Campus Briefs
:: NEWS
PROTECTING STUDENTS, NETWORKS. Every fall, students arrive on campus in droves, and one
of the first things they’ll do is use the network. Institutions have many different approaches to protecting students, data,
and the networking environment. At University of California-Berkeley, the security spotlight this fall was on entering
freshmen. In light of social networking and generally heavy use on campus of sites and directories like Facebook, freshmen weren’t even allowed to access the network until they completed a course promoting safe practices.
HIGHER-END LEGAL ADVICE. Since learning that Blackboard had initiated a
patent action against CMS competitor Desire2Learn, the Sakai Foundation engaged the services of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). Among the SFLC
directors are Columbia University (NY) Law Professor Eben Moglen and Stanford University (CA) Law Professor
Lawrence Lessig.
PLAYING FOR GOOD. Researchers at the University of Southern California are studying
the ways students use and abuse computer-based teaching programs. They’re focusing on predicting student behaviors
in order to identify those who “game” the system rather than engaging its features for real learning. To address and help
those users, USC Research Professor Carole Beal hopes to be able to leverage models of effective human tutors who
guide their students with “judicious offers of learner control when the learner appears to be flagging.”
KEEP IT SIMPLE. Two Rhode Island School of Design professors who wanted to escape the complexity and expense of fullfeatured
learning management systems developed their own streamlined, hosted online classroom environment back in
2001. This fall, they’re offering it publicly, but with an online sign-up and the first 1,000 seats free, Digication Campus is still pretty simple.
:: PEOPLE
TO CIO AND BACK:
Kaufman named UIUC interim
KAUFMAN NAMED INTERIM CIO. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s university librarian of nearly seven years, Paula
Kaufman, is now interim CIO at the school, stepping into the role previously held by Peter Siegel,
who left his post to become vice provost and CIO at University of California-Davis. Kaufman had
been UIUC’s librarian since 1999, a position she will return to when her responsibilities as interim
CIO end.
EDUCAUSE LEADERSHIP AWARDS. This year’s two awards for excellence in
IT leadership in higher education, presented this month in Dallas at Educause 2006, recognize Dan Updegrove, vice president for information technology at University of
Texas-Austin, and posthumously, Howard Strauss, former manager of technology strategy and outreach
at Princeton University (NJ).
Share your success! We want to know about recent promotions, changes, and hires in your campus technology
community. Forward the individual’s name; title; institution and location information; and any relevant
educational and occupational background to [email protected], with the subject line “Campus Briefs.”