News 03-18-2003

Questionmark: Assessment Software for Educators

Click here for Dr. Will Thalheimer's new white paper "The Learning Benefits of Questions." Questionmark enables educators to write, administer, and report on assessments via PCs, LANs, the Internet, and intranets. http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=701

http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=701

Field Narrows in Collegiate Programming Competition

Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the 50 Java and C++ programmers remaining in its 2003 Collegiate Challenge. The tournament is being hosted by TopCoder Inc., which organizes programming competitions for its members and will award a total prize purse of $100,000 to the highest-rated college-level Java and C++ computer programmers in the world. The programmers are ranked based upon their performance during weekly online competitions. The top ranked members are then invited to participate in four online elimination rounds of regional competition. The winner of each region will be named Regional Champion on March 24, and automatically advance to the final field of 16 competitors. The remaining 16 will compete in the tournament's semifinal and championship rounds, which will be held April 4 and 5, 2003 at the University Park Hotel in Cambridge, Mass. There, the tournament champion will win $50,000. The 50 programmers that participated in the Regional Championships represent 34 schools from eight countries around the world. CalTech had the strongest representation with six programmers, followed by MIT, Duke, Stanford, and Georgia Tech, each with three programmers.

Faculty Best Practices: What are Colleagues Doing?

Discuss key issues and hot topics with the experts and your colleagues in the Syllabus Forums at www.syllabus.com/forum. David Brown of Wake Forest University leads a forum on faculty best practices and how to use technology to improve teaching and learning. How are you using asynchronous discussions? What tips do you have for others? Weigh in with your thoughts and questions and see what solutions your colleagues might have.

http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=529

VCU Student Wins Circuit Board Design Competition

Jonathan Andrews, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Engineering, won a $2,000 scholarship from HP and Mentor Graphics Corp. as the winner of a competition on printed circuit board design. Andrews was picked as the winner in the University and Training Institutes category for his data acquisition system design prototype entry. "Although the competition was really an afterthought as I worked on this project, I learned a lot and was constantly amazed, as I worked more with the tools, how I could simplify tasks I had previously struggled with," said Andrews.

Meetings: Carnegie Mellon Hosts Wireless Security Workshop

The Sustainable Computing Consortium (SCC) of Carnegie Mellon University is hosting a workshop to bring together thought leaders from academia, industry, and government to focus on the "hard problems" of interoperability, dependability, and security in mobile, wireless, grid, and other always-on environments. The workshop will be held March 31 - April 1 at the Wyndham Buttes Resort in Tempe, Ariz. "Mobile and wireless Internet access—with more than 100 million users already—is fundamentally changing the ways in which people and organizations both interact and transact," said Dr. William Guttman, director of the SCC. "As consumers and enterprises continue to embrace these technologies, issues of trust and interoperability become increasingly critical. This workshop will serve as a forum for leading experts to address emerging trends, challenges, and future opportunities."

Meetings: Santa Clara U. Confab to Explore IT and Globalization

The Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University will host a conference April 24 on the issues surrounding information technology and globalization. "Networked World: Information Technology and Globalization," will especially address the gap between the information "haves" and "have-nots." "The information age did not evaporate with the bursting of the bubble," said James Koch, executive director, Center for Science, Technology, and Society at SCU. "It's only begun to transform the social fabric of cities and regions around the world, and now is a perfect time to survey the landscape of our networked world." Among the speakers are: Walter Bender, Executive Director of MIT Media Lab; Allen Hammond, Program Coordinator for Law and Public Policy, Santa Clara University School of Law; and Michel Laguerre, UC Berkeley Center for Globalization and Information Technology.

For more information visit: http://sts.scu.edu/globalization

New Deals, Awards, Contracts in Higher Education

FIBER NETWORKS—The Morehouse School of Medicine signed an agreement with AGL Networks to provide dark fiber connectivity from its main campus to a carrier access point that will allow for Internet access and high-speed data swaps with Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State Universities. Morehouse School of Medicine will also have access to alternate telecom services providers.

FAST ETHERNET—Ohio State University said it will deploy a Nortel Networks optical Ethernet to create a high-speed, converged campus network for faster and more convenient delivery of distance learning, course "content-on-demand" and other services to university students and educators. Expected to roll out in April 2003, the system will allow Ohio State to deliver voice, data, and video on one streamlined campus network. It will also provide Ohio State with the bandwidth and enhanced network performance required to enable learning applications that were previously considered too expensive or too difficult to implement over legacy networks.

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