Get the latest headlines each day:
Wired Campus e-newsletter | RSS | Atom

Contact us with feedback, story ideas and tips.

Recent Posts

Senate Committee Approves Orphan-Works Bill | Comment [7]

Student Laptop Orchestra Performs at Carnegie Hall | Comment

Web Surfing in the Classroom: Sound Familiar? | Comment [6]

Harvard U.'s Berkman Center Begins Internet-Governance Project | Comment

Games With a Purpose: Have Fun While Educating Computers | Comment

Search

Categories

Administration
American Library Association, Phildelphia, 2008
Business
Campus Innovations
Distance Education
Educause 2007
Law
Libraries
Most Discussed
Peer-to-Peer
Research
Search Engines
Second Life
Security
Social Networking
Student Life
Teaching
TechForum2008
Video

Blogroll

Academic Gamers
ACRLog
Blogging Pedagogy
Computing Research Policy Blog
e-Literate
Henry Jenkins Weblog
If:Book
Kairosnews
Online Learning Daily
Open Access News
ResourceShelf
Tama's eLearning Blog
Teleread
The Kept-Up Academic Librarian
Using Wiki in Education
Weblogg-ed
XplanaZine

October 29, 2007

Educause 2007 Coverage Recap

Watch The Chronicle’s video coverage of the Educause 2007 technology meeting. College officials talk about their tech challenges, some corporate leaders describe company-college interactions, a reporter gives a guided tour of the massive—and often silly—exhibit hall, a college CIO talks plain English about hi-tech, and there’s a live Tech Therapy video as well. Plus, read on-the-scene news reports from the gathering.

Tech Therapy: The Life of a CIO Is Hard -- and Getting Harder

Dwight Fischer, chief information officer at Plymouth State University, stopped at the Chronicle booth at last week’s Educause meeting to talk about the increasing demands on campus technologists and the stresses they deal with. The Tech Therapists felt his pain.

In the coming weeks, you’ll hear presidents, CIOs, and other influential people on Tech Therapy. Jan Fox, the CIO at Marshall University, will talk with the Tech Therapists about campus security. Robert Cernock, from Central Connecticut State University, will talk about getting presidents and provosts into the conversation about technology.

And, of course, Cary Sherman of the Recording Industry Association of America will be on the show soon.

If you want to be on the show, or if you want to ask a question, write us at techtherapy@chronicle.com

October 26, 2007

Security Expert Says Networks Are Harder Than Ever to Defend

Seattle — Communication technologies generally improve over time. Computers are faster and hold more data than ever before, cellphones that were once the size of bricks are now razor-thin, and new software features emerge seemingly every day. But computer security continues to get worse — meaning there are more serious hacker attacks than ever — argued Bruce Schneier, a computer-security expert and author of the popular blog Schneier on Security, at the closing keynote speech of the Educause 2007 conference on higher-education technology.

The problem is complexity. All those new features are the indirect cause of security bugs. “As systems get more complex, they get less secure,” Mr. Schneier said. “The Internet is the most complex machine mankind has ever built.”

“Things are getting worse not better,” he argued. “ Things are getting more complicated.”

Nontechnical issues are becoming more important than technical ones when it comes to security, he said. That means more regulation might be necessary to improve security in ways that no software patch can.

It was a rather bleak parting message, though perhaps Mr. Schneier wrapped up on a more positive note — like many attendees, this reporter had to leave early to catch a plane. —Jeffrey R. Young

Students Find That Wikipedians Are Tougher Graders Than Their Professor

Seattle — Anyone can add to Wikipedia, the popular online encylopedia, but whether a submission survives is determined entirely by its global community of users — and apparently those users are tougher graders than college professors.

That’s what a few students found out in a course taught last year by Martha Groom, an associate professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington at Bothell. She required all of the 34 students in the course to write an article for their final class project and submit it to Wikipedia. By the end of the term, all of the papers had met her standards — in fact, she said the papers were generally the best she had ever had, since students worked harder knowing their work would be seen by a wide audience. But one of the papers was rejected almost immediately by Wikipedians, and four others were later removed by the community for not being up to the encyclopedia’s standards. [Editor’s note: Ms. Groom says in a comment below that the articles were removed “because they overlapped other, better researched articles.”]

