News Update March 22, 2005
CT News Update:
An Online Newsletter from Campus Technology
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* CCS Presentation Systems - Specials on NEC projectors!
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* The new Dell(TM) Latitude(TM) D610
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* Syllabus2005: Spotlight on Innovation,
Integration & Collaboration
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=13614
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News for Tuesday, March 22, 2005
* Publisher John Wiley Sues Campus Electronic Book Pirates
* Purdue Students Take New ETS Tech "Literacy" Assessment
* Accessible Tech: New Products from IBM, Kurzweill
* Arizona CC Rolls Out Largest PeopleSoft Implementation
* Stanford Offers Online Computer Security Certificate
* Dutch, Romanian, Canadian Students Win Coding Contest
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Publisher John Wiley Sues College Electronic Book Pirates
Publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. filed 10 lawsuits
against people it claimed illegally sold Wiley's
copyrighted products on the eBay auction site. The
lawsuits charged that the people illegally sold
pirated electronic copies of books available in
retail markets as well as pirated electronic copies
of instructor solutions manuals. Wiley distributes
those instructor manuals at no charge, solely to
professors.
Collectively, the lawsuits involve piracy of more
than 75 distinct Wiley titles.
"The sale of infringing electronic copies of books
sold in bookstores hurts everyone, from authors, to
distributors and retailers and the illegal sale of
instructors solutions manuals encourages academic
dishonesty and violates most student codes of ethics"
said Roy Kaufman, a legal director for Wiley.
Two of the cases have already resulted in default
judgments in favor of Wiley in the amounts of $18,417
and $24,398.50 respectively.
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Purdue Students Take New ETS Info Tech Literacy
Assessment
Five hundred Purdue University students are among the
first to take Educational Testing Service’s new
Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
Literacy Assessment. The simulation-based testing
program measures postsecondary students' ability to
define, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create
and communicate information in a technological
environment.
The Purdue students will be among about 8,000 students
nationwide who will take the test by April 15th. ETS
will use their scores to provide aggregate score
reports measuring the performance of particular groups.
"At Purdue University, two of our five undergraduate
core competencies involve information literacy and
information technology," says Cheryl Kern-Simirenko,
Associate Dean and Director of Public Services and
Collections of the Purdue University Libraries, which
has already been at work to integrate information
literacy and tech instruction.
Half of the students who will take the ICT Literacy
Assessment this month are enrolled in Purdue's English
106, a first-year English composition class. Unlike
most freshman English classes, English 106 will
integrate ICT skills into the curriculum. In the class,
students create graphic representations, build Web
pages, and learn to write for different audiences
using technology. Kern-Simirenko hopes that the ICT
Literacy Assessment will provide benchmark information
for future collaborative initiatives.
For more information on the ETS ICT Literacy Assessment
visit www.ets.org/ictliteracy.
Accessible Tech: New Products from IBM, Kurzweill
IBM and Kurzweill showcased new accessibility
technologies at the California State University at
Northridge (CSUN) "Technology and Persons with
Disabilities" conference last week.
IBM exhibited its Home Page Reader, a talking Web
browser. The tool enables developers to test Web pages
for accessibility early in the prototype/design stage
as well as after the content or application has been
deployed.
The company also showcased aDesigner, a tool that
checks color contrast on a Web page, the ability of
users to change the font size and the availability of
links in the page to promote navigability. The tool
checks the page's compliance with accessibility
guidelines.
Meanwhile, Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc.,
unveiled its Kurzweil 3000 for Windows Version 9.
Kurzweil 3000 is reading, writing and learning
software for struggling students. Kurzweil 3000
offers License-to-Go, which provides a way for users
to access Kurzweil 3000 without being physically
connected to the network. Schools can grant licenses
"to go" to any laptop on the network, enabling usage
of Kurzweil 3000 on that computer in or out of the
classroom. Teachers or IT administrators can control
the usage of the license by specifying the length of
time that the license remains valid, whether
overnight, a week, a semester or a year.
Arizona CC Rolls Out Largest PeopleSoft Implementation
The Maricopa Community College system has finished
testing what is believed to be world’s largest
implementation of PeopleSoft Enterprise Student
Administration. Arizona’s Maricopa Community College
system enrolls more than a quarter of a million students
annually and 11,500 employees across 10 nationally
accredited colleges.
Miguel Corzo, Director of Strategic Technology at
Maricopa said testing was critical to the roll-out.
"We've all heard horror stories about major
application rollouts that failed," he said.
"To avoid that same fate, we were meticulous about
testing." It chose a testing solution from Empirix.
Stanford Offers Online Computer Security Certificate
Stanford Center for Professional Development unveiled
an online computer security certificate to teach
software architects, engineers, designers, and
development teams how to build security into programs
from the initial design phase as well as techniques
to improve existing software. The program consists of
three online courses, each course approximately two
hours in length. Courses are self-paced and available
at any time.
Topics covered include buffer overflows, SQL-injection
attacks, off-line dictionary attacks, authentication,
access control, data integrity, symmetric encryption,
public-key cryptography, and more. Detailed
information about the program and courses is available
at http://pr'ed.stanford.edu/?security.
"Computer science is a relatively young field and
security has not been built into many of the academic
degree programs and certifications currently
available," says Neil Daswani, Stanford Ph.D. and
course instructor.
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Syllabus2005: Spotlight on Innovation,
Integration & Collaboration
Join your colleagues July 24-28 for Syllabus2005 at
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leading-edge keynotes and panels, a day at UCLA
with a first-hand view of the latest education
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trends will bring. All this in a fun and exciting
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Dutch, Romanian, Canadian Students Win Coding Contest
Americans students were shut out in the final round
of the Top Coder Collegiate Challenge, a World Series
of college software programmers. Mathijs Vogelzang of
the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, Adrian
Nicolae Carcu of the Babes-Bolyai Computer Science
University, Romania, and Gary Linscott of Queens
University, Canada won the Algorithm, Design and
Development Component tournaments, held in
Santa
Clara, Calif., earlier this month.
Vogelzang beat 23 of the world's top computer
programmers during the onsite semifinal and
championship rounds for the $25,000 grand prize in
the Algorithm tournament. Carcu and Linscott took
home $20,000 and $13,000 respectively as the Design
and Development winners in the Component tournament.
"It was decided in the last minute," said Vogelzang.
"I discovered a bug in my own program but apparently
nobody saw it--including the problem writer. I
hadn't expected to be in the finals and now I've
actually won!"
The Algorithm tournament was a timed competition
where the participants solved complex algorithmic
problems using Java, .Net, C++ or C#. The Component
tournament was focused on software design and
development, where participants in each tournament
were provided general requirements and asked to
design or develop re-useable software components.
The competition is sponsored by TopCoder, a firm
which finds and assesses software development talent
throughout the world, and Yahoo! Inc. The results of
TopCoder's major tournaments, weekly competitions and
component development projects create a global
database of objectively rated and talent-
differentiated student and professional programmers.
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