Wired Campus

'You Geeks Have to Become Radical Militant Activists'

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 20:47:00 -0500

Denver — The face of evil, projected 20 feet tall on a screen behind Lawrence Lessig, belonged to Britney Spears.

The face of good belonged to composer John Philip Sousa.

Mr. Lessig, the Harvard Law School professor, was giving a keynote address at Educause 2009. He argued that intellectual property in education had been taken over by an exclusive-rights model represented by Ms. Spears, the pop diva. That model has pushed out another one based on community

Big East Is a Big Loser in Web Accessibility for Disabled People, Study Says

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0500

Denver – Big East colleges may shine on the basketball court, but they’re getting stuffed by the competition when it comes to the Web-accessibility battle.

The Big East posted the most consistent problems in a new survey of how good a job universities are doing in making their Web sites accessible to people with disabilities. The survey of 80 universities, presented at the Educause conference here this week, pitted five athletics conferences against one another

Google Uses Educause Meeting as Focus Group for Wave

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 11:45:00 -0500

Denver -- A panel of Google programmers wearing green T-shirts talked last night about the company's newest product -- called Wave -- but it was clear that they had come here to learn a few things about education.

Wave is a new kind of communication and collaboration service that is so hard to explain that the company usually points people to an hour-and-a-half video to explain how it works. It essentially combines several existing services in one interface -- chat, e-mail,

Faculty and Technology Officials Fight Over College Values

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 11:30:00 -0500

Denver-- "This is another sign of the culture war between faculty and IT," said a vice president for technology and administration at a medium-sized state university. The official, musing after a session on budget crises here at the Educause 2009 technology meeting, said professors fought hard to keep "low performing" programs in the curriculum, while his university just got the news they would have to lay off 50 or 60 people by Christmas. By low performance, he meant programs that

Americans Are Lonelier, but Don't Blame the Internet, Report Says

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 11:25:04 -0500

Americans tend to have fewer close confidants today than they did two decades ago -- but that isn't because they're all huddled over their computers playing World of Warcraft or reading the Volokh Conspiracy.

A report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests that the Internet and other new communication technologies have, if anything, a modestly

Continuing Education and Social Networking Combine to Attract Students

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0500

Denver -- Continuing education continues to evolve, and e-learning platforms presented here at the Educause conference are vying for attention from universities with promises of enhanced engagement of "lifelong learners" and alumni.

Building on Drupal, the open-source content-management system, a company called GoingOn built a platform for a University of Pennsylvania psychology course in the institution's continuing-education program. The

The Buzz at Educause: Outsourcing, Mobile Computing, Saving Money

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Denver -- Thousands of college technology leaders have gathered here this week for the annual meeting of Educause, the education-technology group.

During the kickoff reception in the corporate exhibit hall Tuesday night, Chronicle reporters talked with a variety of attendees about what they see as the latest trends, and what concerns keep them up at night.

See the video below the fold for highlights of their answers.

Budget Problems Put an End to a Long-Running Tech Newsletter

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 15:32:54 -0500

A long-running newsletter that covers higher-education technology will no longer be published because its author, an employee at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been laid off.

Carolyn Kotlas, who has written the monthly TL Infobits newsletter since 1993, will publish the last issue in November. About 27 positions in her department have been eliminated in the past year, said her direct supervisor, Charles Green, the assistant vice chancellor for the

Online Education, Growing Fast, Eyes the Truly 'Big Time'

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:23:00 -0400

Orlando, Fla. -- Online education is a runaway best seller. Its growth rate -- 12.9 percent -- dwarfs the overall pace of academe’s student expansion. More than 25 percent of all students may have taken at least one online class this year, according to a speculative estimate suggested at a distance-education conference that wraps up here today.

But the

The Latest File-Sharing Piracy: Academic Journals

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:37:56 -0400

Illicit file sharing isn’t just for kids these days. Once mainly used for downloading pirated music, sites have sprung up on the Internet that allow free swapping of academic journals (think Napster’s younger dweeby brother).

A new study,

Getting Real Space to Teach--Virtually

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:50:12 -0400

What did civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy have to do with the Apollo moon missions? Find out next week, when the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds its first virtual conference for educators. The date is November 10, and the time is from 11 AM to 5 PM Eastern time.

There are six sessions with Smithsonian curators, designed to help instructors use

The Netflix of Academic Journals Opens Shop

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:00:00 -0400

By opening the largest online rental service for scientific, technical, and research journals, the company Deep Dyve is hoping to do for academic publications what Netflix has done for movies: make them easily accessible and inexpensive for everyone.

The Web site has been an academic-journal search engine since 2005 and unveiled its rental program this week. Now anyone can “rent” an article—which means you can view it on your

Are College E-Mail Addresses on the Way Out?

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:00:00 -0400

If the last four years are any indication, college-student e-mail addresses may soon be a thing of the past.

So says a report issued by Educause, a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of information technology in higher education. The "Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report" took information from nearly 930 colleges and universities regarding their IT practices and environments.

It found,