News 12-04-2001

• 12/04/01

The Call for Papers has been extended to December 15, 2001, for the Syllabus2002 annual summer conference. The conference will be held July 27-31 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley, Calif. The conference covers a wide variety of timely topics in the field of education technology.

Tracks include: New Technologies Update; Administrative Systems for the Academic Enterprise; Technology Infrastructure and IT Planning Issues; Standards, Interoperability, and Open Source; New Publishing Models and Intellectual Property; Web-Based Environments for Teaching and Administration; Evaluation and Assessment Strategies; and Faculty Innovation-Case Studies.

Interested parties are encouraged to submit proposals online at <http://www.syllabus.com/cfp2002/index.asp>

UCLA Report Pegs Internet Usage Up, E-Commerce Down

A UCLA study on the impact of the Internet shows that despite continued growth in usage, enthusiasm for electronic commerce is down, and concerns about online privacy and security remain steady. The study found that 72.3 percent of Americans have Internet access, up from 66.9 percent in 2000. Users go online an average of 9.8 hours per week, up from 9.4 hours in 2000. While Internet commerce remains strong -- 48.9 percent of Internet users purchased online in 2001 -- it is down from 50.7 percent in 2000. Jeffrey Cole, director of the university's Center for Communication Policy, said that "despite the dot-com meltdown, we found that the Internet is more vigorous than ever."

For more information, visit: <http://www.ccp.ucla.edu>.

Princeton Launches Cashless Card Application

Princeton University has launched a cashless card program that will let students, faculty and staff make off-campus purchases via their university identification cards. The "stored value" program is being set up by Student Advantage Inc., an e-commerce marketing comany. Its SA Cash program enables Princeton users to buy food, necessities and entertainment at a network of off-campus businesses. The company helps build the network by screening, recruiting and offering marketing support to local merchants. It then provides the merchants proprietary transaction processing equipment that is compatible with the university's host system and permits transaction settlement through the university.

For more information, visit: <http://www.princeton.edu>.

Neural Net Theorists Win Louisville Psychology Prize

Neuroscience pioneers James McClelland and David Rumelhart won the $200,000 University of Louisville Grawemeyer award for psychology. McClelland is co-director of Carnegie Mellon University's Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Rumelhart was a psychology and computer science professor at Stanford University until 1998. The psychologists began collaborating two decades ago on a cognitive theory called parallel distributed processing. Their research explored the idea of connectionism -- that no single neuron in the human brain d'es its job alone in processing information, but that neural networks decide things collectively and simultaneously rather than in sequence. The award honors their achievement of bringing the idea to a wider audience in psychology, neuroscience and computer science.

For more information, visit: <http://www.grawemeyer.org>.

UMass Lowell Trains Faculty Online in Distance Learning

The University of Massachusetts at Lowell has put on the Web the course it offers faculty to train them in developing online course materials. "What better way to have faculty understand the technology and the students' experience than to take an online course themselves?'' said Dean Jacqueline Moloney. The six-week online training pilot program will help 20 faculty adapt courses in a distance learning format and complete a course outline. The program will provide both technical and pedagogical skills development needed by faculty to migrate 10 courses online.

For more information, visit <http://continuinged.uml.edu>.

Cal-Poly Nets Grant for High-Tech Labs, Student Outreach

California Polytechnic State University won a $294,000 grant from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers to help the university strengthen its manufacturing curriculum. The grant will help the university create labs and update coursework to prepare students to meet the needs of California manufacturers. The school will also offer a work experience program with participating ME members in 2003. Students will become paid employees at partner companies, allowing them to "earn as they learn" and gain work experience while earning wages to offset their educational costs. SME has awarded more than $1 million such grants to California schools since 1998.

For more information, visit <http://www.sme.org>.

SAP Funds Universities in E-Business Research

Eenterprise software developer SAP, Inc. has started a program to fund university e-business research projects. The company is currently committing more than $500,000 to fund three projects at colleges and universities, with additional research projects to be considered as the program progresses. The initial projects include "Realizing the Process Enterprise," at Carleton University, to study of the role of institutionalizing processes during enterprise system implementations; "E-Business Solutions to Border Control Challenges," at Rutgers University, a study of the information technology requirements for international trade; and "Adoption of Web-Based New Product Development Systems," at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a study of business-to-business product development.

Universities to Use Sallie Mae E-Payment Gateway

Sallie Mae, the student loan financing company, said five more universities had signed to use its Net.Pay electronic payment gateway, pushing the total number of schools using the gateway to more than 80. The electronic payment system, which provides a real-time interface between an school's web site and the gateway, lets students, alumni and others make secure Internet payments using a credit card, debit card or Automated Clearing House (ACH) debit. The University at Buffalo; ITT Educational Services, Inc.; the University of Colorado, Boulder; Mary Baldwin College; and Southeast Missouri University are the latest signees for Net.Pay services. "The Net.Pay electronic payment gateway allows us to bring to our users secure online transactions with minimal effort on the part of our staff and systems people," said William Betlej, director of CIS, Mary Baldwin College.

U. Washington Signs Broadband Services Contract

The University of Washington signed a one-year agreement with Level 3 Communications Inc. to provide broadband connectivity to the public Internet. The company, which offers IP, broadband transport, colocation, and switching services, will provide the university its CrossRoads brand Internet access service via its multiple protocol label switching (MPLS) backbone. The network currently operates at 10 gigabits per second. Scott Mah, director of the school's communication technologies division, in commenting on the deal, said the university puts "exceptionally high demands on our Internet and networking infrastructure."

For more information visit <http://www.washington.edu>.

U. Dayton Picks Groupware Antivirus Solution

The University of Dayton has purchased Sybari Software Inc.'s Antigen groupware antivirus software to protect its Lotus Notes/Domino servers. Susan McCabe, director of Lotus Integration for the university, said it picked Antigen, "for many reasons including trusted scanning, which means less processor time, the ability to quickly block any files or file type, multiple scan engines, and the 24 x 7 uptime." Dayton's Notes servers support more than 10,000 students and 2,000 faculty and staff. Antigen enables users to run multiple-scan engines. It also provides a file filter that lets administrators filter e-mail attachments by file name, type, or wild card. Last year, Dayton was ranked 16th out of 200 colleges and universities accredited by Yahoo as being "Most Wired."

For more information, visit: <http://www.udayton.edu>.

Fiber Optic Pioneers Win 2001 Columbia Marconi Award

Herwig Kogelnik of Bell Laboratories and Allan Snyder of the Australian National University, pioneers in the development of fiber optic technology, will share the $100,000 Marconi Award for work that has revolutionized modern telecommunications. Kogelnik and Snyder have been at the forefront of discoveries in optical technology. John Jay Iselin, president of the Marconi foundation, credited the work of the two scientists with helping move the Internet into the fiberoptic age. "Much of this transformation is attributable to the creativity demonstrated by the two honorees," he said.

For more information, visit: <http://www.columbia.edu>.