storm. But it wasn't, a student had hacked the warning Web site.....
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Will Students at Yale Pay for Cflix?

Yale's pilot program to provide movie downloads for students and reduce illegal large file transfers is viewed with minimal enthusiasm by some....
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Husky Bucks at Connecticut Can Be Load Up On Dollars Without Human Intervention Now

Three new machines, similar to ATMs, permit students to add dollars to their One Card without requiring assistance from office staff....
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RIAA Files 532 New Song-Sharing Suits

The suits were filed in New York and Washington, and the RIAA now faces the newly-more-daunting task of seeking out the identity of the offenders it says distribute an average of 800 songs each on the Internet......
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University of Michigan Students Are Among the Newest RIAA Targets

Nine Michigan students have been targeted by the RIAA for alleged illegal file sharing, but the university has not yet decided to release information about the students to the RIAA or any other source ...
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Trojan Horses Pose Growing Threat at Penn State and Elsewhere

Spyware and other forms of Trojan horses are not as widely recognized as threats, but may pose more serious problems for individuals due to more severe possible consequences.)...
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Duke University Student Machines Also Under Seige

Many students are losing the bulk of their archived work and images. Reactions to the learning curve necessary to make machines more secure are varied...
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Wi-Fi Is Big In New England, Especially On or Near Campus

Bryant College intends to be fully wireless by next fall. At Brown, it is expected that wireless will not replace wired, but expand as needed. At the University of Rhode Island, plans are being implemented to cover the 20 percent of campus most used by 80 percent of the students....
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Researchers at a British University Invent Themselves Out of a Job?

"A new robotic system they developed can, for the first time, independently design and carry out a genetics experiment, then interpret the results."...
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Lack of "Development Environments" Major Flaw In Open Source?

The writer believes that major open source projects cannot continue to grow at a fast pace without much help from the for-profit sector....
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"Learn Anytime Anywhere Physics"

This project replicates the look and feel of a physics lab inside a desktop or a laptop computer, creating the ability for anyone with a machine and access to manage college-level physics.....
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Collaborative Platforms: Say Aloha to WikiWiki

What is WikiWiki? It is a collection of Web pages which can be edited by anyone, at any time, from anywhere. Wiki is a composition system, a discussion medium, a repository, a mail system, a chat room, and a tool for collaboration...
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The Portal for Online Objects in Learning

The Portal for Online Objects in Learning (POOL) project is a consortium of educational, private and public sector organizations to develop an infrastructure for learning object repositories. The project addresses metadata, software and hardware, and bootstrapping the system with initial content. It makes tools available for download, to help set up similar infrastructures elsewhere and to connect them to POOL.....
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U. Kansas Medical Center Picks 3D Storage Solution

The University of Kansas Medical Center (UKMC) has chosen the Magnitude 3D storage area network (SAN) from XIOtech Corp. to support the medical center and the schools of nursing, medicine, and allied health. Magnitude 3D blends the benefits of clustered computing with SANs, to achieve simplicity and scalability. To meet its rapidly growing storage needs, UKMC said it needed a SAN that would be highly scalable, easy to use and reprovision, and worked well in a large Novell environment.

DataWarehouse is Foundation for Cornell Productivity Study

A Cornell University research team will use Erg'Enterprise, a software suite from Magnitude Information Systems, for collecting worker activity logs for an environmental factors productivity study. The study, being conducted at the Orlando headquarters of Insurance Office of America (IOA), will measure the effects of temperature, humidity and light on knowledge workers in an office environment.

The study is the brainchild of Dr. Alan Hedge, Director of Cornell's School of Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory. Miniature personal environment-sensing stations, located next to employees' computers, have been deployed throughout IOA's offices to log environmental factors in employee computer activity. The logs will be synchronized with the Erg'Enterprise DataWarehouse. Data collection will continue through mid-February and be followed by the analysis phase and final report, expected in April of this year.
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