For decades, academia has been hampered by what appears to be preference for opacity and obfuscation. In an article published in this magazine three years ago, "The Vocabularies of Higher Education" (Gaston, 2014), the author lamented the welter of terms and acronyms that has accumulated over many decades, particularly within the current…

Learning management systems (LMS) play a central role in communications in online and distance education. In the digital era, with all the information now accessible at students' fingertips, plagiarism detection services (PDS) have become a must-have part of LMS. Such integration provides a seamless experience for users, allowing PDS to check…

In order to help students make well-informed choices, reliable college ranking systems with comparable information about higher education institutions worldwide have been welcomed by many students. Because traditional college rankings had many methodological problems, a new type of user-based ranking, called "personalized college…

This article describes the usefulness of Web analytics for understanding the users of an academic library Web site. Using a case study, the analysis describes how Web analytics can answer questions about Web site user behavior, including when visitors come, the duration of the visit, how they get there, the technology they use, and the most…

This paper describes how we can move from a single Learning Management System sc. as Sakai, Blackboard, Moodle, or Desire2Learn to a cooperating collection of networked learning content and tools. The move from a single silo of functionality to the ability to use tools from anywhere on the web will greatly increase the variety of tools available…

ScanGrants (www.scangrants.com) is a free, online listing of grants, scholarships, and other types of funding in the health sciences. It is basically a launch pad for anyone looking for money to fund medical research or community/public health projects, or to finance their education in various healthcare fields. The goal is to enable researchers,…

This paper discusses a new marketing strategy that could yield new revenue opportunities. Internet-based marketing is not for the faint of heart. Even colleges that embrace the strategies note that they are rife with complications. Nonprofit colleges increasingly rely on Internet advertising to recruit students, and the phenomenon has caught the…

Explains how the Web can be modeled as a mathematical graph and analyzes the graph structures of three national university publicly indexable Web sites from Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Topics include commercial search engines and academic Web link research; method-analysis environment and data sets; and power laws. (LRW)

Discussion of academic cheating and plagiarism focuses on occurrences in online courses, based on experiences at Baker College (Michigan). Highlights include tools to fight plagiarism; using search engines to detect plagiarism; digital paper mills; plagiarism detection companies; and the role of administrators and faculty. (LRW)

Describes indexes to Web resources that have been created by librarians to be more discriminating than the usual Web search engines, some of which are organized by standard classification systems. Includes indexes by solo librarians as well as by groups of librarians, some in public libraries and some in higher education. (LRW)

Discusses electronic cheating in higher education made possible by new technologies. Highlights include statistics on plagiarism; using Web search engines and paper mills; and ways to combat cheating, including academic honesty policies, designing writing assignments with specific goals and instructions, being aware of what is available on the…

Asserts that online recruiting is a major facet of building and improving enrollment, examining: the student perspective (organizing the site, highlighting benefits and successes, ease of contact, integrating the financial side, and benefits of e-mail); search engines (ranking and recruitment, links, link popularity, and key departments and…

Explains Webcasts and discusses how they can be used for teaching. Topics include Webcast technology; streaming audio and video; bandwidth capacity; locating Webcasts, including search engine strategies for the Internet; using Webcasts in the classroom; similarities with other multimedia materials; expectations for students and faculty; and future…

Describes a collaborative workshop designed by the Associated College Libraries of Central Pennsylvania to identify and teach World Wide Web search skills to librarians. Highlights include how information get on the Web and is indexed; evaluation of Web resources; types of search sites; and which search engine is the best. (Author/LRW)

Today, at the end of 2007, there are evident consolidations in wireless, storage, and virtualization and the path forward seems clearer now than previously. Trends from last year continue strongly, particularly Web 2.0 and the shift to user-driven environments and Internet sites where significant data and video processing is available to those…