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

Awareness of Presence – Good or Bad Thing in a Working Tool?

Imagine a professionally successful Baby Boomer who works for a higher education institution and who probably got their start in information technology working with punch cards or early terminals, some of their early work was probably in programming. This is the kind of person who checks their e-mail twice a day – once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and also checks and answers voice mail on schedule. They earned early on that the best way for them to be productive is to shut out the rest of the world and focus, to concentrate on the task at hand.

This same person is in a position of decision making about whether to support or suppress what may well be the preferred method of communication among Americans who are under the age of 21 – instant messaging? Yikes. That would be like me having the power to decide that amusement parks don’t need roller coaster rides and, in fact, that amusement parks needn’t really even exist, despite the fact that many people enjoy them and that they are a thriving, valid industry.

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College 2003 Distance Learning Revenues Increased 9.67 Percent

According to this report, median enrollment in distance education courses increased by nearly 28 percent and the number of courses offered increased by about 15 percent...
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‘Game Over’ for Oracle's PeopleSoft Bid?

In addition to the PeopleSoft board's recent rejection of the Oracle take-over bid, for which PeopleSoft may have to account to its stockholders later in March, now comes word that the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division is going to recommend that the deal be blocked...
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Geeks Put the Unsavvy on Alert: Wise Up or Log Off

Backlash! Computer-savvy Internet users are expressing irritation about being the victims of those ‘who should know better’ when it comes to activating e-mail-borne viruses...
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LSU Student Government Drives to Require Laptops

The implications of such a requirement are the same as elsewhere, but it this time the impetus is from student government, which has at least some influence on budget...
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Why Heather Can Write?

The law of unintended consequences pops up again, with the rise of youngsters with outstanding writing skills self-learned in relatively unsupervised online communities...
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Are Jabs at "Operating System Monoculture" Overblown?

Not everyone thinks that the Windows "monoculture" world is particularly or inevitably bad, for security or other reasons...
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Student Creates Unofficial Harvard "Facebook"

Privacy and security issues abound in efforts like these to create flexible,useable online community "enhancers." The student's site is modeled after Friendster...
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Williams Student Creates Small-school Online Dating Service

Students at a tiny rural college have trouble meeting each other? Apparently. Within a week of this service's introduction, 4/5 of the students had signed up for it...
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A Month after Spam Act, Hard to See Any Results

Well, there is some change. One month after the big federal anti-spam legislation was signed into law, spam as a percentage of all e-mail went down from 80 percent to 79 percent...
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Students Catch up with Wireless at U. Maryland

"Mobile at Maryland" (MAM) is just starting to catch on with students. Up to 700 at a time are using wireless, which is available on large parts of the campus...
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Ripples – Research in Electronic Presentation Production

RIPPLES, the Research in Presentation Production for Learning Electronically project is investigating how to most effectively use the World Wide Web and CD/DVD-ROM to deliver lectures and course materials outside of the classroom. Its focus is on asynchronous learning environments in which students proceed at their own pace and are not assumed to be accessing the same material at the same time. Students can access lectures as digital audio or video, synchronized with slides, overheads or other materials...
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U. Buffalo, HP Collaborate on Computational Research

The University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and HP joined orces to deploy infrastructure technology and academic resources for the school’s Center for Computational Research (CCR). As a foundation for bioinformatics and life sciences research, HP and UB are building an open Storage Area Network (SAN) with a capacity of 75-Terabytes. HP Services will help design and deploy the system and will provide onsite support services. In addition, HP is providing funds for a one-year post-doctoral fellowship aimed at implementing a computational and data grid in Western New York.

U. Missouri Deal Streamlines Document Processes

The University of Missouri has chosen a document imaging system from Vision Inc. to streamline its document management and workflow. The University will install the ImageNow solution at all four campuses -- Columbia, Kansas City, Rolla and St. Louis. ImageNow will store and allow instant retrieval of about 50 million scanned documents, images and files per year.