Ms. Groom predicts that if the papers hadn’t been graded and revised before being posted on Wikipedia, the number of rejected articles would have been much higher — she predicts that 20 percent of the 34 articles would have failed Wikipedia’s test.

Ms. Groom discussed her experience with Wikipedia in the classroom at a session at Educause 2007, the annual education-technology conference, which wraps up here today.

One of the biggest challenges for students was finding a topic that hadn’t already been covered in Wikipedia, Ms. Groom said. One student ended up writing an entry on “Deforestation during the Roman period,” and another wrote an article titled “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” about the non-fiction book with that title.

Even the papers that didn’t get rejected sometimes met criticism by the Wikipedia community. “The biggest downside is that some Wikipedias are rude and would comment rather ruthlessly in the discussions,” said Ms. Groom.

She argues that the process was a strong learning experience. “They have a much deeper understanding of the research process,” she said.

Should colleges be participating in Wikipedia, which many complain is a hotbed for inaccuracy?

“Is there crap on Wikipedia? Sure there is,” said Ms. Groom in an interview. “So let’s be part of making it better.” —Jeffrey R. Young

Educause 2007: Can You Have Too Much Network Security?

If you want a hint of how serious the U.S. Air Force is about security, just consider its requirements for passwords: They are 15 characters, with at least two uppercase, two lowercase, two numbers, and two special symbols, and they cannot form any recognizable words or follow any keyboard patterns. Oh, yeah — and computer users must change them every couple of months.

Two technologists at the U.S. Air Force Academy used the Air Force password as an example of how burdensome security can be. Larry Bryant, the academy’s director of academic computing, and Richard Mock, its chief information officer, discussed “academic freedom versus network security” at Educause 2007. The main question of the session was “Can you have too much security?” The answer, it seems, is yes.

Mr. Bryant and Mr. Mock detailed some of the struggles they have encountered in running computing for a military entity. The military network is very restrictive: There is always a long approval process for loading new software, commercial e-mail and instant messaging are prohibited, and traffic from “bad actor” countries is blocked. Those limitations have created headaches for academics and students at the academy.

Mr. Bryant and Mr. Mock discussed how they have tried to set up an academy network that is separate from the military network. Granted, the Air Force Academy, as part of the military, is in a different position than most colleges. But Mr. Bryant and Mr. Mock left the audience with some advice about security — and how to know when security is getting in the way of the academic mission.

• When the user pain exceeds security gain, think twice. “If you tighten things down to the point where users start to work around what you are doing, you’ve got a problem,” Mr. Bryant said.

• Communicate with users about why there is a real threat. Tell them about the risks of insecure networks and bad behavior.

• Incremental changes are easier to sell to users.

• If you can’t sell it, then drop it.

Predicting Student Struggles in College

Seattle—Colleges now collect a wealth of data on their students. And within that data lies a way to keep students from failing a class by finding early signs of trouble, says John P. Campbel, associate vice-president of teaching and learning technologies at Purdue University.

At a session at the Educause technology meeting here, Mr. Campbell noted that course-management systems now track student participation in assignments.

He looked at 27,276 Purdue students enrolled in 597 courses. By putting together this engagement data with their GPA’s and scores on standardized tests, Campbell developed a model that successfully predicted students who were heading for a grade of C or lower 66 percent of the time.

In a freshman biology class, students who fit the failing profiles were first sent e-mail messages or told by the instructor about study sessions and extra help available.

Did it work? Not for the highest risk, least engaged students. But for a middle-risk group, the interventions helped. They went to study sessions, got tutoring, and moved out of the high-risk category in their behavior. —Josh Fischman

Colleges Leave E-Mail to Google and Microsoft

Seattle—“Should our university even be in the e-mail business?” Wendy Woodward King found herself asking last year. Her answer, the director of technology support services at Northwestern University told a session at the Educause technology meeting, was no. And that’s why Northwestern students get their e-mail “@u.northwestern.edu” which is hosted, free of charge, by Google Apps Education Edition.

Bryant University, in Rhode Island, also decided to outsource, but went with another free service, Microsoft’s Windows Live@edu. And in both cases, a prime driver behind the decision was that students were already using one of these services when they came to campus.

At Northwestern, Ms. Woodward King found, “90 percent of our students already had Google’s Gmail. When students forwarded their campus e-mail to a non-campus account, 67 percent of them did it to Gmail. Students told us they wanted Google.”

