INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

• 'CULTURE OF SIMULATION'
  Students will need new kinds of critical skills to operate in a culture that will rely increasingly on computer-based simulations, Sherry Turkle, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, said in a keynote address at the EDUCOM conference. (10/31/97)

• THE TALK OF EDUCOM
  Administrators, faculty members, and information-services managers attending EDUCOM's annual meeting are hearing dire predictions about everything from the long-rumored death of the book to the much-talked-about challenges facing support services at liberal-arts colleges -- even about the future of traditional universities. (10/30/97)

• GREEN LIGHT FOR MERGER
  EDUCOM members, meeting Tuesday at their annual conference, approved a merger with CAUSE, higher education's other leading technology organization. If CAUSE members agree to the merger at their meeting, in December, leaders of the two groups hope to create a single voice for promoting technology in higher education. (10/29/97)

• UNIVERSITY SPINOFF SOLD
  A University of Washington spinoff company that created the new Internet tools "Jango" and "Metacrawler" was bought this month by another Internet-service company, Excite Inc., for $35-million. (10/28/97)

• FEMINIST CRITIQUE
  Cheyenne M. Bonnell, a feminist scholar at Wyoming's Northwest College, wants colleges that are designing on-line courses to consider gender differences in learning styles. (10/27/97)

• BEYOND THE TERM-PAPER SUIT
  Early this week, Boston University sued eight on-line term-paper providers in federal court, accusing them of selling the papers over the Internet for students to turn in for credit. But the companies say the suit violates their First Amendment rights to free speech on line. And experts say that suing the term-paper services misses the point -- plagiarism starts in the classroom. (10/24/97)

• ACCESS TO ALL
  Concerned that on-line offerings present serious obstacles to users who are blind or deaf, the World Wide Web Consortium is strengthening its efforts to make cyberspace a friendlier place for people with disabilities. (10/23/97)

• SPAM AT HARVARD
  A mass electronic mailing to nearly 1,300 Harvard University students this week is raising questions about whether colleges can -- or should -- prohibit unsolicited e-mail. (10/22/97)

• MEDIA LAB, TAKE TWO
  Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plan to add a new focus, and a new building, to their Media Laboratory. The new facility, dubbed Media Lab 2, will be devoted entirely to technology for helping children learn, according to the laboratory's director, Nicholas Negroponte. (10/22/97)

• MONEY FOR 'TELEMEDICINE'
  Vice-President Gore on Tuesday announced the recipients of $8.6-million in federal telecommunications grants to improve health and education services in rural areas. He spoke in New Orleans during a ceremony at Louisiana State University's School of Medicine. (10/22/97)

• COURSE TOOLS
  For colleges that have made the decision to put courses on line, the market offers a dizzying array of tools for developing classroom materials for the World-Wide Web. (10/21/97)

• TERM-PAPER MILLS
  Boston University filed a federal lawsuit Monday charging eight companies in seven states with wire fraud, mail fraud, and racketeering for selling term papers over the Internet. (10/21/97)

• HIGH-TECH TOYS
  If all work and no play make a lab a dull place, the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is anything but: The research center announced last week that it would collaborate with four leading toy manufacturers to design computerized toys. (10/20/97)

• THE LATEST FASHIONS
  "Wearable" computers, such as eyeglasses that can send e-mail, may be the next hot trend in technology. Enthusiasm for the new fashions was evident when researchers and engineers from around the world gathered in Cambridge, Mass., this week for back-to-back conferences to review the state of highly portable computers. (10/17/97)

• TECH TALK
  An on-line service created by a technology-oriented community-college group provides a directory of instructors and administrators who are willing to share their experiences in teaching with technology. (10/17/97)

• BUCKS AND MACS AT YALE
  Intel Corporation announced today that it would give millions of dollars' worth of new computing equipment to a dozen universities. But for Yale University, which is slated to receive hardware and software worth $2.7-million, the Intel grant has already become a mixed blessing, reopening a bitter debate over whether the university is moving away from the Apple Macintosh. (10/16/97)

