EDUCATION NEWS
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CAN GRAND THEFT AUTO INSPIRE PROFESSORS?
Educators say the virtual worlds of video games help students think more broadly.
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i49/49a03101.htm
 
DISTANCE LEARNING (DL) GUIDELINES: WHAT WORKS IN DISTANCE LEARNING
What Works in Distance Learning is a collection of findings in the effectiveness of design and development strategies for Distance Learning (DL). Supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Capable Manpower Future Naval Capability (CM FNC), these guidelines were compiled by National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST)/UCLA.
http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=DLGuid
 
TECHNOLOGY LITERATE STUDENTS? RESULTS FROM A SURVEY
Contradictory beliefs exist about student information technology skills. One is that high school students know more than college faculty about computers and information technology. Another is that incoming freshmen do not have the information technology skills needed for college-level work and that faculty do not have the time to teach these skills in addition to course content. [PDF]
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0336.pdf
 
THE LEARNING COLLEGE AND INSTITUTIONAL SURVIVAL
Colleges are challenged to find solutions to the recent convergence of these critical 21st century issues. This abstract describes how Humber set about, in 1995, to find ways to reinvent itself by (1) evolving into a learning organization, (2) creating new multiple-learning-pathway opportunities for its students, and (3) containing costs and seeking new sources of annual funding.
http://www.league.org/publication/abstracts/leadership/labs0803.htm
 
CAMPUS COMMUNICATIONS & THE WISDOM OF BLOGGING
The advent of "blogging"—online journaling—has breathed new life into the Web. A contraction of the term "Web logging," blogging can best be described as a form of micropublishing. Featuring no or very low start-up costs, few basic infrastructure requirements, and ease-of-use, it has enabled users to publish their thoughts and ideas without barriers.
http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7982
 
 

TECHNOLOGY NEWS
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ONLINE DOCUMENT SEARCH REVEALS SECRETS
Many documents published online may unintentionally reveal sensitive corporate or personal information, according to a US computer researcher. Simon Byers, at AT&T's research laboratory in the US, was able to unearth hidden information from many thousands of Microsoft Word documents posted online using a few freely available software tools and some basic programming techniques. Sophisticated editing programs will often store information in a document file that the end user will not see. Storing recently deleted text can, for example, make editing a more efficient process. But Byers says it could also expose unaware users to significant risks.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994057
 
THE ULTIMATE HIGH-TECH DORM ROOM
Aside from clothes, books, and school supplies, you'll also want to stock up on the right technology. The graphic below is a room built for two students. In it, we've placed our picks for the coolest, smallest technology products available in this back-to-school season.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1209776,00.asp
 
THE E-BOOK VS THE ORDINARY BOOK
The computer may affect, to some extent, the subject matter of a book, but will never replace the essence of the book and nobody is considering “replacing the book by a computer” - but it is clear that replacing the existing form of the book by an electronic book is inevitable and will occur very soon. Some of the obvious advantages of the e-book are recapitulated.
http://ifets.ieee.org/discussions/discuss_august2003.html
 
IOMEGA READIES 35GB PORTABLE DRIVE
Iomega is developing a way for computer users to take their hard disks on the road. The San Diego storage company, best known for its Zip and Jaz drives, will announce plans to begin shipping a new type of storage technology called the Removable Rigid Disk (RRD) system. RRDs will be based on commodity hard drive components but will feature a special drive cartridge that can be used to insert the disk in a special drive and remove it. The disks are expected to have a capacity of 35GB.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/12/HNiomegadrive_1.html
 
UPDATE: AMAZON.COM GIVES UP MICROSOFT OFFICE 2003 PRICES
Online retailer Amazon.com has stolen Microsoft's thunder by posting pricing and a release date for the forthcoming Office 2003 software on its U.K. Web site. According to the listings on Amazon.co.uk, Office 2003 Professional Edition will cost $688, the Small Business Edition $618 and the Standard Edition $562. Upgrades cost $433, $377, and $321, respectively. The products will be available on Oct. 24, according to the Amazon.co.uk site.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/14/HNamazgiveup_1.html
 
MICROSOFT CHOPS MAC OFFICE PRICE
The software company is cutting the price of the standard version of Office for the Mac by $100, to $399. In addition, the company is introducing a "professional" version of Mac Office v. X that sells for $499 and includes the company's Virtual PC software for running Windows programs as well as the needed license for Windows XP professional.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5062452.html
 
THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY
The boom. The bust. Now what? We talked to scores of players to learn what lies ahead. Did we find a consensus? Not at all. But we heard a lot of smart thinking and synthesized it into a deeper understanding of our most important industry.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/03_34/B38460333futuretech.htm
 
