OPINION

$100 Laptops? Ultimately, It Is Not About Machines!

By Terry Calhoun

I’m in the process, with my counterpart at the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers, Steve Glazner, of interviewing EDUCAUSE vice presidents Richard Katz and Diana Oblinger about their view of the next 10 years in higher education. Our article will be published in several places in support of 2006’s Campus of the Future Conference in Honolulu.

One early statement by Oblinger struck me hard the first time I read it yesterday: “The stakes will simply be too high in 2015 for us to not work very hard to ensure each student has a successful learning experience.” That was resonating in my head this morning as I glanced at a news story titled “A Low-Cost Laptop for Every Child,” which is about the MIT-related initiative to create a $100 laptop for children in developing countries, the nonprofit organization, One Laptop Per Child.

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IT NEWS

World Wants More Say in Control of World Wide Web

Oh, my, we truly wish Jon Postel was still around. US politics should not control the Internet, but do we prefer UN politics? (USA Today) Read more

RFID Chips Offer Security, Threaten Privacy

"After October 2006, [an RFID] chip will be embedded in every new passport and will contain information such as your name, date and place of birth, nationality, a digitized photo of yourself, and more." (PRWeb) Read more

Tiny Things, Tiny Minds?

"A boiled-down Bible, the Odyssey in haiku, terse txting ... If we're not careful, our obsession with making all things small could obliterate our capacity for complex thought and even our cultural past." (The Guardian) Read more

Technology Changes Spread of Info

Chet Grycz, former CEO of Octavo, spoke at the University of California-Irvine's New University, addressing wikis and blogs and the way they blur traditional categorizations. (UC-Irvine) Read more

RESOURCES

IT Training and Policies

The University of Michigan's Computer Incident Factor Analysis and Categorization Project demonstrates that policies, training, and automated controls "play well together." (University of Michigan) Find out more

DEALS, CONTRACTS, AWARDS

IBM's 'Blue Gene' Takes Up Residency at Computer Center

It's one of the fastest supercomputers in the world and when it boots up, at Princeton University (NJ), they're gonna call it "Orangena." Read more

Calient Networks Teams with MCNC and LSU CCT to Advance Scientific Research

Calient, a provider of carrier-class photonic switching systems and software, and MCNC, a network research facility and nonprofit provider of network services to North Carolina universities and state government, have partnered to integrate optical control plane and Grid computing technologies for research purposes. Working with the Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) at LSU in conjunction with the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), MCNC and Calient are providing new optical network capabilities to drive extreme-scale scientific applications. (Businesswire) Read more