9/18/2007
Social Web hotspot Facebook is the focus of a new course at Stanford this semester designed to teach both techies and non-science majors how to build "engaging Web applications." In fact, the name of the course is called--in Learning Annex-style--"Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook."
9/17/2007
Georgia Tech librarian Brian Matthews has teamed up with GT computer science professor Blaire MacIntyre to develop a space in the Second Life virtual world from which students could "check out" land parcels in order "to hang out, explore, and learn the basics of the software."
9/14/2007
In a study of more than 1 million spam e-mails, computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego have concluded that most scams are hosted by individual Web servers even though thousands of compromised computers might be used to relay spam to end users.
9/12/2007
A shortage of physicians in rural areas isn't a problem unique to Canada, but the highly sophisticated technology solution that the University of British Columbia has set up to solve it may well be.
9/12/2007
Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC) will use a variety of solutions from Datatel to provide a centralized student finance and HR database and to create an online application and registration system. The community college will use Datatel's Colleague Student, Financing, and Human Resources to centralize its data to improve efficiency in enrollment, student services, financial management, financial aid, and human resources.
9/12/2007
Duke University will use Tizra's Agile PDF hosted white label service to repackage, deliver, and sell textbook content in electronic formats.
9/12/2007
AccessMyLibrary is now providing students and educators returning to school with free Web access to almost 30 million online articles from a collection of more than 4,000 publications.
9/12/2007
Lehigh University has added a virtual class to its curriculum this fall called Bioscience in the 21st century. The multidisciplinary class is designed to allow anyone interested to watch lectures and study course material or PowerPoint presentations posted on the university's website for free. Lectures are also available from iTunes U, according to Lehigh University.
9/6/2007
In the past five years, social networking has rocketed from a leisure activity to a "phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users," according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit that follows the impact of the internet in differing social environments. In a recent national survey on teenagers and social networking conducted by Pew, more than half of all online American youth ages 12 to 17— 55 percent to be precise—are heading to online social networking sites. What does this mean for higher ed? Simply this: Your incoming students are now expecting a presence of your college or university on social networking sites.
9/4/2007
Drexel University will collaborate with the University of Michigan and Florida State University to help transform its 10-year-old Internet Public Library (IPL) into a "virtual teaching and learning laboratory for digital reference," the university announced.
8/30/2007
Software on demand provider Velaro is ramping up its Academic Live Help Initiative by making its services available to the higher ed community as a whole. The company currently provides live help services to a number of universities.
8/29/2007
LectureShare has debuted its free online course management system (CMS) at lectureshare.com, which lets instructors upload class announcements, documents, and audio and video files.
8/28/2007
University of California, Berkeley has mounted a publicity campaign to warn its incoming freshman class of the consequences of downloading copyrighted music. The message of the campaign is "Learn Before You Burn" and is directed at the 95 percent of incoming freshman who own computers and may have not been aware that most music is not, in fact, free.
8/23/2007
A new service has been launched to help instructors in both higher education and K-12 institutions detect plagiarized work submitted by students. The service, DOC Cop, is an entirely Web-based tool that provides free and automated assistance in locating "source material" (ahem) used in assignments submitted to teachers.
8/22/2007
With an $8,000 investment, Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy has set up the capability to provide video podcasts for courses that enable students to watch lectures they may have missed or that warrant review.
8/22/2007
The State University of New York-Maritime College this fall will debut two new online courses developed in collaboration with The History Channel. Both courses are to be based around History Channel television series and will be offered for credit, marking the first time The History Channel has developed a course for college credit.
8/21/2007
The Library of Congress announced $2.5 million in grants for projects to establish digital format standards for preserving photos, films, music, and video games. The funding covers eight organizations involved in significant digital content projects, including UCLA's Film and Television Archive and the "Preserving Virtual Worlds" project at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
8/21/2007
Researchers at the U.K.'s Bath University have developed a tool that uses the unique electronic IDs of Bluetooth devices, such as a mobile phone, to map the physical paths of friendship networks, the BBC reported.
8/17/2007
Penn Libraries, the University of Pennsylvania Library system, is embarking on a project to digitize its special collections, including rare books and historical documents. The project will kick off this summer and culminate in a fully searchable collection of rare books online.
8/15/2007
Columbia Southern University has launched a new online service for its alumni. Dubbed "CSU Click," the service provides social networking functionality for the school's graduates at no charge.
8/15/2007
Whatever else your students are doing on the Internet, they are using it for educational purposes as well. According to a study released last week by Houghton Mifflin, more than half of college students use the Internet "to keep up with course work and prepare for exams."
8/15/2007
The University of Oklahoma will deploy Day Software's Communiqué, an enterprise Web content management suite, to help revamp the school's various portals for students, staff, and alumni.
8/14/2007
Yahoo! will open an office in University of Illinois's home town of Urbana-Champaign. The office, which will pursue a cross-section of the Web giant's operations and business interests, will employ about 100 engineers, according to Ken Timmons, vice president of operations for Yahoo!
8/14/2007
Three teams of University of Illinois computer science students are spending the summer trying to launch their own companies with the help of an internship that requires them to pitch their own software or web based services to potential investors.
8/9/2007
Online higher education information provider College Toolkit (Brooklyn, NY) has partnered with SimpleTuition (Newton, MA) to provide online research tools to help students and parents visiting collegetookit.com analyze and compare student loan options using Simple Tuition's service.