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Information Technology in the News
SCHOOLS ADDED TO ARMY’S
DISTANCE-EDUCATION PROGRAM
■ Founded in January 2001, eArmyU, the
U.S. Army’s distance-education program,
is adding a dozen institutions to its current roster of twenty participating colleges and universities. Nearly 31,000 men
and women at more than twenty army
bases in the United States and abroad are
currently enrolled in the program. Due to
increased demand and popularity, enrollment is expected to rise to 80,000 by
2005. Sixty-eight degree programs will be
added to the existing one hundred programs with the involvement of the new
participating institutions, including Watertown, N.Y.–based Jefferson Community College, where about one-third of
the current students are soldiers. Jill Kidwell, a partner at IBM Business Consulting Services, which is contracted by the
army to operate eArmyU, said the demand for the program is “astounding”
and that the expansion of eArmyU will
address “not only a growing enrollment,
but also demands for different kinds of
courses.” (Chronicle of Higher Education,
<http://chronicle.com/free/20 03/01/
2003012802t.htm>)
CHEATING WITH CELL PHONES
■ Officials from the University of Maryland confirmed that six students have admitted to using cell phones to cheat on an
accounting exam, and another six students were implicated. The university
had set up a sting in which answers to test
questions were posted on the Internet as
soon as the test began. Mixed in with correct answers, however, were several
bogus answers. The students involved in
the cheating had friends look up the answers online after the test began and then
send those answers by cell-phone text
messages to students taking the test. Officials then looked to see who had included
the bogus answers on their exams. An official from the university said he has seen
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instances of cheating but never from so
many students at once. In a similar scandal at Hitotsubashi University in Japan,
twenty-six students flunked after using
their cell phones to cheat. (Wired News,
<http://www.wired.com/news/school/
0,1383,57484,00.html>)
WESTERN GOVERNORS CALL
FOR ONLINE TEACHER TRAINING
■ The Western Governors Association
(WGA), which represents the nineteen
states west of the Mississippi River, has
adopted a resolution calling for a program
to allow teachers to be trained entirely
through distance learning. The governors
also adopted a resolution calling for the
colleges and universities in their states to
work together to develop a new computer
language, which they called “curriculum
markup language,” for the distancelearning project. The western states are
especially affected by the teacher shortage, and the WGA sees online education
as one part of a solution to that problem.
Officials from Western Governors University, an online school, proposed standardized courses and requirements so
that students in one state could be certified easily in others. (United Press International, <http://www.nandotimes.com/
technology/story/667448p-4989114c.
html> [registration required])
OPEN UNIVERSITY PARTNERS
WITH NEW SCHOOL UNIVERSITY
■ British-based Open University and
New School University in New York have
announced a partnership designed to
promote each institution’s programs
overseas. Both schools focus on adult
education, and each is interested in expanding into new markets. Open University has made several unsuccessful attempts to enter the American market,
including the U.S. Open University,
which closed last summer. In the new
partnership, the two institutions will
e -publishing
ACADEMICS PUSH FOR FREE
ONLINE ACCESS TO JOURNALS
ince the advent of the Internet,
many academics have complained
about the practice of charging for
online access to scientific journals, as
is done by many high-profile publications, including Science and Nature.
Now, a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation will
support a new organization that will
publish two new online journals, one on
biology and the other on medicine,
which will be entirely free. The Public
Library of Science will be led by Dr.
Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel laureate in
medicine and president of the Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Varmus, one of the critics of charging for
online access to scientific articles, said,
“The written record is the lifeblood of
science.” Dr. Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science, defended the subscriptions, however, noting that the publication’s standards and costs are high. He
said that the number of downloads of
articles relative to the subscription fee
indicates that each article is being
accessed for just a few cents each.
(New York Times, <http://www.nytimes.
com/2002/12/17/science/17JOUR.
html> [registration required])
S
market each other’s distance-education
courses, develop new courses, and offer a
joint management certification program.
An official from New School University
called the partnership a “natural fit.”
