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CT Briefs

9/2/2008

:: NEWS

NC AND NM REPORT BIG BB WINS. The University of North Carolina and the North Carolina Community College System have signed on with Blackboard to deploy that company’s electronic learning platform across 68 individual campuses. Through the implementation, campuses will be able to share courses and learning materials with one another and work in a more collaborative manner across institutions. And New Mexico, as part of the state’s Innovative Digital Education and Learning initiative, is launching a statewide program to standardize on a single electronic learning platform—Blackboard— spanning K-12, higher education, adult education, and government. The initiative will also support a new statewide virtual high school.

OPEN SOURCE LAPTOP TRACKER. 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. Users install a client utility called Adeona (after the Roman goddess who guides children home safely), which continually monitors the current location of the laptop via IP addresses and nearby routers and access points. Location data and associated text are encrypted, keeping the info anonymous and unlinkable, while still accessible by the machine’s rightful owner or an agent of that person. Read more here.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO is building a high-end tabletop display device for interactive exploration of visual 2D and 3D data.

LOOK MOM, NO GOGGLES OR GLOVES! The Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago is building a highend virtual reality device with a major research instrumentation grant of $450,000 from the National Science Foundation. The device, called the OmegaTable, is a modular multisensory touch tabletop for interactive exploration of visual 2D and 3D data (and follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, the LambdaTable). The OmegaTable allows users to engage in visualizations without special goggles, gloves, or handheld controllers, opening up a range of possibilities for research and instruction.