News 09-24-2002

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MBA Programs Get 'Incomplete' in Security

Professional services firm Ernst & Young called on the nation's business schools to beef up their curriculums to include studies in digital security risk management. An informal analysis by the firm of the curriculums of the nation's top 30 business schools noted that while schools such as Stanford and Carnegie Mellon offered in-depth computer security courses, the programs often were not part of general business school studies. And few classes appeared to address cyber security issues directly. "Training and educating just the IT manager is like preparing for a war by arming the generals with howitzers and giving the front line soldiers -- the rest of the work force -- pop guns," said Jose Granado, who leads E&Y's Attack & Penetration Advanced Security Center. "Managing cyber security needs to be a core business discipline for an entire enterprise and MBA programs are a great place to provide that training."

Featured Session on Wireless Networking and Trends at Syllabus fall2002

With the deployment of wireless networking, students and faculty alike are beginning to enjoy the freedom of roaming unfettered through campus with their notebook and handheld computers. Will wireless networking change teaching and course administration? What are the security issues? A panel discussion led by Judith Boettcher, CREN, will present first-hand observations and studies of wireless usage on campus at Syllabus fall2002. This education technology conference, held Nov. 3-5 at the Boston Marriott Newton Hotel, includes keynote speakers, breakout sessions, a vendor fair and an opportunity to network with colleagues focused on technology in higher education.

For information and to register, go to http://www.syllabus.com/fall2002

Stanford Online Press Gets 'Clustering' Software

Stanford's HighWire Press, an online publisher of scientific and medical publications for researchers and institutions, has licensed "clustering" software that will allow it to organize its content into easy-to-navigate clusters for end-users. HighWire licensed the Clustering Engine and Enterprise Publisher from Vivisimo, Inc. to organize search results and publish larger document subsets on its master site. HighWire will offer the products to its own publishing customers for use on their journal websites. "HighWire Press now has 13 million online articles, so researchers need tools to reduce, refine, and tunnel into search results," said John Sack, director of HighWire. The new software, he added, "will help liberate readers from the need to make overly specific queries. Instead, they can recognize interesting topic clusters and drill down from there, in the 'I know it when I see it' style."

For more information, visit: http://highwire.stanford.edu.

Services: ETS Tech Enhances Online Assessment Tool

Educational Testing Service subsidiary ETS Technologies, Inc., unveiled an upgraded version of its Criterion Online Writing Evaluation tool, a web-based service that evaluates students' writing skills and provides immed iate score reporting and diagnostic feedback. The company said the new release g'es beyond offering immediate scoring to providing feedback that annotates a student's writing with specific suggestions for improvement. Among the software's features are: heuristic-based diagnostic feedback that helps writers focus on their errors as they revise their essays, and a work-in-progress revision capability that allows them to make revisions as they review each category of feedback. Instructors can also insert their own comments about an essay both within the essay and in a message board. All of the student's writing, scores, feedback, and comments are saved to a secure virtual portfolio that both the instructor and student can access

eCollege Upgrades Synchronous Teaching Tool

Course management system provider eCollege said it improved its ClassLive Premium offering, a synchronous tool suite that provides real-time instructor-student sessions and record them for future use. The tool set integrates live audio/visual functionality typically found in collaboration software directly into the eCollege course management system. The new suite includes 'One-Way Broadcast Audio,' allowing an instructor's voice to be transferred over the Internet for office hours, online tutoring or live lectures with PowerPoint slides. 'Two-Way Audio' enables students and instructors to speak to each other and in groups without additional conference call technology. 'Synchronized Archives' enables ClassLive sessions to be played back as a streaming video.

MTV Acquires College Television Network

MTV Networks last week purchased the assets of the College Television Network from CTN Media Group, Inc. New York-based CTN is the largest television network exclusively dedicated to serving college students, reaching 8.2 million students each week via a satellite feed to televisions located in public spaces on the largest college campuses, as well as through dorm room cable systems on about 150 campuses. As part of MTV, CTN will continue to offer content geared exclusively towards college-age students (18-24) through a blend of music, news, sports and college-specific programming. CTN said it would continue to create new music and other college-themed events and bring them to college students across the U.S. MTV said the acquisition gives it a means of "super-serving the college market."

Smiley Emoticon Celebrates 20th Birthday

The smiley emoticon turned 20 last week. The first smiley was created by Dr. Scott Fahlman -- then a computer science research professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, and now an IBM researcher -- to prevent the frequent misunderstandings that occurred when one person's joke or sarcasm posted to a local electronic bulletin board was unwittingly taken seriously by others. Widely distributed over the primitive computer networks of the day, the smiley has spawned an entire vocabulary of smiles, retorts and graphic elements constructed from a line of keyboard characters. Fahlman's colleagues at CMU recently unearthed the original email and discussion from Sept. 19, 1982, which can be viewed along with other "smiley lore" via links at his website.

For more information, visit: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/

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