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Adobe Launches Bundles for Online Learning

5/20/2008

Adobe this week launched a new slate of bundles and resources for educators looking to use Acrobat Connect Pro in their online teaching efforts. Adobe just introduced the new version of Acrobat Connect Pro about two weeks ago.

SightSpeed Releases Free MySpace Widget for Video Mail and Chat

5/19/2008

SightSpeed has launched SightSpeed Light on MySpace, a free widget that adds integrated video mail, public video posting, and video chat for members of MySpace. The widget was built using MySpace's Developer Platform, introduced in February.

Purdue Implements Classroom Capture for Campus and Distance Learning

5/16/2008

Purdue University has selected Winnov's Cbox 3 to record classroom lectures and enhance its distance learning programs. The Cbox 3 lecture capture appliance is used at Purdue's School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

New Media Consortium Launches $100,000 Program for Virtual Learning

5/16/2008

The New Media Consortium, a not-for-profit group of organizations focused on bringing technology into the learning process, has kicked off a competitive award program for educational communities in Second Life and Project Wonderland. Twenty grants totaling $100,000 in cash and development assistance will be awarded this year to fund these educational efforts.

Scripting Gurus Debate Dynamic Languages

5/16/2008

Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML and Sun Microsystems' director of Web technologies, hosted a lively post-Script Bowl panel discussion on the future of dynamic scripting languages at this year's JavaOne Conference.

New Blackboard Sync Application Leverages Facebook

5/14/2008

Blackboard Inc. today announced Blackboard Sync, an application that allows students to receive course updates and communicate with classmates while logged on to Facebook.

Wikis Get Users Talking at MIT, Johns Hopkins

5/14/2008

In many ways, college campuses are an obvious implementation for a wiki tool. The decentralized nature of the technology and its ability to allow a wide range of individuals or groups to contribute ideas into a single area through Web browsers make wikis simple and compelling for higher education uses.

Firms To Benchmark Higher Ed Online Operations

5/14/2008

Education consultancy Eduventures has teamed up with The Campus Computing Project to kick off a new study focusing on online operations in higher education.

Study: Top Web Application Vulnerabilities Remain Unfixed

5/13/2008

Organizations still aren't doing enough to protect their data from Web application vulnerabilities, according to a study released Tuesday by security firm Cenzic. The study, Application Security Trends Report, Q1 2008, identified "1,409 unique published vulnerabilities for the first quarter of 2008, with Web technology vulnerabilities comprising 70 percent of the vulnerability volume...."

Data-Focused VS2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 Betas Released

5/13/2008

Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 beta bits for public download this week. In addition to the usual performance enhancements, bug fixes and stability improvements, the SP1 betas offer widely anticipated data access technologies.

Kentucky School System Extends CMS Collaboration Functionality

5/12/2008

The Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) said it will deploy the Wimba Collaboration Suite across 16 colleges to connect students and educators through online video, voice, text, application sharing, polling and whiteboarding.

Texas A&M System Signs Distribution Deal for Virtual Clinical Learning Lab

5/8/2008

Texas A&M University has signed a license agreement with BreakAway Ltd., a developer of game-based technology, for the worldwide rights to Pulse!! The Virtual Clinical Learning Lab. Pulse is a federally funded project in development at the Corpus Christi campus that allows medical professionals to practice decision-making protocol and experiential skills on PCs in a virtual hospital setting. The agreement grants BreakAway the rights to develop, market and distribute Pulse.

Tegrity Records 325,000 Hours of Lectures

5/8/2008

Ed tech developer Tegrity reported this week that usage of its Campus 2.0 classroom capture system hit record levels last year, including, among other things, capturing 325,000 hours of faculty lectures on Tegrity servers in a 12-month period.

JavaOne Keynote: Neil Young Likes Java

5/7/2008

Rock legend Neil Young joined Sun Microsystems' Executive Vice President of Software Rich Green on stage during the opening keynote of the 13th annual JavaOne conference, underway this week in San Francisco.

Writing: It Ain’t the Same Anymore

5/7/2008

E-mail is the ordinal form of this age. But in the collective conscience of higher education, the reference form when talking about writing is still the essay. Should e-mail writing instruction replace the teaching of essay writing?

IBM Expands Team Collaboration, Social Networking Software

5/6/2008

IBM has introduced a new tool for migrating content from Microsoft SharePoint and other data repositories into Lotus Quickr. The new Lotus Quickr Content Integrator, which recently began shipping, is designed to bring content from existing repositories into Quickr's "team places" for collaboration and sharing.

Georgia Tech To Implement CalDAV in Sakai

5/6/2008

Georgia Tech announced recently that it's contracted with open source service provider Unicon to integrate CalDAV within its Sakai implementation. CalDAV is a calendaring protocol that allows for event and meeting sharing across various platforms via WebDAV.

Strangeloop Device Addresses Web App Performance Pains

5/6/2008

Strangeloop Networks has introduced a product the company is billing as the first appliance designed specifically to accelerate enterprise applications in service-oriented architectures. The new WS1000 Web Services Accelerator is aimed at the growing number of organizations employing Web services to integrate disparate applications and databases, to extend their mainframe applications and to deal with performance challenges associated with dynamic Web apps.

Microsoft Scraps Yahoo! Acquisition Plans

5/5/2008

Citing a hefty price tag and other concerns, Microsoft this weekend officially scrapped its plans to acquire Yahoo! In a letter to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed the possibilities of both a friendly buyout and a hostile takeover, stating he believed that in a hostile takeover situation Yahoo! would take steps to make itself an unattractive acquisition target.

Adobe Connect Pro and Presenter Beef Up eLearning Features

5/5/2008

Adobe has introduced a new version of Acrobat Connect Pro, the company's virtual meeting and eLearning tool. The new version includes enhanced integration with Blackboard, as well as several editing and management improvements.

Idaho State Simulates Emergency Response in Second Life

5/1/2008

Imagine entering the virtual world Second Life to discover that a flu pandemic requires you, a health care professional, to attend to stricken patients lying on the streets around an over-capacity virtual hospital. When you report in to collect your virtual uniform, you're told what your responsibilities will be during the disaster and to whom you'll report.

Creighton U Updates Distance Learning Program with iLinc

4/30/2008

Creighton University in Omaha, NE has implemented a suite of services from Web and audio conferencing company iLinc to update the distance-learning platform for its online doctor of pharmacy program. The school evaluated the software from several Web conferencing vendors and chose the solution from iLinc, in part because it integrated with Active Directory to enable single sign-on and authentication.

Web 2.0 Event Draws the Bleeding-Edge Cloud Crowd

4/30/2008

Tim O'Reilly woke up his end-of-the-day audience when he took the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo, held April 22-25 in San Francisco. The publisher of the popular "In a Nutshell" computer books series declared that the Internet is fast becoming "a global platform for everything," and an "amazing tool for harnessing collective intelligence."

Convergence Idea Gets Serious with Live Mesh, Analysts Say

4/29/2008

Analyst reaction last week to Redmond's "Live Mesh" initiative can be deciphered in one of two ways. On the one hand, it's an old idea, namely "convergence," with new buzzwords. On the other, it means that industry leader Microsoft has become serious about playing hard ball with its more nimble competitors, working to simplify the end user experience in a Web 2.0 era.

Wyoming Colleges Bolster Digital Libraries with 'Academic Complete' Database

4/29/2008

The Wyoming Community College Commission, which has seven colleges, and the University of Wyoming have subscribed to the ebrary Academic Complete e-book database, according to the company.