New software for digital books updates a hallowed tradition of scholarship, the margin note, and lets readers comment on the comments.
CommentPress allows readers of electronic texts to write shared margin notes, like these in The Divine Comedy.
Technology Notes
PRIVACY AT ISSUE: Facebook's plan to allow search engines access to many of its pages has upset some users.
'RIVER OF ALLIGATORS': Ohio University's new chief information officer doesn't mind the pressure that came with the job.
Students from Nevada State College and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas chat about their academic and technological habits at The Chronicle's Technology Forum.
Sarah Mihelic (holding microphone): "My dad is still into the whole book thing. He has not realized that the Internet kind of took the place of that. So we go to the library almost every Sunday." Photograph by Todd Bigelow.
Keeping up with information technology is a crucial aspect of university presidents' jobs, say James Martin and James E. Samels, of the Education Alliance.
Gene I. Maeroff, of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University's Teachers College, and Robert Zemsky, chairman of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education, discuss whether e-learning has lived up to its potential.
What's the role of online archives in academe? Discussing the possibilities are Daniel Greenstein, of the California Digital Library of the University of California; Adam Smith, group business-product manager for the Google Book Search and Google Scholar programs; and Danielle Tiedt, general manager of Windows Live Premium Search.
Edward J. Maloney, of Georgetown University's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, urges academe to draw educational advances from technological ones.
Students should understand cybersecurity risks before they arrive at college, says Samuel C. McQuade III, of the Rochester Institute of Technology's Center for Multidisciplinary Studies.
University and technology leaders convened at a forum organized by The Chronicle and Gartner to discuss the role of technology on teaching and learning.
We have become too complacent about the far-reaching effects of technology on our lives, says Vartan Gregorian.
Hear the full conference session in streaming audio.
What TiVo did for television, information technology needs to do for liberal-arts education, if it is to remain a vibrant part of society, says Ann Kirschner.
Carol Twigg, an advocate of technology in education, and Cliff Stoll, an astronomer and teacher who is decidedly skeptical, debate the benefits of the wired classroom. Hear the full conference session in streaming audio.
Academic libraries are not going away, but they are changing.
ANXIOUS TIMES: Librarians may be headed toward obsolescence or toward information utopia. But either way, says James G. Neal, the journey will be a chaotic one.
DIFFERENT BYTES FOR DIFFERENT LIKES: Deanna Marcum predicts that libraries will adapt in various ways to technological challenges but that they’ll all need to work more collaboratively.
Q&A: Deanna Marcum and James G. Neal on academic libraries and IT
How can CEO's and CIO's best help each other? Four of them weigh in. Hear the full conference session in streaming audio.
Q&A: Ira H. Fuchs, Rosemary R. Haggett, and Burks Oakley on foundation support for technology projects
"The Graying of Leadership: How Will It Impact Your Institution?" Speaker: Michael Zastrocky, research vice president, Gartner
Audio: Hear the full conference session from the Higher Education Leadership Forum, using the audio player below. The conference was sponsored by The Chronicle and Gartner, a technology research and information company, and was held in Orlando this fall.
Professors, such as Maurice E. Schweitzer, an assistant professor at the U. of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, are finding new ways to lecture, to run lab sessions, and to interact with students. The Chronicle dispatched reporters to classrooms across the country to find some of the most promising or unusual methods of teaching with technology. Here's what they found:
THESE LESSONS CLICK: Thanks to his students' remote-control devices, a biology instructor at the College of Lake County, Ill., can measure the class's comprehension instantly.
C3PO 4 EE101: Electrical engineering students at Montana State University have a lot of knowledge to navigate, and so do their robots.
PIXEL PERFECT: A University of Denver art-history professor exchanges the slide projector for more flexible digital technology.
CUT! Education students at the University of Texas at Austin are learning to tell stories through laptop-produced s.
CRUDE BEHAVIOR: Computer simulation turns students at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School into oil executives in a tense negotiation.
AMERICAS ONLINE: Videoconferencing allows students at the University of Maryland and the Mexico City campus of the Monterrey Institute of Technology to model a joint business venture.
FACE TO FACE: Thanks to video over IP, the Virginia Community College System can affordably offer an education course team-taught in several linked locations.
A BUILDING TOOL: Three-dimensional software helps students at Carleton College design an environmentally friendly house.
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? Students in an online constitutional-law class from Concord University listen up and write back.
PEN IN HAND: Tablet PC's allow an English professor at CUNY's College of Staten Island to mark up papers the old-fashioned way -- but in a new-fashioned way.
Luke Fernandez finds that IT management is a political process, and should be.
5 CHALLENGES FOR OPEN SOURCE
As colleges turn to noncommercial software -- and try to develop their own -- they face new problems.
SPAM SOLUTION?
Academe continues to fight enormous amounts of spam using open-source and proprietary tools.
SAKAI PROJECT
To control costs, colleges experiment with open-source course-management software.
UPSIDE OF PEER TO PEER
LionShare, a peer-to-peer system, will allow the sharing of instructional materials.
Commentary
NO FREE LUNCH
If open source is the answer, what is the right question? asks Gregory A. Jackson, vice president and chief information officer at the University of Chicago.
NEEDED: AN 'EDUCORE'
Colleges need a coordinating body to set standards for software development, writes Ira Fuchs, vice president for research in information technology at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
MICROSOFT'S VIEW
Open-source and commercial software are both crucial to computing's future, writes Maggie Wilderotter, senior vice president for Microsoft's World Wide Public Sector and a trustee of Holy Cross College.
THE QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD ASK
Higher-education administrators who are considering using open source should think carefully about why the idea appeals to them, write Ron Yanosky and Michael Zastrocky of Gartner Inc., a company that provides research and analysis on information-technology issues.
NO SOFTWARE IS SECURE
Security remains the Achilles' heel of all kinds of software, warn Eugene H. Spafford and David L. Wilson of Purdue University.
A CALL FOR REGULATION
Standards are needed for open-source "underwear" and "outerwear," writes Annie Stunden, director of the division of information technology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
THE OPEN-SOURCE BAZAAR
The creation of Web-based instructional materials makes useful scholarship widely available, writes Michael Roy, director of academic computing services and digital library projects at Wesleyan University.
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Tech Therapy Podcast
Listen to The Chronicle's new audio feature, Tech Therapy, with Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant who works with colleges. Or send in questions for future episodes.
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