May 1, 2009, 3:44 pm
By Steve Kolowich
Amazon, the online retailing giant, is now offering educators, researchers, and students the chance to apply for free access to its hosted computing, or “cloud,” services, the company announced this week. The services can be used to work with massive amounts of data that would jam a regular desktop computer.
The company is offering computer-usage credits, worth up to $100 per student, to instructors who wish to utilize its cloud services in the classroom. Grant applications are available through Amazon’s Web site. Amazon says its hosted services are already being used at institutions such as Harvard University and the University of Oxford.
For example, Oxford scientists at the Malaria Atlas Project—an effort to map the geography of the disease in order to drive prevention strategies—use Amazon’s hosted services to store, share, and analyze data. –Steve Kolowich
April 29, 2009, 4:07 pm
By Steve Kolowich
In the era of anonymous Internet publishing, it can be difficult to determine who said what — and who didn’t. Just ask David Kaiser, a history professor at the Naval War College, who has struggled to dispel rumors that he authored a tempestuous anti-Obama rant (including, in the tradition of all political rants, a Hitler comparison) that went viral last week.
Mr. Kaiser clarified the attribution error on his blog this week, but has had little luck finding out who is responsible for propagating the rumor that he wrote the diatribe. He said another David Kaiser in academe — a scientist for an unnamed “well-known university” — has also received mail about the rant. “I have queried at least half a dozen of his and my ‘fans’ asking them who sent the article to them, in an effort to start tracing the fraud back to its source,” he wrote Monday, “but that seems to be a fruitless endeavor — on…
Read More
April 27, 2009, 3:39 pm
By Steve Kolowich
Texas Woman’s University was forced on Saturday to shut down a student-records system after a student discovered a loophole that allowed him to view the grades and adviser reports of any student at the university, a local newspaper reported.
The Degree Audit Report System, a portal for students curious about their academic progress, was supposed to be restricted to 803 authorized users. But after a junior at the university found he had access to the files, university officials discovered that more than 12,000 people could get into the system.
The system was reportedly shut down and secured after the discovery was made. Officials said the nature of the exposed information, while personal, did not leave the students vulnerable to identity theft or grade manipulation. –Steve Kolowich
April 24, 2009, 2:27 pm
By Steve Kolowich
The National Science Foundation yesterday announced that it will invest $5 million in grants to 14 universities to work on developing new ways to share and organize data.
The grants focus on leveraging the opportunities presented by “cloud computing”—using Web-based services to execute computationally strenuous tasks more easily and cheaply. Experts have been abuzz for some time about how the development of cloud computing stands to benefit higher education, particularly with regard to research and analysis.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Yale University, for instance, each got grant money to develop more effective applications for large-scale data analysis. The foundation awarded funding to other universities, such Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, to work on various ways to make Web…
Read More
April 24, 2009, 2:25 pm
By Steve Kolowich
To Willeke Wenderish, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of California at Los Angeles, exploring the ruins of an ancient temple within an air-conditioned computer classroom can be even more useful than visiting the site in person.
Ms. Wenderish recently co-produced a virtual-reality project called “Digital Karnak,” which allows students (and visitors to the project’s Web site) to learn how the Egyptian religious center has evolved over two millennia. Milling about the ruins or studying a two-dimensional map of the Karnak site can be disorienting, she said. Virtual modeling, on the other hand, allows scholars to observe what in the structure changed and when—using a more sophisticated tool than the mind’s eye.
“It helps them think through all the things that you wouldn’t have thought through if you were looking at a map,” she said—“which areas were…
Read More
April 22, 2009, 4:20 pm
By Steve Kolowich
Lawyers study for years to develop the patience to wade through dense legal tomes on such topics as the “takings clause,” but what about the rest of us?
A coalition of publications at a handful of prestigious law schools is looking out for curious laypersons who might be interested in the debate over intentionalist and textualist interpretations of the law, but don’t have the time to wrestle with a 78-page document brimming with footnotes and legalese. The new online magazine The Legal Workshop offers visitors the chance to browse brief summaries of articles appearing in the influential law reviews (composed by the authors of those articles), written in plain language.
The idea is to open up the content of law reviews to a wider audience and to make legal debates influential and relevant beyond academic cloisters. “As a profession,” Michael Montano, an editor of the Stanford Law…
Read More
April 21, 2009, 4:00 pm
By Steve Kolowich
In the latest and perhaps broadest effort to provide instant access to scholarly resources, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization today inaugurated its World Digital Library, a Web site that allows visitors to browse through a trove of artifacts spanning the history of civilization.
The site, four years in the making, brings together historical manuscripts along with secondary literature describing them—translated into seven different languages. The library includes scanned documents from 27 libraries in 19 countries so far, including a manuscript from ancient Japan that is believed to be the first novel ever. James H. Billington, the U.S. librarian of Congress, who heads the project, says all countries are welcome to contribute. The idea is to use Web technology to put all of mankind’s most precious artifacts in a single, shared repository. —Steve…
Read More
April 13, 2009, 4:29 pm
By Steve Kolowich
The latest variant of the Conficker worm—sophisticated computer malware that uses the Internet to invade and extract data from computers running Windows operating systems—infected between 700 and 800 computers at the University of Utah, primarily ones belonging to faculty and staff members in the university’s health-sciences center.
Officials at the university are saying that computer-security personnel were able to successfully trap and kill the worm by disabling Web connections campuswide before Conficker could begin exporting sensitive data from the infected computers.
Information-technology staff members noticed Friday morning that their Internet browsers were unusually sluggish, said Phil Sahm, a spokesperson for the health-sciences center. Knowing from recent press reports that the latest variant of Conficker was afoot, they disabled the university’s Web connection and spent…
Read More
April 13, 2009, 9:08 am
By Steve Kolowich
Those who attended the Virtual Journalism Conference at Washington State University this week may have glimpsed the future of global journalism in a brief documentary about an avatar-to-avatar news conference. The news conference, which took place in February in the virtual platform Second Life, gave eight Egyptian political bloggers a chance to directly question James K. Glassman, the public-diplomacy czar under form President George W. Bush.
“This is the ultimate situation of breaking down barriers of time and space,” said Lawrence Pintak, director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo—or, rather, his slightly-less-gray-haired avatar said that in the documentary. “We’re putting together people who are on opposite sides of the world for a real-time conversation.”
The Second-Life news conference was the final stage of a…
Read More
April 8, 2009, 3:57 pm
By Steve Kolowich
Nearly six months after Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers settled a legal battle over Google’s campaign to scan books into a vast digital database, it appears as though certain elements in higher education have begun to stir the controversy anew.
Last weekend
Follow Wired Campus through your favorite RSS reader.
Stay up-to-date on the latest news, information, trends and commentary on new and evolving technologies focusing on classroom teaching, scholarship and research, and admissions management.