MICROSOFT LOOKS BEYOND PC PRODUCTS
Microsoft is still king of personal-computer software, which propelled it to legendary success since its founding 28 years ago. But to maintain the growth that made its stock attractive for years, Microsoft increasingly needs to look beyond the desktop PC.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/6453674.htm
 
MACROMEDIA PUTS FASTER FLASH TO THE TEST
The new version is the first major revision of the software since Macromedia introduced Flash MX last year, along with a dramatically expanded concept of the utility of Flash. Instead of pushing Flash as an animation format to serve up blinking and moving online ads, Macromedia repositioned the format as a broad base for developing entire Web pages and delivering Web applications.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5060835.html
 
REALNETWORKS DEBUTS OPEN-SOURCE MEDIA PLAYER
RealNetworks Inc. announced the launch of the Helix Player project, an open-source effort to deliver an open media player for Linux, Unix and Solaris. In addition, Kevin Foreman, general manager of the Seattle, Wash., company said the Helix Player will feature the company's RealAudio and RealVideo binaries to take to Linux, Unix and Solaris the same type of media playback capabilities that Windows and Macintosh environments enjoy with RealNetworks' RealOne Player, which is available for free.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1211159,00.asp
 
SMART ROOMS
In just four months, students at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have built an "interactive physical and digital workspace," a prototype meeting room that could herald the future of interactive collaboration by design teams. At first glance, the Pittsburgh-based university's "Barn" could be any meeting room, with tables and chairs and a whiteboard. But take a closer look and you'll see cameras, projectors, microphones, speakers and electronic pens mounted on the walls and ceiling.
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/groupware/story/0,10801,83642,00.html
 
LINUX CLOSES ON WINDOWS IN USABILITY TESTS
Linux is only marginally more difficult for users to learn than Windows XP, according to a study carried out by German usability testing agency Relevantive. The tests, which compared SuSE Linux 8.2 Professional running the KDE 3.1.2 desktop environment to Windows XP, found that users were able to learn and complete tasks in Linux nearly as quickly as they could in Windows, and in some cases more quickly.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5060709.html
 
MICROSOFT ADDS EXCHANGE SUPPORT TO MAC OFFICE
Microsoft Corp. released an update to Office for Mac OS X, adding Exchange client functionality to Entourage, the suite's e-mail and personal information management (PIM) component. The update, Version 10.1.4 of Office X, also included bug-fixes for other Office applications.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,4248,1210807,00.asp
 
 
 
INTERNET/WIRELESS RELATED
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AS BELATED CONVERTS, SCHOOLS KEEP VIGIL FOR INTERNET2
Today, only about three million people, mostly on college campuses, have access to the network backbone, known as Abilene, that is the heart of Internet2, compared with an estimated 600 million users of the original Internet. But for those sharing data, sending e-mail or browsing the Web on Internet2, the difference in speed is striking.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/technology/circuits/14next.html
 
SEARCHING FOR THE PERSONAL TOUCH
A stealth start-up out of Stanford University is hoping to raise the heat on one of the toughest problems in Web search--and possibly out-Google Google in the process. Kaltix was formed in recent months by three members of Stanford's PageRank team--a research group created to advance the mathematical algorithm developed by Google co-founder and Stanford alum Larry Page that cemented Google's fame.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5061873.html
 
WORM BLASTS WINDOWS USERS WORLDWIDE
A new worm is spreading rapidly across the Internet, and experts warn that it may already have latched onto hundreds of thousands of computers, with more sure to be infected. The 'Blaster' worm, also referred to as the 'Lovesan' or 'MSBlaster' worm, takes advantage of a vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) Remote Procedure Call (RPC) interface, widely publicized in July as the first 'critical' vulnerability in Microsoft's new Windows Server 2003 operating system, though it also affects Windows NT 4.0, Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.
http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2247801
 
INTERNET 1, BLACKOUT 0
No refrigeration, no subways, no smooth traffic flow, no air conditioning -- well, at least the Internet worked. So did the phones, at least in theory. That was the big message in the tech media's coverage of the mega-blackout that took down the power grid serving much of the northeast United States and southern Canada yesterday.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62497-2003Aug15.html
 
OUTLOOK EXPRESS ON LIFE SUPPORT?
Microsoft says support for its stripped-down e-mail client will continue, but as part of future Windows clients. Outlook Express, Microsoft Corp.'s free, stripped-down version of Outlook, is not on its last legs, contrary to reports published reports, Microsoft said. But exactly how Microsoft will continue to support OE remains a bit murky.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,4248,1220165,00.asp
 
