8/26/2008
McGill University Library in Montreal will be using a Kirtas Technologies APT BookScan 2400RA to digitize its collections. The company says that the 2400RA is capable of acquiring page images at the rate of 2,400 pages per hour. The library will be working with Ristech, a Canadian reseller, to implement the digitization solution.
8/26/2008
Ball State University in Muncie, IN has gone public regarding its deployment of a Web site content management system from Sitecore. Ball State chose Sitecore's software to revamp its 220-plus sites, integrating common new media applications and garnering a next-generation user experience that has won several awards from education and new media marketing organizations. Now, Ball State maintains uniformity across all university Web sites and said it has enhanced its recruiting efforts through the site's new look and interface.
8/26/2008
Polytechnic Institute of New York University has selected an Array Networks SPX3000, a universal access controller that combines virtual private network (VPN) and network access control (NAC) functionality. The device will provide identity-based customized portals for 5,000 users to access their individual information.
8/25/2008
Two universities are moving forward in their work with Sakai. The University of Hawaii System has adopted Sakai as its official learning and collaboration service, effective this fall, and Columbia University has recently upgraded to a new version of the open source learning management system as part of a pilot program in several schools and departments. At the beginning of August, the New York institution upgraded its Sakai pilot from version 2.4 to 2.5.
8/25/2008
Sun Microsystems has fulfilled a promise made this summer to release the source code for the Java ME-based light-weight UI toolkit (LWUIT) for mobile UI development to the java.net community.
8/25/2008
Microsoft has released an improved security filter for its Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server that is designed to help thwart SQL injection attacks. The free application, called UrlScan 3.0 (Release-to-Web version), is an add-on tool to IIS that provides real-time verification of HTTP server requests, potentially blocking malicious code.
8/21/2008
As a long-time expert in data warehousing and business intelligence (BI), David Wells has seen the technologies gradually come into their own in higher education. Now a consultant--Wells was formerly director of education for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), a sister institution of Campus Technology--he continues to advise colleges and universities on data warehousing and BI issues.
8/21/2008
San Francisco-based Coverity recently announced the release of Coverity Software Readiness Manager (SRM) for Java, a tool to help assess code readiness. This tool is mainly geared toward managers, providing dashboard-type reporting for determining software availability and maintainability before release.
8/20/2008
Trent Batson takes a look at the National Science Foundation's Report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning, "Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge."
8/20/2008
Over the last six years, Stewart Mader has staked his career on the power of wikis. Mader first worked on wiki adoption initiatives in the IT department at Brown University, becoming fascinated by their power and potential. In this first half of a two-part interview, Mader talks about powerful ways to use wikis in education, content ownership issues, and how wikis tend to be used--and why.
8/20/2008
The Sakai Foundation has released the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment 2.5.2, the first maintenance update to the open-source learning management system since the 2.5 release in March. The new version includes performance enhancements, as well as a number of bug fixes and other enhancements.
8/20/2008
Vorex has released an update to its Vorex Online Survey, a Web-based data collection tool designed to allow schools to collect information and gather feedback from education stakeholders.
8/19/2008
Georgia Virtual Technical College has selected the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS) as the platform for its portal to deliver Web-based instruction to Georgia's 33 technical colleges and one Board of Regents college.
8/18/2008
Colorado State University has selected Campus Management Corp. to provide the infrastructure for its new online campus, known as CSU-Global Campus. The technology the Ft. Collins campus will use includes CampusVue, a student information system, and CampusPortal, an integrated, configurable Web site software.
8/13/2008
Virginia Tech has selected HiSoftware's Compliance Sheriff to address management of its Web site accessibility. Compliance Sheriff is a browser-based service that crawls a Web site and compares pages against a user-defined set of criteria. The tool will compare the school's site against world-wide accessibility guidelines such as the federally-defined Section 508, which addresses how technology should be designed to enable its use by people with physical impairments, and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0/2.0, from the World Wide Web Consortium, which address Web content and mobile Web applications.
8/12/2008
Collexis' Lawriter division has launched a social network for law students. The site, CasemakerX.com, was demonstrated in beta format at the American Association of Law Librarians Conference in Portland in July. A full launch is expected in early fall 2008 to coincide with the incoming class of new law students. Along with the social networking site, CasemakerX will provide free access to the Casemaker Suite of Applications for the American law student community.
8/12/2008
IDG News Service is shedding some light on the current efforts of Microsoft and Google to gain acceptance in the education market. Both offer free services for institutions like mail and storage, along with free collaboration tools for students and faculty. Watch this video to see what representatives from the two companies had to say at the recent Campus Technology 2008 conference in Boston.
8/11/2008
Eclipse developers will soon have an easier time integrating with Maven, the popular Java open source build framework.
8/6/2008
According to the National Association of College Stores in a 2007 survey, the average cost of a new college textbook was $53. The founders of Flat World Knowledge, which launches with its first run of college textbooks this fall, consider that too high--so high, in fact, that they'll be offering textbooks for free, at least in versions that can be read online.
8/6/2008
Walking in the old part of Istanbul, the narrow street awash in shops, each with its appealing bins of gorgeous goods, I kept expecting to find a super market of some sort. But no supermarket ever appeared, just more miles of tiny shops. Welcome to Web 2.0.
8/4/2008
Want to build custom Web applications without writing a single line of code? That's the promise of Model-Driven Development (MDD), and the objective of Intelliun's MDD-based Virtual Enterprise (VE) toolset.
7/31/2008
Digital media software developer Stream57 has released a new version of StreamLine, the company's Webcasting solution. The new 2.8 release adds a suite of e-learning features, including course management and assessment functionality.
7/30/2008
Herkimer County Community College (HCCC) has adopted the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS) to deliver its online courses. The college, which has about 3,300 students, is a two-year unit of the State University of New York (SUNY). HCCC offers 40 traditional degree programs and 20 online degree programs.
7/30/2008
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have created a Google Maps mashup, called SafeRoadMaps, which pinpoints the location of every fatal accident that has happened in the United States using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.
7/29/2008
Purdue University has selected StudentLink from CollegiateLink to manage its 840 student clubs, organizations, and fraternities and sororities. StudentLink will allow individual organizations at the 39,000-student university to conduct online surveys and elections, recruit new members, manage membership lists, and plan events.