8/19/2008
AT&T has extended the deadline for its first-ever Big Mobile On Campus Challenge, a competition that calls on college and university faculty and students to develop apps for mobile devices. The top prize includes $10,000 and a trip to the October Educause 2008 conference for the winning individual or team.
8/13/2008
Chapman University in California has announced plans to deploy Xirrus WiFi Arrays across its campus. The implementation started in Chapman's film school and then will move to student housing, which consists of five three-story buildings. Following that, wireless will be added to classroom, student and administration buildings campus-wide.
8/12/2008
The Utah Education Network has signed a three-year agreement with XO Communications to provide high-speed dedicated Internet access and metro private line services to the not-for-profit consortium of higher and public education, libraries, state government and business with headquarters on the campus of the University of Utah.
8/12/2008
Promethean and Simtrol have announced an exclusive partnership that will integrate device management software from Simtrol with Promethean's Activeclassroom technology. The partnership will give classroom teachers the ability to control a variety of separate devices from a single interface on Promethean's Activeboard, doing away with the need for multiple remote controls.
8/11/2008
A number of colleges have gone public with their deployments of the NComputing multiuser system, among them Fresno Pacific University in Central California, Florida Atlantic University in southeast Florida; and Palm Beach Community College in Florida. The NComputing access device allows a single PC to serve multiple users, each with his or her own monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
8/7/2008
For colleges and universities considering a wireless network upgrade anytime soon, whether or not to go with the new, not-yet-final 802.11n standard is a tough call.
8/7/2008
Pepperdine University has deployed 161 Xirrus XS8 WiFi Arrays (1,288 radios) at its 830-acre Malibu, CA campus. The XS8 WiFi Array integrates eight radios and high-gain directional antennas in one device, along with an onboard gigabit switch, WiFi controller, firewall, and dedicated WiFi threat sensor, which, the vendor said, dramatically reduces the number of devices, cables, and switch ports required to achieve a comparable range of WiFi service.
7/21/2008
A new and free open source system from researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego promises to track down the location of a lost or stolen laptop without requiring the use of a proprietary or central service.
7/10/2008
The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is partnering with self-publishing firm Lulu.com to launch a new academic publishing imprint called ETC Press. All publications will be released under a Creative Commons license and will also have associated Web sites for collaborative authorship and discussion.
7/7/2008
Stanford University School of Education and Innovations for Learning, a Chicago-based nonprofit, have entered into a social entrepreneurship collaboration to bring the $50 Teachermate Handheld Computer to extremely underserved children in Latin America.
6/26/2008
This fall Lyon College, a four-year liberal arts school in Arkansas, will join the elite ranks of post-secondary institutions offering laptops to all incoming freshmen. The program is part of a larger initiative, called "The Lyon Experience," which aims to bring "additional value to the education" the school provides. How can a small college roll out such an ambitious technology program? It's all a question of priorities, according to Lyon College President Walter Roettger.
6/25/2008
Sybase announced that by the end of June its mobile device management suite will be enhanced with antivirus and firewall technology. These new security components will appear in the company's iAnywhere Afaria management and security software. Combined with Afaria's mobile device authentication and encryption technology, the enhanced software is intended to provide protection for Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Blackberry mobile devices from viruses, data compromise, hackers and the effects of mobile device loss or theft.
6/18/2008
A huge increase in freshman enrollment numbers for the fall semester has Loyola University in New Orleans pleased with its efforts to rebuild its student body after Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS) is also looking at strong enrollment numbers, three years after the hurricane and its aftermath of flooding devastated New Orleans.
6/9/2008
At its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) being held this week in San Francisco, Apple released preliminary details of "Snow Leopard," the forthcoming successor to Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") and the next major revision to the Mac operating system. The next revision will focus on performance, according to Apple, "rather than focusing primarily on new features."
6/9/2008
During his keynote address at Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) Monday, CEO Steve Jobs debuted the company's new iPhone 3G, an update to the popular mobile phone and computing device set for delivery July 11. Developers also took the stage during the keynote to show off new technologies arriving for the platform.
6/9/2008
Looking for a little privacy in your life? If so, you might want to leave that cell phone behind. Research released last week by Northeastern University showed not only how easy it is to track individuals by their cell phone usage, but how easy it is to track massive groups of people as well--all without their consent. The research has drawn the ire of those both inside and outside academia for the act of breaching these individuals' privacy and for the implications for further enabling the surveillance culture. But Northeastern is defending the research, saying that the privacy of those studied was of the utmost concern.
6/4/2008
HP this week announced the recipients of its 2008 HP Technology for Teaching grant program. Thirty-nine colleges and universities and 110 K-12 schools will be receiving more than $7 million in cash, gear, and professional development.
5/27/2008
Microsoft's Live@edu, a suite of online tools focused specifically toward education, has now been expanded to include Exchange Labs, which is similar to a hosted Exchange service but with prototype features that are not yet available to the general public. The move brings expanded e-mail options to campus IT departments, including 10 GB of space per account, as free added features.
5/1/2008
This week, Stanford University's Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) gave its first public concerts at the school. Founded this year by Department of Music assistant professor Ge Wang, the orchestra has 20 laptops played by human performers, as well as controllers and custom multi-channel speaker arrays.
4/23/2008
Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast Campus and UC Berkeley's Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business partnered to hold a conference Tuesday of this week in Santa Clara, CA, on "The Mobile Future: Technology Revolutionizing Our Lives." CT talked with James H. Morris, dean of CMU West and a professor of computer science, about the unique conference that brings together both academics and industry leaders.
4/23/2008
Johns Hopkins University has chosen Unicon to develop and deploy the school's new mobility theme based on uPortal, the open source enterprise portal for higher education. The mobility theme is designed to enhance the functionality and content of Johns Hopkins' campus portal to make it accessible by mobile devices such as cell phones, smartphones, and PDAs.
4/23/2008
The term "Nomadic" has been used to describe current college students' culture of wireless and mobile connectedness in the sense that they are not "rooted" but incredibility flexible and fluid when it comes to their social connections and their virtual life culture. This refers not only to their uses of social networking tools but also to the reality that they are connected wirelessly in any situation and for any reason. They are essentially nomads when it comes to their life "space."
4/22/2008
Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast Campus and UC Berkeley's Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business partnered to hold a conference Tuesday of this week in Santa Clara, CA, on "The Mobile Future: Technology Revolutionizing Our Lives." CT talked with James H. Morris, dean of CMU West and a professor of computer science, about the unique conference that brings together both academics and industry leaders.
4/18/2008
Microsoft Thursday described its new platform to help developers more easily create mobile applications that make use of radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology. The company unveiled BizTalk RFID Mobile, a solution designed to work with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and other Microsoft products.
4/16/2008
The digital textbook is one of those technologies that seem obvious but can take a long time to gain traction. In March, the concept got a boost when long-time textbook distributor and retailer Follet Corp. acquired Salt Lake City-based Fourteen40, and, along with it, CafeScribe, a Web site in its beta phase of offering electronic textbooks.