Category: Leadership
October 7, 2010, 01:00 PM ET
Sakai Foundation Will Merge With Another Open-Source Provider
The foundation behind the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment, a popular and free courseware-management and group-cooperation system, has announced that it intends to pursue a merger with another open-software group active in higher education, the Jasig organization. Jasig is known for uPortal, a general online gateway for college and university services. The two groups say they will craft a merger proposal to be submitted to both boards of directors in the coming months.
September 23, 2010, 06:18 PM ET
Former College IT Director Sentenced in Kickback Scheme
The former information-technology director at Valley Forge Christian College in Pennsylvania was sentenced to two years probation in federal court Wednesday after defrauding the college. He got the institution to purchase computer equipment at artificially high prices and in return received kickbacks from the equipment vendor.
The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reported that Craig Stirling had conspired with officials of Intellacom Inc. for two and a half years. Mr. Stirling convinced the college to buy Intellacom equipment at an inflated price. The company would then pay the IT chief a portion of the inflated price, according to The Hazleton Standard-Speaker. Mr. Stirling pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud in May.
U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo ordered Mr. Stirling to pay back the college $27,202 to cover the uneccesary costs and serve the first six months of his sentence on ...
Read MoreJuly 9, 2010, 02:31 PM ET
Harvard Tech Guru Responds to Conflict-of-Interest Accusations
Scholars at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society are constantly quoted in news stories about technology. This week the center itself is the story, after a controversial report in the online publication The Daily Beast questioned its financial ties to leading tech companies. And the center's co-founder has responded.
The chief target of the article, "Harvard vs. Steve Jobs," was Jonathan Zittrain (pictured at left), a law professor, Berkman Center co-founder, and former guest contributor to this blog. Describing Mr. Zittrain as "an influential critic of Apple," author Emily Brill alleged that the Internet scholar and his research center were insufficiently transparent about financial and personal ties to Apple's competitors. Ms. Brill's background added an unusual twist: She acknowledges having been rejected for a job at Berkman.
Ms. Brill's takedown of a net guru—Webheads ...
Read MoreJuly 7, 2010, 05:00 PM ET
New Leader for Advanced Internet Group for Education
H. David Lambert is going to be the new president of Internet2, the advanced networking consortium for the research and education community. His appointment was announced today. Mr. Lambert, now the vice president for information services at Georgetown University, gets to run an organization that, along with several partners, just scored a $62.5-million grant from the federal government to build a new network based on facilities run by colleges and universities and regional and state research and education networks. The new grid is intended to connect communities and give them access to advanced, high-speed Internet applications.
March 31, 2010, 03:19 PM ET
Energy-Use Web Site Shows a Campus Where to Conserve
Many colleges, though not enough, closely monitor their power consumption in order to save money and reduce their environmental impact. But few go as far as the University of California at San Diego, which this week debuted a Web site that makes detailed, real-time data about campus energy use public information.
The Web site, called the Energy Dashboard, shows continually updated data about the consumption of the 60 largest buildings on the campus. Visitors can compare the power consumption of buildings across the campus or break down some of the data by electrical outlets, server rooms, lighting, and other factors.
The idea is to give individuals on the campus the information to understand how they contribute to the university's total power consumption, said Yuvraj Agarwal, the principal architect of the dashboard. Most colleges that have detailed information on energy usage do not...
Read MoreAugust 18, 2009, 04:33 PM ET
Social Media May Be Banned at Southeastern Conference Games
At University of Florida sporting events, you can cheer all you
want, but don’t even think about tweeting.
This month the Southeastern Conference, an organization of 12
top-ranked collegiate sports programs, notified its members that it
was updating its social-media policy, effectively banning fans from
taking video, photos, or updating Facebook or Twitter accounts
during games.
But as the
St. Petersburg Times points out, the conference is not
changing the rules to get its fans to pay more attention to the
action, instead of their phones. At the end of the day, it’s all
about money.
"A conference spokesman said this policy was meant to try to keep
as many eyeballs as possible on ESPN and CBS -- which are paying
the SEC $3-billion for the broadcast rights to the conference's
games over the next 15 years," the Times says. "And also
on the SEC Digital Network -- the conference's own entity...
June 10, 2009, 02:00 AM ET
Arbitrator Rules That Google E-Mail System Does Not Violate Faculty Agreement at Canadian Campus
An arbitrator says Lakehead University, in Ontario, had the right to switch its campus e-mail service to a free program offered by Google and did not violate the collective agreement with the Lakehead University Faculty Association.
The union objected to the switch because it feared that e-mail messages could be opened by the FBI or CIA under the USA Patriot Act since Google is an American company, subject to that law. The arbitrator acknowledged in his ruling that "the likelihood of such incursions by U.S. authority into a private e-mail system (Lakehead’s own former system) was marginal compared to what might occur in the presence of the Google system." However, he ruled in favor of the university because the wording of the collective agreement was not specific enough to ensure e-mail communication met the concerns of "absolute privacy to faculty members."
The Canadian Association ...
Read MoreApril 30, 2009, 09:39 AM ET
Research and Education Network Leaders Look for Lessons in Inauguration-Day Traffic Spike
Arlington, VA — It has been about 100 days since Barack Obama took office, but this week college networking leaders were talking about what an Inauguration Day spike in Internet traffic means for the role of high-speed research networks on campus.
A session here at the annual meeting of Internet2, a college high-speed networking group, focused on what it called “the Obama effect” on campus networks. On January 20, the day President Obama was sworn in amid record-setting crowds and an onslaught of media coverage, Internet use on campus networks spiked to record levels as people on campuses watched video of the speech on their computers or sent Facebook updates about the event, according to a college officials who spoke at the session.
That spike caught some officials off guard. “All of us were a little surprised by the impact of this,” said Marla Meehl, manager of network...
Read MoreApril 16, 2009, 03:21 PM ET
Tech Therapy: A College Leader Talks About Outsourcing E-Mail
Paul Turner, manager of academic technologies at the University of Notre Dame, discusses his university’s decision to outsource e-mail on the latest edition of Tech Therapy, recorded live at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum last week. Students had been unhappy with the e-mail system’s performance, and officials at Notre Dame wanted a solution that would be more secure and possibly save money.
The university investigated a number of e-mail companies and ended up going with Gmail. “The students got a much faster and smoother e-mail experience,” Mr. Turner says. “To move students to Exchange, it would have cost us $1.5-million. To go to Gmail cost us nothing.” By outsourcing e-mail, the university IT staff is able to concentrate on other things.
Warren Arbogast, co-host of Tech Therapy, says that outsourcing e-mail...
Read MoreMarch 25, 2009, 04:26 PM ET
'Idaho Education Network' Cut Out of State Budget
A plan to connect public schools, universities, and business in Idaho with a high-speed broadband network may be delayed after the State Legislature cut the project’s seed money out of its annual budget, the Associated Press is reporting.
The Department of Administration had requested $3-million from the state for the 2010 fiscal year—a sum it hoped to more than triple with federal matching funds and private foundation money—to increase broadband access across the state. This would involve building an “Idaho Education Network”—similar to one in neighboring Utah—that would allow learning institutions to swap interactive videos, among other things.
Although Mike Gwartney, the department’s director, had requested a 69-percent increase from this year’s allocation, the bean counters stymied him, trimming the agency’s take by 1.7 percent instead. –Steve Kolowich
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Each day on Wired Campus, The Chronicle's technology reporters highlight key IT developments and put them in perspective.