Microsoft - Google Battle Over University E-Mail Management

Google and Microsoft are giving away hosted e-mail services to universities and colleges around the globe in the hope to hook students when they graduate. For the schools involved it's a can't lose proposition, cutting costs of both hardware and human resources and offering a bigger and better service to the students.

Jeff Keltner, head of Google's Apps for Education team says that administrators appreciate the cost savings and security benefits. "They walk away saying my data is probably safer in Google's data center than anywhere I would house it myself," he says. "And they appreciate the advantages to having data in the cloud, rather than residing on phones or laptops, which are devices that tend to get lost."

A 2008 national Campus Computing Project (CCP) survey indicates that 57% of schools who had outsourced said that they had opted for Google, while 38% had partnered with Microsoft.

Source: Time.com

Students Returning To Computer Science

A couple of recent reports/surveys of American and Canadian Colleges and Universities have indicated that students are starting to get interested in computer science again after an 8 year slump in enrollment.

“We’re seeing amazing increases in enrollment,” Eric Roberts, a computer scientist at Stanford University is quoted in the New York Times as saying. “It’s not that people have forgotten about the offshoring of jobs, but our competition isn’t what it was. There are fewer places to go, and we don’t have Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and Citibank to compete with.”

While Peter Harsha, director of government affairs at the Computing Research Association says “The most compelling story for our community is that interest in computer science appears to have turned the corner,”

For some reason those banking jobs just don't seem all that appealing any more...

NASA Recruits WALL-E To Raise Interest In Science

NASA has teamed up with Disney's Pixar and enlisted their cute little robot star WALL-E to help encourage children to take an interest in science. "WALL-E is going to be a guest host to help us teach about NASA's satellite mission to the moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter," said Marci Delaney, the DLN team lead at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "We hope that with the help of our new robot friend WALL-E, NASA can encourage young people to learn about science and technology and become the explorers of tomorrow." said Robert Hopkins, chief of strategic communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Check out NASA's For Educators site.
Here's a link to the Public Service Announcement.

I think I need to see WALL-E, don't know if I can convince my teenagers to join me though...

Audit Berkeley lectures from home via YouTube

CBC is reporting that The University of California, Berkeley is making it's entire selection of course lectures available free of charge on YouTube. "YouTube's ongoing innovations create a great environment in which students and lifelong learners alike can discover, watch and share educational videos," said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of webcast.berkeley, in a release.

This is exciting news, combine these videos with free course material from MIT and you can see a real trend starting!

Learning from YouTube - a college credit course

Here's a CTV.ca story about a liberal arts college in the U.S., Pitzer College, that's offering a course entitled "Learning from YouTube". The professor teaching the course said that she is "underwhelmed" by the sites content but the course was created "to explore the role of the popular site". Not surprisingly most of the course work is done online but the 35 students enrolled in the course do meet in a classroom on occasion. I wonder if they offer distance education? Professor Alexandra Juhasz invites the public to participate by visiting www.youtube.com/MediaPraxisme

IT has lost its luster among students - demand still high

CBC news reports that while demand for information technology workers is projected to spike, students are staying away from the training programs that would fill the need. It seems as though large scale layoffs by some of the major players has created the perception among students that there are no jobs in IT. According to the Information and Communications Technology Council, the jobs are there but the focus in the industry has changed from large scale complex systems to the tackling of real world problems. Health-care applications, environmental projects, and supply chain management systems are driving current demand.

Black hole

According to the Globe and Mail, 90 Dalhousie University students in Halifax, N.S. have been disciplined for cheating. The students gained access to answers to a series of on-line assignments hosted by a protected website which is part of the online courseware created through Blackboard Learning Systems software. The university was tipped off by two fellow students. The thing that amazes me is the magnitude of the cheating... while I'm sure first year Chemistry is a popular course choice for anyone in sciences, I'd still like to know how many students take the course in a semester?