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE INTERNET AND THE WORLD WIDE WEB?
Many people use "Internet" and "World Wide Web" interchangeably. They shouldn't, and here's why. The Internet, of course, is the maze of phone and cable lines, satellites, and network cables that interconnect computers around the world. The Web is the name given to anything on the Internet that can be accessed using a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/internet/article/0,12543,336930,00.html
 
GOOGLE LABS COOKS UP E-MAIL NEWS ALERTS
Web search powerhouse Google offered a glimpse into its plans for the popular Google News aggregation portal, rolling out a beta version of an e-mail notification service that allows personalized delivery of breaking news stories. The Google News Alerts service, cooked up within the Google Labs unit, lets users specify keywords that are likely to appear in news articles that interest them.
http://www.atnewyork.com/news/article.php/2245771
 
A FIGHT FOR FREE ACCESS TO MEDICAL RESEARCH
Why is it, a growing number of people are asking, that anyone can download medical nonsense from the Web for free, but citizens must pay to see the results of carefully conducted biomedical research that was financed by their taxes? The Public Library of Science aims to change that. The organization, founded by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two colleagues, is plotting the overthrow of the system by which scientific results are made known to the world -- a $9 billion publishing juggernaut with subscription charges that range into thousands of dollars per year.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19104-2003Aug4.html
 
OPEN-SOURCE SPAM-BLOCKER GETS HIGH MARKS AT CORNELL
When the academic year begins this fall, students at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management will be armed with what its CIO sees as a powerful new weapon to battle spam.
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/groupware/story/0,10801,83689,00.html
 
ONLINE FORMS STANDARD GETS A PUSH
The Web's leading standards organization has nudged forward its specification for creating Web forms after a long delay in the standards process. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)  published XForms 1.0 as a proposed recommendation. The technology, based on the digital document lingua franca Extensible Markup Language (XML), is a way of building online forms to be more flexible than current Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)-based documents.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5059904.html
 
NEW TOP-LEVEL DOMAIN GOES .PRO
RegistryPro is hoping doctors, lawyers and accountants will get with its .pro program. The Atlanta-based company, which is the official administrator of the new .pro top- level domain, is trying to drum up business among professionals for the new domain names. The names go online in a few weeks, RegistryPro said.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5061326.html
 
XML: EXTREMELY CRITICAL OR EXHAUSTINGLY COMPLEX?
XML is a language to define languages -- a meta-language. Gartner defines it as "a toolset to define building blocks for data identifiers." "The impact of XML on our daily lives and business processes is going to be felt in waves over the next 20 years. Ignoring XML now is like ignoring the World Wide Web in 1993 or ignoring client server in 1989."
http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020415,39115499,00.htm
 
MLB GOAL: FORGET TICKETS, JUST USE CELL PHONE TO GET IN
Bob Bowman, who oversees Major League Baseball Advanced Media, says his goal for next season is letting fans get into ballparks without tickets. The idea, he says, is for fans buying tickets online to use their Internet-enabled mobile phones to flash bar codes to be scanned by handheld devices at stadium gates. "There'd never be a piece of paper," he says.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/hiestand/2003-08-06-hiestand_x.htm
 
 
 
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[NOTE: The selections above are from the Academic ADL Co-Lab News Report, a limited-distribution, weekly executive summary of trends, strategies, and innovations influencing the future of learning and technology in higher education. It is prepared by the University of Wisconsin System Office of Learning and Information Technology (OLIT) in coordination with the Co-Lab. Collegebuys.org/schoolbuys.org is using these selections with permission. The selections from the weekly summaries were selected and edited by David Stuart of collegebuys.org/schoolbuys.org.]
 
[NOTE: This information is provided for information purposes only. Mention or discussion of a product, company, or person does not represent any official endorsement or criticism of the same. All authors and organizations retain complete copyright.]
 
[SOURCE MATERIAL: The reference as specific as possible is provided to a source for each summary. When using an online link, ensure the URL has not been broken with a carriage return.]
 
[ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Judy Brown is the Emerging Technology Analyst for the University of Wisconsin System, OLIT. Brown conducts research and consults for the 15-institution UW System. She is Director of the Academic ADL Co-Laboratory at The Pyle Center in Madison, WI. Until recently she coordinated the WTCS Hardware and Software Purchasing Consortium and other statewide technology initiatives for 16 technical college districts comprised of 47 campuses. Brown was named one of the Top 100 women in computing by McGraw Hill's Open Computing magazine (December 1994). She writes a business technology column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and is the coordinator of eWEEK's Corporate Partner Program.]
 
[COMMENTS & CONTRIBUTIONS: If you want to offer material, or if you want to comment on the contents, contact Judy Brown at judy@academiccolab.org