Article Review: Flash Memory Moves onto the Desktop

I was recently reading an article by Kate Greene titled: “Flash Memory Moves onto the Desktop: Flash memory is moving from iPods to desktops and laptops, providing a performance boost and the potential for instant boot-ups” about flash drives being used as a supplement to magnetic drives. If you have attended our CII sessions on USB keys, imagine having that same technology integrated into your desktop. In this article, Samsung, a big developer in flash memory and flash memory manufacturing, has begun shipping a hybrid drive, which integrates flash memory with the magnetic storage drive. What is the benefit of using flash memory? Flash memory is solid based, so you don’t have to worry about parts breaking off and jiggling around and damaging the hard drive. This makes it faster and more energy efficient. Manufacturers and developers say that this could make boot-up quicker and faster application start ups.

Imagine, a USB key being your whole hard in the near future, it’s something worth pondering. To read the whole article visit the Technology Review website or click on the link below to read more.

-Angel Brady

Campus Technology

In this online Article at campustechnology.com, it talks about a topic that has become rather important at Rider University, Emergency Preparedness. In my meetings about this topic, it’s specifically about technology, e.g. how to keep the web server up in the case of a blackout. This article talks about a presentation done by the people at Tulane, who had spotlights of national coverage on them regarding their response to emergency and their preparedness during Katrina, and the focus is that they realized the people are so much more important than the technology, and it’s actually possible to over prepare in terms of technology. I’m not saying that we’re over-preparing at Rider, but maybe we should consider the length to which we’ll rely on technology as a focus in the case of a real emergency.

Campus Technology
Moreover, they added, no level of hitech preparedness can ever be guaranteed to be enough, or to be precisely the right kind of technological preparation for any given disaster. How easy it would be to assuage our fear of future catastrophe by constructing a fortress of systems and tools! But that would not only be no assurance of safety, the panelists pointed out, it would represent a conscious decision to move dollars (always a finite commodity in institutions of higher education) away from the provision of learning—and the mandate to educate our students is the reason that institutions of higher learning exist.

Students Rebel Against Database Designed to Thwart Plagiarists - washingtonpost.com

Rider uses Turnitin.com and it is a favorite tool of many faculty here to combat plagiarism. The real problem that I see is that plagiarism is really a result of bad assessment design. If faculty were to take the time to design projects and essays that could not be answered with papers they find online or fraternity files, or whatever, Turnitin.com would be unnecessary. At any rate, it turns out that people don’t like putting their written work into a massive online database that someone else is getting rich from, and I don’t blame them. Let’s make our assessments better and put turnitin.com out of business. Need help? Call the Rider University Center for Innovative Instruction at 609 896 5000 x7489.

Students Rebel Against Database Designed to Thwart Plagiarists - washingtonpost.com
But some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students’ Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin’s automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. And they contend that the school’s action will tar students at one of Fairfax County’s academic powerhouses.

Yale University to post courses on Web for free - Yahoo! News

This is particularly interesting considering that Angel just came back from an NJEdge meeting where one unscheduled topic was “Why should I put up wikis/mp3s/video of my teaching for free for anyone to see?”

Personally, I think this is a short sighted argument. If all someone needs from you as a teacher is a recording of a single set of lectures to render you all used up, you’re probably not doing your job as a teacher properly. Open learning just creates one more resource for people to use to learn.

Yale University to post courses on Web for free - Yahoo! News
BOSTON (Reuters) - Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible.
While Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others already offer course material online without charge, Yale is the first to focus on free video lectures, the New Haven, Connecticut-based school said.

The 18-month pilot project will provide videos, syllabi and transcripts for seven courses beginning in the 2007 academic year. They include “Introduction to the Old Testament,” “Fundamentals of Physics” and “Introduction to Political Philosophy.”

A Journey to the Center of Yahoo - New York Times

Although I use Google services where available, Yahoo! definitely has some good stuff going on. This NYTimes article [get it while you can] talks about what Yahoo is trying to do, which is essentially, I think, to keep up with Google.

A Journey to the Center of Yahoo - New York Times

Late last year, Yahoo made a deal with the tiny X1 Technologies company, which had created the best desktop search system for files on Windows computers. (X1 rivals the Spotlight desktop search, which is built into the latest Macintosh operating system.) As a stand-alone product, X1 sells for $75 and up; under the name Yahoo Desktop Search, Yahoo’s Web site offers its version free.

This year, Yahoo also bought Flickr, a system for storing, sharing and commenting on photographs; a scheduling application called Upcoming; and the mail utility Oddpost, on which it is basing a new e-mail system. Last year, Yahoo overtook Hotmail to become the world’s most-used free e-mail service. Its new e-mail system, now running in a limited beta version and scheduled for release next year, applies technology called Ajax, discussed in a previous column, to mimic the speed and power of a normal desktop program.

