OPINION

Digital Tweed: Mapping the Terrain of Online Education

By Kenneth C. Green

“ONLINE EDUCATION IS NOW CLEARLY PART OF THE EVOLVING 21st CENTURY LANDSCAPE OF AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION.”

Like so many things in education and the academic community, much of the (sometimes polite, sometimes passionate) conversation about big issues is often driven by opinion and epiphany, rather than data and evidence. Certainly, the decade-long discussions on and off campus about distance and online education, fall into this mode. All (or at least many) of us have fixed and firm opinions about the efficacy and quality of online and distance education, and the impact of these programs for students and institutions.

Consequently, it is useful and refreshing to find informative reports with credible data that help map the still somewhat uncharted territory of online and distance learning in American higher education. The November 2004 Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) Report, “Entering the Mainstream,” coupled with the Consortium’s September 2003 report, “Sizing the Opportunity,” bring timely, informative data to the occasionally contentious conversations about online and distance education. (Sloan-C, a consortium of institutions and organizations committed to quality online education, receives financial support from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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IT NEWS

Adobe Buying Macromedia for $3.4B US

Strategically it d'es indeed make a lot of sense. And the products complement each other as well, and make for potentially simpler relationships between Campus IT and vendors. Adobe Chief Financial Officer Murray Demo said in an interview last month there are “too many software providers out there chasing too few dollars.” He said “customers basically want to have fewer relationships with software vendors.” (Bloomberg)
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Celebrating Moore's Law

Now one of the world's wealthiest people $4B+) and an active philanthropist, Gordon Moore first put pen to paper and predicted the constant acceleration of chip technology in 1965. At that time, a transistor cost $5.52; now a single one costs about a billionth of a dollar. (Wired)
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Defining “Official” Messaging on Campus

Who gets to send “official” messages to everyone on your campus? Some people think that on the University of Pennsylvania campus, the answer is "Too many!" (Daily Pennsylvanian)
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Bervard Community College Busts 20 Staff for Internet Porn

Every campus hopes that it d'esn't have to use the policies in place regarding such things, but administrators at BCC recently found that they had to. (Florida Today)
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Potential Problems with New Portal Produce Puzzled Looks at Pace

Pace University's new portal system won't be fully functional until January 2006, so puzzled looks on some faces were to be expected; they've still got learning curves to undergo. (The Pace Press)
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RESOURCES

SyncScan: Faster Handoff Between WiFi Networks

It comes to you from the University of California, San Diego, and is patent-pending: "SyncScan is a handoff algorithm which can cut the time it takes to switch from one Wi-Fi access point to another by a factor of a hundred over existing solutions." (Science Blog)
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DEALS, CONTRACTS, AWARDS

101communications Acquires T.H.E. Journal

101communications, a leading B2B media company, which publishes Campus Technology and this eletter, has acquired the assets of ETC Group LLC, publisher of T.H.E. Journal, the largest circulated, and oldest continually published, journal serving technology users in K-12 and higher education.
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LiquidMatrix Inks Deals with Four Institutions

LiquidMatrix today announced that four higher education institutions, each utilizing a different enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, have selected LiquidMatrix’s ActiveCampus solution to help them achieve their business objectives. The four institutions
are: Faulkner University, Alabama; Saint Joseph College, Connecticut; West Virginia University; and University of Maryland. (Liquidmatrix)
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