News 11-26-2002
Sponsor: Announcing Syllabus Radio!
www.syllabus.com/radio/index.asp
Log on to www.syllabus.com/radio/index.asp
and listen to audio interviews with established leaders and creative thinkers
in higher education as they discuss the good, the better and the best uses of
IT on campus. This week, Judith Boettcher speaks with Michael Giordano, Instructional
Designer and Manager of the Instructional Development Center at the University
of New Hampshire, on using technology to create collaborative workspaces.
U. Maryland, NSF to Build Children's Digital Library
A partnership of government, non-profit, industry, and academic organizations
have announced a five-year, $3.3 million plan to build a digital library of
10,000 children's books drawn from 100 cultures as part of a long-term research
project to develop new technology to serve young readers. Built by The Internet
Archive, the largest library on the Internet, and The University of Maryland's
Human-Computer Interaction Lab, a leader in children's interface design, the
International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) will serve children and libraries
worldwide by providing a large-scale digital archive of literature for readers
ages three to thirteen. "This is the beginning of a long-term project to provide
children around the world with access to literature from different cultures
in a way that is intuitive and accessible," said the ICDL's Director, Jane White.
"This collaborative effort by government, commercial, academic, and non-profit
organizations will change the way children learn about other cultures, and strengthen
libraries worldwide."
For more information, visit: www.icdlbooks.org
Microsoft Certification Recommended for Credits
Certifications for Microsoft Word 2002, Excel 2002, PowerPoint 2002, Access
2002, Outlook 2002—collectively, "Office XP"—and Microsoft Project 2002
have each been recommended by the American Council on Education (ACE) for one
semester hour of lower division college credit. The Project 2002 exam is also
recommended for upper division credit. Students who hold or are pursuing Microsoft
Office Specialist certification for Office XP (2002) applications or Microsoft
Project may apply via the ACE Transcript Service for use as possible college
credit. "With the advance of computer technology, Microsoft Office skills are
now essential to enter and succeed in nearly every job market," stated Jo Ann
Robinson, director, ACE College Credit Recommendation Service. "This college
credit recommendation validates Microsoft Office Specialist certification skill
requirements for Office XP and Microsoft Project as being equivalent to college-level
skills needed to succeed in school and at work."
For more information, visit: www.acenet.edu
Rice, HP to Build Texas's Fastest Supercomputer
Rice University's Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) and
HP said they plan to build Texas' fastest academic supercomputer, the Rice Terascale
Cluster (RTC). Scheduled to come online early next year, RTC is to be built
on clusters of HP's Intel Itanium 2-based workstations and servers. RTC is expected
to be the first computer at a Texas university with a peak performance of 1
teraflop, or 1 trillion floating-point operations per second. More than 30 researchers
from fields as diverse as biochemistry, political science, physics and computational
engineering have already booked time on RTC. The computer will be composed of
132 HP Workstations zx6000 and four HP Servers rx5670. "Since RTC is a shared
resource, it has to have the flexibility to meet a diverse set of high-performance
computing needs—be they computationally demanding, data intensive or mathematically
complex," said Moshe Vardi, director, CITI.
ExxonMobil Will Spend $100M on Stanford Energy Project
ExxonMobil Corp. announced its plans to invest $100 million in a Stanford University
project dedicated to researching new options for commercially viable technological
systems for energy supply and use, which have the capability to substantially
reduce greenhouse emissions. The Global Climate and Energy Project (G-CEP) will
be led by Stanford University and involves research institutions and global
companies, including ExxonMobil, General Electric and Schlumberger. The announcement
comes as scientists have begun calling for a research effort as ambitious as
the Apollo project to address both energy needs and emission reductions.
For more information, visit:
http://gcep.stanford.edu
Awards, Deals, Contracts in Higher Education
E-TRAINING—Arizona Government University signed a contract with
TraCorp Inc. to convert the school's current instructor-led courses to Web-based
training before Oct. 31, 2003. The school has launched an initiative to use
the benefits of online learning in its training programs for over 42,000 state
of Arizona employees. "eLearning is the wave of the future and Arizona wants
to stay on the cutting edge," said Gregory Price, Dean of Academics at Arizona
Government University.
E-PROCUREMENT—Scotland's University of Edinburgh has signed a multi-year
license agreement for SciQuest SelectSite Advanced Procurement Application (APA)
to improve purchasing processes and identify areas for cost savings. The initial
implementation will include users in the Science & Engineering, Medicine & Veterinary
Medicine colleges. After this successful pilot phase, a campuswide implementation
of up to 4,000 users is planned. SelectSite APA is a Web-based sourcing, procurement,
and catalog management application designed for research-intensive organizations.
Corrections: New Dell OptiPlexTM SX260 Pricing
Due to a production error, the price of Dell's new OptiPlexTM SX260 small computer
mentioned in Friday's newsletter was inaccurate. The correct starting price
for the computer is: $699. Here is Friday's item in its entirety:
DELL SMALL COMPUTER—Dell Computer Inc. introduced the smallest
computer in its history. The OptiPlexTM SX260 weighs under 8 pounds and is 50
percent smaller by volume than the existing OptiPlex small form factor computer.
It can be mounted horizontally or vertically underneath a desk, to a wall or
behind the optional SX260 flat panel monitor. The system's hot-swappable media
bay accommodates any module from any Dell Latitude notebook. The SX260 system
has no PCI or AGP slots, meaning greater image stability and standardization.
Prices start at $699.