News Update Tuesday, March 7, 2006
CT News Update:
An Online Newsletter from Campus Technology
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News for Tuesday, March 7,
2006
1 ] Higher Ed Mavens Support Wyden Internet Neutrality Bill
2 ] Texas A&M Lab to Research RFID Public Safety App
3 ] Humboldt U. Researchers Compare Blackboard, Moodle
4 ] Canadian Higher Ed Group Picks Learning Object Repository
5 ] Purdue Mounts Enterprise Server for Big Science Apps
6 ] Deals: Berkeley
Electronic Press Available Via Blackboard
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1 ] Higher Ed Mavens Support Wyden Internet Neutrality Bill
Higher education leaders praised a bill introduced last week by U.S. Sen. Ron
Wyden (D-Ore.) to prevent high-speed Internet service providers from charging
content companies extra for faster delivery of their Web sites. Wyden said the
bill would help to ensure smaller start-ups trying to do business on the Internet
would not be outdone by bigger companies. 'Neutrality in technology enables
small businesses to thrive on the Internet, and allows folks to start small
and dream big,' Wyden stated. 'That's what I want to protect with
this legislation.'
In a letter to Wyden, Internet2 president Douglas Van Houweling and Educause
President Brian Hawkins said, “higher education depends upon an open Internet
to accomplish its mission of promoting educational opportunity for all Americans.”
Wyden's bill would prohibit high speed Internet providers from creating priority
channels and charging extra to deliver different types of content, such as movies
and music. Google Inc. and other content providers argue that a private fast
Internet could block users of their services. The big telephone carriers say
the bill is an attempt to regulate the Internet.
To read a speech by Wyden on Internet neutrality, visit:
http://wyden.senate.gov/media/speeches/2006/02072006_testimony_on_net_neutrality.html
2 ] Texas A&M Lab to Research RFID Public Safety App
Texas A&M University has opened a laboratory to do research into business
applications that could take advantage of wireless sensing devices and Radio
Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies. The first project of the Sensors
and RFID Technologies Lab involves designing a system to be used by a hazardous
chemicals distributor to monitor temperature and chemical vapors. The complete
system, which incorporates ActiveTag RFID technology from Access Inc., is currently
being tested and will be released at the end of March.
'The goal of the laboratory is to prove the value of converging sensor
monitoring with RFID technology,' said Ben Zoghi, professor and director
of the lab. 'By combining the two technologies, we can provide constant
monitoring as items move throughout a facility and the on-demand RFID triggers
alarms when it is outside the normal set range. This is true, real-time visibility.'
3 ] Humboldt U. Researchers Compare Blackboard, Moodle
Two Humboldt State (Calif.) University researchers performed a side-by-side
comparison of a course delivered via the Blackboard course management system
and Moodle, an open source-based CMS. The Feb. 2005 project, created by Joan
Van Duzer, an instructional technologist, and Kathy Muoz, a professor
of health and physical education, compares performance and student satisfaction
across features that include electronic assignment submissions, virtual areas
for workgroups, online testing, surveying, and discussion forums.
The researchers, who were new to online teaching, wanted to answer the question:
“can free software satisfactorily meet the needs of students, faculty,
and instructional technologists for online teaching and learning?” Their
project found that Moodle 1.3.2 held advantages over Blackboard 6.0 Basic Edition
in the areas of providing individualized feedback easily to all assignments,
as well as the ability to track a student’s activity in class. Blackboard
had the edge over Moodle in appearance, gradebook, and threaded discussion,
according to the researchers.
Van Duzer and Muoz were winners of Blackboard’s 2005 Bionic Course
Contest for exemplary instructional design for online courses. Each of five
winning contest entries was awarded $5,000 at the annual Blackboard User's Conference
in Baltimore on April 12, 2005. Blackboard announced the formal completion of
its acquisition of WebCT last week in a cash transaction worth $178 million.
To view the Humboldt survey please visit: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm
4 ] Canadian Higher Ed Group Picks Learning Object Repository
The Co-operative Learning Object Exchange (CL'E) a collaboration among 27 Canadian
universities, has picked the multilingual version of the Desire2Learn Learning
Object Repository (LOR) to enable users to develop, share, and reuse multimedia
learning content. CL'E manager Peter Goldsworthy said the Desire2Learn repository
was picked because of their “innovative future-oriented thinking and leading
edge attitude.” CL'E will be working over the next couple of months to
replace their existing application with the Desire2Learn Learning Object Repository.
They will also be working on a new peer review project.
5 ] Purdue Mounts High Performance Server for Big Science Apps
Purdue University deployed an enterprise-wide software-based file-server for
its three primary supercomputer clusters, which comprises 914 nodes and nearly
14 teraflops. The super fileserver, the Fusion parallel file system from Ibrix,
Inc., will be used to support scientific visualization, geo-informatics, and
climate modeling projects at Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing.
Michael Shuey, a higher performance computing architect at the Rosen Center,
called the system a “very scalable, high-speed file system” that
would give researchers “rapid access to terabytes of data from hundreds
of compute nodes.”
6 ] Deals: Berkeley Electronic Press Available Via Blackboard
Blackboard Inc. signed a deal with the Berkeley Electronic Press to offer users
a module that would let educators search Berkeley’s 85,000 online scholarly
journal articles, working papers, institutional repository materials, theses,
and dissertations from within Blackboard. Blackboard’s ResearchNow Content
Building Block would provide users access to Berkeley’s ResearchNow database,
a collection of peer-reviewed journals, subject matter repositories, working
papers, and other 'grey literature' content from institutions that
have opted for inclusion. More than 50 schools, including the University of
California system, Boston College, Cornell, and the University of Nebraska,
use the Berkeley platform for their repositories.
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