In the age of electronic media, some say producing textbooks is a dying art. And it may be true that every day, devices with names such as iPod and eBook threaten to replace the age-old "technology" of the traditional book with a newer, faster, and equally (if not more) portable approach. In many cases, at colleges and universities across the…

Advocates of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) say it saves money on long distance calls by sending them over the Internet, improves communication by eliminating the Private Branch Exchange (PBX), and offers a host of neat features such as call forwarding, e-mail accessible voicemail, and more. When it comes to measuring the dollars-and-cents…

Technology product procurement can be a daunting task for a college or university--especially a smaller institution--to accomplish alone. Perhaps this is why schools are tackling it by banding together. When it comes to purchasing technology, a little help from friends is the key to economies of scale, which frequently net schools the best…

With tuition on the rise, Auxiliary Services departments at a variety of colleges and universities are proving that they can innovate and still save their parent institutions cash. Primary areas of innovation include: (1) With advancements in technology, institutions are moving campus purchasing programs into the wireless space; (2) As junk mail …

Across the U.S., a growing number of schools are turning to ePortfolio assessment technologies to help them monitor and evaluate student progress in a variety of disciplines--and to help them and their students do even more. Across the board, educators report that their ePortfolio efforts have revolutionized the learning process, and the…

Using videotaped lectures to practice American Sign Language (ASL) used to be a pretty tiresome process for hearing-impaired and other students at the University of Rochester (NY). In order to access the videos, students had to trek to the campus library, reserve an audio/visual station in the media center, take out the appropriate tape, and watch…

With K-12 students seeming to, at all times, have one foot in the real world and one in the virtual, school districts are starting to acknowledge a new collective responsibility: to teach kids what it means to be a good digital citizen and how to go about being one. The movement to address and characterize digital citizenship originated in the UK,…

For years, doing laundry at Columbia University (New York) was just as labor-intensive as it is at most universities. Fortunately, as of last spring, laundry life at Columbia has changed dramatically. Today, with the help of a real-time Web-based service called LaundryView, students can log on to the system via the LaundryView Web site from a link…

There is no shortage of online learning platforms available today. Whether it is Blackboard (www.blackboard.com), Desire2Learn (www.desire2learn.com), Sakai (www.sakaiproject.org), Moodle (www.moodle.org), Angel Learning (www.angellearning.com), Datatel (projected to be a CMS player in Q4 2008; www.datatel.com, or another product, chances are that…

Today, in the age of real-time and anytime electronic assessment, it's a safe bet that just about "everything" will "be on the test"--if the "test" is the ongoing assessment of learning and performance, that is. With technologies such as ePortfolios, in-class student response systems, and simulation/assessment software, schools can now assess…

The benefits of deploying a communications system that runs over the Internet Protocol are well documented. Sending voice over the Internet, a process commonly known as VoIP, has been shown to save money on long distance calls, make voice mail more accessible, and enable users to answer their phones from anywhere. The technology also makes adding…

In the corporate world, the notion of customer relationship management (CRM) is nothing new. That particular technology sector is now jam-packed with software that enables organizations to monitor and manage every interaction with a customer, from the very first experience on, throughout the lifecycle of the relationship. That relationship spans…

At a time when colleges and universities are struggling to plan the mobile campus of the future, many of those with laptop programs have found refresh programs to be their key to success. Planned well, these efforts establish a strategy to rotate the latest laptop products into the campus technology portfolio, ensuring that schools stay…

Increasingly, colleges and universities are turning to open source as a way to meet their technology infrastructure and application needs. Open source has changed life for visionary CIOs and their campus communities nationwide. The author discusses what these technologists see as the benefits--and the considerations.

When most academic technologists tackle computing, their time is occupied by laptops and servers--relatively small-scale stuff. A couple of blades here, a couple of blades there. Generally, even for network managers, the processing power rarely stacks up to anything awe-inspiring. Sometimes, however, computing can be bigger and broader than many…