Blogs

This twenty minute podcast features an interview with Andrew Torget, Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. It was recorded at the Coalition for Networked Information Fall 2008 Task Force Meeting.

I just started working within a remote dba services  project. This is caused by general strategy of our faculty to outsource all IT operations to offshore companies. This allows us to save money for the major faculty activities. This is very interesting to work with people 10 000 miles away and have very good cooperation. Because of ITIL practices uses it does not matter were the Service desk is situated and we covered whole 24 hours with support because of time zone differrence. I hope that our faculty will eventually outsource at least half of overall IT operations. Will write up here in comments about successes and fails in this start-up project.

I'm an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, affiliated with CSAIL. My research interests center around the limitations of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally.

This fifteen minute podcast features an interview with Ellen Smout, Manager of Corporate Data Security for the University of Western Ontario. The conversation was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2008 Annual Conference, and centers on her approach to data security at the University of Western Ontario.

Update (Jan. 4, 2009): According to a report today in the Wall Street Journal, the RIAA is replacing MediaSentry (see references below) by a Danish company, DtecNet Software. Good news? Bad news? We'll see. -- Steve

After 5 years and 35,000 lawsuits (number of guilty verdicts: zero), the music industry has apparently figured out that it's neither cost-effective nor good business to pick fights with your customers (Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 19, 2008).

Well, duh!

Instead, the RIAA wants ISP's to pick fights with their customers:

This twenty-five minute podcast features a conversation recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2008 Annual Conference. The topic is Privacy and Security.

Privacy and Security. Privacy or Security. Privacy versus Security. What is the relationship? And how do the two effectively co-exist in a college and university environment? How does governance and executive commitment factor into the development and sustainability of an information security program? These questions and more are presented in this candid and lively roundtable conversation. Our discussion participants include:

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has issued its report based upon survey findings called "The Future of the Internet III." Technology stakeholders and critics were asked in an online survey to assess scenarios about the future social, political, and economic impact of the Internet.

Among the key findings were:

The Federal Trade Commission has issued its final report on "Security in Numbers: SSNs and ID Theft". The report, based upon extensive fact-finding by the FTC that included a workshop with remarks from three experts from higher education, focuses on the use of SSNs in the private sector. The report was developed pursuant to a recommendation of the President's Identity Theft Task Force, which was established in May 2006 to develop a coordinated plan to prevent identity theft, prosecute identity thieves, and help victims recover from the crime.

Below is a summary of the final recommendations:

Recommendation 1: Improve Consumer Authentication (to make it more difficult to use SSNs to commit identity theft) - "the Commission recommends that Congress consider establishing national consumer authentication standards covering all private sector entities that maintain consumer accounts."

Just realized I set this up as an exercise, and forgot to post content. Will now use it as a place for discussion of institutional service issues. Stay tuned...

CALL FOR PAPERS

special issue of Learning, Media and Technology

issue theme: Learning in Virtual Worlds

Edited by Jeremy Hunsinger and Aleks Krotoski

Virtual worlds are learning worlds.

There is substantial evidence that people learn in virtual worlds. While most learning in these spaces is informal, existing outside the school curriculum, formalised learning environments have also been developed in textual worlds, MOOs, MUSHes, MUDs and multi-media spaces like ActiveWorlds(R), Second Life(R), World of Warcraft (R) to support educational goals in primary, secondary, higher and lifelong learning contexts.

This ten minute podcast features an interview with Chris Prom, Assistant University Archivist and Associate Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was recorded at the Coalition for Networked Information Fall 2008 Task Force Meeting. Prom is part of team that developed the Archon software, which was awarded the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration.

Archon is an open source application for archivists and manuscript curators. It automatically publishes archival descriptive information and digital archival objects in a user-friendly website. There is no need to encode a finding aid, input a catalog record, or program a stylesheet. Archon's scripts will automatically make everything in the system searchable and browsable on your repository's website.

This twelve-minute podcast features a conversation with Shimizu Yasutaka, President of the National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan. This interview was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2008 Annual Conference. Our conversation host is John E. Bucher, Chief Technology Officer at Oberlin College.

EDUCAUSE announces a new constituent group, Sustainable IT, which will focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions through IT infrastructure, including data centers and server rooms, networks and switches, and desktop computers and office equipment. The group will be led by Joyce Dickerson, director, Sustainable IT, Stanford University.

Peruse other EDUCAUSE constituent and discussion groups.