2/1/2008
Mobile broadband, collaborative Web technologies, and mashups will all significantly impact education over the next five years, along with "grassroots" video, collective intelligence, and "social operating systems." This according to a new report released this week by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, the 2008 Horizon Report.
1/30/2008
Perhaps more than anything else, the sight of a group of students clustered around a single computer screen, jostling for space and a better view, made Karalee Woody aware of the need for better collaborative computing tools at the University of Washington.
1/30/2008
Education technology provider Panopto has released an update to its lecture capture and streaming tool, CourseCast. The latest version, CourseCast 1.5, adds several enhancements in the areas of lecture distribution, editing, and workflow. It remains free for educators through the Socrates Project, which provides access in exchange for participation in the software's ongoing development efforts.
1/30/2008
Don't want Office 2003 SP3 rolled out across your desktops next month? Then make sure you don't have Microsoft Update set to automatic.
1/29/2008
IBM has unveiled several new collaboration tools and Web 2.0 technologies, including IBM Lotus Mashups, a forthcoming commercial mashup maker designed to allow "non-technical users to easily create enterprise mashups." At the Lotusphere conference in Florida last Wednesday, the company also introduced new versions of Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr, a rich collaboration tool.
1/24/2008
Speaking to a standing-room only crowd at FETC 2008 in Orlando, FL Thursday, presenters Ann Barron, James Welsh, James Takacs and Luis Perez--all from the University of South Florida (USF)--shared their insights on planning, producing, and administering the university's educational podcasts, hosted through Apple's service, iTunes U.
1/23/2008
A years-long project at Ball State University to digitize a huge range of content is using advanced encoding technology and digital rights management (DRM) to help manage and make available thousands of hours of content stored in its libraries. The university has also recently expanded its digital offerings to include high-definition TV.
1/23/2008
The Princeton Review already has its SAT LiveOnline courses, and Ohio University already has an island and an expert Second Life (SL) developer. Together, they are offering a series of SAT strategy sessions in a Second Life site within the Ohio University island at Second Life.
1/16/2008
Welcome to the first issue of a new Campus Technology e-newsletter, Web 2.0, pertinent to the times and to higher education. A term that grew in currency over the past three years, "Web 2.0" refers to the next generation of the Web, which we now have. This newsletter will capture the latest buzz about Web 2.0, suggest the implications of that buzz for higher education, and point toward interesting and useful Web 2.0 sites and functionalities for educators and students.
1/16/2008
Is podcasting spreading like wildfire across campuses, or does it just seem like it? Can good podcasts on your school's site boost enrollment? How can educators get started in podcasting on a budget? What's the first rule to follow in considering whether or not to create a podcast?
1/15/2008
At the Macworld Conference & Expo, Microsoft has officially released Office 2008 for Mac, the latest version of the company's ubiquitous office productivity suite. Office 2008 was originally supposed to have shipped last summer but instead arrives today in three versions, including a new education edition. The company is providing guided tours of the latest edition at the Macworld convention through Thursday.
1/9/2008
The debate continues over just how useful virtual worlds like Second Life are for educational purposes. We spoke with Drexel University's Jean-Claude Bradley, who is e-learning coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences, and an associate professor of chemistry. Despite his initial skepticism, in 2007 Bradley helped establish Drexel's presence in Second Life, Drexel Island, and used Second Life last semester to augment portions of his Introduction to Organic Chemistry course. He has blogged extensively about his use of the medium. Here, he discusses the benefits--and drawbacks--of the much-discussed virtual world.
1/9/2008
Sandy Schaeffer makes a call for higher education technology decision-makers to put pressure on the LMS vendor community to begin to un-bundle their products... with particular emphasis on greater flexibility in terms of content management.
1/9/2008
Julian Lombardi, the assistant VP for Academic Services and Technology at Duke University, accepted a prestigious award this past December for Duke of $100,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for leadership and development work in advancing the Croquet environment in open source.
1/9/2008
Smart Technologies this week debuted a new full-version update of its Notebook collaborative learning software and also launched new interactive whiteboard systems. The new Notebook 10, which will make its first public appearance at the Macworld Conference and Expo next week in San Francisco, adds 30 new features for lesson creation and delivery.
1/8/2008
Rich Media software developer Panopto is making its CourseCast lecture-capture technology available free to qualified educational institutions, including K-12 schools, colleges, and universities. The software is being distributed though the company's new Socrates Project to provide free access in exchange for participation in "ongoing beta and developer programs aimed at continually enhancing the technology...."
12/12/2007
Active, collaborative learning is a laudable goal in the classroom, but with individual students at computers throughout the room, it's not always easy to achieve.
12/12/2007
The idea of the electronic portfolio in higher education in the US has transmuted from a focus on learning to a focus on accountability. Trent Batson hopes to clarify the difference between the terms "ePortfolio" and "assessment management system."
12/11/2007
In the mixed computing environments common on university campuses, supporting multiple operating systems and myriad hardware configurations can be a nightmare for IT. In the past, one solution has been to go with a single platform. Great for IT. Not so great for users. But at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, they've come up with another solution....
12/11/2007
ProfCast has released a new version of its eponymous software designed for capturing and distributing classroom lectures as enhanced podcasts. ProfCast 2.2.0pb4, a public beta of the presentation capture software, includes fixes and enhancements to previous 2.2 releases and is available now for Mac OS X.
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.
12/5/2007
Catering to the way students communicate, more and more university libraries are providing instant live chat services to users who need help while accessing the library over the Internet. For example, a chat screen may pop up when an online patron clicks on a Help tab from the library's main page. A librarian then corresponds via chat to answer the patron's question.
12/4/2007
The Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education has adopted Desire2Learn as the learning management system for the Oklahoma Higher Education Consortium, a public higher education consortium that focuses on the selection and deployment of technologies to be used in Oklahoma's colleges and universities.
12/3/2007
Wacom today launched two additions to its flagship high-end tablet lineup, the Cintiq 12WX and the Cintiq 20 WSX. The new models expand the range of sizes available for the tablets, which integrate a display and pressure-sensitive interactive input for visual arts applications, delivering for the first time a Cintiq priced (barely) below $1,000.
12/3/2007
Premier Assistive Technology released Premier Presentation Capture software as a component of its Premier VideoCast Studio. The software is designed for recording classroom lectures and make them available as video and audio podcasts.