October 11, 2007
A Second Life For Academics
Planning on building a campus in Second Life for your university? Make sure your calendar’s open. Building an island for the University of New Orleans took “more time than I ever expected,” said Merrill L. Johnson, associate dean of the university’s College of Liberal Arts, in a Chronicle chat this afternoon.
“I have a funding proposal out that will allow us to use commercial builders for the final build,” said Mr. Johnson. “Our main building is in fact a mansion that I bought at [a Second Life] store for 25 real dollars. It has been configured to hold classes, offices, display areas, etc.”
In addition to that functional space, New Orleans’s foothold in Second Life also includes a digital sandbox where professors can play. “This opportunity is important in acclimating faculty and staff” to the virtual world, Mr. Johnson said.
For more advice on Second Life, read the complete transcript of today’s discussion.
Posted on Thu Oct 11, 04:14 PM | Permalink | CommentIn China, a Different Kind of Laptop Requirement
Plenty of American colleges now tell freshmen they must bring laptops to campus, but a growing number of Chinese institutions are doing just the opposite: They’re prohibiting first-year students from having computers of their own.
Nanjing, Zhejiang, and Shanghai Jiaotong Universities have all recently enacted computer bans aimed at preventing freshmen from becoming addicted to Web surfing or computer-game playing, according to the Beijing News. The idea, apparently, is that first-year students don’t have much self-control: Once they become sophomores, they’re allowed to buy machines.
It’s worth noting that some of the institutions actually boast impressive technology programs. A team of students from Shanghai Jiaotong, for example, took first prize in the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2005 International Collegiate Programming Contest — an event considered by many to be the Olympics of undergraduate computer science. —Brock Read
Students Score a Hit With Scrabulous
Jayant Agarwalla, a 21-year-old Indian college senior, and his brother, 26-year-old Rajat, didn’t realize how popular the free online version of Scrabble they developed would become when they created it in 2005. Now that their game Scrabulous has more than 950,000 registered users, and over 340,000 active users everyday, will the Agarwallas put it behind a pay wall? No way, they say, because they love the game too much.
“Keeping it free was the primary reason we developed this game,” says Jayant Agarwalla, who had just enrolled at St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata when he and his brother developed Scrabulous. The brothers used to play Scrabble on another site until it started charging users in 2004. “So when we developed our version we thought it is such a beautiful game and why should we charge to play it?” he says.
The Agarwallas put Scrabulous on their own site in 2006, but their version really took off after they put the application on Facebook, the social-networking site, in late June. “We didn’t really use Facebook until then, because it wasn’t popular in India,” says Rajat Agarwalla, adding that they had tired of social networking sites in general. “Then a friend told me it would be great if he could play Scrabulous on Facebook.” In May, after Facebook started letting developers build applications to run on its site, the brothers adapted Scrabulous. Now they have developed French and Italian versions of the game and a Spanish version is in the works.
Scrabulous now has the most active users of any game that can be played over Facebook. According to the technology blog GigaOM, that’s because players get immediate and graphic feedback for each move. As games go back and forth, Facebook users have an incentive to check the site constantly for new plays, the blog says.
The Agarwallas earn just enough to cover their hosting costs and have in recent weeks been receiving investment offers from venture capitalists. “We are open to partnering with investors but at the end of the day just money alone isn’t the criteria for a partnership. Any partner must increase value to the game’s users,” says Rajat Agarwalla.
Both brothers are excellent scrabble players as well. In fact, Jayant recently won a Kolkata-wide scrabble tournament in his age group. They are no longer Facebook virgins either. “Now we always have Facebook open and both of us have 20-odd Scrabble games going on with friends and relatives.” —Shailaja Neelakantan
October 10, 2007
'A Digitally Isolated Africa'
How desperately do many African colleges need improved Internet access? At many institutions, the current connections are so spotty that campus presidents trek to Internet cafes just to conduct business.
If top administrators don’t have reliable Web access, it’s a safe bet that faculty and students aren’t getting that access either, says Calestous Juma, director of the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “The result,” Mr. Juma writes in Business Daily Africa, “is a digitally isolated Africa that cannot effectively educate its students and conduct quality research.”
The near-extortionate cost of bandwidth in Africa has proved to be a major impediment to progress, and African governments haven’t stepped in to help: Most national leaders “have abdicated their role in providing digital infrastructure to universities,” Mr. Juma says. Independent groups like the Bandwidth Consortium have managed to strike halfway-decent deals for African institutions, the professor notes, but it’s high time for governments to try and secure free Internet access for their colleges and universities. —Brock Read
Stanford Students Hope to Hit Gold With Facebook
Colleges that are struggling to attract more women and minorities to computer-science classes may want to consider offering a course similar to one at Stanford this fall.
