In the summer of 2004, the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco unveiled their very ambitious and interesting microscope facility. Over the past few years they've spent a considerable amount of time and money on this project, and they've also created this fine website to offer those far away from the Bay area some access to this project. First-time visitors will want to click on the "Features"

How do you solve a problem like solids, mathematically speaking? Well, you could use this rather fascinating resource provided by the Convergence magazine. Offered as an educational resource by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), this particular resource brings together the work of the Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli (c.1445-1509) and the geometric sketches of Leonardo Da Vinci. Both men

It's difficult to track the changing tide of global power, but the Washington Post has offered this rather intriguing resource for doing just that. Essentially, the Global Power Barometer (GPB) provides "a relative measure how well various nations, ideologies and political movements are exercising their power to move global opinion and events in the direction they desire." Part of this analytic

This hour and ten minute podcast features the panel discussion, "The State of the Internet According to the Congressional Internet Caucus", recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2008 Policy Conference in Arlington, Virgina. The participants include:

• Tim Lordan, Executive Director for the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee
• Ari Schwartz, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for the Center for Democracy and Technology
• Joe Tasker, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs and General Counsel for the Information Technology Association of America

The Congressional Internet Caucus is a bipartisan group of over 170 members of the House and Senate working to educate their colleagues about the promise and potential of the Internet. EDUCAUSE is a member of the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, which includes a diverse group of public interest, nonprofit, and industry groups working to educate Congress and the public about important Internet-related policy issues. This session highlights the priority IT policy issues before the 110th Congress according to the cochairs of the Internet Caucus and provides an overview of the Advisory Committee’s programs and activities.  

Today is the last day for advance registration for an upcoming pre-conference that I am doing with colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Texas Advanced Computer Center. See registration link and details below.Datagrid Technologies and LibrariesFriday, June 27, 2008,  9:00 am- 5:00 pmAnaheim, CAThis pre-conference will be a panel presentation featuring librarians and storage administrators from the UC San Diego Libraries, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Texas Advanced Computer Center, that will cover various aspects of datagrid technologies for use in libraries. The group will cover the overall benefits of utilizing datagrid technologies with institutional repositories, digital libraries, and digital preservation systems within libraries and will look specifically at case studies of the UCSD Libraries and the SDSC based Chronopolis digital preservation data-grid. Most of the tools for these systems are open source and with very minimal instruction can become an important collaborative network for use with academic bandwidth such as the Internet2 Abilene network for sharing large collections of born-digital material and escaping proprietary hardware lock-in on large-scale or mass digitization initiatives.Registration - http://www.ala.org/ala/eventsandconferencesb/annual/2008a/registration.cfmSpeakers:Ardys Kozbial, UC San Diego LibrariesDeclan Fleming, UC San Diego LibrariesDavid Minor, San Diego Supercomputer CenterRobert McDonald, San Diego Supercomputer CenterChris Jordan, Grid Infrastructure Group, Texas Advanced Computing Center

[Slides][Audio]
Joint Conference of Campus Saskatchewan and The Educational Technology Consortium, Saskatoon, SK (Keynote) May 16, 2008 [Comment]

This 40 minute podcast features a keynote address by Rebecca Whitener, Former Vice President of Enterprise Risk Management and Chief Risk Officer at EDS. Her speech, "Addressing Complex Security Threats Through Risk Management," was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2008 Security Conference in Arlington, Virginia.In this session, we address the current cybersecurity issues that are challenging higher education leaders today as they try to stay on top of the risks associated with attacks on information systems from internal and external sources. Emerging enterprise risk management (ERM) methodologies are examined as a source of guidance for creating an effective risk-based approach for managing current and future threats.

The Center for Studies in Higher Education, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is conducting research to understand the needs and desires of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their fields, as well as their careers, our approach focuses on fine-grained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including sharing, collaborating, publishing, and engaging with the public. Well into our second year, we have posted a draft interim report describing some of our early results and impressions based on the responses of more than 150 interviewees in the fields of astrophysics, archaeology, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.Our work to date has confirmed the important impact of disciplinary culture and tradition on many scholarly communication habits. These traditions may override the perceived “opportunities” afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category. As we have listened to our diverse informants, as well as followed closely the prognostications about the likely future of scholarly communication, we note that it is absolutely imperative to be precise about terms. That includes being clear about what is meant by “open access” publishing (i.e., using preprint or postprint servers for work published in prestigious outlets, versus publishing in new, untested open access journals, or the more casual individual posting of working papers, blogs, and other non-peer-reviewed work). Our work suggests that enthusiasm for technology development and adoption should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements (including the needs and goals of final archival publication) in highly competitive professional environments. 

Multi-touch interfaces are input devices that recognize two or more simultaneous touches, allowing one or more users to interact with computer applications through various gestures created by fingers on a surface. Some devices also recognize differences in pressure and temperature. Multi-touch technology introduces users to swipes, pinches, rotations, and other actions that allow for richer, more immediate interaction with digital content. Multi-touch devices and supporting applications offer diverse ways of visualizing information to improve understanding, and they facilitate new ways to foster collaborative creation, permitting several users to work simultaneously on a single screen.The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues. In addition to the "7 Things You Should Know About…" briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more, please visit the ELI Resources page.

A parking server at the University of Oklahoma that contained personal information such as Social Security numbers was breached in March, but just discovered this week.

Pennsylvania’s state education system now has a Web site to show students if course credits from one college transfer to another.

Questions about whether simply making a song available to copy is an act of copyright infringement might mean a new trial.

One of the challenges of IT leadership is working with vendors and the associated contracts, agreements and licenses common to the operation of an IT department.  I'm trying to figure out how and when I learned to handle this part of my operation.  I'd like to give my staff the benefit of attending classes and professional development that would improve their skills in this area (maybe an Executive MBA in IS Leadership that our university offers emba.oakland.edu).  I'm seeking options that offer opportunities to develop skills in handling vendor relationships.  I thought an occasional blog posting on this topic would help explore the nature of the environment and the skills required of IT leaders. Making ConnectionsA challenge for vendors is making the connection with the decision-maker who can confirm a potential sale.  A challenge for IT leaders is selecting the right products for purchase in their departments, which requires a lot of attention to the technology market.  These purchases must align with university directions, purchasing procedures and a general expectation for ethical conduct. When I moved into a leadership role, it was amazing to me how fast the word spread through the vendor community.  Within a short period of time, I was flooded with telephone calls, more calls than I could ever hope to return.  Vendors would leave voice messages and my voice mail was always full.  Vendor messages would display more and more frustration at my lack of response.  At one point a vendor did get through to me, and expressed his anger and frustration.  I was frustrated in return:  "Did I ever ASK you to contact ME?" At one point I kept a ticker of how many vendor calls I received, and when it was over 125 in one week, I realized I couldn’t manage connecting this way.  I changed my voice-mail message to say that "Vendors should contact the purchasing department; I do not return unsolicited vendor calls."  I have about 300 e-mail filters which allow me to sort the advertisements into "review" and "trash"; I only look at e-mail ads for products that I am currently following.  Fortunately my university has a "no solicitation" policy which supports my actions, and vendors are always welcome to contact our purchasing department.   Over time, vendors have tried a variety of sales tactics that are sometimes irritating and sometimes entertaining.  Some of my favorite connection opening lines follow, now often arriving by email but sometimes by phone message (when they ignore my voice-mail message): 

• "I want to follow-up on the material you asked for at our booth at the last conference."  Interesting, when I didn't stop at the booth and have no interest in the product.  Sometimes the conference is one I didn't even attend.
• "I'm taking over the account for Sam, and Sam left notes about the project he was working on for you."  I wasn’t working with Sam on anything.
• "I'd like to get your opinion on this product."  I do understand that you don't really want my opinion; you want to see if I want to buy.
• "I've already shown this to your Registrar and he really wants this product." Oh, great, so you are trying to circumvent our publicly mandated bid purchase process!
• "I saw the post on the CIO list, and I know that we should contact you by list rules, but I have such a good solution for you that I thought you'd really like to know about it."  Geez!   This is the biggest source of complaints I receive from CIOs on the list.

 So how does a vendor make a successful connection with me?

• I go to conferences with strong vendor floors with a list of vendors that I want to visit.  The national Educause conference is a favorite.  Having quality staff at a strong vendor display is important.  I need to interact with vendor representatives who can answer technical questions and sales questions.  I'm clear about our bid purchasing process.
• When I contact a vendor to request follow-up or product materials, or when I ask for follow-up materials at the conference, I'd like those materials within the next 6 weeks.  I especially like it when you can immediately point me to the relevant materials on the vendor web site.
• When I need to find the right person to talk to, the vendor should have a process that enables me to find the right sales contact.  A failure I experienced with a major hardware vendor:  I tried the web site, got a contact number, called and was referred around for over 8 weeks.  Never got to a person who could give me a sales demo or tell me how to buy the product.
• Please don't offer me tickets to any sporting event or attendance at any golf-outing!  As an employee of a public university, I avoid these vendors unless I absolutely have to talk to them, and then only with my purchasing director present.

 My role as a CIO requires that I learn how to make good connections with vendors.  We've created an internal document that provides our staff guidelines on making connections.  As I mentor staff, I ask questions that pay attention to those four bullets:  Did you go to the vendor floor?  What products were exciting?  Is the vendor responsive to your requests for materials?  Can you easily contact people who can get us information?  Are you spending time with vendors where no sale is possible? (why?)  This seems to be helpful in their understanding of making vendor connections.

Proposed feature would create a stable version of some Wikipedia pages approved by experts.

What are students searching the web for most frequently while at school? Turns out, it's math games, animals, and historic figures and events, according to an unscientific index of the 15 most popular in-school search terms released by Thinkronize Inc.

In a case that sends a strong message about the possible consequences of cyber bullying, a federal grand jury on May 15 indicted a Missouri woman for her alleged role in perpetrating a hoax through the online social network MySpace against a 13-year-old neighbor who subsequently committed suicide.