(Chronicle of Higher Education, <http://
chronicle.com/free/2003/01/2003012801t.
htm>)
© 2003 EDUCAUSE
tech
LATEST DISTRIBUTEDCOMPUTING PROJECT:
SMALLPOX CURE
■ A group of universities and public and
private organizations has announced a
new distributed-computing project to try
to find a cure for smallpox. Project participants include Oxford University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, IBM,
United Devices, Accelrys, and the United
States Army Medical Research Institute
of Infectious Diseases. Recent fears about
smallpox as a tool for terrorists have led
President Bush to call for vaccinating millions of health-care workers, firefighters,
police officers, and military personnel.
The smallpox vaccination, however, carries a risk of infection. The goal of the new
project is to narrow the list of substances
that might prove effective as a cure for
smallpox after infection. As with other
distributed-computing projects, volunteers will download a screen saver that
gives the project access to unused processing power. The project needs a few
million computer users to download the
screen saver and donate their extra processing power to the molecular modeling
and screening of possible compounds.
(New York Times, <http://www.nytimes.
com/2003/02/05/health/05SMAL.html>
[registration required])
COLUMBIA CLOSES FATHOM
■ Columbia University has announced
that because of continued unprofitability,
the Fathom online-learning venture will
be shut down. Fathom was created about
two years ago as a for-profit company to
develop Web-based courses and sell
them to the public. Fathom attracted a
number of high-profile partners for development of content, including the
American Film Institute, the Cambridge
University Press, the London School of
Economics and Political Science, the New
York Public Library, RAND, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Michigan system. Though officials at Co-
watch
LAWMAKERS TRY TO LIMIT SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS AS I.D.
esponding to the growing incidence and risk of identity
theft, California Assemblyman Joseph Simitian has introduced a bill in the state legislature that would limit the use of
Social Security numbers as identification. The bill would prohibit employers from using Social Security numbers “for any
purpose other than taxes” and would prohibit universities from
putting the numbers on student IDs. Another bill in California
would put strict limits on how and where government agencies could use and post
Social Security numbers. Chris Hoofnagle, of the Electronic Privacy Information
Center, said that a number of incidents of identity theft have prompted several colleges, universities, and other state governments to question having Social Security
numbers available in relatively prominent places where they can easily be obtained.
(Wired News, <http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,57395,00.html>)
R
lumbia would not release investment totals for Fathom, the university in 2001 reportedly funded Fathom with $14.9 million and recouped only $700,000, in fees
and sales revenue. Robert Kasdin, senior
executive vice-president at Columbia,
said of the decision to dissolve Fathom:
“The university is going to be better
served if we focus [resources] on the
campus-based initiatives.” (Chronicle of
Higher Education, <http://chronicle.com/
free/2003/01/2003010701t.htm>)
NEW PLAGIARISM SERVICE FOR
BRITISH UNIVERSITIES
■ The Plagiarism Advisory Service,
based at the University of Northumbria,
is a new electronic plagiarism-detection
service available to all British colleges and
universities. Papers are returned four
hours after being submitted to the service
and are color-coded to indicate the level
of matching to documents available on
the Internet. Red indicates that more than
75 percent of the text has been copied,
blue means less than 10 percent, and
other colors are spread in between. Instructors also see which Web site(s) the
copied content comes from. (Ananova,
Legal
Issues
<http://www.ananova.com/news/story/
sm_737513.html>)
MIT CHOOSES SIX UNIVERSITIES
TO WORK ON DSPACE PROGRAM
■ In November 2002, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) released
DSpace, an open-source, academic
archiving program that was funded by a
grant from Hewlett-Packard. Since its release, DSpace has become extremely
popular, offering researchers a simple
tool to archive academic materials in a
searchable repository. DSpace has been
downloaded by about 2,000 organizations since its release, but as officials from
MIT have noted, it does not come with explicit instructions. MIT has chosen Columbia University, Cornell University,
Ohio State University, the University of
Rochester, the University of Toronto, and
the University of Washington to become
the DSpace Federation, which will test the
software and offer suggestions about how
to improve it. The DSpace Federation is
supported by a grant from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation. (Chronicle of Higher
Education, <http://chronicle.com/free/
2003/01/2003013001t.htm>)
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