Academic Technology News

• The EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges 2009 | EDUCAUSE

  The is another Educause research project. How is the process similar to that used by the Horizon report? How is it different.

  tags: CRIN606

• Xobni: Email Organization Tool One Key Question

  Anna has given this a try, and I hope that she’ll demo it for us on Wednesday night. After working with it for a week, would you recommend that it be more widely adopted?

  tags: CRIN606, Social Operating Systems

• Yahoo’s vision of the future | Videos on ZDNet

  Karen posted this to her Diggo account before we ran into Xoboni. How are the two alike? How are the different?

  tags: crin606, social, operating, systems

• IT Index | Academic Commons

  Here are some powerful examples of the extent to which trends identified in the Horizon Report are coming to fruition in higher education. While this report focuses strictly on students entering Amherst, a small liberal arts collect in the northeast, the statistics are telling. William and Mary is seeing many of the same trends, including the increase in the number of iPhone and iPod touches. We had somewhere between four and seven hundred iDevices on the William and Mary network during the first week of school.

  tags: CRIN606

  • By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts.
  • Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, IPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus network by the end of the day on August 24th, the day they moved into their dorm
  • Based on the first 9 months of 2008, estimated percentage increase in help-desk tickets in 2008 over 2007: 11% (or 15.6 weeks of work for a staff member).
  • • Estimated number of hours it would have taken to update the graphics, navigation, and organization of the 2005-2006 College web site (static HTML): 50,000.
    • Hours it took to roll out the new web site in August 2008 (database-driven): 3.5.

• The looming crisis: Personal syndication overload

  Here’s a good example of some of the practical practical problems that have to be solved before some of the predictions of the Horizon Report are likely to come to pass. Which of the six Horizon Report initiatives is reflected in this article? What’s significant for teaching and learning in the process of content creation that he describes?

  tags: Productivity, CRN606

  • So this is my challenge to the Web 2.0 community: Solve the personal content and community problem. Take the multi-publishing chops of Ping.fm, the aggregation features of Friendfeed, the republishing capability of Twitterfeed (with more functions, please), and the discussion aggregation of Disqus, and put it all together into one simple, easy-to-maintain product that acts as a hub for publishing, reading, and community in all these services. And while you’re at it, make sure you don’t steal traffic or community from the services you’re front-ending; they all have personalities we want to keep alive.

Testing one of the Diigo features in posting to blog.

• TidBITS Business Apps: VMware Fusion 2.0 Released - Annotated

  Here’s a third application that I’d like to explore.

  tags: vmware, tidbits

  • Not so long ago, it seemed like every time I looked at my computer screen, either Parallels or VMware had released yet another version of their respective virtualization programs for running Windows on an Intel-based Mac. Over the last several months, though, those rapid-fire releases have slowed way down. Parallels has focused its recent attention mainly on Parallels Server (see "Parallels Server Brings Virtualization to Leopard Server,"
  • 
    • Here are some additional application that I might like to text. - post by generoche

A Computer Lab That Students Use but Never See - Chronicle.com

In the year or so, Pablo, John Drummond and I have attended several meetings on the Virginia Virtual Computing Labs which is an attempt to build on the work that NC State has done. I’m still hoping that we can find to use virtual machines to finish up the data mining project that we funded through the business school. I think that data mining is a topic that has wide applications in public policy, government, economics and the School of Education–if we find a way to make the software available conveniently and inexpensively.

The Chronicle recently ran this article on the work that NC State has been doing and it mentions our VVCL project.

At George Mason, the executive director of instructional technology, Sharon P. Pitt, says the university is adopting the model in partnership with universities across Virginia, using software developed by North Carolina State.

Pablo is working with Chon and SAS tech folks to setup a workshop for early October to explore some of the SAS capabilities–perhaps with some folks from Institutional Research who are big SAS users as well. Additional information is available on the project wiki site.