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

ASCII versus HTML. Good-bye ASCII.

It finally happened. Last week at SCUP we received an e-mail message from one of the more than 12,000 subscribers to "SCUP E-mail News" (SEN) asking to unsubscribe from the weekly higher education planning e-mail newsletter. The writer noted that they would love to be re-subscribed, if and when we resort to an HTML-formatted newsletter. Even though I knew it would be trouble, I shared that bell-weather message with our marketing director, who is already pushing me faster than I wanted to be moved in that direction.

Then, I asked the question, once again, of the UWEBD list of 1,700+ college and university webmasters. As usual, they responded with a great discussion thread, the gist of which was yes, consumers and marketers want HTML e-mail, and pressure is mounting, but that a number of issues involving technology and back-end work, combined with issues relating to spam filters and touchy e-mail servers, still made it more desirable, from their perspectives, to use ASCII in e-mail communications.
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EFF Patent Hit List Is Topped By Acacia Technologies

The EFF asked constituents to suggest potentially invalid patents that were being used to unfairly stifle IT innovation. The list will be familiar to most, and it's a pleasure for most in higher education to see Acacia at the top.
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Father Of ASCII Dies at Age 84

Bob Bemer had a lot to do with early computing, and a lot to do with the computing that we do now. Would that each of us could make what are so clearly important contributions.
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Electronics City, India - America's Back Office

What's like at the other end of the IT off-shoring movement? At one campus, which was built from scratch in less than 90 days three years ago, an administrator says, "We never have to worry about placing the students. Everybody gets placed."
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MagLev D'esn't Work at Old Dominion

It's technology, and it d'esn't work. And, unlike IT that d'esn't work, this bullet-shaped train just sits there and draws flack.
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Hackers Seed Web Sites to Infiltrate PCs

While no big-name eCommerce Web servers were hacked, attackers managed to infiltrate financial institutions, a used-equipment merchant and automotive sites, says Mark Sachs, director of the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center. All told, several hundred IIS servers, serving up thousands of public Web pages, were hacked, Sachs says.
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Hacker College

After graduation, students take a special exam, and if they pass, they get a certificate naming them as Certified Ethical Hackers. It's no wonder corporate IT security budgets are several times what they used to be.
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The SCOB Outbreak - Making Web Visits Dangerous

Now, phishing can happen at an infected Web server - not just via official-looking HTML email. People who browse with something other than MSIE are comfortable with this one.
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Computer Algorithm to Solve College Admissions Diversity Issues

Can this program simplify the routine colleges and universities go through to handle diversity admissions issues by clustering applications into groups based on weighted factors?
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How's the Blackboard IPO Doing?

The Motley Fool crowd analyzes its future, quite intelligently, actually. I bet they went to college. "Blackboard has a nice moat against competitors and the potential to raise prices as the product becomes indispensable to customers."
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Students Accused of Hacking Into N.C. State Police Computer

Apparently the students used their illicit access to add fictitious incidents to the campus police daily incident log.
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Apple Working on Simplifying Hard Drive Searching

Do you find it easier to Google the entire Internet than to find things on your own hard drive? Apple wants to make that task easier, as it takes aim at Microsoft's Longhorn.
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UT Austin to Give Each Student a "Keychain Call Box" Device

Instead of call boxes on posts, UT Austin officials want to give each student a keychain device that can be triggered to alert campus security that the specific student, identified on a computer screen by photo, has a problem - and precisely where they are.
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Colleges Reach Out Via Instant Messaging

Admissions officers now using instant messenger to reach potential students. By far the majority of teenagers use IM, and now admissions staff are using that resource to field questions and be persuasive.
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U. of North Texas Switches to Web-based EIS System

To provide all sorts of nifty new functionality for students, the campus is finally moving most of its student-related information off of mainframes it has had in use since 1984.
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Webloggers Deal Harvard Blog-Bores a Black Eye

We don't really understand all of this, but the intensity with which the blogging community is reacting to what looks like typical IT fare is interesting, to say the least.
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NLII and NMC to Collaborate on Identifying and Assessing New Technologies

They will collaborate on the annual "Horizon Report," which will identify and describe emerging technologies that will have a major impact on higher education.
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Smart Classrooms to Debut at Sanford Institute, Duke University

"The desks will welcome laptops as readily as pen and paper, and chalk dust will be a thing of the past." But, hold on, planning is still underway and the classrooms are a year away from completion.
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Mann Library to Preserve Historical Agricultural Literature on Microfilm and the World Wide Web

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded $618,857 to the Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University to preserve local and state agricultural literature on microfilm. The library also is re-launching the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) Web site to make agricultural materials of national historical significance available on the World Wide Web.

The NEH grant and the CHCA contribute to a long-term preservation project, the National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature (NPPAL). The project prevents historically significant published materials on the history of state and local agriculture and rural life from being lost to natural decay.
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