OPINION

Campuses Make Way for the Worldwide Wiki

By Rich Seeley

Do you wiki?

Almost sounds suggestive, d'esn’t it?

But while it is a trend on college campuses, where it may be bordering on a craze among the millennial generation, you can still get blank stares when you ask a grayer general audience about wikis.

Sometimes bundled into a product category that marketers at IBM and Microsoft call collaborative computing, the humble wiki is really little more than an accessible and editable Internet-based word processing document open to anyone with a Web browser.

If you’ve ever worked on a memo or letter with a co-worker and taken turns sitting at the keyboard typing in new copy, revisions and edits, you’ve got the basic concept of a wiki. Except that since it’s Web-based, you and your partner do not have to be in the same room. You just need to be on the same planet. Or perhaps you could be on another planet if you have a good enough wireless connection. Read more

IT NEWS

University of Maryland Hit by Virus Spreading through AIM

It's the first media report we've seen of an AOL Instant Messenger virus hitting a campus hard. Apparently it presents itself as a message from someone on your buddy list urging you to click on a link. (Diamondback Online) Read more

StarOffice8 Faces Uphill Struggle to Gain Acceptance on Campus

At least one school, the University of Toronto at Scarborough, uses mostly StarOffice rather than Windows. (COMPUTERWORLD) Read more

New High-Tech Building at RVCC

Raritan Valley Community College (NJ) is planning a 48k square foot building with intensive technology throughout. (Courier News, Bridgewater, NJ) Read more

Indiana University Plans 1950s 'Scare' Posters for IT Education

Each of the eight IU campuses will be inundated with a series of posters imitating those of 1950s monster movies as past of National Cyber Security Week. (Indiana Daily Student idnews.com) Read more

RESOURCES

Global Consortium Forms Open Content Alliance to Bring Additional Searchable Content Online

The Open Content Alliance (OCA), a global consortium has been formed to provide open access to content while respecting the rights of copyright holders. OCA members includes The University of California, the University of Toronto, Internet Archive, Yahoo! Inc., Adobe Systems Inc., the European Archive, HP Labs, the National Archives (UK), O'Reilly Media Inc. and Prelinger Archives. The OCA provided content includes cultural, historical and technological digitized print and multimedia content from libraries, archives and publishers. The Content Repository's complete works will be searchable and downloadable for free by anyone. (OCA) Find out more

DEALS, CONTRACTS, AWARDS

Wheelock College G'es for Jenzabar

Wheelock College (MA) is adopting both the Jenzabar EX ERP and its Internet Campus Solution (JICS). (BusinessWire)

DyKnow Enters Classrooms This Fall at Purdue

DyKnow (http://www.dyknow.com), a vendor of interactive educational technology, announced this week that Purdue University (ID) has chosen DyKnow Vision and DyKnow Monitor interactive teaching, learning and classroom management software to “make lectures more engaging and collaborative for professors and students.” Beginning with this fall 2005 semester, the DyKnow software will be used in the College of Engineering and the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture.