California Virtual Campus

Mozilla has announced its new Mozilla Labs Concept Series and issued a call for participation from anyone interested in submitting a concept, idea or mock-up. The new initiative, Mozilla said, is intended to makes it easy for anyone interested to contribute to the development of the online experience — no programming experience necessary. However, the software maker said it is particularly interested in connecting with thinkers from outside of the open source field.

by Walaika Haskins

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Information technology leaders in colleges and universities are more concerned about environmental issues than their counterparts in every other sector–corporate, state/local, federal, and higher education. But they are also least likely to have formal policies in place for addressing energy efficiency, according to a new survey released Monday by CDW Government (CDW-G).

The Higher Education IT Energy Efficiency Picture
According to the report, dubbed the “Energy Efficient IT Report” (E2IT), 65 percent of higher education IT pros said they support environmental initiatives versus and average of 54 percent in all other sectors combined. They’re also more likely than others (56 percent versus 46 percent) to work with top executives “who are concerned with environmental sustainability.”

By David Nagel

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Kelsey seems like an average American town. Many of its 53,000 residents work in plastics for Riordan Manufacturing, a subsidiary of the Fortune 1000 company Riordan Industries. They give birth at the ordinary Patton-Fuller Community Hospital. On weekends they stroll through the historic downtown or stop by the gourmet grocery, Kudler Fine Foods. And Kelsey’s high school, like too many others, has had a large number of teen pregnancies.

You won’t find Kelsey on any map, however. It exists only online, in software designed by the University of Phoenix for its business, information-technology, education, and health-care courses. Kelsey and its elaborately constructed fictional companies are what the university calls its “virtual organizations” — online teaching tools designed to simulate the experience of working at a typical corporation, school, or government agency.

By Paula Wasley

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The bad guys on the Internet are narrowing the time frame they need to unleash computer attacks that take advantage of publicly disclosed security holes, new research shows. More and more of these attacks are coming within 24 hours after a vulnerability is disclosed. That means security flaws are being exploited in Web browsers, computer operating systems and other programs before many people even have had time to learn there’s a problem, according to IBM’s latest Internet Security Systems X-Force report

by Jordan Robertson

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Social networking tools aren’t really new in the computing world. After all, AOL was the granddaddy of social networking environments back in the Internet’s early days. But the extension of these environments to mobile devices is new. According to an Informa Telecoms report, about 50 million people, or about 2.3 percent of all mobile users, already use the mobile phone for social networking, from chat services to multimedia sharing. The company forecasts that the penetration rate will mushroom to at least 12.5 percent in five years.

by Jim Knapik

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“IT consumerization” is a spectacularly bad buzzword just about any way you look at it. Grammatically, it’s an attempt to coin both a verb (”to consumerize”) and an abstract noun (”consumerization”) derived from that verb at the same time; so it’s a new coinage derived from an equally new coinage, which gives it a kind of compound awkwardness and ostentatiousness. And then there’s the fact that it’s not entirely clear at first glance whether the term refers to the “consumer use of IT products” or the “IT use of consumer products” (it’s the second definition).

by Jon Stokes

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As a whole, the education industry is usually relatively slow to integrate technology into the classroom. In lots of schools nationwide, unbridled access to computers and the Internet is still the exception rather than the rule. Sure, school districts use computer networks, e-mail and teacher pages on school Web sites to more efficiently communicate with staff, students and other teachers. However, using technology to enhance learning is often a by-product rather than the thrust of technology in the classroom.

by Jack M. Germain

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The changes and challenges that new technology has brought to teaching and learning are well documented. New technology has changed how people receive, understand, and apply new information and ultimately has changed student expectations and thinking skills. Educators often refer to 21st Century thinking skills, technology skills, and knowledge skills to describe both the current changes and future changes resulting from new and immediate technology-rich or mediated learning environments.

by Ruth Reynard

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You may be stuck with Vista, but with a few tweaks and tricks you can make it look and feel just like its predecessor.

Your new PC came with Vista. Maybe your office deployed Vista. Or, perhaps, you got caught up in the early hype and bought Vista. Whatever the case, now you’re stuck with it. Wish you could turn back the clock and restore your beloved Windows XP? Unless your name is Marty McFly, you’re outta luck.

by Rick Broida

Read PC World

Tucked away in a 1,200-page bill now in Congress is a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students’ homes.

It sounds Orwellian, but the paragraph — part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act — is all but assured of becoming law by the fall. No one in Congress objects to it.

The paragraph is actually about clamping down on cheating. It says that an institution that offers an online program must prove that an enrolled student is the same person who does the work.

by Andrea L. Foster

Read The Chronicle of Higher Education