• SOUTHERN EDUCATION
  The Western Governors made a big splash, but don't count out the South. Educators there are about to go public with their own regional program to promote distance learning. An announcement of the new venture, to be called the Southern Regional Electronic Campus, is expected within a month. (10/16/97)

• DIGITAL LIBRARY
  The University of California system announced Tuesday that it would create a new on-line library that will coordinate electronic-archiving projects on the system's nine campuses and will create a central data base of electronic materials that researchers can use from their own computers. (10/15/97)

• NEWS FROM ATLANTA
  Oracle Corporation announced a $50-million project Monday that it says will enable colleges to help alleviate a worldwide shortage of people with training in information technology. The announcement came on the first day of a conference on technology sponsored by the League for Innovation in the Community College. (10/14/97)

• TRACKING TECHNOLOGY
  E-mail is now used in almost a third of college courses, according to results of a 1997 survey released today by the Campus Computing Project. (10/13/97)

• BOOK WAREHOUSES
  More universities are finding that the only way they can store and preserve all library materials is to create vast off-campus warehouses. That leaves more room on the campus for services that modern library users demand: computer stations, multimedia classrooms, and coffee bars. (10/13/97)

• ON-LINE SALES
  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is converting its campus computer store into a virtual marketplace. (10/10/97)

• SHIFTING FUNDS
  The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted to draw $23-million from a $30-million "intellectual infrastructure" fund to help pay for the Clinton Administration's Next Generation Internet project, which is working closely with the Internet 2 project to build a faster network than today's Internet. (10/10/97)

• 'À LA CARTE' ACCESS
  The American Chemical Society has agreed to allow university libraries to purchase "à la carte" access to electronic editions of its journals. (10/10/97)

• COURTSIDE
  As the Supreme Court gets back into session this week, law clerks and lawyers are replacing summer tourists as the most common denizens of its historic building, in Washington, D.C. But a new virtual tour created at Northwestern University is enabling a host of sightseers to visit the Court on line. (10/9/97)

• BEN FRANKLIN ON LINE
  When J.A. Leo Lemay began collecting documents for a biography of Benjamin Franklin five years ago, a detailed, day-by-day record of Franklin's adult life emerged. Realizing that his research might be useful to other scholars, he put it on the World-Wide Web. (10/8/97)

• INTERNET 2 DEMO
  Senators and university researchers met over wine and 3-D goggles Tuesday night at a demonstration of computer applications that will be made possible by Internet 2, the high-speed computer network being built by more than 100 universities. (10/8/97)

• GETTING PERSONAL
  Computer specialists at the University of California at Los Angeles have created a system that can make personal Web pages for all 30,000 students on the campus. The system, dubbed "My U.C.L.A.," provides students with pages of links to campus resources that are geared to their interests. (10/7/97)

• LAG IN DISTANCE LEARNING
  Small colleges are the latecomers to the distance-education movement, but larger universities are already committed to the idea, according to a survey released Monday. (10/7/97)

• SIMULATED PROBLEMS
  A chemical-engineering professor at the Johns Hopkins University has programmed a "virtual laboratory" that permits students to perform interactive experiments on the Web. (10/6/97)

• BARGAINING OVER TECHNOLOGY
  The faculty union at Ontario's York University has won a promise in its contract that professors will not be required to use new technology in their classrooms. (10/3/97)

• TALKING HEADS
  Professors look like comic-book characters while they're lecturing. Students' disembodied heads float around the classroom. Is this a cartoon horror movie or just creative pedagogy? At two universities this semester, it's a different approach to on-line learning. (10/2/97)

• THE WEB AS WORKSPACE
  With more academic journals popping up on the World-Wide Web every month, some scholars are beginning to use the Internet as if it were a photocopier or reading room. But the Wiley & Sons publishing house, which opened its on-line service today, wants professors to see it also as their personal workspace. (10/1/97)