Terry Calhoun, IT Trends Commentator
Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
University of Michigan

Feeling Like a Pony Express Rider? Uh Oh, Here Comes the Telegraph

In a recent articled titled The Impact of Technologies on Learning, researchers at the University of Washington reported on substantive focus groups with more than 100 students and faculty through a program called Listening to the Learner.

The results were what you might expect. Students clearly want to see faculty make more use of pertinent technologies, and faculty meet up with a number of barriers, such as lack of equipment, lack of rewards for the use of technology, and culture shock-as one faculty member put it, feeling like a Pony Express rider just as the telegraph comes along. The study recommends a reorganization of technology support, but those recommendations don't affect IT managers much. To tell you the truth, I think the study highlights, once again, academic departments' lack of understanding of what their own mission might be, and the concomitant lack of a departmental strategic plan.
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Blackboard Outlasts Rivals, Eyes Stock Sale By End of May

It seems like a very different kind of IPO than the Goggle one. And it's certainly smaller, with Blackboard expecting to raise less than $60M. Will that be enough to continue as a major player in te $2.2B postsecondary enterprise software market?
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MIT Aims for the Bottom Line

MIT's Media Lab's new project is "CELab, or consumer electronics lab, which will capitalize on the convergence of new technologies and consumer demand for easy-to-use devices." It's a virtual lab, though, without a bricks and mortar component and with concomitant low operating costs.
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How Far D'es MIT's OpenCourseWare Program Reach, One Year Later?

How about "everywhere?" MIT's OCW has reached one-third of its goal, now having more than 700 MIT courses on the web and aiming at 2,000 by 2008. One symbol of its reach is that a consortium of Chinese universities are translating all the courses into Chinese, and putting up 1,000 of their own courses as well.
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How Much D'es Information Technology Matter?

One year ago, Nicholas G. Carr wrote a Harvard Business Review article titled "IT D'esn't Matter." He took some instant hits from IT industry bigwigs, and now he's published a book in response titled "D'es IT Matter?" D'es it all boil down to not being IT itself, but how you use IT?
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UCSD University Hack - 380,000 Identities At Risk

An intruder who had been using the extra disk space to store digital movies, hacked into the UCSD Business and Financial Services Department servers. Although the IDs and other sensitive data for hundreds of thousands of staff, alumni, students, and applicants were accessible, there is no evidence that they were accessed.
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Drexel U. Summer Upgrade to Increase Network Speed

Drexel's current wireless network, consisting of 325 access points, most of which were installed around 2000, will be replaced this summer by 802.11a access points intended to be up to five times faster. After the upgrades, an additional 600+ access points will be installed in additional campus locations.
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U. Texas at Austin Limits Library Computer Usage to Official Users

Due to "persistent unauthorized" abuse, the more than 200 computers available inside the UTA library, only the handful which are dedicated to searching the library collection and locating books remain available only to users with an official university EID.
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Online Student Elections a Success at Columbia College in Chicago

The student government association at Columbia modified a pre-existing campus software program called OASIS to allow for secret, personalized balloting, rather than purchasing a pre-formatted balloting package.
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UNC's Two-Year Search for a New CIO Is Over

The new CIO is Daniel Reed, formerly of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, who was hired in to UNC last year in a faculty position. He will be CIO and vice chancellor for information technology as well as holding down a $3 million Chancellor's Eminent Professorship.
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Budget Cuts at Cal State Stanislaus Affects IT Staffing

Brian St. Denis, a network security analyst in the Office of Information Technology position has just gone from full-time to part-time. He's not alone.
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A Hard Eye on IT Purchases

Warren Arbogast g'es onto campuses and finds out where IT is wasting money. He claims that he can spend a couple of days on any campus and find a way to save more than $100k. But he's not big on laying off staff.
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Valley City Seeks to Offer Online Technology Degree

An online degree program to address the nation's shortage of technology teachers could create jobs for this city and major revenue for its university, officials say. City commissioners last week gave the Valley City-Barnes County Development Corp. permission to invest $150,000 to help expand Valley City State University's technology education program.
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Mobile Media Consortium Hosts "Go Mobile or Go Home"

This daylong event was designed to explore the power and potential of mobile media and wireless technology. The event featured panel discussions on the state of wireless, mobile media content and what's next in wireless innovation. The day concluded as NMI students showed off this semester's mobile media projects.
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Southern Illinois U. Carbondale Joins WebSurveyor Grant Program

SIUC has joined WebSurveyor's Academic Grant Program. As one of the many educational institutions to participate in the program, SIUC has integrated WebSurveyor into its marketing curriculum. The WebSurveyor software will enable the students to develop questionnaires for surveys.
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