1/15/2008
A new Web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online got a nod of fame last week when it was referenced in The Washington Times profile of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, which the paper called "at the forefront of the new wave of collecting history." The free, open-source platform is named Omeka, a Swahili word meaning "to display or lay out goods or wares; to speak out; to spread out; to unpack."
1/10/2008
The University of Georgia this week said it's investigating a security breach that might have exposed as many as 4,250 Social Security numbers, including those of several hundred current residents. The actual incident occured in late December and was the second discovery of a breach potentially exposing SSNs at the University of Georgia in 2007.
1/4/2008
Project Zero (an IBM incubator project) is an extension of the Eclipse open source Java programming IDE. It allows Java programmers to use a familiar development environment to create dynamic Web applications. While the project is supported by a "community," much like open source efforts, the aim of Project Zero is commercial, with IBM counting on getting feedback from developers in the mean time.
1/4/2008
Eclipse and Java coders are being offered a helping hand with their component assembly challenges from a new company with a fledgling free service. The Web-based Cloudsmith service, from the company of the same name, is designed to streamline component assembly across multiple sources. It helps developers cobble components directly from the Internet, or "the cloud"--that global pool of connected computers drawn as lump on countless whiteboards.
1/2/2008
Intel Corp. released a new software product suite that is designed to enhance the performance of XML in service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments, or other environments where XML handling needs optimization. Intel XML Software Suite 1.0, which was announced last month, provides libraries to help accelerate XSLT, XPath, XML schemas and XML parsing.
1/2/2008
Adobe Systems is planning to release the source code for the remoting and messaging technologies within its LiveCycle Data Services suite as a separately branded product called BlazeDS. A beta of the product is available now on the Adobe Labs developer portal.
1/2/2008
WaveMaker Software unveiled two new developer solutions this week: WaveMaker Visual Assembly Studio and WaveMaker Rapid Deployment Framework for Enterprise Web 2.0. The former is designed to provide enterprise departmental developers with a visual dev tool for building data-driven Web apps. The latter enables those apps to be deployed to industry-standard Java app servers.
12/10/2007
To better understand the views, attitudes, and usage of various technologies and brands among college students, Eduventures conducted research of 18- to 24-year-old students enrolled full-time at a four-year college or university via a Web survey.
12/10/2007
Microsoft has begun a full rollout of the private beta of its Live Office Workspace. OLW, unveiled earlier this year, is a Web-based feature of Microsoft Office that allows for collaboration and sharing of documents. The technologies included in OLW have already been rolled into Microsoft's Live@edu, a portal, communications, and collaboration suite for education.
12/6/2007
ChitChat has launched a new online tool for educators. Dubbed the "Educational Network," the service provides free online hosting for class Web pages and multimedia content and allows educators to share materials with one another.
12/4/2007
The NetBeans community has released the latest build of its open source, Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) with, among other new features, a dual-licensing scheme. NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is licensed under both the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 with ClassPath exception and Sun Microsystems' Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). NetBeans creator and primary corporate sponsor Sun Microsystems proposed adding the GPL license option.
12/3/2007
For nearly a decade, Macromedia's Flash (now an Adobe product) has been the de facto standard for Web animation. It's in widespread use across the Web. Recently, Microsoft introduced its Silverlight platform, a competitor to Adobe's Flash and a few similar technologies.
11/29/2007
Enterprise open source software provider SpringSource (formerly known as Interface21) has released Spring Framework 2.5, the latest upgrade to its Java/J2EE application framework.
11/27/2007
It just got a little easier for developers using Microsoft's .NET Framework technology and SharePoint to integrate their .NET applications with IBM's Java-based portal technology. In a global reseller deal, IBM agreed to sell Mainsoft Corp.'s .NET Extensions solution with the IBM WebSphere Portal solution.
11/15/2007
The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) is expanding its e-learning activities by developing online and hybrid programs in health care. The move will help alleviate what the college described as a "backlog of potential students who previously were prevented from enrolling due to limited classroom space." The initiative includes new online nursing, paramedic, and medical lab technician programs.
11/14/2007
Researchers in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new Web-based technology that's designed to take recorded classroom lectures to the next level. The technology, developed by a team led by MIT's Regina Barzilay and James Glass, provides search functionality for classroom video recordings. At present, the prototype only works with MIT's online lectures made available to the public through the university's OpenCourseWare initiative, but it may be made available to other institutions in the future.
11/13/2007
Carnegie Mellon University will become the first higher education institution to work with Yahoo!'s M45, a new project announced yesterday by the Internet firm designed to advance distributed computing research and software development. The program, which leverages the Apache Software Foundation's open-source Hadoop, will allow researchers to test software running on a Yahoo!-provided 4,000-processor supercomputer.
11/13/2007
Software AG recently unveiled Natural for AJAX, a variant of Software AG's Natural 2006 programming language. Natural 2006 is typically used at the enterprise level for transactional systems running on mainframes.
11/13/2007
Open source solution vendor Red Hat is collaborating with Sun Microsystems with the aim of creating a "fully compatible, open source Java Development Kit (JDK) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux," according to an announcement issued by Red Hat.
11/12/2007
Illegal file sharing at colleges and universities is back on the agenda in Congress. In a bill introduced in the United States House of Representatives late last week by Reps. George Miller (D-CA, chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor) and Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX), language was introduced requiring institutions to deal with file sharing and the illegal distribution of copyrighted material by students. However, reports on the legislation (and responses to the reports) may be overstating the significance of the wording.
11/7/2007
Students at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, the only liberal arts university in the world for the deaf and hard of hearing, are benefiting from lecture capture software that includes closed captioning. That lets students view videos of lectures on demand, complete with text captions along the bottom of the screen.
11/7/2007
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (also known as Virginia Tech) is enhancing its Web presence in an effort to improve communications, offer new services, and provide autonomy to schools and departments at the university to create and reuse content. For the Web upgrade, Virginia Tech is deploying Percussion Software's Rhythmyx Web Content Management system.
11/7/2007
Palo Alto-based Symphoniq Corp. has teamed with Seattle-based F5 to address application delivery problems on the client side--something that may not be well tracked by network administrators. Under a partnership deal, Symphoniq's TrueView Express client monitoring solution has been incorporated into F5's BIG-IP application delivery controller solution.
11/5/2007
Google's attempt to grab moral high ground in the social networking development is a step in the right direction, according to industry analysts.
10/25/2007
Small and medium-size institutions looking for ways to beef up technology programs without adding staff might consider outsourcing some or all of IT. At Ocean County College on the coast of New Jersey, an outsourcing partnership has resulted in a popular and growing selection of online courses.