Campus Briefs
:: NEWS
EXCEL IN GRADING. Instructors at the College of Business Administration at Abilene Christian University
(TX) now check student work more thoroughly and quickly, and return it complete with individual feedback. They’ve
designed and implemented a tool called “ChexEl,” which automates grading of homework completed via
Microsoft Excel.
THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR. At St. Petersburg College (FL), IT
leaders hoped to use their course management system from Angel Learning to communicate
more effectively with a diverse and growing student population. They created the St. Petersburg Online Communicator
(SPOC), which works within Angel to increase the number of touch points between faculty and students. SPOC is a rich
set of tools for voice communication, screen capture, and video and audio recording.
WE GOT IT COVERED.
For two years, Norfolk State University (VA) has worked toward ubiquitous internet access on campus, with dorm renovations
for connectivity, WiFi installations, and more. Now, the school is completing a reaffirmation project to doublecheck
that it provides 100 percent internet coverage on campus, including in the green spaces and other areas covered
by the wireless service. The project will culminate in the fall with a media event featuring NSU’s WiFi capabilities, so
that returning faculty, staff, and students will be more aware of wireless services on campus and how to use them to the
fullest.
VIRTUAL COMPUTER LAB. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point is offering students remote
access to a virtual computer lab, so that they may use specialized software any time, from anywhere. The lab is open
24/7/365 and can be accessed via a web login and remote desktop protocol.
CYBER ENTREPRENEURS.
Using several collaboration technologies, including a discussion forum, a wiki, a web portal, and an intranet, students
in Harvard Business School’s (MA) International Entrepreneurship course participated with nine other universities
worldwide in a Virtual Entrepreneurial Team Exercise, a global business simulation. The VETE allowed some 460 students
working in 98 teams to hone their skills in dispersed group dynamics on an international stage.
HIGH-PERFORMANCE ALUMNUS:
Sun’s Chairman Scott McNealy
at Stanford’s CEES dedication.
ONLINE COMMUNITY PATENT REVIEW. Students and faculty at New York Law
School’s Institute for Information Law and Policy are working on a project to inform and streamline
patent reviews with an online system that will involve community experts as advisers in the patent
examination process.
BIG EARTH, BIG COMPUTERS. Two institutions boosted their contributions
to computational geosciences this summer. The California Institute of Technology dedicated
a new Earthquake Media Center to assist media in quake reporting. The Geosciences
Computational Facility, where the center is housed, uses a high-performance supercomputing cluster
based on technology from Dell to generate earthquake visualizations. And Stanford
University (CA) opened its new Center for Computational Earth and Environmental Science
(CEES) as a research partnership among the university, government, and private industry. Sun
Microsystems donated $3 million in hardware, services, and cash to help launch
CEES, so researchers and students can tackle complex computational problems surrounding analysis,
simulation, and prediction of geologic processes and ecological systems.