When I tried the beta release of the new mail program, I was amazed that I could, for instance, quickly view the contents of an e-mail message without opening it, via a “preview pane” like Outlook’s - while operating over a normal Web browser. Yahoo, meanwhile, has intensified operations in its offices in Santa Monica, Calif., to bring more music, video and news content to its sites.

Princeton offers Vodcasts of Lectures

Well, I can’t say that it’s an original idea, but the big P is likely to follow through on this idea of free Vodcasting of lectures. I hope that Rider groks what’s going on and asks me to make some percentage of lectures available from here as well.

Princeton to Offer Free “Vodcasts” of Lectures on Web

Princeton University (NJ) has added “vodcasts” - shared videos that can be watched using Apple Inc.’s iTunes - to the podcasts, or downloadable sound files, it already offers on its Web-based University Channel. The service makes academic lectures and events available to the public via the Web. Apple recently introduced vodcasting technology in conjunction with the video-enabled iPod as a way of sharing video files over iTunes. Subscribers are notified when podcasts and vodcasts are available directly on the website or for downloading onto a computer. Both options are free of charge.

RedDot 6.5: New Features Extend Usability and Simplify Content Delivery

I quite literally almost choked when I saw this. Saving to CMS from Word? Editing from Firefox interface!! Yay!

New Features Extend Usability and Simplify Content Delivery

RedDot, Now Even More User-Centric

With RedDot’s improved SmartEdit, content contributors and other business users can create and edit content using Microsoft Word and save changes directly to CMS, eliminating the need for any CMS training.

A new Mozilla Firefox user interface allows RedDot CMS users to work on any platform supported by the open-source browser, including Macintosh, Linux and Unix based systems.

Alexa - Web Discovery Machine: Watching the ‘Net Trends

I was a bit surprised to find that I had been doing many of these. It really does give you a heads up on what’s going on to pay close attention to del.icio.us/popular, for instance. You end up being the one who says “Hey did you hear that ?” all the time, and people respond with some wonder, thinking “How did he hear about that - I’ve been on CNN all morning and they never said a thing. That’s web 1.0 thinking right there, buddy.

I must say though, I’m not as big of an alexa fan as this guy.

John|work++

Alexa - Web Discovery Machine: Watching the ‘Net Trends

Watching the ‘Net Trends
My job requires that I keep tabs on all the latest trends on the ‘Net, but there is no single good way to do that. Some things still escape my attention. So, I thought it would be interesting to have a discussion about trend-watching on the ‘Net and the methods for keeping up.

The Daily Princetonian - Blackboard merger may benefit users

Here’s one analysis of the acquisition of WebCT by Blackboard. I personally think that it’s very likely the merger will create a disaster. I also think that the revered simplicity of Blackboard will go away. Oh, yeah, and since there’s no competition to speak of, demand of services, support and features will rise and supply of those will fall, resulting in [incredibly] a larger price tag.

The Daily Princetonian - Blackboard merger may benefit users

“What people will see in the next year or two is more and improved features, but I think we would see them without this merger,” he added. Later on, Hood said, Blackboard will probably try to fuse its reputedly easy-to-learn system with WebCT’s more complex, feature-rich system.

“For people who want to do more collaborative work in their teaching and research, I think [WebCT] facilitates that more easily,” he said. “It’s not a simple thing to learn how to do. I would say, for example, the learning curve for Blackboard is an hour as opposed to the full day to learn WebCT. I know that the WebCT folks say that WebCT is so much richer [in features].”

APP.COM v4.0 - Principal curbs kids’ Internet activity | Asbury Park Press Online

Somehow I don’t think they thought this out very well. I know privacy is dying in this country, but it’s certainly not dead yet. blogging == free speech, especially where personal independent accounts exist. I think Rider might take some issue with what their students blog on their own, too, but I’m sure they would never try to do anything to stop them.

APP.COM v4.0 - Principal curbs kids’ Internet activity | Asbury Park Press Online

When students post their faces, personal diaries and gossip on Web sites like Myspace.com and Xanga.com, it is not simply harmless teen fun, according to one Sussex County Catholic school principal.

It’s an open invitation to predators and an activity that Pope John XIII Regional High School in Sparta will no longer tolerate, the Rev. Kieran McHugh told a packed assembly of 900 high school students two weeks ago.

Effective immediately, and over student complaints, the teens were told to dismantle their Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs. Defy the order and face suspension, students were told.