By going with Google, she says, the university avoided costs in maintaining and upgrading an e-mail system, and took advantage of state-of-the-art technology that Northwestern could never supply.

Bryant was particularly interested in staying in touch with alumni, and giving them one e-mail address for life, says Art Gloster, vice president for information services. “Many of our students already used Microsoft’s MSN Hotmail services,” he says. Moving to Live@edu, with an “@bryant.edu” address, kept the transition from student to alumni easy and seamless. More than 50 percent of the 2007 graduating class signed up. —Josh Fischman

October 25, 2007

A Message at Educause 2007: Technology Is Underutilized in Higher Education

Seattle—On Thursday, a panel of members of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education spoke to attendees of the 2007 Educause conference about the Spellings Report and how technology might improve American higher education.

Mara Liasson, a reporter for National Public Radio, interviewed Robert Mendenhall, the president of the Western Governors University; Charlene Nunley, president emerita of Montgomery College; and David Ward, the president of the American Council on Education.

The group discussed aspects of the Spellings Report, and questions about technology and the future of education were sprinkled into the talk. The panelists said that technology would play a vital role in helping to provide access to higher education, especially among underserved communities.

The panel also said that technology and campus technologists should play a role in helping to assess the effectiveness and success of higher education. Mr. Ward said that senior administrators at colleges needed to get involved in learning more about the potential of technology in education.

Ms. Liasson quoted a portion of the report that said that public support for higher education was going down and that colleges are not operating efficiently, all of which made higher education less affordable. She then asked the panel: “Do you see IT as a means of reducing costs, or is it itself just an additional cost that drives up tuition?” The audience laughed.

Mr. Mendenhall replied bluntly: “I think technology has created the greatest productivity improvement in history over the past 20 years across every segment of our society — except in education.” The comment drew applause.

The way technology improved productivity in every other industry is that we changed the way we did things — we changed the business process, he said. “We still do education the way we did it 500 years ago,” he said. “Where technology has the potential, it’s not being realized today.” He said that technology should be used more often to deliver information to students, freeing instructors to lead discussions, answer questions, and interact closely with students.

Managing Learning From Kindergarten Through College

Seattle—There’s discontent about a disconnect between college and the school years that come before it. The complaints are being voiced frequently at the Educause 2007 meeting, and major companies are trying to throw technology in the gap.

“Students are not arriving at college prepared, academically,” says Peter Segall, a vice president for higher education and operations at Blackboard, the course-management software company. So Blackboard just announced a K-through-20 initiative. The company plans to spend $1-million dollars to connect local school districts to college campuses. The general idea is to use Blackboard software as a bridge, letting high-school students participate at some level in college courses, and probably have their performance assessed. Crossing the bridge in the other direction, colleges can provide instructional resources for local schools, going all the way down to the kindergarten level.

Though not endorsing the Blackboard approach, Michael King, IBM’s vice president for global education industry, says the lack of student preparation is something his company is worried about. “There’s a pipeline problem, because students are not arriving at college with core competencies, particularly in science and math,” King says. And since IBM has to hire people to develop technology, King says, these incompetencies are a real concern.—Josh Fischman

Students Enhance Courses Digitally

Seattle—Why should professors do all the work of course design? At Connecticut College, they put the power in the hands of students.

At Educause 2007, the education-technology conference, Chris Penniman, the college’s director of instructional technology, reported what happened when students in some courses were turned loose with iPods and digital cameras.

In a freshman psychology seminar, “Identity: Psychological and Literary Perspectives,” students used the digital devices to conduct audio and video interviews to convey concepts of identity.

“We don’t have hard measures of results,” says Ms. Penniman, “because we didn’t have one course without iPods and one course with them. So we couldn’t do comparisons.” She did have student evaluations, however. Most students said the technology had engaged them more deeply in the subject. They added, however, that they could have used more guidance on using the devices to meet the needs of the course.

In an introductory Russian course, students were given iPods loaded not just with language-lab lessons, but also with Russian recordings of newscasts, folk-tale readings, songs, and music videos. The instructor reported that students scored higher on listening comprehension and speaking tests than did students in previous years.

The students, not surprisingly, wanted to keep their gadgets after the course was over. —Josh Fischman

Previous