10/7/2008
Is "cloud computing" the next big thing in IT, or are you just a victim of "cloud wash?" Recent statements by Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison and software-licensing contrarian Richard Stallman zeroed into the phrase.
10/6/2008
New Windows Server and .NET Framework 4.0 technologies aimed at developers who are building composite applications will be released at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, Oct. 26-30. The server technologies are the first to support Microsoft's upcoming "Oslo" modeling platform, according to Microsoft.
10/3/2008
Amazon announced Wednesday that it is conducting a private beta test of Microsoft's server products running on Amazon's hosted computing platform, which is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon expects to offer companies the ability to run their applications on EC2 using Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server sometime in the fall, according to an announcement issued by the company.
10/2/2008
Here's a bit of trivia for your next high-tech happy hour: A "nog" (in addition to being a Christmas favorite) is a wooden block built into a masonry wall so that joinery structure can be nailed to it. For the founders of Piscataway, N.J.-based startup Bluenog this obscure bit of carpentry nomenclature was the perfect metaphor for an integrated software suite that includes a content management system (CMS), rich portal features and business intelligence (BI) capabilities.
10/2/2008
What is clickjacking? Security pros are trying to make sense of a new bug found by researchers that apparently affects various Web browsers, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
10/2/2008
Developers can get prepared for the next version of Microsoft's rich Internet application platform by grabbing Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0 developer runtime edition, which became publicly available in late September.
10/1/2008
Blogging can be an effective tool for learning, but its benefits shouldn't be taken for granted. It takes careful planning and skillful management to make it work in an educational setting. Here are five of the most common mistakes for instructors to avoid when incorporating blogs into instruction.
9/26/2008
The six-person information security office at Wayne State University faces the same challenge common to most institutions of higher education: limited resources and unlimited problems--especially when it comes to identifying problematic network traffic.
9/26/2008
Finjan, a company that sells security products, said it has uncovered examples of obfuscated code embedded in rich-content files, and not just in HTML-based Web pages on legitimate Web sites. According to the vendor, code obfuscation remains the preferred technique for cybercriminals for their attacks.
9/25/2008
Lecture capture has been gaining momentum in recent years, but that momentum is being outpaced by student demand. According to new research released this week by the University of Wisconsin-Madison involving about 7,500 undergraduate and graduate students, an overwhelming 82 percent of students said they would prefer courses that offer online lectures over traditional classes that do not include an online lecture component. The researchers also pointed out the implications for these findings extend well beyond the classroom.
9/25/2008
Duke University has selected BoardVantage for the electronic distribution of written materials to the University's Board of Trustees.
9/23/2008
Adobe debuted Creative Suite 4 Tuesday, with all-new versions of its major development, design, publishing, and video/motion graphics applications, along with new and modified pricing and licensing schemes for both K-12 and post-secondary education. We have a inside look at the new features in each of the core applications, along with preliminary findings based on a pre-release of the Creative Suite 4 Master Collection.
9/23/2008
iParadigms, creator of the Turnitin plagiarism detection service, has released a set of tools designed to help students improve their writing skills through enhanced teacher-student communication and peer collaboration. The Web-based WriteCycle suite of services combines the company's Turnitin service with its new GradeMark Digital Grading service and a peer review collaboration and feedback tool.
9/23/2008
IBM has unveiled a new storage solution designed to help organizations take advantage of cloud computing technology in order to significantly reduce their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) storage needs.
9/22/2008
Smart Technologies has recently added seven new languages to its Smart Meeting Pro collaboration software, intended to address the needs of a growing global customer base.
9/19/2008
In the United States, IT spending in education will reach $47.7 billion by the end of this year and is expected to top $56 billion by 2012, according to a new report from Compass Intelligence, an IT consultancy and market research firm. This growth in education--both K-12 and higher ed--is being fueled in particular by expenditures in telecommunications, collaborative technologies, and outsourced IT services.
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.
9/17/2008
Maybe you've heard people ask: "Who needs large lecture halls to learn? Who needs a sound studio or post-production facilities when you can have them on your laptop? If high-end lab equipment or scientific simulation software is also available via the Web, why do you need to visit a campus to run an experiment?" Is "Why attend college at all?" now a serious question?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.