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2 Higher Ed Consortia Sign with Xerox for Printing and Document Management

9/18/2008

The Midwestern Higher Education Compact has signed a three-year contract with four possible year renewals with Xerox Corp. for printing equipment and document management services. MHEC will also extend this agreement to its sister organization, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

Zend and Adobe Partner on RIAs at PHP User Conference

9/18/2008

This week, for the fourth year in a row, the once-obscure-now-ubiquitous dynamic scripting language, PHP, took center stage at the annual Zend/PHP conference in Santa Clara, CA. The big news at this year's show (also known as ZendCon) comes from Adobe Systems, which announced plans to collaborate with Zend Technologies, the show's sponsor and the creator and commercial maintainer of PHP.For the fourth year in a row, the once-obscure-now-ubiquitous dynamic scripting language, PHP, took center stage at the annual Zend/PHP conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The big news at this year's show (also known as ZendCon) comes from Adobe Systems, which announced plans to collaborate with Zend Technologies, the show's sponsor and the creator and commercial maintainer of PHP.

Vista Desktop Licensing Plan Has Its Virtues, Gartner Says

9/18/2008

Windows licensing took an evolutionary turn in early September when Microsoft announced two new licensing options under its Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) program. The program allows IT administrators to move the OS to other PCs (or Macs) using virtual machine (VM) technology.

Cray Unveils CX1 Supercomputer for Office Use

9/18/2008

Cray Inc., in conjunction with Intel and Microsoft, this week unveiled a relatively low-cost supercomputer that works in office environments. The Cray CX1 high-performance computing (HPC) machine features the use of Intel processors for the first time and comes with Windows HPC Server 2008 preinstalled. It also works with Red Hat Linux Version 5.

Lumbering Global Economy Affects IT Industry

9/18/2008

The sluggish global economy has migrated to the IT industry, according to a survey released recently by Forrester Research. The analyst firm's somewhat gloomy outlook says 43 percent of companies contacted have reduced their overall IT budgets this year, while 24 percent are curtailing discretionary spending.

A Victory for Becta? Microsoft Makes Concessions

9/17/2008

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) appears to be heading toward a reconciliation with Microsoft. The agency, with its outspoken stance on interoperability in education, said it's been making "substantial progress" in its discussions with the company that it once chastised, progress that includes concessions on education licensing programs for schools and colleges.

Echo360 Unveils Web-based Editor for Digital Lectures

9/17/2008

Echo360 has announced enhancements to its lecture capture platform, EchoSystem. Foremost is a Web-based editor that gives instructors the option to tailor their recorded lectures.

Is Blended Learning Effective?

9/17/2008

Blended learning sounds like a nice idea--mixing a traditional classroom environment with online components--but is it actually effective? It seems almost intuitively obvious that it is. And with the explosion of blended course delivery in recent years, despite the dearth of research, clearly education institutions take that point for granted.

Kadoo Launches Site for Managing, Storing, and Selectively Sharing Digital Content

9/17/2008

Kadoo has launched a site where users can manage, store, and selectively share their digital content from one place. The service was created by executives from Blackboard, which produces products and services for the education market.

U Michigan, DTE Team Up To Launch $100,000 Clean Energy Prize

9/17/2008

A new competition is challenging teams from Michigan colleges and universities to develop the best business plans for bringing new clean energy technologies to market. Organized by DTE Energy and the University of Michigan, the Clean Energy Prize challenge will award $100,000 in prize money during spring 2009 in an effort to help draw emerging technologies out of university labs in Michigan and into the commercial space.

Universities To Research the Education of Engineering Students

9/16/2008

A team of researchers from four universities has just received three grants totaling $1.1 million from the National Science Foundation to study how engineers are educated. Faculty from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, California Polytechnic State University, and the University of San Diego in California will be collaborating on issues related to recruiting, retaining, and educating engineers.

