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

Who's Laughing Now, or, I Sure Am Glad I Didn't Go Corporate

A few days ago I noticed and skimmed an article reporting on a survey conducted last fall of CIOs at a number of higher education institutions. It found that they were experiencing some budget reductions, were working hard to do more but without more people, and that there were some concerns that the innovative and creative parts of what higher ed IT staff do might suffer.

I don't think that will happen. I happen to think that many of us who are in the higher education realm, even if lacking a faculty position, are here for the same reasons that the faculty are - for precisely the creativity and innovation possibilities. "Playing" is part of our job, and the future looks bright for that part of our job description staying put.
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Broadband Over Power Lines (BPL)

Some consider BPL a great, low-cost way to get Internet access out to rural areas. Others decry the interference on radio frequency spectrums during tests and early applications. Will we be shaking our finger at power lines and saying "Bad Power Lines" (BPL)?
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Developing a Quantum Computer

Einstein despised what he called "spooky entanglement," but a recent breakthrough demonstrated for the first time, such entanglement between a trapped ion and an optical photon.
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Web-Enabled Faculty Database for Management and Accreditation

The AACSB, Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, chose the University of Tennessee to pilot new AACSB accreditation standards. Administrators at UT, went to outsourcing to build SEDONA - "a self-service, Web-enabled database application for collecting, managing, evaluating, and reporting faculty teaching, research, and service activities."
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Virtual Universities: Real Possibilities

This reports the outcomes learned from a study by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) and the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET) of virtual colleges and universities (loosely defined). Its findings are presented in six categories. This is definitely an article to read for anyone who wants to think they're on top of this area.
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IUPUI Hit Hard By Trojan Horse

The Trojan horse, Backdoor.Anyserv.B, was inserted into the network by a hacker, and on top of that, a problem with the core network on the Indians University-Bloomington campus caused serious outages for users at all eight IU campuses.
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Ohio U. to Change the Use of Social Security Numbers

The university expects to stop 95 percent of its use of student social security numbers by the fall of 2005, with an implementation plan that substitutes the students' email address for online transactions and a pin number for other transactions.
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Why Has IT Not Paid Off As We Had Hoped (Yet)

A long essay by the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and its chief technology office at the University of Virginia about why, from the days of punch cards and daisy wheel printers to our current state in 2004, the promise of IT implementation in higher education has not quite come through . . . yet.
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Blaster Worm Hero Honored at U. of Colorado-Boulder

Davis Chen, an undergraduate, is "Student Employee of the Year" for being the man who saved CU-Boulder from the more serious financial impact felt by many other institutions from the "Blaster" work as students returned to school in the fall of 2003.
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UCLA Implements File-Sharing Quarantine in the Residence Halls

The 7,500 students (and some faculty and staff) who live in UCLA residence halls now face implementation of the quarantine approach. When the school is notified of a file sharing violation, the user's computer becomes unable to connect to other ResNet machines and to servers outside the UCLA campus, until the situation is resolved.
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U. Texas at San Antonio to Implement Laptop Solution

The school is going to go big on technology-assisted learning. A set of overlapping initiatives, including an extensive wireless network and the beginning of talks to manufacturers about getting good prices and support on laptops, have begun.
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Higher Ed Coalition Opposes Justice Dept. Effort to Extend Wiretap Law to Internet Providers

A coalition of higher education and library associations has just filed a comment with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opposing a Department of Justice attempt to bring all broadband access to the Internet within the scope of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). The current CALEA legislation gives law enforcement agencies access to communications traffic under specific legal conditions and constraints. (EDUCAUSE)
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NSF Awards $450,000 to Cornell U. Library

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded Cornell University Library a $450,000 grant to create a system for the long-term preservation and dissemination of digital mathematics and statistics journals.
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