More and more universities are joining up to offer a variety of course materials through the OpenCourseWare project, and Utah State University is now one of the partner institutions involved in this laudable venture. This site is made possible by funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and visitors will be delighted to learn that they can make their way through course materials from

The PBS program Frontline always asks good questions, and their question for this particular program is a complex and difficult one to unravel: "Just how radically is the Internet transforming the experience of childhood?" The program talks with experts in child psychology, teenagers who've created online personalities for themselves, parents, and others who are involved in this restructuring of

February 12, 2009 will mark the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, and the C-SPAN network will be ready with this website and a host of special programming to commemorate this important date. The materials on the site are divided into five sections including "Schedule", "Timeline", "Video", "In His Own Words", and "Gallery". The "Timeline" offers a brief overview of important events in

A different perspective on this website. Seeing what someone else thinks are the 'top 5' posts (of the last 100) in OLDaily is interesting. Well, to me at least. TonNet, education and tech, May 15, 2008 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

Well-informed post on recent developments in interoperability standards. I've had a look at the Common Cartridge stuff; it's cool but not groundbreaking (and would probably have gained a bit more traction had people been able to freely access the specifications without having to shell our real money to join the consortium). LTI - Learning Tools Interoperability - is a concept with some merit, corresponding roughly with the distributed nature of web 2.0 applications. If you want to view the specification you will be greeted with a message, "The page you are trying to access is reserved for participants in the IMS/GLC Community." I don't care it "It's easy and free to join" - creating this sort of barrier is exactly contrary to the concept of open specifications. Michael Korcuska, Sakai Blog, May 15, 2008 [Tags: Interoperability, Cool] [Link] [Comment]

Desire2Learn has filed its notice of appeal in the Blackboard patent lawsuit case. Meanwhile, Blackboard has filed a motion in an Ontario court in an effort to enforce the Texas settlement (Blackboard has no patents in Canada). Unattributed, Desire2Learn, May 15, 2008 [Tags: Desire2Learn, Patents, Canada, Copyrights, Blackboard Inc., Patents] [Link] [Comment]

According to this report, Britain's BECTA has rejected Microsoft Office, arguing that it does not support open standards. "The report's conclusions could end up costing Microsoft millions of dollars in lost sales in the U.K. public sector market." Tim Hand, Tim's Blog de Blog, May 15, 2008 [Tags: Open Standards, Great Britain, Microsoft] [Link] [Comment]

"To catch college students trading copyrighted songs online, the Recording Industry Association of America uses the same file-sharing software that online pirates love, an RIAA representative told The Chronicle at the organization's offices during a private demonstration of how it catches alleged music pirates."

I have been calling this type of metadata 'second party metadata', while Scott Wilson is here using the term 'social metadata'. As he describes, "APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) is a means of sharing an individual attention profile [and] ULML (User Labor Markup Language) is a specification for tracking the metrics of user participation in social web services." He's quite right when he says "neither APML or ULML is going mainstream anytime soon" but here's how it ought to work (it won't, not without a lot of kicking and screaming first, because of commercialization and privacy issues): this metadata is made accessible for harvesting, and when it is harvested, is used to create resource profiles, which assist in the distribution of resources. Scott Wilson, Scott's Workblog, May 15, 2008 [Tags: Web Services, Accessibility, Metadata] [Link] [Comment]

We need your help! EDUCAUSE has released surveys for two of its publications: the bimonthly general-interest magazine EDUCAUSE Review and the peer-reviewed quarterly journal EQ. To help us determine content for future issues of the two publications, we would (really) appreciate your filling out either or both of these (super) short surveys here: EDUCAUSE Review http://survey.educause.edu/ertoc081/ and EQ http://survey.educause.edu/eqtoc081/. We look forward to learning what is important to you so that we can provide the information you need and the articles you'll want to read. Thanks!

This is a powerful essay (language warning) on the nature and future of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The telling point is near the end: "the OS that OLPC ships should be one that embodies the culture of learning that OLPC adheres to. The culture of open inquiry, diverse cooperative work, of freely doing and debugging - this is important. OLPC has a responsibility to spread the culture of freedom and ideas that support its educational mission; that cannot be done by only offering a proprietary operating system for the laptops." There's a lot more in here - including, for example, his criticism of OLPC's non-existent deployment plan. And he writes, "I quit when Nicholas told me - and not just me - that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there." Via One Laptop Per Child News. Ivan Krstic, code culture, May 15, 2008 [Tags: Operating Systems, Project Based Learning, Portable Computers] [Link] [Comment]

Just got an email saying that "the 'Information Environment' team at JISC (responsible for repositories among many other things) has a new(ish) blog... We're using it for a few things, including highlighting interesting new work from the various programmes of work underway." Various Authors, JISC, May 15, 2008 [Tags: Information, Learning Object Repositories, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), Web Logs] [Link] [Comment]

Interesting site with a lot of useful information, though the Flash interface makes it hard to navigate and impossible (of coirse) to cut and paste. Via elearningpost. Christian Behrens, Website, May 15, 2008 [Tags: Information, Online Learning] [Link] [Comment]

Measure to reuse of orphan works clears Senate committee.