Students at the university are flocking to a computer-science class on designing software applications for Facebook, says an article in Fortune.
Facebook’s $10-million grant program provides up to $250,000 to developers who build promising software for the social-networking site. And many students hope to get rich quick by designing a killer Facebook application. Of the more than 5,000 Facebook applications created since May, though, only four have attracted more than a million users. — Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Wed Oct 10, 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comment [1]More IT Leaders Get Close to College Presidents' Ears
A perennial complaint among college IT departments is that no one in top administration listens to them. But a new survey shows that even if presidents aren’t listening, they are now within shouting distance slightly more often.
Educause, the higher-education technology consortium, has just released a survey of IT management on 952 campuses, ranging from large research universities to small community colleges. The data were collected in early 2007. We reported on some important findings about outsourcing yesterday.
When it comes to influential positions, the survey shows that the percentage of top IT administrators who sit in the president’s cabinet is now 48 percent, a 2-percentage-point increase over last year. Looking at different types of institutions, the percentage of IT leaders in cabinets climbs to its highest level among community colleges, which report 63 percent in the presidents’ top decision-making groups, up from last year’s level of 59 percent.
Questions about how well presidents listen were not asked. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Wed Oct 10, 02:04 PM | Permalink | CommentOctober 9, 2007
A Faster, Stronger Internet
Internet2 announced the completion of its new high-speed network infrastructure today at its annual fall meeting. The nationwide network is built on an optical infrastructure that has a capacity of 100 gigabits per second on a scaleable platform that provides users with additional bandwidth on demand. What it means: Members of the Internet2 organization will be able to share large amounts of data about science research, telemedicine, and performing arts, among other subjects, even faster than on its old high-speed network, called Abilene.
The Internet2 consortium comprises colleges, businesses, and other organizations that share the network for research and other purposes. Rick Summerhill, chief technology officer, said in a written statement that the new network will help make high-speed Web capabilities more ubiquitous: “Just like you switch on a light or turn on a water tap, we envision a future where researchers, scientists, faculty, artists, etc. will be able to ‘turn on’ a high capacity network connection when and where they need it.” —Dan Carnevale
Posted on Tue Oct 9, 04:28 PM | Permalink | CommentMore Colleges Outsource Information-Technology Services
More colleges are outsourcing their information-technology functions, according to a report out today by Educause, a higher-education-technology group.
The report says that the percentage of institutions using external vendors to run various IT functions increased over the 2006 fiscal year, from 57 percent to nearly 62 percent, the third consecutive year there was a significant climb in this category.
The survey of 952 campuses measured campuses’ IT practices and policies for the 2006 fiscal year. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Tue Oct 9, 03:25 PM | Permalink | Comment [2]Good News for Computer Science Grads -- Sort of
Starting salaries for college graduates with computer science degrees are up, hitting their highest levels in seven years, according to a recent survey. But midcareer workers at big employers may face layoffs and “restructuring.” These two trends are somewhat connected, unfortunately.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers reported last month that the average salary offer to a computer science graduate was $53,051 in 2007, up 4.5 percent from last year. Students graduating with management information systems degrees received average starting salaries of $49,966, up 5.9 percent from last year.
Employers face a shrinking labor pool, since the number of computer science graduates has dropped significantly since the turn of this century. Laws of supply and demand apply, so companies compete harder and pay more for a smaller supply of qualified graduates.
That’s the good news. But as companies pay more for new workers, and struggle to compete in a crowded marketplace, midcareer workers with larger salaries become a tempting target for budget-cutters. Computerworld reports this week on major staff cuts at Intel and Sun Microsystems, and pressures for staff reductions elsewhere.
So computer science still seems like a tricky career arc. People are in demand fresh out of school, but may become more vulnerable as they gain seniority. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Tue Oct 9, 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comment [5]Improved Blackboard Course Extractor Debuts
Course instructors often need to extract announcements, attachments, and discussion-board entries from Blackboard course archives. The new revision of bFree, a Blackboard application designed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, could make this job easier.
According to the Academic Commons blog, bFree “now extracts Announcements, Discussion Board entries, archives, and attachments, as well as Digital Drop Box and group File Exchange uploads. It continues to extract wiki entries and attachments, staff information and attachments, and content area pages, including folders, descriptions, links, and attached files of all kinds.” It won’t, however, pull out tests, surveys, and assignments.
bFree creates an independent Web site that mimics the original Blackboard course structure. The site can be placed on a Web server for easy access. The bFree software is free and available under a Creative Commons license. —Josh Fischman,
Posted on Tue Oct 9, 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comment