1/12/09

La Salle University, Barcelona
La Salle was founded some 300 years ago and is an internationally recognized institution with over 60 universities in Europe, the United States, South America and Asia. La Salle Barcelona has a reputation for quality education in which the overall development of the individual combines with a disciplined academic programs.

12/12/08

Items from Clark Aldrich

• Costs for simulations
  • Here are some items that typically and significantly increase costs:
    • full motion video (many instead use comics / illustrations)
    • advanced graphics
    • calibrating units, maps, processes, and other parts of relevant systems
    • creating a new Genre
    • having a totally self-paced/asynchronous deployment
    • customizing or building software instead of configuring or using off-the-shelf
    • distance deployed multiplayer
    • building a complex game
• Educational simulation: how you want your pilot or doctor to learn
• Why I would rather teach in a distributed classroom than use educational simulations
  There are two interesting trends facing college instructors today. Both are high tech, and both require innovation. And both have the potential to re-create higher education.

From DSC:
Creating engaging, interactive, multimedia-based learning materials can be quite expensive -- but can be offered again, and again, and again. I post this item here because pooling resources is one way to achieve excellent results.

12/10/08

Study: More colleges turn to large IT vendors -- from eCampusNews.com
Well-known IT companies have catered to smaller colleges in recent years, numbers show

11/8/08

The Knowledge Network Explorer -- link from Donna Murray
The original AT&T Education First Initiative helped connect California schools, libraries and community colleges via ISDN lines (integrated services digital network). These high speed networks are capable of carrying large amounts of text, voice, and video data over existing telephone lines. Today, numerous educational facilities are using or contemplating using videoconferencing over a variety of networks including the most common, ISDN or IP (Internet Protocol) networks.

This guide is designed to help teachers, librarians, and students use videoconferencing technology effectively. If you're new to videoconferencing, this site will provide the background you need to get started. Experienced videoconferencers will find ideas, strategies, resources, and checklists to help improve the quality of their videoconferencing. Please try searching our Videoconferencing Directory to determine who else has videoconferencing. Join our Collaboration Collage (aka ed1vidconf) listserv to see what they are doing with it!

11/07/08

From 3 Ways Web-Based Computing Will Change Colleges -- from the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Jeffrey Young

Reshaping IT Departments

Cloud computing is also leading colleges to band together to offer services (emphasis DSC). After all, because servers that run Web-based software can be anywhere, why not get together with a few other colleges to build a joint data center?

That is already happening in Virginia, where a consortium of more than a dozen colleges is building the Virginia Virtual Computing Lab (emphasis DSC). The system will let students or professors at the different institutions use their own computers to access specialized software, such as 3-D modeling programs. The idea is to bring the kind of programs usually found in college computer labs right to students wherever they are, and one day it might make old-fashioned computer labs obsolete.

The Virginia project is modeled on a system already up and running at North Carolina State University, and that virtual lab is being shared with two community colleges and the University of North Carolina system.

"Students can't really tell where it is since they're going over the Internet," says Henry E. Schaffer, coordinator of special IT projects and faculty collaboration at North Carolina State. "With a normal broadband connection, it just works."

Meanwhile, colleges will outsource some services that it makes more sense for a big consumer company to handle, like e-mail, saving the colleges money to go build the services that they can do better.

...

Also, there are human obstacles to collaborations like Virginia's virtual computer lab, so just because such projects make good sense doesn't mean that colleges will be able to pull them off if partners have conflicting ideas of how they should operate.

A new book by Educause that is scheduled to be released next week at the group's annual conference captures the mix of promise and confusion that cloud computing poses today. Called The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing, it offers more than a dozen essays with predictions about the next stage of computing on campus. The book€™s introduction argues that a cloud is an apt metaphor for the shift ahead: Clouds get harder to see your way through as you walk into them.

10/3/08

6 Universities Join NASA Astrobiology Institute -- from Campus Technology, by David Nagel
Research teams from six universities have been selected by NASA to become members of its Astrobiology Institute with the aim of exploring the "origins, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe." Teams were each awarded five-year grants, averaging $7 million each, according to NASA.