Campus Briefs
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES, WEBCAST-STYLE.
When
UC Berkeley’s (CA) Educational Technology Services
(ETS) began offering Webcasts of class meetings for regular courses, here’s
one thing it didn’t predict: The biggest growth area of hits on the ETS
Web site is for last year’s classes. Yup; students are viewing last year’s
Webcasts, presumably to get a wider perspective on subject matter, and as a study
strategy. The reaction: ETS is looking into the best ways to make archived classes
available to serve this new demand.
RIAA PRESSES ON.
The Recording Industry Association of America (
www.riaa.org)
continues to target college students with its legal and PR campaign to stem illegal,
P2P downloading. An RIAA press release earlier this year implicated students at
11 colleges and universities in the latest round of John D'e lawsuits for illegal
file-sharing and copyright infringement. But
Campus Technology columnist
Kenneth C. Green, also founding director of The Campus Computing Project, contends
that P2P downloading is really more a consumer market issue, not a campus problem.
Green cites data compiled by the 2004 Campus Computing Project, showing that college
students accounted for less than 4 percent of the John D'es in RIAA’s legal
filings.
THE WEAKEST LINK.
Recognizing that US colleges and universities may represent the greatest vulnerability
in the country’s chain of critical infrastructure security, the US Department
of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has awarded $200,000 to
Information Security in Academic Institutions (ISAI), a New York-based research
organization, to study the problem. An 18-month research project, conducted through
Columbia University’s Teachers College (NY), will collect
survey and interview data from more than 100 IT directors from the nation’s
colleges and universities, to help pinpoint problem areas and recommend solutions.
LSU DELIVERS ON MAIL.
At
Louisiana State University, students can now opt for a brand-new
hosted e-mail system with a selection of services. LSU is the first academic customer
of Outblaze’s (
www.outblaze.com) Outblaze-EDU services, so administrators are looking forward to a high level of customized
support and help in keeping one step ahead of spammers and virus threats. Geared
for scalability, the system will eventually handle the of about 70,000 student
accounts, say campus spokespeople—a burden that’s being gradually
lifted from the shoulders of the IT department as students sign up. So far this
year, about 15,000 students have signed on.
 WALL STREET AT VU
Villanova students get an
edgy real-world trading floor.
THE OPENING BELL.
Simulated stock trades, complete with real-time financial data, give Villanova
University’s (PA) students in the College of Commerce and Finance
the ultimate hands-on experience in financial decision-making. The college’s
Applied Finance Lab has just opened its doors to an updated, real-world trading
floor equipped with ticker displays, Bloomberg and Reuters feeds, and the latest
Dell (www.dell.com/hied) desktop systems
and NEC (www.nec.com) plasma
displays.
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BIG DONATION, BIG STORAGE.
When
Tsinghua University, China’s largest and most prestigious
university, needed a network computing and storage infrastructure to serve its
8,000 faculty and more than 30,000 students, Network Appliance Inc. (
www.networkappliance.com)
stepped in with a donation of hardware, software, and services worth $3 million.
The NetApp gift supports a personalized storage system so that every student and
faculty member will have private space on the university system.