NSF Grants Aim To Increase K-12 Science and Math Teachers

9/16/2008

The National Science Foundation this week awarded nine grants aimed at expanding the number of undergraduates pursuing teaching careers in science and math. This week's grants, administered through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, range from $500,000 to $750,000. Thirty such grants have been awarded this year so far. Sixteen were awarded in 2007.

VMware Fusion 2 Expands Hardware Support, Improves Networking

9/16/2008

VMware has released VMware Fusion 2.0, a major update to the desktop virtualization solution for Mac OS X that has been in public beta since back in July. The new version, a free upgrade for users of VMware Fusion 1.x, focuses on expanded support for Mac hardware configurations, including additional graphics capabilities, as well as networking, security, storage, and application sharing improvements.

VMware Launches GoVirtual.org in Response to 'Massive Growth' in Academic Membership

9/16/2008

After announcing a four-fold increase in its VMware Academic Program over the last 12 months, virtualization giant Vmware unveiled a new Web site dedicated to virtualization researchers and academics. GoVirtual.org is an online resource intended to help support the growing interest in virtualization among the global academic community.

Lourdes College Selects Intelliworks To Track Graduate School Contacts

9/16/2008

Lourdes College Graduate School has gone public with plans to manage its prospective student contacts, events, and electronic communications though the Intelliworks constituent relationship management (CRM) platform.

Niigata U and Oki Collaborate in Developing Biodegradable Toner

9/16/2008

Niigata University in Niigata, Japan and Oki Printing Solutions announced an agreement to jointly develop and manufacture environmentally conscious toner that uses biodegradable complex fine particles, originated from biomass resources. A toner prototype will be ready by 2009 and Oki Printing Solutions plans to market the product by 2010 globally.

Leopard Update Tackles Security, Active Directory Issues

9/16/2008

Apple has released an update to Mac OS X Leopard. The new version, 10.5.5, addresses issues with security, stability, and application performance and is available now for all versions of Leopard through 10.5.4.

Intel Rolls Out 65W, 6-core Xeon 7400 Processors

9/15/2008

Intel this week began rolling out its new line of Xeon processors targeted toward server markets. The new Xeon 7400 series features four- and six-core configurations designed to be used in systems with at least four processors and is targeted largely toward data centers and, in particular, virtualization applications.

Penn State Collaborating with Alcatel-Lucent on Video Social Networking

9/15/2008

The Pennsylvania State University and Alcatel-Lucent have announced an agreement to jointly develop a mobile video social networking application. The collaborative research team will be funded by the vendor.

Microsoft Boosts Modeling Strategy and Rejoins OMG

9/15/2008

Microsoft, as part of its overall initiative to support modeling capabilities, especially in its .NET Framework, last week joined the Object Management Group (OMG), a nonprofit organization that fosters integration standards for the enterprise.

Northern Michigan U Issues 6,000 Laptops to Students

9/15/2008

Northern Michigan University has deployed 6,000 Lenovo ThinkPad R61 notebooks to its full-time students to provide access to 724 Web-based classes this fall. This is the 10th year that NMU has issued ThinkPads to its student body.

eCollege Partners with Cdigix for Rich Media Integration

9/15/2008

eCollege has announced a partnership with Cdigix that will give students at institutions using the company's course management system integrated access to rich media assets, including audio and video, among other things.

EduTone Integrates Virtual Appliance Platform

9/15/2008

VIP Tone has announced a partnership with rPath that uses the company's rBuilder and rPath Appliance Platform to distribute and maintain VIP Tone's EduTone Gateway virtual appliance.

Google's Chrome Browser Contains Microsoft Code

9/15/2008

The newly released Google Chrome Web browser beta is a completely open source solution and a potential challenger to Microsoft's proprietary-code Internet Explorer browser, but Microsoft's Senior Program Manager Scott Hanselman found a little bit of irony in Google's browser as well.

U Virginia and San Jacinto College Streamline BI Work with Information Builders WebFocus

9/15/2008

The University of Virginia School of Medicine and San Jacinto College have gone public with their adoption in the last year of Information Builders' business intelligence tool, WebFocus.