As the national economic climate worsens, and college and university endowments, coffers, and funding sources shrink, schools are forced to get the most out of every dollar. That means that administrators are bending over backwards to see that all new investments provide maximum return on investment (ROI) over the long term. Campus eCommerce is no…

Everyone seems to have a different definition for "Web 2.0," but most people agree the phrase describes a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services that aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users. Technically speaking, these new technologies include blogs, wikis, folksonomies…

Back in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president and the internet was still a novelty, college recruitment was remarkably low-tech. Most prospective students visited high school guidance offices, wrote away for information about schools, attended college fairs, and visited campuses they were considering. Most admissions and recruiting activities…

Building access control (BAC)--a catchall phrase to describe the systems that control access to facilities across campus--has traditionally been handled with remarkably low-tech solutions: (1) manual locks; (2) electronic locks; and (3) ID cards with magnetic strips. Recent improvements have included smart cards and keyless solutions that make use…

Nowadays, college and university auxiliary services departments are turning to text messaging types of technologies to move a host of programs and offerings into the mobile environment. A July 2007 study by Youth Trends indicated that 95 percent of college freshmen come to school with a cell phone or other handheld device, and 78 percent of them…

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…

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 …

More and more colleges and universities today have discovered electronic record-keeping and record-sharing, made possible by document imaging technology. Across the country, schools such as Monmouth University (New Jersey), Washington State University, the University of Idaho, and Towson University (Maryland) are embracing document imaging. Yet…

True excellence in technology implementation emerges when IT, administrative, and academic leaders link IT to mission-critical institutional objectives, investing in hardware and software to serve an explicit purpose and a distinct population of users. This article illustrates that at public institutions of higher education in New Hampshire as…

Metaphysically speaking, the idea of self-reflection has been the subject of discussion for thousands of years. The idea carried human beings through the Renaissance, and an entire movement tied to it sparked a sociopolitical movement called the Enlightenment. In more recent times, thought leaders such as Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Sigmund…